The Opposite Of Love Is Not Anger, But Fear

When we are afraid, our bodies respond to this with high blood pressure, our pupils dilate and the heart pumps blood at a fast pace. But sometimes fear lives only in our minds because it can be imagined to come to life even when there is no real  danger.

There are many types of fears. For example, we may fear failure, rejection, loss of influence, and change.  When we are scared we don’t make decisions, we are not creative and most of all we are not happy.

Carl Gustav Jung, that great Austrian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, argued that we all have certain traits that we hide. Ever since we were little, we have realized that this behavior is necessary if we want to be accepted.

Those particular traits that we do not accept in ourselves are like a shadow that appears on the stage at some point in our lives. Alongside this “shadow,” we develop something that Freud called the “ideal ego,” a kind of self that we create to fit into our environment and that is meant not to be rejected.

Fighting the shadow causes many problems because when we don’t accept ourselves out of fear, we don’t love ourselves. Fear is the opposite of love.

What would you do if you weren’t afraid to accept yourself, acknowledge yourself, or be rejected? You would be totally free and enjoy the love you have for yourself and others.

What is the opposite of love?

Hate is like  fighting someone or something.  It is actually useless. What is the joy of anger? Nothing at all. In the end, we will only experience our own misery as we take it.

Paulo Freire, a Brazilian education expert, says,  “The opposite of love is not, as we often or almost always think, anger, but the fear of love, and the fear of love is the fear of being free.”

Love softens you, fear hardens you. Love opens the whole cosmos, fear isolates you from yourself.

Why are we afraid to love?

Love is always a risk. Every single time we have to take that risk by living a life and experiencing a passion for love. Our past experiences and beliefs limit us and bring about our fear of love.

Our fear of love stems from our lack of love for ourselves or insufficient self-esteem. If we cannot love ourselves, how can we love another person?

In order to love ourselves and others, we need to cultivate a healthy self-esteem. Argentine psychologist Walter Riso suggests some factors for improving self-esteem:

• Encouraging self-praise. Every time we do something good or positive, we should continue to do it by praising ourselves. See how well I did!
• Rewarding yourself. Every single achievement in our lives, no matter how small, deserves a reward. The prize can be something simple that we like and enjoy.
• Eliminate narrow-minded beliefs  that prevent you from strengthening yourself. While we sometimes set limits on what we feel, we also sometimes unleash those feelings. What’s wrong with mourning in public or showing your love for someone over others?
• Be ashamed of your own success or efforts, but rather know how to enjoy them.

The most extreme case of fear of love is philophobia. A person who suffers from philophobia is unusually afraid of falling in love with another person, committing to another person, and maintaining close human relationships.

These lustful people take advantage of several different  mechanisms to protect themselves from love  and refrain from their own comfort zone:

• They fall in love with impossible people.
• They start relationships that are doomed  because the two people are very different.
• They provoke quarrels with another person to get that other to end the relationship.
• They tend to look for faults in another person to  justify and justify themselves.

How can we defeat the fear of love

Fearing love is a normal feeling when we have gone through nasty trials, but we should not let it take control of our lives. The fear of love must be faced face to face, without running it away in fear.

If you are afraid to have a relationship with another person, you should tell it directly so they can take part in their best efforts.

Communication is especially important in overcoming all our fears. In addition, it is necessary to leave past relationships with the past and live in the present every single day.