Undefended Love Quotes

“The closer we get to our radiant center, the greater the access we have to the source of love, clarity, and compassion.”
― Jett Psaris, Undefended Love

“Had our parents remained emotionally presentas we underwent early experiences of emptiness and loneliness, we would have learned that these feelings did not have to pull us out of relationship and thrust us into isolation. Emotional presence is the capacity to be nonjudgmental and motiveless when listening or simply being with another. If our parents had been able to give us the space and time to feel what we were feeling --without trying to change, fix, or control us--our emotional disturbance would eventually have cleared and we would have reconnected with our essence. Our parents' emotional presence would have given us the external support we needed to endure our discomfort until the emotional disturbance lessened.

Unfortunately, most of our parents could not tolerate the emotional discomfort evoked in them by our pain: They were emotionally absent, self-absorbed, or intent on controlling or fixing what we were feeling so they would not be disturbed. As a result, our capacity to stay in relationship while going through difficult emotional experiences was compromised. For example, if we were crying and they did not know how to ease our pain, they may have felt inadequate. We may then have responded to their need to feel capable by denying or controlling what we were experiencing. In this way we learned that to stay in relationship with them we had to disconnect from our internal life. Conversely, to remain in contact with ourselves, we had to cut ourselves off from our parents. In either case, in the absence of emotional presence, we learned that we cannot be fully ourselves in relationship.”
― Jett Psaris, Undefended Love