Spam Filter For Your Brain - Episode 118
I've been thinking a lot about what people need to do to be lovable? What do other people need to fulfil for you to make you love them? It's something that I hear a lot in coaching calls. It's something I see a lot popping up on social media: "Red flag! They didn't do this, so you need to cut them out!" And some sort of faux empowerment like this is a way to set boundaries. And I don't know that that serves anyone. I feel like it is the opposite of how I want to live my life and how I want to interact with things. Yet somehow it sort of sold as some weird empowerment thing.
So here's me over here being contrary again, and out here with the wild opinion that my friends actually don't need to do anything for me. They don't need to do anything at all. The fact remains that I benefit from loving my friends. Like my friends in my life are an absolute joy. And quite often when I hear people having difficulties with friendships or not trying to iron out difficulties or try and navigate their way through difficult circumstances, quite often what I hear is, "They didn't do that and so I should behave like this", or "I'm the one always making all the effort, or they never return messages", or I sort of put them through this test in a way where I withheld my love from them, I withheld my friendship, and they basically didn't notice. And so clearly, I'm the one doing all the legwork here, and so why should they win the prize of me?
And I don't find life works like that. Everyone's got their own stuff going on and most people are just trying their best and trying to fit in, being a good friend around an awful lot of other obstacles. And I find it hugely more beneficial for me when I'm like, oh, this person's really amazing. I would like them in my life. I'm gonna do everything that I can within my. My energy levels the rest of my life. And my remit to remind that person regularly that I think they're brilliant. That's basically what friendship is to me. A whole load of series of remembering to try and big people up, remind them that I appreciate, and I see them and check in occasionally and see what they need. They don't have to do anything or be anything in order to be worthy of that kind of action and interaction from me, because it's me that benefits. I'm the one who gets to love them. And frankly, that's just like a brilliant, brilliant feeling, though.
I think it would be lovely if I was able to cut out pieces of my heart and splice them into other people and so they could have an idea as to how wonderful I think they are. The fact is that actually, other people can't feel your love. I've got a previous episode on this if you think that's quite a controversial or a bit of a weird notion, but I promise you that you don't have the capacity to generate electricity going off in someone else's head.
What they think about you, what they think about the actions that you're taking, what they think about the words that you're saying, all of those things culminate in how that person perceives your love and whether it is reciprocated or not. I'm not even sure that reciprocal love is a thing. In a way, I sort of feel like two people, three people, a big group of people, all have their own love stories going on, and they all have their own narratives and stories about what love is, what friendship is, what communication is, what community is. Everyone's got their own story. So it's not like you're just mirroring each other. Sometimes you're fortunate and lucky enough to have similar thoughts that generate similar emotions that look like they're reflecting each other. But actually, we're all just trying to navigate a whole series of thoughts and emotions that are going on in our body at any one time.
When I look at it like that, why wouldn't I want to feel more love? Why would I set people a whole load of tests that if they don't fulfill, I get to experience less love? That's a wild thing for me. I benefit from being able to look at the people around me think that they're wonderful. I feel those chemicals, they're going on in my body. Nobody needs to do anything to be worthy of the love that I offer them.
And, of course, the reason why I sort of wanted to speak on this a little bit this week is because when you are putting people through this framework, you have to do something to be worthy of love. You have to fulfill a certain number of expectations, needs, tasks, in order to be someone who is worthy of affection, of care, of consideration; The person you're going to use this moral compass most against is yourself.
And the more people in the world who could really sit into the feeling that we don't need to do anything to be worthy of love, care, trust, respect, empathy, and compassion. We just are. You are worthy of love just because you exist just as every baby arrives without any kind of need to do or be anything. They just. We're born with the innate ability to deserve a respect and a reverence of life just because we are. When we hold that at our core value, we are able to step back a little bit and hopefully reflect that in the people around us. And they're great training grounds and great testing grounds for this theory.
So you can learn how to access that part of your brain: Nobody needs to do anything for me to love them. If you can use your friends as that testing ground slowly, slowly, it may become more accessible to you that actually, you don't have to do this big old what is often a gargantuan list of hugely impossible tasks in order to get yourself to a place where you could be lovable, maybe you were just lovable. Just because you are, just because you happen to be alive on this great big spinning rock of air and water at this particular moment, how incredible that you get to voyage with the people around you that you love in all of the history of time. What are the chances of that, really? It's absolutely phenomenal.
But when we treat friendships as transactional, I believe that's the opposite of unconditional love. And if we can learn to have our friends around us as little learning stepladders, to be able to explore what unconditional love feels like for us, there is more of a chance that we're going to be able to feel it for ourselves.
I hope that's some food for thought for you this week, and I look forward to speaking to you next week.
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