You’ve been hurt over and over in your relationships, and now you are hesitant to seek a relationship for fear of getting hurt again. You might be asking, as many of my clients do, “How do I overcome my fear of being hurt again in a relationship?”

It’s important to understand that there are two kinds of hurt.

• ·      The heartbreak that comes from someone being unloving – lying, betraying you, being angry or judgmental, suddenly ending a relationship, and so on.
• ·      The hurt feelings that come from what you are telling yourself and how you might be judging yourself. Are you telling yourself things like, “What did I do wrong?” “How could I have been so stupid as to believe him (or her)?”

Healing involves learning from and lovingly managing both kinds of hurt.

Healing Heartbreak

With this kind of hurt, you need to bring much kindness and compassion to yourself so that the pain can move through you, rather than get stuck and continue to fester.

You need to move toward the pain rather than try to avoid it in any way. You need to learn to comfort yourself as you would comfort a hurting child, bringing love to the heartbreak and letting your inner child who is in pain know that he or she isn’t alone – that you are here with love. Whatever you do to avoid the pain rather than embrace it with compassion keeps it stuck in you, fueling the fear of getting hurt again.

You also need to open to learning about what the heartbreak is telling you, regarding the person who has been hurtful to you. You need to accept your lack of control over that person and accept that he or she isn’t likely to change. You need to value yourself enough so that you don’t keep going back for more abusive or unloving behavior. Healing the fear of getting hurt again means that your inner child knows that you, as a loving adult, are not going to put him or her back into an unloving situation, and that you are going to listen to your feelings about someone. Your feelings are an inner source of guidance that needs to be listened to rather than ignored or rationalized.

Healing Hurt Feelings

Healing hurt feelings means that you become aware of what you are telling yourself and how you are abandoning yourself that is causing the fear of getting hurt again. Judging yourself for someone else’s unloving behavior is a way to believe that if only you were different, you could have control over them, which is a big, and very common, false belief. You don’t cause others to lie, betray or in any other way be unloving. Accepting your lack of control over others will enable you to stop taking others’ behavior personally. You take others’ behavior personally because you want to believe that it’s your fault and that if only you changed and did things ‘right’, they would love you.

Judging and blaming yourself is hurtful to you. As you accept your lack of control over others and stop blaming yourself for their behavior, you will find that you no longer suffer from the hurt feelings that you are causing with your self-rejection.

Once you know that you can lovingly manage heartbreak, and that you will no longer judge yourself for others’ unloving and rejecting behavior, most of the fear of getting hurt again will go away. It’s not so much what someone else does that causes the fear – it’s much more about how you deal with others’ unloving behavior. When your inner child knows that you are not going to reject yourself in the face of a partner’s rejecting behavior, that you are not going to take that person’s behavior personally, and that you are going to bring compassion to your heartbreak, you will feel safe enough to reach out again for a relationship.

Heal your relationship or your fear of getting hurt again with Dr. Margaret’s 30-Day online relationship course: Wildly, Deeply, Joyously in Love.

Image by Jerzy Górecki from Pixabay