Time and again this fundamental truth keeps popping up;
Our ability to truly love is directly connected to our tolerance for emotional vulnerability. In other words, the more we can tolerate being emotionally vulnerable, the greater our ability to love. Love therefore has nothing to do with another person, it is something within ourselves and the courage to expose it; the ability to tolerate and overcome the fear of emotional pain, or hurt. Therefore when we say “I love you” to someone, we are not really actually loving them, we are merely feeling safe enough in their presence to expose our true selves to the risk of emotional pain, or hurt. It’s about the courage of letting love out, rather than receiving anything emotionally from another person. Therefore, also, loving someone is not dependent upon them, but dependent upon you and your courage and ability to let your emotional guard down.
We all have emotional guards, some more than others, but the hardest emotional guards to overcome are the ones set up in the amygdala before the hippocampus comes on line at around the age of 3 to 4 years old. Ones that consciousness and explicit memory have no access to. Emotional injuries in the first 3 to 4 years of life are almost impossible to repair without some conscious acceptance of their existence. They set up emotional guards with an autonomy totally separate from the conscious personality and with the power to usurp the personality at any moment and whenever the person finds them facing the threat of emotional exposure, whenever that person is confronted by the fear of emotional vulnerability.
Love and Fear are complete polar opposites. We are like magnets, we attract or repel and the forces of that attraction and repulsion are Love and Fear. Whenever we repel, we do so out of fear.
Therefore, behaviour that we refer to as Bipolar, is an instability of Love and Fear; our internal magnet is, essentially, unstable. A dysregulation of our perceptions of threat and safety. An amygdala with a hair trigger, lacking in or pertaining to a dysfunctional cortical modulation.
Relational Dynamics 
The Physiology of Pain Addiction On a physical level, the addiction is not really to pain, but primarily to free-flowing endorphins that accompany the pain. Endorphins are a hormone-like substance that the body releases whenever a pain or injury is experienced. They are very similar in structure and effect to the opiates, like heroin and morphine. Endorphins are pain-killers. When you stub your toe you feel a sharp pain, immediately followed by numbness, which accompanies the anaesthetizing endorphins. The feeling of numbness associated with endorphin release is not unpleasant and, in fact, can be an almost euphoric sensation. People who exercise vigorously are familiar with this feeling. All strain on the body yields endorphins. Emotional stress, like physical stress, leads to strain. If the strain is constant, the body sends a continuous stream of endorphins, which results in a dull (and barely noticeable) anesthetic effect. When endorphin flooding is part of everyday life, the senses are actually deadened. Workaholics experience this, but just as in the toe-stubbing example, the feeling can be somewhat pleasant. With sustained endorphin release you can still feel emotions, but only if they are intense, such as anger, rage, sorrow and fear. These trigger further endorphin release, which can lead to further emotional numbing. And once you become used to living an endorphin-filled existence, it is hard to give it up. With so much pain-killing substance running through your body, there is a sense of security that makes you feel safer in the world. It’s a shield inside the body that protects you from subtle feelings that are more difficult to block, like tenderness, vulnerability, and love.
And then when love comes along, you stop feeling so safe?
An interesting perspective. With, I think, a fair amount of truth 🙂
As long as we are reacting unconsciously to our childhood emotional wounds and intellectual programming, we keep repeating the patterns. We keep getting involved with unavailable people. We keep setting ourselves up to be abandoned, betrayed and rejected. We keep looking for love in all the wrong places, in all the wrong faces. Is it any wonder we have a fear of intimacy?
a self perpetuating virus of fear?