The Fallacy of Going for Love and Affection: Why We Should Go for Playfulness
Many of the people I get dreams from or work with in counseling sessions suffer from a kind of internal obsession, which I have had myself at times in my life, that believes that if we only have love and affection from someone, then our lives would really work and we would somehow my whole. In the midst of that belief this is what ACTUALLY happens step by step.
- First of all we start from a position of weakness in a relationship that says the other person has all of the love to give and I have nothing. The longing for love and affection is like believing that you are a dried up well that needs filling. When someone else fills it, then you will be ok. It is NOT such a strong position to start from.
- Sometimes you can get into a relationship and get your well filled up for a short time, but if you are internally a dried up well, people will abandon you sooner or later because they don’t want to have to continually hang with a dried up well. Seeking love and affection equals abandonment.
- When you get abandoned from others because of being a dried up well, then the tendency is to hide in the mind rather than living fully in the world. The mind becomes a safe place where you don’t have feel abandoned.
To get out of the pattern that ends up in abandonment there is an easy switch which works amazing well. Instead of believing that you need more love and affection, you can believe that you need more play. The difference between seeking love as if you are dried up well and being involved in more play is that play takes you out of your mind and puts you fully into your body in the present tense, the now. Not surprisingly when you are fully in your body, then you can connect with others more easily because you are a well that is full of positive energy.
It is a bit counter-intuitive but it explains why when you come home from stressful work where you have had to face a lot of harshness or rejection, that going out and exercising or playing re-energizes you when you are tired. The natural tendency after facing the negative world is to return home and believe that what you need is love. This is because the outside world has dried up your well. If it worked to get love from someone, it would be a great strategy, but it just doesn’t work. It just leaves you feeling abandoned.
Play re-engages yourself and puts you back into your body fully. It starts from inside of yourself and then connects you back to positive energy. When you are connected to your inner self, then you automatically with almost no effort connect to everyone around you.
So when you feel like your spouse or mother or father or someone doesn’t love you, then just make the mental switch and go for play. You will forget them and be connected with everyone around you.
Richard Hastings is an expert in change work and dream work and author of Dreams for Peace. He is a 
Dreams For Peace 
Thanks for your post, so true. I’m in the process of morphing from a dried well into a full playfulness vessel 🙂
Hi Richard,
I read your new post this morning and then continued working on Day 8 of the 19-Day Transformation program (that is found in the Products section of your website). Coincidentally, it is on the same topic: (fear of) abandonment. I thought I would re-post a few paragraphs from what you wrote before for others who are reading this to continue to expand on the information you are sharing on your post now.
Here is the first section of Day 8: The Mother of All Fears. You wrote:
Day 8: The Mother of All Fears
Originally Published January 12, 2013 Change work , emotions , memory , NLP , reflections, transformation , virtues
Tags: exclusion, fear of abandonment, fear of exclusion, protective fears
“Ye were created to show love one to another and not perversity and rancour. Take pride not in love for yourselves but in love for your fellow-creatures. Glory not in love for your country, but in love for all mankind.” Baha’u’llah
Sometimes good ideas like having 19 consecutive days of doing this transformation plan run into obstacles that slow things down. Friday I had an all day huge elementary school track meet to organize and run and then today I was at a tennis tournament for my high school team.
Sooner or later the reason most of us abandon our plans comes down to fear. Since we are a social species and count on our survival by being part of a group, the mother of all our fears is some form of exclusion. Today as I was watching my tennis team perform and interacting with them, nearly all of the players were nervous. They worried about the results and were fearful of being eliminated. If we all just had the quality of playfulness and could stop the thinking so much about the results, we would probably perform at a much higher rate.
When we think about exclusion, our minds go out into the future and imagine how it is we might get eliminated in one form or another. There are an infinite number of ways to be excluded. Then we experience some kind of tensing which causes hesitation, resistance, stopping, freezing, paralyzing, or any of a number of other coping strategies. As soon as the tensing happens our performance suffers. The interesting thing about the mind is that it cannot go off into imagination land with a fear unless we have already had experiences of exclusion. First you experience the abandoning feelings, then it goes into memory. When you set about doing something that requires full attention in the present, your mind immediately goes to imagining abandonment. If you can let go of the memory and imagination and tension, then getting to where you want to do is relative easy because you have no resistance inside.
We all come from a world culture that is largely based upon systemic and institutionalized exclusion. No one escapes it. We have memory banks full of abandonment. Everyone on the planet has the fear. It is why the most important issue of our era is unity. The first place to go when you are starting to look inside to see the things that are holding you back is how you have been left out or pushed out in one way or another.
For instance, if you are a member of race who has been excluded in the culture, you will have a lot of negative memories about it, and the memories are going to get triggered. You cannot escape the triggers. The key to achieving success with yourself and getting to the transformation you want is to not let the exclusion take over your mind and cripple you, nor should you take violent steps toward those who have done the excluding. When fear takes over the mind, we cannot achieve the success we are after.
We achieve success by recognizing the triggers, understanding the source, and then letting them go. It is important to feel them and acknowledge them because without the consciousness, they just act independently for survival sake in an unconscious manner. What is needed is the new energy because spiritual qualities like patience, joy, love, honesty, and courage always create a more united world when they are practiced correctly.
The exercise today is to understand the source of your exclusion by answering the following questions…..(NOTE TO READERS: The exercises are included in the program.)
** Richard, (and others who read his blog posts), the reason I am sharing this here is because I remember how it felt when I first started seeing these things in myself. This year, I’ve chosen Playfulness as the virtue I want to work on and develop more and before reading your post I wouldn’t have really realized how Playfulness is a solution to being like a dried up well. I am only just starting to see it now and can think of one or two ways to begin trying some new things today and I feel really excited about that. Thank you for sharing what you do. I am really grateful.**