It builds up and now you have to unlearn all of it

Just to learn it all over again differently

As a four-year-old, you could not understand that the actions of your parents or loved ones can lead to your downfall of anxiety and trauma. It is during that time that you start to shape yourself into the adult of your future. That adult who will meet so many people, make acquaintances, experience friendships, fall in love, become part of the competitive world, and need to succeed at all of it.

The experiences, situations, and circumstances you live in when you’re “only a child” are your future love language, your way of understanding, your fears, your type of happiness, your worries, your level of competitiveness, and your longing for something meaningful. It is due to those moments we encounter as children that we experience anxiety, attachment issues, a fear of abandonment, and so much more. I am not focusing on those negative outcomes only; there are times when you had the best moments with your loved ones — mom taught you how to ride a bike, dad taught you how to always push forward, mom showed you genuine care and love, dad showed you that sometimes tough love is the way, and so on. Yes, we acquire good qualities along the way, but our being is set to remember the voids, the pain, the wrongs — the things we want to fix.

And then comes the harder part — the part when you start facing those memories. You start to notice that every reaction or feeling you have now stems from a trigger that has been implanted in you for years — possibly since your first words — and now it’s time to confront it and deal with it the proper way. They’re so many — those triggers — they’ve built up, they’re exhausting, and you cannot handle all of them because now you also have a life to live! Nonetheless, we do our best to seek the truth. It’s time to clear things out and feel better. We’ll likely spend our entire lives trying to do this, but it’s worth it to understand the core problem.

You find yourself feeling hopeless again when you must merge your life with someone else’s, someone you love and want to spend forever with. Now you have two sets of triggers: childhood approaches (not to mention traumas), and different levels of awareness. And that is where the phrase “love is hard” comes from. They’ve substantially diminished the terms and impact of the phrase. It is not only “love” we are talking about here, and it is not only “hardness”! It is a lot of sacrifice, compromise, understanding, awareness, giving, letting go — every term you can find that embodies letting big chunks of you go effortlessly without losing oneself. Now, that’s not “hard,” that’s “crazy effort” — love is a lot of giving, love is a lot of awareness, and love is A LOT of sharing!

You both have different origins, upbringings, and views, so what matters to you may not matter to them. What you consider “a lot” may be simple to them, and vice versa. And that’s the beauty of it: now you have to unlearn so much so you can accept new knowledge, perspectives, and languages of care. You cannot be a one-way street anymore. Some of you may have fled from the truth about who we are and why, but it will come back to haunt you. You need the answers to those questions, and factually, there is no other way if you choose to share your life — let alone give birth to a new one.

Our points of view and convictions should be honored, but we must sometimes set them aside to allow space for others. It’s important to discover new approaches, even if you don’t embrace them right away. Otherwise, you may find yourself locked on a confined road that leads to further triggers and traumas.

We are here to accept one another; we all have a difficult past, and we all come from the same source. At the end of the day, we are all a bundle of collective triggers trying to make it through life with as little damage as possible. Does it work? I don’t know about you, but I’m facing it, and I am making sure I do the best I can for myself and those who matter to me, sometimes even those who don’t.

Why? Because what other ultimate purpose does life really offer us?
I’ll leave you with a question that goes deeper than you think and could spark a new debate.