THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AUTHENTIC LOVE & SELF-SERVING LOVE
Authentic love has no strings attached. It is given freely, recognizing a need in another and our own ability to meet that need. While unconditional love and authentic love can be considered synonyms here, I prefer the term authentic over unconditional because unconditional means without conditions and while this is the goal when authentically loving, we only discover how to love unconditionally by first understanding how to set our intentions TO love unconditionally. When we have an authentic desire to love, we set this as our intention. Our love may be imperfect, but our intention is perfect.
Self-Serving love is given with the sole purpose of getting something in return for the “gift” of its love. Oftentimes we see self-serving love disguised as authentic love. It looks like love and to the untrained eye can even feel like love, but once the lens is zoomed all the way out, we can see that it is in fact self-serving love. Self-Serving love is when the “giver” of love has an ulterior motive. They will do something for the other person that they know the other person either needs or wants to make the other person feel something–either happy or grateful or inspired to give in return. The receiver of the “gift” then might feel so grateful or so inspired (or maybe so guilty) that they give back in return. And here’s where the gifting and receiving shifts from authentic love to self-serving love. Self-serving love has expectations while authentic love has sincere intentions.
HOW TO TELL WHEN IT’S SELF-SERVING LOVE
Study the giver’s behavior! If the receiver of a gift does not feel the intended feelings the giver was after–if they do not feel guilt or gratitude or inspired to return the favor–how does the giver behave? Do they become passive-aggressive? Do they act like a victim? Do they martyr themselves? Maybe they get quiet and give the silent treatment? When we understand the difference between authentic love and self-serving love we can see people a lot clearer and with this heightened perception gauge motives and intentions when receiving. This way, if we are not able or capable of giving in return, we will be able to decline the “gift” from the self-serving person. If we are developed enough in our self-awareness we can even shift the gift offering and simply give to the self-serving person realizing that they are in need themselves. While authentic love might present similar in behavior, mistakes made by authentic love will follow with apology and acknowledgement of mistakes made.
LOVING FOR THE SAKE OF LOVING
Since authentic love is given freely, we must understand that when we choose to give to another, we ourselves must gauge where this desire to give is coming from. When we give for the sake of loving we expect nothing in return. Our hearts feel joy when the recipient receives our gift and that is reward! And even then, sometimes the recipient may not appreciate our gift and still we would have no expectation for them to be happy with our gift. We are giving something strictly out of genuine feeling in our hearts to give.
USING LOVE AS AN INVESTIGATIVE TOOL FOR OUR OWN LOVE CAPACITY
As we give to others, we will be able to gauge our own motives and intentions. We will be able to determine where our desire to give is coming from. At first, we may genuinely believe that we have a sincere desire to give only to discover after we have given we did want something in return because contradicting emotions arise in us. Perhaps we believed that we had the energy and wherewithal to rake our neighbor’s yard, but halfway into the project our energy level dropped and suddenly we felt overwhelmed. Frustration begins to bubble up in us. Thoughts arise, “I always do this to myself! I always take on more than I can handle,” etc. And so it is that we gain insight into our inner-worlds and things like priorities, boundaries, needs, response ability, and our own capacity to love. We learn to love through trial and error. We learn to love by practicing loving!
LOVE AS A GOAL
When I first began my self-discovery journey, I had been inspired by a book about unconditional love. I loved the ideas the book presented and had many “a-ha” moments while reading. I came to the realization that 1. I did not know anything about love and 2. If I wanted to be the mom that my daughter needed, I would have to learn everything about love! For me, I could not learn quickly enough. I passionately consumed everything on the subject of unconditional love desperate to grow my love capacity. As I gained knowledge and understanding (all intellectual in nature of course–emotional understanding came years down the track!) I was able to see authentic love and self-serving love everywhere. I saw parents claiming they loved their children unconditionally while berating them, condescending them and demanding of them. I saw managers belittling their employees and taking advantage of them. I saw businesses using click bate and manipulative practices to make a sale and so much more! All of this observing awakened me to a world I had no idea I was living in. My eyes were opened and once they opened, they could never be shut again!
LOVE AS A PURPOSE
Love became my why for everything! And the more that I learned, the more I became aware of how many factors interconnect with being loving. Once my goal of loving was set, I needed to simultaneously understand human behavior, motives and intentions, needs and desires, cause and effect, growth and development, beliefs and thoughts, trauma and triggers, energy and consciousness, and on and on. I quickly realized the incredible feat it was to choose love in all things. At first, my focus was external. I wanted to love everyone around me. I wanted to serve others. But, along the way, what I found was that absent self-love and self-care, I was loving from a self-serving place because as my energy depleted and as I was unable to love others and meet my own needs, I would get angry. So much anger would arise in me as I attempted to love and I could not understand it! I genuinely did want to love others, so why was I so angry?
EMOTIONAL LAYERS & THE INNER CHILD
As I asked the right questions–why does anger keep arising while I am trying to love–answers began to come. I began to learn that the goals that I was setting were with my brain, not my heart. My brain had absorbed all this knowledge and felt inspired, but my heart continued to have the same beliefs, scars and emptiness that it had when I began. Nothing internally had happened. There is a concept in the spiritual community called Dominance which states that what is dominant in our soul takes precedence. In order to change what is dominant, we must first uproot what is not useful and then replace it with what will be useful. We must empty to get filled. If I wanted to love in the manner that I was learning about, I would first have to gain insight and understanding into this emptying process. And so it was that I learned about this psychological term, “the inner child.” Basically, the theory is that each of us have an inner-child (or multiple inner children) at different ages in our development. Where a trauma occurred, the child gets “emotionally frozen” at that age and when triggered we revert back to that developmental age. In order to fully integrate our inner child with our adult self, we must “emotionally process” all of these “frozen” parts of ourselves until we release all of the causes. Yes, I had to sit down for that one! Gigantic Sigh! I thought that this loving thing would be a piece of cake. I’d set my intention, I’d serve others and instant joy would follow! That was the plan, but the universe’s smile had widened knowing my stubborn self and that I was relentless and that I was not going to quit. And so it was that I began my actual self-discovery journey diving head first into my inner world to learn everything the universe wanted to teach me. And layer, after layer, after layer–each when I was ready to peel it away and discover what was beneath it–has taught me that this process cannot be rushed, that the timing of everything is exactly right and that as we accept this process, stop fighting the timing of it and surrender to the learning program, we will arrive at our direction’s destination when we are ready!
SELF-AWARENESS & EMOTIONAL UNDERSTANDING
As I began this inner exploratory work, I slowly began to become self-aware. I learned why I got angry when I got tired while serving others which was because I am prone to sensory overload. I require budgeting my time and energy more than the average person and can only do so much each day. Serving others without consciousness meant that I would push myself beyond what I could handle and that led to sensory overload which led to emotional triggering and meltdowns (anger being the onset of the meltdown). I also learned that self-care is essential to genuine giving. If my bucket is not full, there is no way that I will have what I need to give to others. What is more, I learned that until my needs are met, I do not have the capacity to meet others needs. This meant that no matter how much desire I felt to give to others, until I had my needs met, I’d forever end up in the same spiral of eventual trigger. So, instead of giving at the capacity that I wanted to give, I would narrow my audience to a select few and focus all my time and energy on simply loving them instead of trying to love the world!
GROWING IN LOVE
Over time, with practice and wisdom, we do grow in our capacity to love authentically. Once we are able to manage our own energy systems, we can use our intellect to find ways to expand our love while maintaining our energy limits. This blog has become my way of being able to love more people without overwhelming myself. I’m able to give what I can each day and then let the algorithms determine how many people each blog reaches. Love as a purpose enables me to take this journey one day at time. I learn more each day about love and giving love and about myself which helps me to expand my love capacity.
FAITH & SELF-TRUST
I’ve been on this journey for quite while and I am still building up my faith. Faith is a hard thing because we tend to fall back into old belief habits. The belief habit that I struggle with the most is self-reliance and faith requires trust in an outside source which makes that one hard for me. This is why I had to learn to really, really trust myself. To fully trust myself, I needed to quadruple test all the concepts and theories I was learning to ascertain that they were valid. If I tested a concept and theory and it did not work as advertised, I rejected the practice and kept looking for ones that did work. Only applicable concepts and theories survived to adoption of the practice for me. I became a scientist on this journey and I would literally study each concept and theory by applying it to my life to test it. This is how I got so good at seeing through the BS of promotional campaigns. Propaganda is huge in our capitalistic society and with everyone needing to make money to survive, creating marketing campaigns is above creating loving strategies to serve others. Since I have always been super passionate about serving others, I needed to find sources that really delivered their claims. Being self-reliant, I suppose, has served me here, but faith enables us to receive more abundantly. When we are self-reliant, we essentially say to the universe, “I got this, no thanks!” When we have faith, we say to the universe, “Can you help me?” and then instead of one person working on something, infinite people can work on it! And so faith, as you can see here, becomes invaluable to achieving the goals and objectives we set for ourselves.
HAVING FAITH IN LOVE
Rumi once said, “I searched for God and found only myself. I searched for myself and found only God,” which perfectly illustrates my experience with this process. Faith for me has been found on the other side of Love searching. Only after I found myself and began to overcome my own scarcity mindset did I really find my own faith and discover the universe in a way I never have before. I guess I reached my capacity of what I could do on my own and realized that if I am to rise to the next level, I am going to need some help! So be gentle and patient with yourself, let the journey unfold as it will for you without self-judgment. So much of who we are when we begin the journey is what we absorbed unconsciously from our environmental conditioning. The self-discovery journey is about draining out what is not needed and re-absorbing what is!
FINAL THOUGHTS
As our eyes are opened to authentic love and we begin to feel the power of this life force, we begin to understand the value. In a world where far too many are overworked and underpaid, living in unsafe conditions and the victims of greedy people’s agenda’s and power struggles, having the ability to see what is true has never been more essential. Finding the courage to seek after authentic love is not easy, but the rewards are definitely worth it! May your journey to discovering authentic love be filled with wonder and awe as you find yourself, your purpose and the life that you are worthy of!
Much Love!
Self Discoverly 