With Kate Schroeder, M.Ed, LPC, NCC
What’s Love Got To Do With It?
Love. The quintessential four letter word. Confounds everyone, can feel quite elusive at times, and yet seems to be the underlying desire that motivates most people in their lives, that is, to feel loved by someone. The desire to experience unconditional love is so strong that many people expend vast amounts of time, money, and psychic energy to acquire this most elusive of treasures. It becomes, for many, like trying to catch one’s shadow that is always just a step out of reach, and yet tantalizingly close enough to continue to hook them in pursuit.
The instinct to look outside of ourselves to meet this experience of love, is a common and understandable misconception reinforced repeatedly by our culture, the media, and fairy tales from our youth. To be sure, we have had it ingrained in us from early on, that we are the creators of our own world, and to seek happiness through our choices in our outside worlds. How often have we heard statements such as “if only he loved me enough he would have known” or “I cannot believe she did not know that about me?” We project our deepest emotional needs onto another person, and then become upset or angry, and even depressed when that significant other cannot fulfill our need to feel cared for and loved. How many relationships have we seen come to a crashing halt because of unowned wounds that we somehow make another person responsible for in our present day lives? Believing that surely if the relationship were “right”, we wouldn’t be in conflict with this special someone, and all our emotional needs would be automatically met without having to express them out loud.
As a child, this was a fair and reasonable expectation as part of a parent’s job is to help their child learn about their own needs, desires, interests, values and self, and to give them this primal experience of unconditional love. But as an adult, we can no longer look outside of the self to get these needs met. We cannot expect another person to know our deepest needs and desires, when we do not even know them ourselves. When we do, we are placing all our power to be happy or whole in the hands of an external source that has its own set of needs, wants, and desires in this world. If we are to truly experience the kind of love we seek at our deepest level, we first have to love ourselves in the very way that we are hoping for from another. And this requires that we be willing to invest the same kind of time, effort and energy into discovering and learning to love ourselves, as we would another. This is the source of love that everyone is seeking, and when found can never be lost.
For more information on guided imageries, meditations, classes, and upcoming programs visit Kate at: www.kateschroederlpc.com.
You can contact Kate at:
Transformation Counseling, LLC
8084 Watson Road, Suite 226
Saint Louis, MO 63119
(314) 761-5310
kateschroederlpc@gmail.com
www.kateschroederlpc.com