71: The Love Well: How to Overcome Loneliness and Feel Worthy of Love

Is it difficult for you to feel loved? To feel truly and deeply loved?

Today we explore what happens to your relationship when it’s hard to love yourself.

• I’ll tell you about the deep hole of loneliness I carried from childhood well into adulthood
• How you can begin—or continue—to feel worthy of love
• And how worthiness—and what I call The Love Well—is the key ingredient to allowing you to receive the deep love you crave.

If you’d prefer to read a transcript of this episode, click here.

What is a Love Well?

We all have a Love Well. It gets filled up by various people in our lives. We draw from this well to serve love to others in our lives. The profound thing about a Love Well is not how full it is or isn’t.

The most important thing about the Love Well is that it has a bottom. If there is no bottom, no matter how much love is poured in, none of it lands. It is an open abyss until a bottom is created.

I know of two ways to put a bottom on your love well:

1. Your parents can build the bottom of your well for you, gifting you with a working well right from the start
2. You can, when you are old enough, build your own bottom.

If your parents gave you a ready-made-bottom-in-place well thank them. They may not be everything you want, but they gave you a gift.

If you weren’t that lucky and your parents didn’t know how to pour that foundation into the days when you were young, don’t despair. It’s possible to go in for a remodel.

Everyone has to do some Love Well maintenance at some point in life, so the folks who got lucky in their choice of parents simply have a head start.

At some point, we all emancipate from our parents and the job of tending the child inside us becomes our own responsibility.

Emotional wounds impact your Love Well

My parents loved me. Without a doubt. But each of them was wounded, and their wounds were built into my Love Well.

In addition to their love, my father’s shame and my mother’s unworthiness were also built into my Love Well.

So, it leaked.

Even though my husband tried to love me, that love couldn’t pool up. So, I couldn’t feel it. I felt lonely.

Sometimes I cried because of the lonely feeling, and he’d hug me. I believe moments like this helped me to have energy to feel worthy and I’d do some work on the bottom of that well.

But sometimes I blamed him. I could always find something to blame him for. In these moments when I was least resourceful, I did damage not just to my own Love Well, but also to the well of love my husband and I were trying to build in our marriage.

How to tell if your Love Well is due for maintenance

It is possible to find someone who will coach you through the process of construction. Someone who will even let you drink out of their well until you get on your feet. But none of us will lead fulfilled lives without a working well of our own.

There is a different time frame for every person, but if you go through friends like Oreo cookies it might be time to examine the health of your own Love Well.

Here are a few signs that your Love Well may need some maintenance, or a complete overhaul:

• You apologize all the time. As you say hello, as you say goodbye, figuratively apologizing for the very air you breathe.
• You blame. You might blame yourself, your partner, the postal carrier, or the check-out clerk.
• You need to be RIGHT. And in order for you to be RIGHT, others must be proven WRONG.
• You check out. You might use scrolling on your phone, alcohol or another substance, or you might just tune out.
• You feel resentful or taken for granted. By your partner, by your extended family. By the world.
• You are a people pleaser. You make it your job to make everyone happy, even when that’s impossible. So you feel like you’ve failed.

Here’s an example:

If you were in my office as one of my private clients, I would have a specific invitation tailor made for you. But because I don’t know your exact needs, I’m going to give you some choices.

Trust yourself to know which invitation is made for you:

1. Self talk. Managing your self-talk is critical maintenance for your love well. I want to recommend a book by my teacher, Martha Beck: Finding Your Own North Star. This book is amazing at helping you talk to yourself differently. The way you talk to yourself is a reflection of the sort of “bottom” you have on your well.
2. Find time to rest. Because rest is a synthesizing emotion and that is key. Listen to episode 58 of this podcast about the three kinds of rest. Rest allows you to tune into YOU. And YOUR needs. Believe it or not, tuning into your needs is foundational work for securing the bottom on your own love well. When you rest, you are valuing yourself. You make yourself worthy of doing nothing but resting. Nothing to prove. Nothing to deserve. You are worthy because you’re breathing.
3. Surround yourself with loving people. Distinction: not to GET love from them. But to create a restful space where you don’t need to care for others. Listen to episode 42 about staying in your own business. It’s powerful for your love well maintenance to be around loving people who don’t need anything from you. It’s an easier space to practice staying in your own business.
4. Hang upside down. Feel your back body. Feel your breath. Even just a forward bend resets your brain chemistry, washing your body with blood and juiciness. Your back body is the Yin part of your body that receives reflected light/energy/love. When you focus on your breath, you allow your sympathetic nervous system to help you reset and rediscover your baseline.

How about you?

How do you do maintenance on your Love Well?

I want to hear from you. What ideas do you have to secure that bottom of your Love Well so that you know you are worthy? Worthy to have an overflowing well of love in you life.

Text me at (970)-210-4480 and let me know.

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