The Shadow of Love: How to Stop Hiding from Love and Start Growing Real

by Oli Anderson, Transformational Coach for Realness

The Shadow of Love: What Can Happen When You Disown Your Love For Yourself & Life

Love is one of the most natural and real things in the whole of the human experience which means that we all have the capacity to tap into it and to allow our lives to become richer, deeper, and more meaningful as we feel more connected to ourselves, other people, and to life itself.

Unfortunately, ‘love’ can also get us into trouble if we’re not careful – for example:

• Perhaps you opened your heart to somebody who made you regret it.
  
  
• Perhaps you were taught that showing affection was a sign of ‘weakness‘.
  
  
• Maybe you discovered that being vulnerable left you exposed to ridicule, rejection, or disappointment.
  
  
• Maybe you learned that the only way to receive love was to become useful, agreeable, or indispensable to somebody else.
  
  
• Etc. etc. etc.

Whatever might’ve happened, there are many encounters that we can have with the world that can leave us picking up and internalising a pretty unreal message:

“It’s not safe to be yourself when love is involved“.

What normally happens when we receive this kind of message is that – instead of accepting the capacity to love and learning to express it in a healthy way – is that we send it into exile in the Shadow Territory.

The problem with this kind of exile is that that love – just like anything else that’s REAL – doesn’t magically disappear simply because you refuse to acknowledge it…instead, it finds other ways to express itself which often create problems that seem to have very little to do with love at all.

These new problems are symptoms of the Shadow of Love: the ways we distort, suppress, and misdirect our capacity for love because we’ve lost touch with our ability to accept it within ourselves.

This is the fourth article in our series exploring the passive and active shadows of some of our most human qualities and – as we’ll see – reclaiming love is an essential part of tapping into your own realness and living a life that feels REAL.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

What Is the Shadow Self?

When people think about the shadow self, they often imagine a dark psychological basement filled with all the things they’d rather not admit about themselves because they’re ‘bad’ in some way – for example, anger, fear, hatred, jealousy, selfishness, and our more animalistic instincts.

These qualities can certainly end up in the shadow but the often forgotten fact of the matter is that the shadow isn’t exclusively made up of things we consider ‘bad’.

In fact:

Anything we disown about ourselves can end up in the shadow – including many of our most ‘positive’, beautiful, and even powerful qualities.

For example:

• Your creativity might end up in the shadow because expressing yourself once attracted criticism.
  
  
• Your confidence might be suppressed because you were taught that standing out in some way was ‘arrogant’ (or whatever).
  
  
• Your natural playfulness might disappear because you learned that being serious was the only way to earn respect.

In relation to what we’re talking about in this article, your love might go into hiding because, at some point, expressing it didn’t feel safe and was perceived as a threat to your sense of belonging or acceptability by those around you.

This can happen in myriad different ways – for example, perhaps you were rejected after telling somebody how you felt, only received love and affection from your family if you met certain conditions (even though real love is unconditional), or you discovered that loving somebody only ever meant putting your own needs aside and then ended up becoming a people pleaser.

You might even have been mocked for being sensitive, caring, or emotionally open – even though these qualities often require a lot of strength (assuming you’re not identified with your emotions and lost in a victim mentality or whatever)!

Whatever the original experience, the end result is that you begin to associate love with danger and then – in order to protect yourself – your ego developed a simple strategy in order to help you survive the pain you’d been through:

Stop acknowledging the ‘part’ of you that loves.

When people stop acknowledging this ‘part’ of themselves then it tends to go in one of two ways:

1. They become emotionally distant – insisting that they don’t need anybody.
   
   
2. They become excessively attached to people, desperately trying to secure the love you don’t know how to access within themselves.

These two responses to inner pain and a separation from oneself (because they sent something very real into ‘exile’) appear to be opposites but they’re actually two expressions of the same underlying problem which is that they’ve disowned their love and the ego is trying to maintain the illusion that it isn’t there.

Unfortunately, REALNESS doesn’t work like this because whatever is real within you will continue to influence your life, whether you acknowledge it or not and so the question isn’t whether your love will express itself, but whether you’ll own it consciously or allow it to emerge through unconscious patterns.

This brings us to the two shadows of love:

1. The Passive Shadow of Love: Afraid to Open Your Heart

The Passive Shadow of Love develops when we suppress our capacity to love and become disconnected from our feelings:

Rather than risking vulnerability, we learn to keep people at a distance, intellectualise our emotions, avoid difficult conversations, and convince ourselves that relationships are more trouble than they’re worth (which, of course, in some cases, they are but not all relationships).

The passive shadow of love can also turn us into experts at appearing unaffected and totally unbothered by life:

For example, somebody expresses affection and we make a joke.

Somebody else asks how we’re feeling and we change the subject.

Somebody gets close enough to see beneath our carefully constructed persona and suddenly we need some space (so that we can “process”).

We might even pride ourselves on being independent, rational, and self-sufficient so that we don’t need to have any real contact with other human beings (even though in reality human beings aren’t independent but interdependent).

There’s nothing wrong with independence, rationality, or self-sufficiency, of course, but problems start to arise in our lives when we use these qualities as camouflage for our fear of being seen.

When we disown our capacity to love then emotional distance can become a substitute for emotional freedom.

• We tell ourselves that we “don’t need anybody” but beneath the surface, we’re terrified of needing somebody and discovering that they don’t want us.
  
  
• We convince ourselves that we “don’t care” but we spend an extraordinary amount of energy making sure nobody can tell that we actually do.
  
  
• We avoid vulnerability because we don’t want to get hurt – forgetting that vulnerability is also what makes genuine intimacy possible in the first place.

It’s all just an extension of the mask that we try to trick ourselves into forgetting that we’re wearing…

The Void Behind Emotional Avoidance

When we don’t allow ourselves to actually feel our feelings then we don’t simply eliminate the possibility of emotional pain but we also reduce our capacity to experience connection, joy, intimacy, meaning, and even real purpose.

In fact, the less we allow ourselves to feel whatever is being felt, the less connected to ourselves we become because our feelings are part of (not all of) the information through which we understand our needs, values, boundaries, and desires.

What this means is that the more we suppress this information, the more inner friction we create, and then eventually that friction turns to frustration, and then misery (on a long enough timeline) as we put an unnecessary distance between ourselves and reality.

For example:

• We might remain in relationships that no longer feel ‘right’ because we’re afraid to admit the truth.
  
  
• We might struggle to identify what we actually want because we’ve spent years prioritising what seems ‘sensible’, ‘acceptable’, or ‘safe’ (and so we’re performing our way through life instead of being present).
  
  
• We might even create unnecessary drama because unacknowledged feelings continue to influence our behaviour indirectly – for example, somebody who refuses to acknowledge their fear of intimacy might repeatedly choose unavailable partners and then when the relationships inevitably fail, they can tell themselves that nobody is capable of loving them properly (and so their apparent independence becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy).
  
  
• Etc. etc. etc.

Eventually, anybody who refuses to feel what they actually feel experience the Void which is the familiar sense of restlessness, the endless search for something ‘more’, or a vague sense disconnection from themselves, other people, and the truth of their own experience.

The irony of all this, of course, is that the person who suppresses love to avoid suffering can end up creating a life in which they suffer from the absence of the very thing they’re trying to avoid (and which is nevertheless already there because WHAT’S REAL IS ALWAYS REAL).

2. The Active Shadow of Love: Trying to Love Your Way Out of the Void

The Active Shadow of Love develops when our disowned capacity for love becomes exaggerated, misdirected, or compulsive and so – instead of withdrawing from relationships (like with passive shadow) – we throw ourselves into them.

When the active shadow is driving us like this then we find ourselves becoming excessively attached, constantly seeking reassurance, or obsessively focusing on somebody who seems to hold the key to our happiness (because we’re treating them as the ultimate thing in our lives).

In the worst cases, we might mutate into the kind of jealous person who always needs to know where their partner is, what they’re thinking, and whether they still feel the same way about us.

Alternatively, we can also become a ‘rescuer‘ and end up dedicating ourselves to ‘fixing’ other people’s problems, trying to take responsibility for their emotions (which is impossible), and helping them become the people we believe they could be (instead of supporting them to be whoever it is that they actually are).

In all of these cases, we might tell ourselves that we’re being loving and, sometimes, we genuinely are trying to help but beneath our apparent generosity, there is often a less comfortable motivation which is that we’re trying to use somebody else’s needs to escape our own disconnection from ourselves and our lives in the Void.

Perhaps in some unconscious way it all makes ‘sense’:

• If we can make ourselves indispensable then perhaps nobody will leave us.
  
  
• If we can ‘rescue’ somebody then perhaps we’ll finally feel ‘worthy’.
  
  
• If we can get another person to love us enough then perhaps we’ll no longer have to confront the shame, emptiness, or uncertainty we carry within ourselves.

Whatever the case may be, ‘love’ has now become a strategy for managing our own unresolved feelings and – because such strategies are driven by shame and fear – we can gradually lapse into control freakery.

We might give advice nobody asked for, resent people who don’t follow it, feel betrayed when somebody we’ve helped fails to appreciate us in the way we expect, or become so invested in another person’s potential that we can no longer accept the reality of who they actually are.

None of these things are ‘love’ but the ego trying to negotiate a deal with reality so we can avoid facing ourselves and then returning home:

When Somebody Else Becomes the Source of Your Love

One particularly powerful expression of the active shadow is obsessive attachment:

This can happen when somebody experiences limerence which is an intense preoccupation with another person – often accompanied by idealisation, intrusive thoughts, and a powerful desire for reciprocation in order to be able to feel ‘whole’ or ‘complete’.

In these cases, the person experiencing it might feel as though they’ve encountered somebody extraordinary who has awakened a feeling in them that nobody else could ever inspire:

And, whilst the experience certainly can feel extraordinary, there’s an important distinction to make which is that:

The person who awakens your love didn’t create your capacity for it.

What usually happens when we feel the obsessive attachment of limerence is that another person activates feelings, desires, and possibilities that we’ve kept hidden from ourselves – they don’t actually ‘add’ anything to the equation but there’s something about them that ‘unlocks’ whatever we’ve been hiding from ourselves (because psychologically we let our emotional and mental barriers down in either their presence or as we imagine an idealised version of them).

In other words, their attention makes us feel alive, their affection helps us experience our own tenderness, and their apparent interest gives us permission to feel worthy, desirable, or hopeful but then we mistake the person who activated these feelings for the source of them.

This can make us believe that our emotional survival depends on keeping them close which is why we idealise them, overlook incompatibilities, and become attached to a fantasy about what they represent (which is really a fantasy about leaving the Void without simply returning to the truth about ourselves and life).

When they withdraw, we feel as though we’ve lost not only them but also the ‘part’ of ourselves that came alive in their presence – the truth, though, is that our capacity for love was never exclusively theirs to give us and even though they may have awakened it, it’s still up to us and us alone to own it.

Until we do, we might keep searching for another person to recreate the feeling, repeating the same patterns with different faces as the the Void remains and our attempts to fill it become increasingly exhausting.

3. The Real Expression of Love: Deep Connection Without Control

The Passive and Active Shadows of Love emerge from the same fundamental disconnection:

One response is to suppress our love so that nobody can hurt us whereas the other is to overexpress it so that somebody will make us feel safe, worthy, or complete.

Both approaches are attempts to manage the vulnerability of being human, both involve resisting reality, and both prevent us from experiencing love as something we can consciously own and express.

The real expression of love is different and it’s about finding a sense of balance:

Real love allows us to connect deeply with somebody or something while accepting that it is what it is and we are what we are.

What this means is pretty simple (but not always easy to actually live):

• We can care about somebody without needing to control them.
  
  
• We can be vulnerable without demanding that our vulnerability guarantees a particular outcome.
  
  
• We can appreciate what somebody brings into our lives without believing that our happiness depends entirely on keeping them there.
  
  
• We can love somebody and still recognise that the relationship isn’t ‘right’ for either of us and so we don’t try to force things.
  
  
• We can feel disappointed when somebody leaves without concluding that we’re worthless.
  
  
• We can help somebody without trying to take responsibility for their entire life.
  
  
• We can allow ourselves to be ‘seen‘ without treating every possible rejection as the final verdict on our value.

None of this is about becoming detached, indifferent, or invulnerable – nor does it mean pretending that we don’t need other people because, at the end of the day, human beings are relational creatures and so we all need relationships and are affected by them.

Realness simply means that we stop making other people responsible for resolving the ‘parts’ of ourselves we’ve refused to accept ourselves.

When we actually OWN our real capacity for love then we can give ourselves more fully because we’re no longer asking the other person to complete us:

We don’t have to hide our feelings to protect our ego and we don’t have to exaggerate them to secure somebody else’s attention – instead, we can love freely and in the flow because we aren’t using love as a disguise for fear.

4. How to Reclaim Your Love and Start Growing REAL

Here are five practical steps to help you start balancing out the active and passive shadows of love so you can step into your realness even more:

Step 1: Notice Where You Disown Your Love

A good starting point is to train yourself to become aware of the situations in which you suppress, deny, or exaggerate your emotions:

Do you withdraw when somebody gets close to you?

Do you struggle to tell people that you care about them?

Do you find yourself obsessing over somebody whose attention feels uncertain?

Perhaps you habitually ‘rescue’ people, even when they’re capable of solving their own problems.

Maybe you give far more than you genuinely want to give and then become resentful when your efforts aren’t reciprocated.

Don’t judge yourself for whatever patterns you notice in yourself – simply become curious about them and allow yourself to see them without identifying with them (they are something you have, not something you are).

These self-coaching questions can help:

• When do I find it difficult to acknowledge that I care?
  
  
• When do I feel compelled to prove my love or to try and earn somebody else’s?
  
  
• Where am I pretending not to need connection?
  
  
• Where am I expecting another person to make me feel whole?

The aim isn’t to label yourself as avoidant, needy, or co-dependent but to recognise where your behaviour might be protecting you from feelings you haven’t yet learned to accept and actually feel.

Awareness is the first step towards reclaiming what’s been disowned and putting yourself back on the path to wholeness.

Step 2: Accept the Feelings You Were Taught to Hide

Once you’ve identified your patterns then it’s time to begin practising acceptance – for example:

• If you feel affection then let yourself acknowledge it.
  
  
• If you feel lonely then actually admit it.
  
  
• If you’re frightened of rejection then allow yourself to recognise the fear without immediately building a strategy around it.
  
  
• Etc. etc. etc.

Acceptance isn’t the same as impulsive expression and so you don’t need to act on every feeling and you certainly don’t have to tell everybody everything you feel – you just need to allow your experience to exist without treating it as something else.

Try this simple exercise to see what I mean:

When a strong feeling arises, pause, and then say to yourself:

“This is what I’m feeling right now – I don’t need to deny it, justify it, or immediately do something about it.“

Then notice what happens in your body and mind when you just allow things to BE:

You’ll most likely discover that the feeling becomes easier to tolerate when you stop fighting it and you’ll also probably notice the stories your ego creates to protect you from it.

Practise allowing those stories to be there without automatically believing them because the more you accept your own experience, the less you need to organise your life around avoiding it which frees you up to do something REAL.

Step 3: Separate Love from the Need to Control

Another helpful step is to pay attention to what happens when somebody you care about behaves in a way you don’t like – for example:

• Do you immediately try to change them?
  
  
• Do you withdraw affection to punish them?
  
  
• Do you become anxious and seek reassurance?
  
  
• Do you start imagining how different everything would be if they would finally become the person your ego wants them to be?

These reactions might be understandable in a way but they also deserve a little closer examination so it’s worth asking yourself:

“Can I accept this person as they are whilst also being honest about what I need and what I’m willing to accept in my life?“

Remember, acceptance doesn’t mean approval, passivity, or abandoning your boundaries:

You can accept that somebody is unreliable and decide not to depend on them, you can accept that somebody doesn’t reciprocate your feelings and choose to move on, and you can accept that a relationship matters deeply to you while recognising that it isn’t healthy.

Real love doesn’t require you to surrender your own judgement – it just requires you to stop confusing your desire for a particular outcome with the truth of what is actually happening.

Step 4: Practise Vulnerability Without Demanding a Reward

If you’ve spent years suppressing your love, start expressing it in small, manageable ways.

Tell a friend that you appreciate them. Let somebody know when they’ve made a difference to your life. Have an honest conversation about something you’ve been avoiding.

If you tend towards the active shadow, practise expressing care without turning it into a transaction.

Offer help without assuming responsibility for the other person’s choices. Give affection without using it to secure reassurance. Allow people to make their own mistakes without automatically stepping in to rescue them.

The important thing is to stay within your Stretch Zone: the space where you’re challenging familiar patterns without overwhelming yourself.

You don’t need to transform your entire emotional life overnight.

You simply need to start behaving in ways that are more aligned with the truth of what you feel and what you value.

And remember: vulnerability doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get the response you want.

That’s precisely why it matters.

You’re learning to express yourself because it’s real, not because you’ve found a clever way to control the outcome.

If you’re ready to go deeper into building flow and uncovering your real life then check out my book Trust: A Manual in Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace.

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Step 5: Build a Relationship with Yourself That Doesn’t Depend on Somebody Else

The final step is to practise offering yourself the acceptance you’ve been seeking externally:

This doesn’t mean becoming so ‘self-sufficient’ that you no longer care about connection – just that you recognise that another person’s approval can never substitute for your willingness to accept yourself at the most foundational level.

Here’s what this might look like:

• When you make a mistake then practise responding with honesty rather than self-contempt.
  
  
• When you feel lonely then acknowledge the loneliness rather than immediately searching for somebody to distract you from it.
  
  
• When you want something then allow yourself to want it without making its achievement a condition of your worth.
  
  
• When you experience rejection then let yourself feel the disappointment without turning it into a story about your fundamental inadequacy.

This is vital because the more you accept yourself, the more freely you can participate in relationships without having to wear a mask:

You can want somebody without needing them to validate your existence, you can enjoy being loved without making it the only evidence that you’re lovable, and you can open your heart without handing somebody else the responsibility for keeping it open.

This is where love starts to become a genuine expression of realness rather than another strategy for escaping the Void.

The Final Word: Love Is Something You Own, Not Something You Have to Earn

The Shadow of Love reminds us that our greatest emotional struggles don’t always arise because we lack something – sometimes, they arise because we’ve disowned something we already have.

We suppress our love because we’re frightened of being hurt (Passive Shadow) and we become obsessed with finding it externally because we’ve forgotten how to accept it within ourselves (Active Shadow).

In both cases, we’re trying to escape the vulnerability of being REAL but love isn’t something you have to ‘earn’ by becoming indispensable, impressive, attractive, or endlessly useful to other people – nor is it something you have to suppress to prove that you’re strong enough to survive without it.

It’s just a capacity you already have and can learn to acknowledge, accept, and express with an even greater grounding in its truth.

As you reclaim it, you’ll probably discover that you still experience fear, disappointment, grief, and uncertainty because realness doesn’t exempt you from being human.

What changes, though, is your relationship with these experiences:

-You become less inclined to hide from your feelings and less compelled to make other people responsible for resolving them.

-You can connect more deeply because you’re no longer trying to control every possible outcome.

-You can give without keeping score, receive without suspicion, and let go without pretending that you never cared.

Above all, you can recognise that loving somebody and needing them to complete you are two very different things.

The more you own your love, the less you need to use other people to find it, and the less you need to use them, the more freely you can love them.

That’s the real expression of love.

So stay real out there,

P.S. If it’s time to step out of the shadows and start growing real then book a free coaching session with me and I’ll help you start moving towards balance and flow.

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Trust: A Manual for Becoming the Void, Building Flow, and Finding Peace is a book about learning to return to your realness by cultivating trust in yourself and trust in life.

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Shadow Life is an exploration of the human shadow and the hidden side of our personalities. It looks at the masks we wear, where these masks come from, and how we can take them off.

The book explores how we can better manage our relationships with shame, guilt, and trauma in order to remove the Mask that the world has asked us to wear (and that we forgot we were wearing) so we can live an authentic life with less drama, chaos, or BS whilst we’re still around.

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