It might seem like the easiest thing in the world to accept hugs, kindness and caring from another person but in fact many of us have the hardest time doing that and we may shun people who are loving to us. Most of us actually need warmth and compassion from others especially when it is lacking in our life. Some of us use alcohol and drugs to cover up this missing need and the hurt of what we don’t have. Others simply become numb over time to the real caring that other people offer and we are hardly aware of when we have been cared for or when we ourselves have been caring to others. It’s like we live in a lonely world without love. The worst part is that we lose the facility to love and be loved and we lose our humanity.

Pushing love away is just not in our nature. When we do so, life is grim.There is a big price to pay for such losses. Even when we are pretty good people, we become robots, connecting to others in mechanical and superficial ways. We lose a lot of our spontaneity and sense of humor. We become depressed without knowing why we are depressed. It feels that something is very missing in our life, and we may not know what it is. Even when our life is good there is a certain unexplained emptiness in it. We may become codependent with others, hoping to care for someone else instead of ourselves. Despite our best efforts there seems no way to escape it. Every day feels very much like the same. There are reasons for this. As humans, we are social creatures, much like the chimpanzees, whose DNA resembles ours to a large extent. We are not like snakes, spiders, alligators and other solitary animals. We like to cuddle with others, suckle our young and hang out in groups to feel secure and content. Pushing love away is just not in our nature. When we do so, life is grim.

If life is so grim without love, we might ask ourselves why would we ever want to push love away? It just doesn’t make sense, does it? Well in fact there are good reasons why we avoid people being kind to us, complimenting us or avoiding affection from others. Here are some signals of how we push love away from us:

• When others become more personal with us, we write it off as sentiment and nothing more or we see it as manipulation.
• We hardly ever feel worthy of others being kind to us unless we pay them back.
• The words “Thank you” are a rare part of our vocabulary.
• We become uncomfortable with being openly personal with others.
• Direct eye-to-eye contact freaks us out or makes us look weak.

Why are we so afraid to let others love us?

Many of us don’t accept gifts from others because deep down we don’t feel that we deserve such caring or else we don’t want to be obligated to those who are nice to us. Most of these attitudes derive from unconscious childhood harm where someone was nice to us and there was a price to pay. So shunning love is our faulty way of protecting ourselves. Some of us are limited in our own ability to be kind to others, so we would rather not receive caring and see our own deficits. Learning to love is a delicate art that requires practice and learning. Some of us know that we ourselves aren’t generous and we’d rather not feel our own deficits. Some of us simply don’t know what to say to others who are kind to us. Perhaps we feel that what we say has to be perfect and don’t realize that it is the thought or effort to acknowledge caring from others that really counts. Our society as a whole tends to monetize caring so acknowledging caring has to be done by giving some else a diamond ring or some other trinket. It would be unthinkable to send someone a simple message of care, without enclosing a gift card. The materialism of our culture diminishes the simple tender gifts of caring, which are often quite powerful. Often saying less while being sincere is the best gift to others. A good book to read on this topic is Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved by Harville Hendrix, Ph.D. and Helen LaKelly Hunt, Ph.D., Simon and Schuster, 2006.

When you let other people love you, your whole life will change for the better. You will feel less lonely, your mood will glow with brightness, and your body and health will magically improve. It does take effort and courage to let this happen.

How we can learn to accept love in all of our relationships

When you let other people love you, your whole life will change for the better.Receiving caring is not just something reserved for boyfriend/girlfriend relationships. You can receive and offer love in all of your relationships. Although many of us miss when other people are being kind to us, the fact is that many people hold us in positive regard a lot more than we realize during our day. For example, the bus driver who slows down so that we don’t miss their bus is showing regard for us. When you offer your seat to an older person on that same bus, you may be doing the nicest thing for someone that they received that day. If you called your mother today for no particular reason, she may tell her friends and relish your generosity for many days afterwards. You know it’s the small things that mean a lot to others. The more that you do kind things for others, the more apt you are to recognize when others are being kind to you. You may even develop a sixth sense of when people are wanting to love you. Then you will realize just how lovable you really are! Being open to love should not surprise you, especially if you get in the habit of recognizing strengths or difficulties in people you meet. Most of us tend to disown gifts we offer others.

I remember a client of mine who said he felt like such a failure around his daughter. She would open her heart to tell him how much it hurt to have nothing to say to a friend whose dog just died. He said he never wanted to be like his father who’d never responded to his feelings. I said that he had nothing to worry about because his daughter knew he would likely not have words for her since that’s why she opened up to him. She just wanted to read his mind to know that he cares about her. He said that even without words he was caring for her. I said that she probably read your facial expressions and got support that way. Many times other people read our minds just to know that we care. And that’s enough to know that we care!

John H. Driggs, LICSW, is a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in private practice in St. Paul and co-author of Intimacy Between Men. We may earn a commission via some of the links on this page – at no cost to you.

Last Updated on March 7, 2024