Overcoming the loss of love outside yourself

Just recently I've been rediscovering an increased awareness of love, which includes receiving love from God and experiencing it within myself - in the heart. When I feel this, any sense of loss and grief disappears, I feel literally more whole, more awake, more myself, and happier.

I've been dealing with the loss of my wife since 2024 and it's been difficult. But it's also been an education and has inspired a lot of insights. What suddenly dawned on me this morning is that maybe I've been seeking for a love that is missing within, outside of myself, because of some kind of lack within.

Maybe even when she was still around, I had certain senses of lack and unlove - a lack of self love - and she seemed to become "an idol", a seeming symbol of love, a source of love, and a way to get my needs met.

This is what ACIM would call "special love", which is driven by lack and need. First we look within and believe that love is missing, which can only happen through self-condemnation and judgement and a general lack of love (denial of God/Self). Then we go seeking externally to find salvation through someone else. Someone who seems to "do it to us and for us."

We might then form a sense of or degree of love toward a person, but it is often then a conditional love with strings attached. You start off with a neediness within, the other person seems to make up for some of your shortcomings, they support you and prop you up, and you seem to mostly cover up your internal lack. It feels like love because some degree of love is there, but there are also conditions involved - a narrowing of love and freedom to the limits of form.

Two people can then "cling" to each other in the storm and support each other and grow together, but at the same time the underlying "need" forms dependency, which we might also call "attachment". I see this attachment also as the attempt to associate love with form/physicality, such as believing you love a person "as a body". This narrows the love to the limits of form and makes it more exclusive, "attaching" love to something physical.

The problem comes when the narrowed form-based love interest goes away, you believe that LOVE ITSELF goes with them. ie if the body dies, then the love dies with it, attached to it. Then there's a belief that love is lost, and a sense of despair ensues. This of course makes sense because if love is dead and you lack love within, there is nowhere to get love and you must despair in darkness.

I see also that despair comes from the sense of unresolvable lack/need within. If I lack love in some way internally, and I "need" to get it from anywhere other than within/God, and begin to "seek and do not find" with the ego - seeking for it in some external source, and that seeming external "solution" to the lack/need goes away, the mind is left holding the needy compulsion.

When you are in a position where you have a need, and you have no way to meet the need, or when you have a problem that cannot be solved, or you depend on someone to fulfil some role or function for you and then they stop doing it, your mind sees no way out and becomes lost and hopeless. And this then produces a sense of horror and rage and despair and loss. Or, what ACIM would call, "special hate." The rage of the ego comes out as an unhealable wound gushing all over the place.

The underlying lack/need comes into awareness and is experienced as unresolvable, and then continually creates more loss as it wants, needs, depends on and expects that which has gone away externally. This shows up like the withdrawal symptoms of an addict. Similarly, the mind remains "dependent" on the external thing for its source of salvation, and keeps seeking it for a solution, but the thing is gone and isn't providing what it once was, causing the mind to feel a sense of loss, deprivation, abandonment, etc.

The thing that's been dropping in for me now is that this so-called "loss" that seems to be focused on the "death of" an external figure, is actually a PROJECTED FORM of an internal lack of love. I thought perhaps I was "getting love" from some external source and needed to do so, and kept continually trying to do so even after the external source was gone. In other words, the internal "lack of love" was not addressed, and trying to solve it externally just kept reinforcing it. "How unloved I am" became the source of despair.

But what really needed to happen was to realize that this was a second-hand solution. Loss, or "hankering for the idol that died", was only a secondary solution to the internal lack of love. And when there is a presence of love within, the mind no longer needs to seek without to get its "needs" met. A loving mind HAS no needs, and it is only "needing someone" that produces loss. And need is not love.

I've been finding that if I connect with love within, receive love from God, allow myself to see myself as loved by God and lovable etc, then it seems to automatically switch off the loss. The loss can't even "go there" because it has no foundation - no guilt/lack/sin/hate of self to feed from.

In effect, I saw that it wasn't so much that I had loss about a person dying, but that I really believed that LOVE ITSELF had died. As if part of God had died, was nowhere to be found WITHOUT, and therefore could not be felt within either. When I affirmed that love was not dead but still alive, as God, as my SELF, this seemed to lift me up to a whole new level of wholeness.

What I've also found is that having more love within seems to automatically alleviate the entire foundation of that part of me that seems to want to "seek for" the missing person. The part that is very emotional which felt attached and yearning for and needing the person to be there, which asks "I want them, where are they", wondering where they'd gone, wanting them to come back etc... was a sort of deflected projection of a deeper internal lack of love.

In other words, the loss of a dead partner isn't really the cause of a sense of loss. It's not even their absence that causes it. It's what the absence MEANS for your attempt to solve the problem of lacking love within yourself. What it means for how you will get your "needs" met.

It's much more to do with the dynamic of special love, the sense of a lack of love within for yourself, and the attempt to "attach to" the person as the symbol of the love that's missing, to milk them for all they're worth. As if only they can provide what you lack. As if only their presence can console you. As if you need them just to exist. As if without them you are dead and hopeless with no way to resolve your lack. And dependency isn't even really the issue because it's just HOW you tried to resolve your lack by tapping into a seeming source.

Perhaps the bigger truth then is that if I/we had love within ourselves, from and shared with God, and would allow ourselves to BE loved more, we would actually have far less of a sense of "I need you", or "you complete me", or "I depend on you", or "I want you back" etc... which is the psychologically twisted attachment that forms when you are IN NEED. If we are not in need, within, internally, then we are more whole and no longer seeing ourselves as "dependent on" someone else for happiness, wholeness, identity, or anything else. We get it all from God in our creation.

As I find an increasing love within, and allow myself to BE loved more, to receive and be grateful for love that God has given already, the sense of loss is greatly reducing. I literally feel a letting go of that psychological external dependency, that emotional reaching out, that longing for what's not there, that wanting what I cannot have and then thinking that there is no other solution to my "problem". The problem of a lack of love.

There IS another solution to loss and death. The solution is LOVE. Love heals and restores and maintains the wholeness of what we are. Without love we ARE lost and are in a constant state of loss, and in that loss we project the cause of it and try to fill the hole using another person externally. We may partially love them but if our love was whole we would not NEED them, depend on them, or be "attached" to them. That's neediness is a special relationship rather than a holy relationship.

A holy relationship would be rooted in internal wholeness and a lack of needs, such that we feel and experience wholeness and happiness within ourselves BEFORE the other person even enters into it. We then come from love, instead of coming from neediness and lack and selfishness. We bring and give and extend love, instead of trying to take it, and receive it from God as our supply.

In loss, the ego is like a little child that cries because its favourite toys have been taken away and it wants them back. It is a self-interest of seeing oneself as deprived and lacking (lacking love, self, identity, God, other), and therefore dependent on external things to seem to complete us. But we can't even really be completed by external things, they just cover up the continued lack within. And while they may be loving us, we may be failing to fully love them.

I think in the bigger picture the lesson long term has been more along the lines of learning to love myself more and letting myself receive God's love more, and finding love here and now within myself AS myself, rather than trying to get it from somewhere else as a bandaid. An opening up to a more unconditional love, and lifting love away from being attached to physical objects or conditions. An expansion in my sense of love and identity and realising that love is not physical. And what is made of love can never be dead.

I think in particular that I spent many years trying to be a caregiver and helper and fixer as a form of love, but there was still an underlying lesson of not really getting my own needs met and not loving myself fully enough. I gave extremely but would not let myself receive much. And the more externally focused my life situation became the more I became lost and unhappy. My source of love was gradually taken away and so I've been having to learn where to find the love again, and whether it even exists.

Fortunately I do now feel a movement toward finding it WITHIN, rather than without, and this is a whole new adventure in discovery and opening and awakening. Realising that what I sought for externally is actually inside. Realising that the whole spiritual path of seeking has been the problem all along, and lifting out of that toward a focus on recognition, acceptance, and awakening to a pre-existing love that God has given is a massive shift in orientation and "problem solving approach."

It's been like a 180-degree turning point, shifting from the seek and do not find approach to life, to more of a "finding and not seeking" approach. And truly I have to say that finding and FEELING love within is the biggest revelation - I am still discovering the depths of it as if I forget it was even possible. The more I feel love within the happier I feel. It makes me literally feel more whole, like I have more personality, like I'm being me more. And all my "energies" and emotion seems to be returning to a much more centred and whole state rather than all over the place.

But the major "reward" of it all, is that it is making the terrible LOSS melt away. A loss which felt like it would never end. A loss which ultimately is caused by moving AWAY from love. Because in truth, loss is a desire for death, and is a belief in it, rather than a belief in love and life. And loss can only seem to be experienced as the loss of something separate from you. It's part of the separation idea and the ego. Yet where there is love, there is nothing lacking and no needs and no deprivation.

Love is the answer. Love is the atonement. Love is the undoing of death and despair. We must learn once again that we are very, very loved.

"I am sustained by the Love of God. - Here is the answer to every problem that confronts you today and tomorrow and throughout time."

"Put all your faith in the Love of God within you, eternal, changeless and forever unfailing. This is the answer to whatever confronts you today."

"Here is the answer! Seek for it no more. You will not find another one instead."

"Here is the answer! Do not turn away in aimless wandering again. Accept salvation now. It is the gift of God and not the world."

"The text explains that the Holy Spirit is the Answer to all problems you have made."

"Your holiness is the answer to every question that was ever asked, is being asked now, or will be asked in the future. Your holiness means the end of guilt, and therefore the end of hell."

"Forgiveness is the ANSWER to attack of any kind. So is attack DEPRIVED of its effects, and hate is answered in the Name of Love."