This is Your Brain. This is Your Brain in Love.

Can you imagine, and perhaps you really can, what it is like to experience that first, heart-blowing realization that someone actually loves you completely? Loves you without boundaries or restraint, regardless of your brokenness, emotional issues, and the truckloads of psychological stuff you carry with you? It is addictive to say the least. Your mind returns again and again to thoughts of that person who loves you so unconditionally. Why? Because it feels marvelous. The endorphin rush you feel each time you realize that someone can actually love YOU (and all your quirkiness, your faults, and your issues that seem to make you relationally dysfunctional) is likened to that of a chemical rush to your brain.

Unconditional love is just that, no conditions attached. You are loved just because you are YOU. Not what you do. Not because of how good you are or how you look or sound or smell. Just because you are that amazing and unique package of YOU. Someone finds delight in the person of you. That is heady stuff…and you want more.

I am blessed to have experienced this. For the first time in my life, no matter how weird I got, or dysfunctional, or disappointing I was, I was loved completely. This person didn’t see a need to change or reform me, to control my loud, hyper personality, my neediness, or insecurity. In fact, just the opposite happened. My new love actually celebrated and enjoyed the real me, told me wonderful things about myself I had not known. And so, I became……addicted.

We have heard the phrases “addicted to love” and “love addiction”, and come to find out there is scientific truth to them. According to results found in a study done in 2000,

This kind of love and acceptance brings a dopamine rush and can be full-out addicting! Love is indeed a wonderful “feel good” drug!

I’ve always been afraid to be completely real, somehow feeling that I wouldn’t be liked for who I really am. I’m pretty sure I became a people-pleaser while still in the womb, but that is a story for later. So when I was fully and completely accepted, with joy no less, it was a wonderful and beautiful balm to my wounded spirit. A balm that began to heal and nourish and “give my heart wings” enough to venture out of my self-imposed survival mode (which felt very much like a box). The fear of what others would think about me, how they would regard my true personality, began to fall away in the face of such acceptance and enjoyment of me.

We are told that God has this kind of love for us–actually because His is a sacrificial love, it’s way better–but it’s hard to even conceive. However, to experience unconditional love in a person, with skin on, someone we see, talk with and touch, gives us a much clearer picture.

I hope that if you haven’t yet, you will experience this kind of unconditional love. We all deserve it. I didn’t think I did. I settled for the other kind. It hurt. It stifled. It closed me up. But this kind of love? This love set me free.

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I’d give you an extra big hug. Thanks!