The Opposite Of Love Is Not Hate, But Fear

We tend to believe that the opposite of love is hate. However, these two extremes have nothing to do with each other. The opposite of love is fear. A fear that paralyzes us, like so many others that we have to deal with every day. Because we live in fear, although fear of what? What would you do if you had no fears?

What would you do if you werent afraid?

One of man’s innate feelings is fear. It is a natural response to danger. Fear helps us to survive but it also limits us and has been used many times to break wills. It affects both the body and the mind.

In the face of fear, our body reacts with the increase in blood pressure, our pupils dilate and the heart pumps blood at high speed. But fear is sometimes only in our mind, because it can be imaginary, when it does not have a correspondence with a real danger.

There are many types of fear, the fear of failure, the fear of rejection, the fear of loss of power, and the fear of change.

Carl Gustav Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, argued that we all have certain traits that we hide, since from a young age we realized that this was necessary if we wanted to be accepted. That set of traits that we do not accept from ourselves are like a shadow that emerges at some point in our life. Along with “the shadow”, we develop what Freud called “the ideal of the self”, which is a self that we create to fit into our environment and not be rejected.

The non-acceptance of the shadow entails many problems, since we do not accept ourselves out of fear, we do not love ourselves. Fear is the opposite of love. We do not love ourselves out of fear of ourselves and we are not capable of loving others.

What would you do if you weren’t afraid to accept yourself, to recognize yourself, to be rejected? You would be free and you would enjoy your love for yourself and for others.

What is the opposite of love?

Hatred or “odium” in Latin, represents rejection of someone or something. It is actually useless. What is the use of hating? No problem. We’re just going to feel bad about ourselves. Paulo Freire, an expert on education issues of Brazilian origin, maintains that:

Love sweetens you, fear hardens you. Love opens you up to the universe, fear locks you up in yourself.

Why are we afraid to love?

Love is always a risk. On each occasion we will have to take that risk and live life, live the passion to love. Our past experiences and our beliefs limit us and induce us to fear to love.

Our fear of loving stems from our lack of love for ourselves or lack of self-esteem. If we cannot love ourselves, how are we going to love another person?

Our self-esteem or the consideration we have of ourselves. It is an aspect that we must improve in order to love ourselves and other people. The Argentine psychologist Walter Riso, proposes some keys to improve self-esteem :

• Encourage self-praise. Every time we do something good, something positive, we should praise ourselves. How well I have done!
• Reward yourself. Any achievement of our life, no matter how small, deserves an award. The award can be something simple that we like and make us enjoy.
• Eliminate repressive beliefs that prevent you from reinforcing yourself. Although sometimes we must put limits to our feelings, others we must let them go. What’s wrong with crying in public or showing your affection for someone to other people?

• Do not be ashamed of your successes and your efforts, enjoy them.

The extreme case of the fear of love is philophobia. A person suffering from philophobia experiences a very intense fear of falling in love with another person, of commitment, and of maintaining intimate relationships.

Philosophobic people use several mechanisms to defend themselves against love and stay in their comfort zone:

• They fall in love with impossible people.
• They start relationships that are destined to fail, because the two people are so different.
• They provoke discussions with the other person, to cause the other to break the relationship.
• They tend to look for flaws in the other person. In this way they justify themselves.

How can we overcome the fear of loving

The fear of love is a normal feeling when we have had negative experiences, but we should not give it a place and let it rule our lives. The fear of loving must be faced face to face, without running away.

If we feel a certain fear of the relationship with another person, it is convenient to let them know so that they can participate. Communication is essential to overcome our fear. It is also necessary to leave past relationships behind and live the new relationship day by day.