Recently, I was coaching a woman who quietly made the following devastating statement:
“I don’t understand why I keep visualizing the worst possible outcome in my relationships.”
I told her:
This happens because abandonment feels familiar to your subconscious. Not because you desire it, but because your system has learned how to function there. It regards abandonment as familiar territory and knows the survival pattern that follows. Guarding the heart, shutting down emotionally, pulling back, staying alert, and remaining armored made sense as a way to endure what could not be met or held.
That strategy created safety.
But it also created distance.
Conversely when you focus on what is good, when you allow yourself to receive love fully, something deeply unsettling happens. Control begins to dissolve. Love pulls you into the unknown, and the unknown feels dangerous to a system that learned safety through withdrawal and self protection.
She looked at me and said, “If I go there, it feels like I am dying.”
And I said, “Yes. You are.”
Not physically, but spiritually.
You are dying to the version of you that survived by closing. You are dying to an identity built around vigilance rather than connection. You are dying to the illusion that love can be managed, controlled, or made safe.
This is where it gets deeper.
When we orient ourselves toward the worst possible outcome – usually abandonment or betrayal, which are deeply intertwined – we enter a zero sum game in which there is no winning outcome.
Even if abandonment does not happen, something else does. Emotional withdrawal sets in and appreciation starts to fade. The other person feels it, often without knowing why, and eventually retreats as well. After all, we primarily respond to each other’s energies.
We might tell ourselves we are “protecting” our inner child.
But this is a misunderstanding.
That child does not want to hide. They want to be seen, held, chosen, and met in the fullness of their aliveness.
Protection without connection slowly becomes another form of abandonment. Remember this. When you disconnect from yourself in the name of safety, you are not protecting your inner child. You are leaving them alone in a cold empty shell where their deepest longing cannot be met.
Love, I told her, is always a risk. That is the price of entry.
Anyone who opens their heart pays it. There is no exemption for those who have been hurt. And yet many spend their lives trying to find a way to love without risk, especially those who have been abandoned or betrayed.
Let me be clear: a love without risk does not exist.
Love without risk is not love at all; it is control. It is self-protection disguised as intimacy.
Yes, opening your heart can be painful. It exposes fragility, uncertainty, and the possibility of loss. But it is also real, alive, and the only path toward what you actually desire.
And this is not where the story ends.
It is possible to live with an open heart without losing yourself entirely. These two experiences are not inherently linked, even though many people believe they are. An open heart does not require naivety, fantasy, or mistaking potential for truth.
What often happens is this: “opening the heart” gets confused with ignoring reality, over-projecting goodness onto others, or staying loyal to what is hoped for, instead of what is actually present.
The deeper truth is simple: you can live with a wide-open heart, fully aware of risk, fully grounded in reality – while maintaining discernment, sovereignty and an unshakeable connection to yourself. Love does not require self-abandonment. It asks for courage, yes, but courage rooted in clarity, not blindness.
This is your power. Everything else is self protection.
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