“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” — attributed to Lao Tzu
Let me ask you something, and I’d like you to answer honestly… just to yourself. When someone is kind to you, really kind, for no reason at all, what happens inside? Do you relax into it? Or does a small voice start doing the sums: what do they want? What do I owe them now? How long before it stops?
If you recognised that voice, you are in very good company. Most of the people who sit in my clinic chair have it. And underneath it sits one of the biggest questions any of us will ever ask: is it actually possible to be loved, and to love, without conditions? Or is every relationship, deep down, a trade?
I believe it is possible. Not easy, not perfect, but possible. And the reason it so often feels impossible has far less to do with your partner, your parents or your friends than you might think. It has to do with what your body learned about love long before you had the words to argue with it.
Love and relationship are not the same thing
Here’s where most of us get tangled up straight off. We use love and relationship as if they mean the same thing. They don’t.
Love, the real thing, is an inner stance. It’s wishing someone well. It’s seeing their worth as something that isn’t up for negotiation. And that, yes, can be held without conditions.
A relationship is something different. It’s a house two people live inside together, and every house needs walls. Boundaries. Agreements about how we treat each other. If someone is cruel, dishonest or unsafe, you can go on loving them and close the door. Both are true at once.
Why does this matter so much? Because I have met so many people, often people carrying old wounds, who stayed in places that were hurting them and called it unconditional love. It wasn’t. It was an old survival program dressed up in love’s clothes. Unconditional love never asks you to abandon yourself. Full stop.
Reciprocity is not a transaction
Now, you might be thinking: but every good relationship involves give and take, doesn’t it? Of course it does! The question is not whether we give and receive. It’s why.
Picture two couples. On the surface they look identical. They cook for each other, they listen, they show up. But in one house there’s a little ledger tucked in a kitchen drawer. Every kindness gets written down. Every favour is a debt. Every sacrifice is quietly waiting to be repaid.
In the other house, there is no ledger. They give because they care, not because the books need to balance.
How can you tell which house you’re living in? Watch what happens when one person can’t give for a while. Illness. Grief. A dark season of depression. In the ledger house, resentment builds, brick by brick, week by week. In the loving house, one person carries more for a time, and nobody sends an invoice.
The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm put it beautifully in The Art of Loving: immature love loves because it needs, while mature love needs because it loves. See how that works? Same ingredients. Completely different recipe.
Why love can feel like something you have to earn
So why do so many of us live in the ledger house, even when we’d much rather not?
Because somewhere along the way, we learned that love has a price. Be good. Be quiet. Be clever. Be useful. Don’t be too much. Nobody had to say it out loud. A child picks it up the way a sponge picks up water: from a look, a silence, a door closing, affection that arrived when we pleased and vanished when we didn’t.
I call these Family Rules: below-conscious survival programs we absorb in childhood to keep ourselves safe and connected. They were brilliant at the time. They kept us loved, or at least kept us close to the people we depended on. The trouble is, they don’t retire when we grow up.
And here’s the part that matters most. These lessons aren’t stored as thoughts you can simply argue with. In my work, I describe them as Emotional Memory Images (EMIs): imprints held below conscious awareness, and, as I set out in my 2021 and 2022 papers in Frontiers in Psychology, held not only inside the body but in the space around it, the peripersonal space right in front of us. Bruce Lipton taught us to look at the cell membrane as the place where the cell meets and reads its world. I simply ask: what if that conversation carries on beyond the skin?
Think of a smoke alarm wired to a photograph of a fire. There’s no fire in the room today. There’s a kind partner, a warm hug, a gift for no reason. But the alarm doesn’t look at the room. It looks at the photograph. And off it goes: tight chest, knotted stomach, what’s the catch? (I explore this alarm in more depth in Beliefs Are the Symptom; the Image Is the Source.)
That’s why the barrier to unconditional love is often not they don’t love me unconditionally. It’s my body doesn’t believe love can come without a price. Not “what’s wrong with me?” but “what happened to me?”
Jennifer’s story
(Names and details have been changed, as always.)
Jennifer came to me as she was leaving an eighteen-year marriage. From very early on in their relationship, her husband had held every penny. Every bill, every account, every decision about money went through him.
“He is cruel,” she told me. “All of these years I’ve been afraid of him. But he threw a plate at our daughter, and something snapped inside of me. Enough! I yelled it silently, inside my own mind. The next day I filed for divorce.”
Eighteen years. Why so long? It’s the question people so often ask, isn’t it? And it’s the wrong one. Fear is a remarkably good jailer. When the body has learned that speaking up is dangerous, it keeps us small and still, not because we’re weak, but because that’s how it has kept us alive. The alarm was doing its job, year after year.
And let’s be very clear about one thing. Control is not love. Holding all the money, keeping someone afraid: that’s the ledger house at its most extreme, where only one person ever holds the pen. In England and Wales, controlling or coercive behaviour in an intimate relationship has been a criminal offence since 2015. It has a name for a reason. I’ve unpacked the hidden mechanism behind it, the pattern I call the Fox, in Coercive Control: The Hidden Mechanism Behind the Fox.
So what snapped? In that piece I call it the Snap: the moment someone simply cannot comply any longer. But here’s what struck me. It wasn’t Jennifer’s love that broke. Her love for her daughter is what spoke louder than eighteen years of fear. That’s the power of unconditional love: it would do for her child what, for so long, she couldn’t yet do for herself. It drew a line.
There’s a second part to Jennifer’s story, and it’s the part that made me sit up.
For years she had lived with debilitating migraines. Not the odd headache: there were times she was confined to a dark bedroom for up to a month. The pills didn’t help. Five years with a Chinese herbalist. A whole raft of approaches, mainstream and alternative. “Eventually,” she said, “it left me without hope.”
Then she made the decision to leave. And the migraines disappeared.
Here’s how she explains it, in her own words:
“The energy I was haemorrhaging to maintain stability in a very unstable relationship, and to keep up appearances for the ‘support network’, who were basically supporting the status quo, was actually causing me harm. Real physical hurt, born out of the psychological war of the marriage, where I remained a hostage for the sake of our daughter.”
Read that last line again. A hostage for the sake of our daughter. The very love that held her there was the love that finally set her free. Isn’t that something?
This is what I mean when I write dis-ease, with the hyphen on purpose: a whole system ill at ease long before it has a name. Jennifer’s migraines were not “all in her head”. They were real, physical and utterly debilitating. But her body was carrying a war it had never been allowed to put down, and holding up a smiling front for everyone watching. Something had to give, and for years, it was her.
Now, I’d never promise that leaving a relationship will cure a migraine, and I’d never suggest anyone stop seeing their doctor. Migraines have many causes and deserve proper medical care. But stories like Jennifer’s are exactly why I keep asking, alongside the medicine, not just “what’s wrong with me?” but “what’s happening to me?” It’s why I’ve written about the hidden cost of undiagnosed trauma on the body.
Enough is a boundary. It’s love with its walls finally up. And that silent word wasn’t the end of Jennifer’s story. It was the first line of a brand-new one.
She asked me while the divorce was going through. Even then, the control hadn’t stopped; it had simply changed shape. He demanded that she tell no one. Meanwhile, he went round each and every part of their network, in tears, announcing that she was divorcing him and he had no idea why.
Think about that for a moment. Silence for her, a stage for him. Psychologists even have a name for this pattern: DARVO, which stands for Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. The same “support network” that had propped up the status quo for years was now being recruited to his side, and Jennifer was expected to keep smiling and say nothing. Again. (If you’re watching someone you love go through this from the outside, please read Spot the Fox. Staying warm and reachable matters more than you know.)
And here’s the part I want you to really hear. Jennifer was making her break for freedom on her own. Nobody was coming to rescue her. The one anchor she had was her lawyer, a woman with twenty-five years’ experience of coercive behaviour, who could name her husband’s every move before he made it.
Why did that matter so much? Because when you’ve lived inside someone else’s version of reality for eighteen years, having one person look at it and say calmly, “Yes, that’s exactly what this is,” is like finding a handrail in the dark. Naming it doesn’t take the pain away. But it gives you your sanity back.
But the cruellest blow was still to come.
“Even my daughter sides with him,” she wept.
I asked her to look at it another way. Her daughter had grown up inside the illusion of a “Happy Family”. And who had kept that illusion alive, day after day, year after year? Jennifer had. Not out of weakness, and not out of deceit, but out of love: to protect her child from the war going on behind closed doors.
So of course her daughter couldn’t see it. She’d never been shown it. The Happy Family wasn’t a lie she’d been told; it was the house she’d grown up in, the Family Rules she’d breathed in without ever knowing. From inside that house, Mum leaving doesn’t look like escape. It looks like Mum breaking everything.
That’s not betrayal. It’s the very protection Jennifer gave her, still doing its job. And the same love that built that illusion can, in time, gently let the truth in.
It was in the middle of all that, while she endured his victimhood, that she asked me:
“Can there be love in a relationship without transaction and manipulation?”
After eighteen years of fear, control and keeping up appearances, she wasn’t asking out of cynicism. She was asking because she genuinely didn’t know what it would look like. Perhaps you don’t either. And my answer to her is my answer to you: yes, there can. Let me show you what it looks like.
What unconditional love actually looks like
Let’s bring this down to earth. In a relationship built on unconditional regard:
- You can be seen at your very worst, and the ground beneath the relationship doesn’t shake.
- An argument is about the issue, not a threat that love will be withdrawn.
- Giving doesn’t leave a sticky residue of you owe me.
- Your worth is assumed, not something you have to keep proving.
- Boundaries exist, and they’re respected without being heard as rejection.
Now, a gentle word of honesty. No human relationship is perfectly unconditional every minute of every day. We’re people! We have needs, limits and bad Tuesdays. The realistic aim is a relationship whose foundation is unconditional, with the everyday agreements (who does the school run, how we speak to each other, what we promise) built on top of it.
The foundation is love. The walls are boundaries. And the house stands because it has both.
So where do you start?
With yourself. Plain and simple. We tend to offer, and accept, unconditional love only to the degree we can extend some of it inward. If your own inner voice keeps a ledger on you, you’ll find one everywhere you look.
So here’s a little experiment. Next time someone is kind to you and you feel that familiar tightening, pause for thirty seconds. Ask yourself: if this feeling were out there rather than in here, where would it be? Up? Down? Close? Far away? Don’t do anything with it yet. Just look. You may be surprised how much your body already knows. And no, you don’t need to tell the story first. That’s the whole point of Healing Without the Story.
This is exactly the kind of work I’ve built into MindReset, available on Apple and Google. It’s designed to help you meet those below-conscious imprints gently, in your own time, and begin the process I call remembering to forget.
And one important note of care: if what you’re carrying feels heavy, or if old trauma is part of your story, please do this work alongside a trauma-informed practitioner. You deserve to be held safely while you heal. That isn’t weakness. It’s wisdom.
And if, like Jennifer, you’re living with someone who frightens or controls you, please reach out. In the UK, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline, run by Refuge, is free, confidential and open 24 hours a day on 0808 2000 247. Men can call the Men’s Advice Line on 0808 8010 327. If you’re in immediate danger, call 999.
Love without the ledger
So, is unconditional love possible? Yes. I’ve watched it happen, again and again, in people who were utterly convinced it wasn’t for them.
It rarely arrives because you find the perfect partner. It arrives when the old photograph stops setting off the alarm. When your body finally learns, below words, that you don’t have to earn your place at the table. You were always welcome there.
Those early lessons were messages, not life sentences. And messages can be rewritten.
Cheer up! The ledger was never yours to keep. Put it down, and see what love feels like without it.