Photo: One Foot Island, Autitaki, Cook Islands by J. Wilder Bill

During our millennial enlightenment, the trend for how to love pressures us to disconnect from responsibility. We are enticed into the false-beauty of delving into the darkest corners of our personal feelings.

The shift from idealized happiness to painstaking denial is clear from the television guide list. When I tune into network channels for a little down time from cancerous family members, repairing a hurricane damaged home, proving to giant corporations they’ve been double charging my bill for years, and managing fraud, my poor little brain gets blindsided. Explosive emotions dominate the themes. Tag lines for the shows includes, “dysfunctional family” and “masterful in eliciting a range of feelings” and “dark, nuanced.” If I wanted to spend my free time listening to people argue, I’d just assume turn off the tube and dedicate more time with loved ones. The trend on and offscreen is to demand the right to deserve love.

The fact is, what it takes to receive loved hasn’t changed, ever. No criteria exists for earning the right to love. Business leader, Malcolm S. Forbes, put the low emotional returns of living a high drama life into perspective, saying, “Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.”

Qualifying how difficult your life is to receive a greater amount than the next guy generates a competition, but love is not distributed in limited rations. The behavior you tune into provides a precedent of how you process the environment. Basically, the more time you spend in a situation, pleasant or dysfunctional, the more you get used to the stimuli.

Our brains adjust to processing the heightened emotions by disconnecting certain awareness sensors. Once those signals of threat and pain are tuned out, we accept the bad as being normal. The good news is we can adapt to anything, however, adapting to the barrage of resentment fractures our channels for receiving love.

The scenario, “birds of a feather flock together,” applies to the way we adjust our actions to mimic the behavior of those we spend time with. Exposing yourself to high drama, whether televised or in person, is counterproductive to receiving love.

Using anger as proof you deserve love removes you from what you crave. The modern coping skill of keeping a tally of every monstrosity you’ve suffered implies you consider your experience to be more significant, and you don’t care about others. Once undervalued and unappreciated, those around you disconnect from your message, since their brain adjusts by tuning out the bad feelings. They won’t identify love with a ranting person. I’ve learned to be careful in mentioning my hardships, because just as soon as I feel sorry for myself, the person next to me shares a greater hardship.

The more we use drama in despising the sensation of lacking love, the greater we distances herself from feeling loved. “Your task is not to seek for Love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it,” stated Rumi.

You only need to show up and be present to acquire genuine love. No one else has to participate in your receiving love. There is nothing for you to qualify. Skip rallying together an audience to support your cause to prove your highest ranking in getting the most love. “What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us,” provides Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Even if you believe you have a resilience to harsh words, putting them out there has the same effect of stabbing yourself with a knife. Hearing the insulting references and self loathing is harmful to your emotional self.

Thinking demeaning thoughts about yourself places you in the role of playing the victim, and the lower you place your emotional self, the farther you are from accepting love. While in law school, I would tell myself repeatedly that I was going to flunk out of school as a motivational tactic. After graduating, I acquired a position at a desirable workplace. A fellow graduate ran into me at the courthouse, and was agitated that all those years I whined about barely making it when I was capable of landing such a prestigious position. I felt bad, and a bit ashamed, because I didn’t realize my self motivation technique offended others. I made others feel less deserving by spreading my low energy, when I stored a full reserve of quality mentality for my personal thoughts.

Wake up each day glad to be you. Don’t shy away from embracing the electrifying charge of unfortunate events in your past. The challenges were moments to broaden your perception of universal love. The pain you felt was personal to you, which gave you the opportunity to make love in your life a personal experience. Instead of loathing your challenges, recognize them as manifestations of your insightful depth. Knowledge is a precious commodity and transforming difficulties into fables for you to share with others on similar paths allows your purpose on this planet to soar.

Your trials and tribulations, whether you felt they were unfair or viable punishments, make you an expert in resolving that subject. Give yourself the special treatment you know in your heart you deserve. According to Gautama Buddha, “You can search the world over and you will find no one who is more deserving of your kindness and well wishing than you yourself.”

If you are unconvinced your life isn’t the horrifying torture you perceive, participate more in the world and explore your neighbor’s path. Protect yourself from eroding your love shield by evaluating the behaviors you tune into, both on and off the big screen. Now is a time for opening your awareness.