The Opposite Of Love Is Fear

One of our innate feelings is fear. This emotion is a natural response to danger. Fear helps us survive, but it can also limit us.

When we’re scared, our blood pressure rises, our pupils dilate, and our heart pumps blood around our body at high speed. In some cases, however, the fear is entirely in our minds, because fear can be aroused even when there is no real danger at all.

There are many different forms of fear. We can fear failure, rejection, loss of power and change. When we’re scared, we don’t make choices, we aren’t creative, and we’re not happy.

Carl Gustav Jung, the well-known Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, stated that we all have certain qualities that we try to keep hidden. Ever since we were young we found out that this was necessary to be accepted.

The composition of qualities that we do not accept in ourselves is like a shadow that appears at some point in our lives. In addition to this ‘shadow’, we as humans develop an aspect that Freud calls our ‘I-ideal’. This is a form of ourselves that we create to fit in with our environment and not be rejected.

When we reject our shadow side, it can cause a lot of problems. Because we don’t dare to accept ourselves out of fear, it actually becomes clear that we don’t really love ourselves. Fear is the opposite of love.

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

What is the opposite of love?

Hate or ‘odium’ in Latin means to reject something or someone. This feeling is actually completely useless. What’s the point of hating? None at all. This will only make us feel bad about ourselves.

According to Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator, “ the opposite of love is not, as we often or almost always think, hate, but rather the fear of love and the fear of love is actually a fear of being free.”

Love softens you, fear makes you harder. Love opens up the universe, fear makes you isolated within yourself.

Why are we afraid to love?

Love is always a risk. Every time we have to take the risk by living our lives and experiencing the passion of love. Our past experiences and beliefs limit us and create a fear of loving.

Our fear of love stems from our lack of love for ourselves or our lack of self-confidence. If we are not able to love ourselves, how can we love someone else?

In order to love ourselves and others, we need to develop more self-confidence. The Argentine psychologist Walter Riso gives us some important tips to improve our self-confidence:

• Encourage Self Praise: Whenever we do something good or positive, we should praise ourselves for it. Look how well I did that!
• Reward yourself: For every achievement in our lives, no matter how small, we deserve a reward. This prize only needs to be something small, something we like and enjoy.
• Eliminate oppressive beliefs that keep you from empowering yourself. Although we sometimes limit our feelings, sometimes we also throw them out. What’s wrong with grieving in public or showing your love for someone to others?
• Do not be ashamed of your success and efforts, but rather enjoy it.

The most extreme form of fear of love is called philophobia. A person who suffers from philophobia is extremely afraid of falling in love with someone else, of committing to another person, and of maintaining intimate relationships.

People with philophobia use several mechanisms to protect themselves from love and to stay in their own comfort zone:

• They fall in love with impossible partners.
• They enter into relationships that are doomed to failure because that other person is very different.
• They provoke fights with that other person to get him/her to end the relationship.

• They tend to look for faults in the other to justify themselves.

How can we overcome our fear of love?

It’s normal to be afraid of love when we’ve had bad experiences in the past, but we need to make sure that this fear doesn’t rule our lives. Fear of love should look you straight in the eye, without running away from it.

If you are afraid of getting into a relationship with someone else, you should let them know so they can get involved.

Communication is essential to overcoming our fears. It is also important to leave past relationships behind and live each day in the present.