For all humans, love is a necessity. Love helps to create growth and connections and helps us to heal. It is important not only to give love, but to accept love in return. To accept love from others is to value others support. This helps us be nurtured as well as nurture others.

Receiving love is a choice, which can be hard for some people. When we grow up without love from parents or caretakers, experience trauma in relationships, or many other things that are out of our control, we tend to lose trust in others. This lack of trust makes it hard for many people to accept love from others.

Allowing someone to love us is linked to our self-image and how we love ourselves. We must love ourselves in order to accept love from others. Trust is key to accepting and even giving love. It can be hard to accept love after neglect or trauma. In turn, it is important to accept that love after experiencing trauma. We must be open to trust in order to be open to love.

Tips to Accept Love

• Understand Your Vulnerability

We must know what makes us vulnerable and how to handle out vulnerability to accept love. Love makes us very vulnerable but if we understand our vulnerable limits, we can help manage this vulnerability while also accepting love.

• Consider the Persons Intentions and Genuineness

Are the persons intentions kind and genuine? If someone’s intentions are pure then it is easier to let them in and accept love. Listen to your instincts on if someone’s intentions are genuine or not when deciding on trusting them.

• List and Understand Your Fears

Knowing what we do not want helps us accept what we do want. If we know that we do not want to surround ourselves with people that belittle us like our parents did, or someone who has narcissistic behaviors like a past relationship, then we can learn to find what we do want in future relationships.

• Learn to Love Yourself

This is the number one thing when learning to accept love from others. If you cannot love and accept yourself, how can you expect others to treat you with love and kindness? Loving ourselves can also show us how others should treat us when learning to accept love from others.

• Create Goals

Creating goals can help us surround ourselves with people that we trust. Creating goals can also help us know what we want from relationships and what we expect out of these relationships.

• Let People In

We cannot know what we do and do not want or what our fears are without letting people into our lives. This does not mean that they must stay there permanently, some people are simply in our lives to teach us. We cannot grow and learn to accept love without letting people in.

• Failure Is Okay

Not everything works out the way that we want it to and that is okay. Even though not everything works out, we grow and learn from our failures and mistakes. Keep an open mind when dealing with mistakes.

Remember that it is okay to not fully be able to open up to people. All we can do is try to work on ourselves and love ourselves so that we may be able to accept love from others. Not everyone’s experiences with love and relationships are the same. What may work for someone else, may not work for you.

Taking these steps in healing yourself and learning to trust others is a huge step. Be proud of yourself and kind to yourself through this process. Everyone deserves to love and be loved, but love does take time.

If you find that you are struggling with accepting love from others and being able to trust in relationships, a trained mental health professional can be extremely beneficial to helping you through this process.