When unconditional love feels threatening
Maybe like me, you've occasionally excavated a belief that you must do something to earn love, or even earn your right to exist at all. This week I noticed that when “I must earn love” is operating in me, then unconditional love threatens my primary motivation for being, and how I define myself. If I don’t have to earn love, what am I supposed to do? Who am I? Am I (at all)?
This helps explain my resistance to love, safety, grace, etc. Accepting these things requires redefining the foundation of how I orient to "me" and "world," even if it is more experientially primary. Luckily, the old one is a false foundation. And I can experience its contradiction any moment I'm in it: If I'm feeling unconditional love, I categorically didn’t have to earn it. Anytime this fear or nihilism comes up, it’s already resolved.
In the moment, this means recognizing / experiencing "unconditional love" and "conditional boundaries" at the same time. The old foundation is cheap and known, so the new orientation will feel hard at first. But it's also experientially false—a construct overlaid on okness, so there's nothing one needs to do aside from be with what's already here (including the new awareness of the love that's here).
Another part of my recent insight is that I want to communicate my unconditional love with everyone else, too, and not conflate it with conditions. I love you unconditionally; of course that doesn’t have anything to do with how often I want to be around you, or if it’s ok to hurt me, or whatever.
What good then is unconditional love? It’s good for the sake of itself.