you're not hard to love. you were loved badly.

You are not hard to love. At some point in your life, you were loved badly, whether it was by a parent when you were younger, maybe a relationship that you had in high school or college, or maybe the relationship that you have with yourself. No matter what it is, you are not unlovable. You are capable of being loved. You deserve to be loved exactly the way that you want to be. And anyone, including yourself, that tells you otherwise, is simply wrong. My name is Ethan Joule, and welcome back to "Feel Your Feelings." Today, we are going to be talking about love. And not just the good side of love. We're not going to be talking about love in the traditional sense that we all think of. We're not going to be talking about relationships with others. We're not going to be talking about how to love others. We're going to be talking about loving ourselves, and how others can affect that. Today's intro was not just a hook. It wasn't just a warm-hub. It's the truth. And it's the truth that most of us need to hear, but never have. Maybe you've spent months, even years of your life thinking less. If you clicked on this episode, I'm quite confident that you felt this way. And there's a story that we tell ourselves. Most of us have a story that we carry about why our relationships haven't worked. Why people leave. Why love feels so hard to hold on to. And for a lot of people more than would ever admit it, that story sounds something like, "I'm too much." Or, "I'm not enough." Or some exhausting combination of both. But here's the thing about that story. You didn't write it yourself. Someone handed it to you. And someone handed you that story early on before you had a good sense of self and you just absorbed it. You started treating it like the truth. The people that were supposed to show you what love felt like early on parents, caregivers, early relationships through high school and college, they taught you something. Whether they meant to or not. And what they taught you became your nervous system's definition of love. In consistency, felt like love. Chasing somebody, felt like love. Walking on egg shells feels like love. Earning affection. Managing somebody's mood, making yourself smaller to keep the piece that felt like love. And not because you're broken. But because that's the version of love that you were given, the version of love that you were taught. So why did this happen? Why us? Why do you feel this way? There's a concept in psychology called attachment theory, and I'm not going to give you a lecture. But the short version is this. The way we were loved as children or in our earlier lives, defines the template that our brain uses for every relationship that we have as adults. If the people who raised you were consistent, warm, and available, you probably developed what's called a secure attachment. You learn that love is stable, that people come back, that needing someone doesn't make them disappear. But if the love that you received was unpredictable, warm sometimes and cold others, present one moment and absent the next, loving you when you performed well and withdrawn when you didn't, then your nervous system learned something different. It learned that love is conditional. You have to work for it. That the moment you relax, it might disappear. So you grew up optimized for this anxious kind of love. Hyperattuned to other people's moods, always scanning for signs that someone might pull away, terrified of abandonment, either clinging too tight or shutting down completely because the alternative felt too dangerous. And that's not a character flaw, it's not something that you do wrong. It's a survival strategy that made total sense in the environment that you created it. The problem is you're not in that environment anymore, but your nervous system doesn't know that yet. We tend to be drawn to what feels familiar, not what feels good, what feels familiar, and for a lot of people, those are not the same thing. So if love for you has always been a certain kind of way, a little bit chaotic, a little uncertain, a little like you're always one wrong move away from losing it, and then you meet somebody who offers a stable kind of love, a gentle love, a consistent love. It might not feel like love at first. It might feel boring, too easy, like something must be wrong. And then you meet someone who makes your nervous system light up who's a little unpredictable, who keeps you guessing, who you have to work to keep. And that feels electric, it feels like chemistry because you've been there, because it's familiar, because you know how that works. You're falling for the pattern. You're falling for the version of love, your nervous system, already knows how to do, and that is the trap with this type of love. That is the trap when we learn these kind of attachment styles early on. We are trained to keep ourselves there. It's what's familiar, it's what we know, we know how to handle it, we know what to do when it hurts. So you tell yourself the story again. When that person who's unpredictable runs away, the way many unpredictable people do within love, you tell yourself, "I'm too much, I push them away, something is wrong with me." And the pattern repeats again, but that's not what happened. What happened is you got handed a broken template early on in life, and you've been running this template on everyone you meet. That's not your fault. And it's not your destiny, either. You might believe that you're too much, too difficult to love. But at some point, somebody taught you that. Maybe it was a parent who needed you to be smaller, a relationship that punished you for having needs, a childhood, where love always came with conditions attached. You learned to shrink, to apologize, to edit yourself down until you felt like you were somebody who was easier to love. But the people who taught you that you were hard to love, they weren't showing you who you are. They were showing you who they are. And you can't keep letting that reflect on you. You deserve the love that you crave. You deserve gentle, calm, predictable love. You were never the problem. You just had the wrong teachers. And there's a problem with this kind of love. It really has some negative effects on us. When someone is inconsistent with you, when they're cold or critical, when there are conditions to that love, it is almost impossible not to internalize it. Especially when it happens during the years, where you're still figuring out who you are. Especially when it comes from someone who's loved you needed. That belief gets wired in deep. It becomes the lens through which you interpret every relationship that follows. If someone doesn't text back quickly, they must be losing interest. If someone seems distracted, I probably said something wrong. Someone ends things, proof. Proof that I was right about myself all along. You're not being irrational. You're being consistent with the evidence your early experiences gave you. But the problem is the evidence was never about you. It was about them. Their inability to love you well was not a verdict on your worth. It was a reflection of their capacity. And what we have to do is relearn this love, both with others and with ourselves. Relearning what love looks like is not just a simple mindset shift. It is not a decision that you make. It is a slow and unglamerous, sometimes frustrating, rewiring of something that lives in your body, your nervous system, learned what love feels like. And the only way to teach it, something new is through a repeated experience of something different, which means this takes time. Which means you will probably have moments where that old pattern feels more real than the new one. Which means healing in this area is not linear and that makes it frustrating. But here's what it can look like. It looks like noticing when something feels familiar in the wrong way. Not running from it automatically, just noticing. You know, asking yourself, is this exciting because it's genuinely good? Or is it exciting because my nervous system recognizes the pattern? It starts to look like letting stability be interesting, letting consistency be enough. It starts with tolerating the discomfort of being truly seen by someone. And not performing, not managing, not editing yourself down into a smaller and easier version of who you are, just being who you are and letting that be enough. It starts by asking yourself, not just, does this person like me? But do I actually feel safe with this person? Do I feel like I can breathe? That last question is something that a lot of people forget to ask because we're not even thinking of ourselves in this way. We're so deep in this pattern of believing that we are unlovable, that we don't even look out for ourselves. We don't even look for safety and comfort in love for ourselves, but we have to. This is a real and deep issue, and it will take time. You have it rooted within you that you are not capable of love, that you are difficult to love, but you're not. You have just learned a pattern over and over again through your childhood or through early relationships that love is supposed to be unpredictable or earned, but it's not. I promise you, love can look stable. It can look calm. It can be predictable. You deserve that kind of love. You deserve to be loved, gently, by others and yourself. You've just had the wrong people telling you that. The belief that you are hard to love, that you are too much, not enough, that was never a fact. It was a lesson taught to you by people that are insecure or bad at loving you. and lessons can be unlearned. You were not built wrong. You were shaped by the love that you received. And the love that you received was incomplete. It is not the final word on who you are or what you get to have. You are allowed to be full yourself, all of it, and still be loved. That kind of love exists and you are perfectly qualified for it. You deserve it. I promise. That's going to wrap it up for today's episode. Thank you so much for being here. If you like this episode, please drop me a comment and let me know what you think about this topic. Also, if you need help feeling your feelings, you should check out my music on all platforms. Under the name of Ethan Jewel, I almost guarantee it'll make you cry. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you for understanding that you are not hard to love. And as always, thank you for feeling your feelings. I'll see you next time. [Music]