Many of us have been there. To the heart that has known betrayal, abandonment, or pain, safety can feel suspicious. Protection can feel like control. And someone offering true, unconditional love can seem like a danger to your survival strategy. It can even feel as if it is stifling to your sense of independence.
Because for a wounded heart, real love doesn’t feel familiar—it feels foreign. And what’s unfamiliar often feels unsafe and unsettling.
Unconditional love doesn’t demand, doesn’t chase, doesn’t manipulate—it simply is. And in its quiet power, it exposes everything we’ve believed about ourselves that is not love.
It mirrors back your worthiness, and that reflection can be hard to look at when you’ve been told—by trauma, by experience, by broken relationships—that you aren’t enough.
So what happens?
When that once-in-a-lifetime, soul-fire kind of love enters, the heart panics. The ego kicks in. The nervous system defaults to self-protection. You run. You sabotage. You retreat into the only space that has felt safe—fear. The familiar cocoon of control, distance, or emotional numbness.
But here’s the truth:
Your higher self called this love in.
It knew.
It always knew. That it was time to heal so you can receive all that it wants to offer you.
And even if your current self couldn’t yet hold the expansion of it—didn’t believe love like that could live in a human being—you were being stretched to meet the level of love your soul has always longed for. The love that has always been with you—for a thousand lifetimes.
So be gentle with yourself. Show yourself grace.
You’re not broken. You’re healing. You’re expanding. you’re shedding those previous illusions of what you thought or felt like love, but were masqueraded as trauma bonds-the wounds speaking to one another, finding comfort in what was familiar through past experience. It was a signal but not true, unconditional love.
Unconditional love triggers you, in the best way: it calls and speaks to your Higher Self. This is the kind of love that tells you to remember who you really are. I
Allow yourself the space to grow into the capacity for receiving what you are now being shown does exist. A love that doesn’t harm but heals. A love that doesn’t leave but holds, holds space for all of who you are. A love that doesn't overpower, but honors.
Let the walls fall—not all at once, but brick by brick.
And with each fall, let in a little more grace, a little more light.
Because you are worthy of this kind of love.
And it’s not here to threaten you.
It’s here to free you.
Have you ever pushed love away out of fear? Let’s talk about it. Tag someone whose love changed you.
Check out our Love Alchemy 1-1 and Group Coaching, and our free Self-Love Reset resource here on our website.
I am Charisse aka The Catalyst Coach™, Transformational and Relationship Coach—certified in Integrated Attachment Theory. If you’re ready to explore how learning your attachment style can help you identify, understand, and reprogram core beliefs and patterns so you create the heart space for healthy relationships, book a Catalyst Clarity™ Call with me.