Undefended

Let them feel your love before they feel your self-protection.

People who want to love you feel affronted by your self-protection. The harsher it is, the more affronted they feel.

People ready to love you are insulted when you don't trust them. Rightfully so. Protection is a response to a threat.

Self-protection isn't particularly friendly most of the time because it is a response to threat. This is the *actual* mechanism behind most harm in relationships, as much as we love to say it's narcissism...

When those who want to love you feel attacked for trying to show you love, you'll start feeling their self-protection more than you feel their love.

Of course, there are people who will continue to show you their love, their understanding, their care, when you show them your self-protection. But those rare few are capable of calling in a community of people who don't self-protect at all, who simply exist as safe beings and therefore operate from love.

A person capable of managing your self-protection and showing you love in a way that you experience it is doing emotional labor on your behalf. You create a barrier to intimacy in any relationship which requires emotional labor from the other person, and that makes you less appealing to people who are capable of relating from devotion, which is free of labor and obligation.

This leaves you playing in the sandbox of people looking out at each other, wary of threats, engaging in self-protection first, and love second. You engage with a collective agreement that relationships will certainly involve navigating a matrix of each others' self-protection systems.

Self-protection inspires self-protection from others which may come in the form of

—anxious-avoidant attachment patterns

—codependency and martyrdom

—masking/performance

—cycles of resentment and repair

—intrusive-thought driven conflict and processing

Safety is like your skeleton. Self-protection is like armor. The point of connection is your skin—somewhere in between.

The boundary is where we feel the connection, where it is palpable, pleasurable, potent.

When the boundary I offer is loving, warm, and connected, it's welcoming rather than alienating. It's easy rather than laborious. It's a blessing without any burden.

I offer my love, investing the bulk of my trust in myself, and it turns out there is rarely any need for self-protection.

I offer my love, and those eager to love meet me right there.