Coming clean to feel the love you want …

We want to be loved down to the core, by somebody who knows every chink in our armor; but it may not occur to us that we must REMOVE the armor! We must face our wounded nakedness before we can actually share it, to feel thoroughly known and loved. We must also tend the wounds, beneath those chinks, in order to heal them. If we conceal anything at all, we don’t feel unconditionally loved. Many assume that you can’t tell a partner everything; but unless you do, you undermine love. What you have (or seem to have) is a facade; because intimacy, a connection based on what you know, is the foundation for authentic love. The more naked the knowledge, the deeper the connection, the roots, the foundation.

We are accustom to the armor, though. When we realized we were separate from Mother, and that she wouldn’t always be there, we learned to survive independent of her. That meant latching on to what was within our reach and, unfortunately, we embraced some false beliefs and self-destructive habits. We still abide by coping mechanisms that kept us alive and presumably sane, but no longer serve us. We defend our beliefs and our behavior, plugging holes in our armor, with distorted-as-necessary evidence. And we take the pain, excess weight, and restraints of the armor for granted.

You’re weary of the burden, though, weary of covering the truth, measuring your words, styling your hair and your life for approval, strategizing to compare favorably, and justifying your behavior. The dissonance is overwhelming; something has to give–your head, your back, your normality. You want to breathe fresh air. You want to come clean and let the chips fall where they may! You want to be loved for who you are, not who somebody wishes you were. Some of us hit bottom before we discover the worth of what remains; but falling down is a gift that lets us see and demonstrate what we’re made of. Anything we had hoped to conjure up fades into the background, much like the gilded damsels when Cinderella entered the ballroom.