When loving someone means leaving them
on no longer enabling harmful relationships
In our culture, love is treated like commodification to “complete” you. Therefore, you spend your life trying to earn it through outside validation in the form of success, status and relationships. But love is not a possession that is given or taken away, love is a state of consciousness. It is the awareness of your wholeness and the inherent wholeness of all beings.
The people we love are portals to that state of consciousness within us. You feel love when you are with them, not because they are the source of love, but because they bring you to the awareness of love inside you. That is why the feeling of falling in love is a surrender to a blissful state where everything is more vivid, warm and alive because that is the vision of reality when you are in a state of loving awareness.
The problem arrises when you start to believe that without this person, you cannot channel into the awareness of love within yourself. in those moments, you have lost sight of love and fear has set in. I don’t want to lose this person because I won’t be ok without them.
It’s at this stage that many people find themselves stuck in relationships that are toxic and abusive.
Staying with someone who is harmful to you is not love, it’s attachment. Attachment is the belief that something or someone will make you whole. you get attached when you are unaware that you are already complete. In other words, when you are temporarily unaligned with your higher self.
I was in an abusive relationship for 5 years in my 20s. I didn’t leave for so long because I loved my partner and losing them felt like losing a part of myself. But for the majority of the time we spent together I didn’t feel love because fear and lack was the dominating state of consciousness of the relationship.
My partner was a deeply wounded person and in their darkest moments, I no longer existed in their mind as a being worthy of care and respect—I was merely a plot device to reenact the toxic narratives of their trauma. And when my partner treated me lovelessly, I no longer saw them as a whole being who was deeply suffering and needed to get help—they became a symbol for all the reasons I wasn’t lovable and earning their affection was a means for me to feel whole again.
When I finally got the courage to leave, it wasn’t because I no longer loved this person, it was because I discovered new portals to experiencing the consciousness of love within myself. I started reading spiritual books and going to yoga. I started making new friends and focusing on my art. These experiences were doorways to returning back to my Higher Self, the inner knowing of my wholeness that I was born with.
I saw clearly, it was not loving to myself or my partner to enable their harmful behavior.
We often think that to love someone means to stay with them but love says no to harm because love is a state of consciousness and loveless behavior cannot sustain it.
Sometimes it’s easier to love someone when you