EP18 – Why Love Shouldn’t Cost You Yourself
[00:00:00] So many women in my work come to me with a very confused idea about what love is. Many women equate love with overgiving, over-holding, over-functioning, rescuing, self-sacrifice, and eventually the heart just closes down from exhaustion. Hi, I'm Nicky Kerman, and welcome to the Practical Mystic Podcast, where universal wisdom meets modern life.
Today I want to talk about love. Loving others, being kind, being compassionate, being open-hearted. They are all things we associate with love. But I think many women were taught a distorted version of love, one where love meant putting everyone else first, making ourselves smaller, being compliant, keeping the peace, carrying the emotional weight of everyone around them.
I know that's what I have done for so many [00:01:00] years of my life. It was normal. That's what we were supposed to do, and eventually what happened is I became exhausted. I burnt out, and I wasn't loving. I became resentful and angry, and I confused love with self-abandonment. What I've learned is that a heart-led life doesn't mean saying yes to everything.
It doesn't mean tolerating poor behaviour. It doesn't mean endlessly giving of myself until there's nothing left and I'm depleted. A truly open heart includes me. It includes self-respect, honesty and discernment, compassion for myself and others, really clear boundaries of what is okay for me and what's not okay, and the ability to receive.
And this was a [00:02:00] huge lesson for me. How do you receive compliments? Do you deflect? Do you shy away? Would you openly receive them gracefully and let them land and allow them into your heart? Honestly, being appreciated was one of the most difficult things I found. My heart would just close and reflect it back, and always saying to the other person, "Oh, but you're this," and downplaying the compliment or the attention that I was receiving.
Always saying things like, "Oh, this old thing," or, um, "Oh, yeah, but you're this and this and this," instead of just being able to receive the compliment, the love, the attention, the kindness that was being shown to me. I effortlessly do it for everyone else around me, [00:03:00] but it was so hard to learn to receive.
When that happens, when the heart closes like that, there's this instant wall. I often refer to this as the F-off wall in my work. we do that as a protection mechanism, but we protect ourselves from good things as well as from bad things. That wall comes up when we've been hurt and betrayed, rejected, or taken for granted.
But it also comes up when we've overextended ourself for long periods of time, when we're the one crossing our own boundaries by over-giving and getting into everybody else's business. And after a while, the heart just is like, "Oh, this is too exhausting. I have to shut down to protect myself." And that's the kindest thing that your heart can do for you in that moment, is to close off from other people.
It wants to protect because it wants to love fully, but it doesn't want to love without [00:04:00] also receiving love. Think of it as an infinity. Love has to flow in and out in equal measure to feel balanced and complete. A closed heart often looks like numbness, cynicism, and isolation, pulling away from people and difficulty receiving.
It can look like over-giving and over-pleasing when it's not our natural state or not a place that's comfortable for us, and so it becomes Hypervigilant and exhausted. Often looks like distrust of ourselves and others. And when we're really closed off, and we're really guarded, we can become very defensive very easily.
But we also find that we are shrinking our energy, we're shrinking our world. We don't tolerate things as well. We're [00:05:00] prickly and reactive. Lots of people come to me when they're struggling with intimacy at this stage because they're not open to their partner. But I always think of intimacy as into me, I see.
They're struggling to be intimate with themself, to know themself fully, to trust themselves and allow that heart to open, especially after it's been hurt. A closed heart isn't a weakness, it's protection. So it's important to notice why it's closed. What's happened? And is that trigger of the protection a little bit too fine? Like a little bit too sensitive?
Is it looking for the programming of being hurt in every single situation? It's anticipating pain with [00:06:00] every interaction
You put the wall there for a reason, but keeping the wall there has required effort. It's based on fear. This beautiful quote from Robert Frost says, "If I was going to build a wall, I'd like to know what I was walling in and walling out." And I think of this often with boundaries, is that we can set boundaries of like, "I'm not going to put up with this," or, "I'm not going to do this." But you have to ask yourself, "Am I walling in, protecting myself from being hurt so I can keep the hurt on the inside?"
Rather than just protecting from somebody else hurting me again. Because we're anticipating the exact same thing from the past to reoccur here in the present And we go out into the future trying to control all the possible ways that you could [00:07:00] maybe get hurt again. We don't want to put ourselves out there because, oh my gosh, what if this happens again?
I get hurt again. And so we keep closing in, closing in, closing in. The walls get higher and higher and higher. The other side to a closed heart is obviously the over-open heart, the over-empathy. Some people just don't close their heart, and they feel everything so strongly that they are, I think the term is, a bleeding heart, and they hold no self-boundary in what they give. But it's often from an ego place.
The shadow side of that is, am I overgiving in order to get something? And that's often stability or safety or peace. And so the over-open, the people who gush and are all over you and [00:08:00] are throwing so much love, we can find a little bit off-putting too.
I know I can be a little bit like that. I can be too intense at times, and it's because I care so much or what I thought that's what it was. But really it was, if I give, then I will be safe The over opening has no boundaries, no discernment, no energetic filter. We just absorb everybody's emotion all the time like a big sponge, and we try to rescue constantly
Oh. Even now, just thinking about how I lived like that for so many years, it's exhausting, right? I tolerated behaviour well beyond where I should have walked away, let it go, spoken up, moved on. I stayed too long And [00:09:00] I confused empathy and compassion with self-responsibility. And it came from a deep desire to be loved, to be liked, and an old, outdated belief system of my own value comes from what I give, not who I am.
Boundaries are a part of love. They're not the opposite of love, because without boundaries, resentment grows, exhaustion grows, authenticity disappears.
The boundary is, “what is okay for me and what's not okay for me?” But also what is okay for the other person and what is not okay for the other person? We have to have one eye on both. Because just because it's okay for me to overstep a boundary in some of my relationships, it's not okay in all of my relationships.[00:10:00]
Just because I want to overgive in some areas doesn't mean it's received well, and sometimes the truth is, it's a no or a not yet, or that doesn't work for me I can't carry this for you. And even when people say that back to you, if you're an over giver, that feels like rejection But it's because we're not keeping an eye on what's okay for me and what's okay for you.
You have to love yourself as if you love another person. So I was doing a workshop a few years ago in leadership, and there was a part of the course that we were talking about trust. Trust in our business, trust in our team, trust in ourselves. And there was an infographic of, like, these lily pads across the pond, and the first lily pad was self-belief.
And I kept thinking to myself the whole [00:11:00] day we were going through this work is, how do you get to self-belief? It's like, uh, what is that? And I, I was really frustrated with it, and I sat with it for weeks and weeks, and I kept saying to Spirit, "I don't understand it. why can't I get to self-belief? What is that?
What am I missing? Why do I feel like I'm not there?" And Spirit drops in, "The first step is self-love." And I'm like, "Oh, well, that's great, isn't it? It's useful." And months and months go past, I'm getting more and more frustrated with Spirit not telling me the answers here. And then one day, I'm with a client, and out came my own little infographic as I was explaining something, and I was downloading it from Spirit, and they said "The first step is self-awareness.
When we become aware of how we impact the world, we start to make different decisions." And once we start to make different decisions, when we meet a challenge, [00:12:00] we can take responsibility for those decisions. We go, "Oh, okay, I can see how that's affecting things in my world now. What am I going to change and what am I Going to do differently?"
And this is where we start to have boundaries or perhaps we've bumped up against somebody's boundary and go, "How am I Going to do this differently?" And the gateway then is kindness. You have to be so gentle on yourself because the previous version of you that just met this challenge wasn't aware of this information.
You were closed off to it, or you, you'd never understood how to be kind to yourself as well as kind to others. And so the kindest thing you can do for yourself there is have compassion and understanding of where you're at in that moment of now. And then from that state of compassion and awareness and the taking the responsibility, we then [00:13:00] gathering a stronger sense of self-love And as we keep practicing the self-love, not abandoning ourselves, taking action, taking responsibility, we get to self-belief And it took me so long to really grasp this, and it's something I'll share further down the track.
But
Here's a pathway to self-love
And that pathway to self-love is balanced of love of others as well as love of self. It's respectful, it's kind, it checks on others and supports others, but also checks into self and supports self It's seeing yourself with the same kind of clarity and love and kindness that you see in others. That tolerance [00:14:00] But it's deeply uncomfortable to receive that kind of attention on yourself.
It's deeply uncomfortable to rest in love and peace and acceptance We're so used to prioritizing others, it's not comfortable really to put our own needs first
How do you care for yourself as well as you care for others? What would be different? If you took responsibility for your own self-love, what would need to change in how you view your heart? The heart was never meant to be permanently open without discernment. It was never meant to stay permanently open to other people.
You have to fill your own cup first. The love in has [00:15:00] to equal the love out. Love of self, love of others. You cannot give from an empty cup. Equally, your heart was never meant to stay closed out of fear, pain, resentment, grief. Your heart opens and closes gently throughout the day. Your energy moves. It's more open sometimes, more closed others.
We want it to be free-flowing, not in one state nor the other. You can give and receive freely And it's aligned with your voice, your authenticity, your beliefs. And so you might ask yourself, "Where have I confused love with self-sacrifice?"
Where am I closing my heart, walling myself in? [00:16:00] shutting off that that I actually desire
Place one hand over your heart and gently breathe in, and just ask yourself, "What does my heart need from me right now?"
What does my heart need from me right now?
Just breathe and see what drops in.
This isn't about what you need from others, just simply from you Just listen Living with an open heart, living a heart-led life does not mean abandoning yourself It means me too It means [00:17:00] staying connected with yourself so strongly while remaining open to life, love, experiences. It means loving deeply without disappearing into the other person And it's giving without depletion and exhaustion because your cup is full
It's about receiving without guilt, embarrassment, shame And perhaps most importantly, remembering that you are worthy of the same love that you give so freely to others If this episode has touched something within your heart that you'd like support with, please reach out [00:18:00] for a soul guidance session.
I'd love to connect with you and hear what your soul wants to express in your heart-led life. Thank you so much for joining me. Please subscribe and follow on whatever platform you're listening to this episode on. I thank you for joining me, and I'll see you next time on The Practical Mystic Podcast.
