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While I was in college, I became increasingly fascinated with health, medicine, psychology, sociology, history, and semantics, the study of meaning, largely because I wanted to understand people more deeply. That curiosity never left me.

Over the years, I’ve spent countless hours listening to therapists, researchers, and healers talk about relationships. Recently, I was listening to a podcast where a guest said that a huge percentage of men don’t know how to give or receive love. From what I’ve seen over the past three and a half decades of working with people, I’d go a step further.

A huge percentage of people — men and women — have a very limited capacity to give or receive love.

Most of us were never shown what it looks like to love in a grounded, emotionally present, and consistent way. We weren’t taught how to stay open when we feel vulnerable or afraid, or how to stay connected when we’re hurting. And beneath all of that, many of us are carrying deep emotional wounds that limit our capacity to love and be loved.

This article is about what it actually means to give and receive love, why so many of us struggle with it, and what it looks like to grow these capacities over time. I’ll be sharing understandings I’ve internalized and skills I practice daily, and I encourage you to explore and apply them in your own life as well.

Love Isn’t Just a Feeling — It’s a Capacity

Many people think love is a feeling that just happens. You “fall in love,” you “just know,” or you don’t. But when you look at decades of research and clinical practice — from people like John and Julie Gottman, Sue Johnson, Harville Hendrix, Terry Real, and others who’ve worked with thousands of couples — a different picture emerges:

Love is not just a feeling.

It’s a capacity — one that allows us to stay present, open, and connected, and to truly care for someone, rather than shutting down, lashing out, clinging, or running away.

These capacities are shaped by the homes we grew up in, the way our caregivers related to us, the trauma we lived through, the culture we’re embedded in, and what we’ve done (or not done) to heal.

So when I say, “many people don’t know how to give or receive love,” I’m not making a moral judgment. I’m talking about emotional development, attachment patterns, trauma, and the nervous system.

The Roots: How Our Early Experiences Shape Our Capacity to Love

Let’s start where this really begins: childhood. Attachment researchers like John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth — and later clinicians like Sue Johnson and Dan Siegel — have shown that our earliest relationships literally shape the architecture of our brain and nervous system.

If we grew up with caregivers who were consistently present and responsive, emotionally attuned most of the time, safe to go to when we were distressed, able to repair after conflict, then our nervous system learned something profoundly important:

“Love is a place I can relax into.”

But so many of us didn’t get that.

Instead, we had parents who shut down emotionally, caregivers who were overwhelmed or depressed, adults who raged, shamed, or disappeared. Homes filled with tension, fear, instability — or the quiet ache of emotional neglect… being tolerated, but never really seen.

When that happens, the nervous system organizes around survival, not connection.

And that’s where patterns like:

• Anxious attachment (chasing, clinging, panic)
• Avoidant attachment (shutting down, detaching, dismissing)
• Disorganized attachment (approach–avoid, chaos, dissociation)

begin to take form.

Fast forward to our adult years, and that same nervous system and psyche, conditioned for survival, is now trying to “be in love.”

Why So Many of Us Can’t Give Love

Giving love is more than saying “I love you” or buying flowers.

To genuinely give love, we need to be able to show up and stay present, listen without immediately defending or attacking, attune to another person’s emotional state, take responsibility for our behavior, repair when we’ve hurt someone, be moved by our partner’s reality, and keep our hearts open even when we’re uncomfortable.

From the outside, it looks simple.
From the inside, for many people, it’s anything but.

Emotional underdevelopment

A lot of us are emotionally stunted, especially men but not only men. Intellectually, we know the language of relationships (“communication,” “vulnerability,” “being supportive”), yet emotionally we’re still operating at the level of a wounded child. We know how to impress, pursue, charm, seduce, and perform, but we don’t know how to love.

Love requires slowing down, feeling, being impacted, letting go of performance, and being honest when we’re afraid or insecure. And if we grew up in a home where nobody modeled that — where there was no emotional presence, no repair, no softness, no genuine vulnerability — then we’re likely to have little or no point of reference for what real love looks or feels like.

We can talk about love.
We can crave it.
We can chase after it.
But we can’t embody it because the emotional capacities required to love another person simply never had the chance to develop.

Fear of intimacy

For many, real intimacy is frightening because it activates old wounds. When we get close to someone, it stirs up the terror of being abandoned, the fear of being criticized or rejected, shame about our own perceived inadequacy, and the rage tied to all the times we weren’t loved the way we needed.

If we never learned how to work with those emotions, our system will do whatever it can to protect us. We’ll go numb, pull away, turn to porn, work, substances, or distractions. We’ll generate drama by starting a fight, or we’ll keep our partner or potential love interest at arm’s length.

From the outside, it looks like we’re withholding love.
From the inside, it feels like we’re struggling to hold yourself together.

Confusing intensity with intimacy

This is one of the biggest traps I see people falling into.

Those of us who grew up in chaotic or emotionally neglectful homes tend to associate drama, volatility, the chase, instability, and emotional roller coasters with “love” or “chemistry.” Neurochemically, the push-pull of an inconsistent partner — especially in trauma-bonded relationships — creates massive spikes in dopamine, cortisol, and adrenaline. It feels alive.

By contrast, a steady, emotionally available partner can feel boring, flat, suspicious, or even threatening.

When we equate love with intensity, we will unconsciously seek out or create chaos — and we won’t know how to show up with the kind of steady, grounded presence that real love actually needs to grow.

Lack of emotional and interpersonal skills

Successful relationships aren’t built on grand gestures; they’re built on the small, everyday skills of turning toward bids for connection, managing conflict without contempt or stonewalling, repairing after ruptures, expressing appreciation, and maintaining a basic sense of goodwill.

Most of us were never taught how to regulate our nervous system when we feel triggered, how to listen without interrupting, how to express anger without cruelty, or how to own our part in a conflict. For most, these are not intuitive skills — they have to be learned and practiced.

Without them, our “love” shows up as control, withdrawal, caretaking, jealousy, possessiveness, or anxious chasing — but not as genuine, steady, attuned love.

Why So Many of Us Can’t Receive Love

Receiving love is even harder than giving it.

To receive love, we have to let ourselves be seen, allow someone to care for us, feel worthy of their attention and affection, soften our body enough to let that care in, and, whenever it arises, work through the impulse to push it away, shut down, or devalue the person offering it.

The deeply wounded parts of us may say… “I don’t deserve this”

If our early experiences taught us that we were too much, not enough, a burden, invisible, or only valuable when we performed, then when someone genuinely values us, our mind and nervous system don’t know what to do with it.

Love bumps up against the old internal narratives that tell us:

• “If they really knew me, they’d leave.”
• “This can’t last.”
• “They must want something.”
• “I’m going to mess this up.”

Instead of relaxing into being loved, we test them, push them away, provoke fights, start scanning for flaws, sabotage the connection, or run toward someone less available — someone who feels more familiar.

Love as danger

For those of us with a history of betrayal, abuse, or who grew up with caregivers who were horribly inconsistent or manipulative, love is not associated with safety. It’s associated with being controlled, hurt, abandoned, or used.

So when someone says, “I love you,” our body doesn’t hear safety. It perceives an incoming threat.

The closer someone gets, the more activated our nervous system becomes. Receiving love starts to feel like a threat to our survival.

Overwhelm and shutdown

When we’re feeling emotionally overwhelmed, we instinctively move into protest (anxious pursuit — reaching, chasing, seeking reassurance) or withdrawal (shutdown). If we have never learned how to stay present while being seen and cared for, we vacillate between the extremes, either clinging and demanding reassurance, or shutting down and detaching completely.

Neither state allows love to fully land.

Living in our heads, not our bodies

Many of us — especially those of us who’ve been through trauma — escape into thinking. We analyze, interpret, and obsess, but we can’t actually feel what’s happening in our chest, abdomen, or throat.

Receiving love is a somatic experience.
It lives in the body.

If we’re disconnected from our bodies, the best we can do in our attempt to understand love is to intellectualize it. And when love is only conceptualized, we can’t fully take it in, and the emotional and relational capacities required to truly love another person have not yet fully developed.

What It Really Means to Give Love

Breaking this down in more practical terms, giving love in a healthy, grounded way means:

Presence

Rather than being checked out or lost in our head, we actually show up. We’re there — physically and emotionally. We look at the person we’re with. We listen. We feel them.

Attunement

We pay attention to their emotional state. We notice subtle shifts. We check in: “We seem a little distant — how are you feeling?”

We care enough to ask, and to listen to the answer.

Emotional Responsibility

We don’t dump our unprocessed pain onto them and call it “being honest.”

We recognize our triggers, our history, our wounds — and we actually work with them instead of making them someone else’s burden.

Reliability

We do what we say we’ll do. We show up when we say we will. We repair when we break trust.

Over time, our presence becomes something the other person can lean into.

Compassion

We allow ourselves to be moved by what someone is feeling and the challenges they’re facing. When discernment shows that intervention can genuinely help, we step in.

Rather than reacting to discomfort or overriding another person’s agency, we respond from clarity — offering support in a grounded, appropriate way.

Boundaries and Honesty

We say no when we need to. We don’t pretend to feel things we don’t. We assert our needs with clarity, while taking those of others into consideration.

And instead of disappearing, we communicate openly and directly.

These are some of the foundational elements essential for giving love.

It’s not dramatic.
It’s not performative.
It’s steady.
It’s emotionally mature.

What It Really Means to Receive Love

Receiving love is its own practice.

To receive love in a healthy way means:

Allowing Ourselves to Be Seen

Instead of hiding the parts of us that we feel are unlovable or inconvenient, we allow others to see who we really are — not just the curated version of ourselves.

We allow ourselves to be known.

Letting Love In

Rather than immediately pushing away expressions of love or kindness shown to us by others — minimizing or dismissing them — we allow people to do kind things for us.

We let them support us, encourage us, show up for us, nurture us, and even love us.

Softening Our Body

We notice where we tense up — our jaw, chest, abdomen, throat — and we practice softening those places when someone is loving toward us.

We allow our body to receive what our mind may not yet trust.

Facing Our Shame

We acknowledge the parts of us that feel “broken,” “too much,” or “not enough.”

We begin to reveal those places to people who’ve earned our trust — not to be fixed, but to be met.

Staying Instead of Running

When we feel the urge to run, create distance, start a fight, or shut down, we stay a little longer and we gradually extend the time we remain present.

And then we breathe while allowing the waves of fear — and other uncomfortable feelings, sensations, and impulses that arise — to move through us without taking over.

With continued practice, we become more at ease with ourselves, with what’s happening in the moment, and with the people we’re learning to stay connected to.

Receiving love means being vulnerable.

And for many of us, it’s much harder than giving it.

How We Begin to Grow Our Capacity to Love

Shaming ourselves for not knowing how to love serves no useful purpose. We’re judging ourselves for not having skills and capacities we most likely haven’t had the opportunity to learn.

Instead, begin by saying, “I wasn’t given the foundation, but now I can learn.” This shift alone is powerful, because we’re giving ourselves permission to be human.

Learning how our attachment system works

Understanding our attachment style — anxious, avoidant, disorganized, or more secure — gives us a map of our own patterns.

Books like:

• Attached by Levine & Heller
• Hold Me Tight by Sue Johnson
• John and Julie Gottman’s work on bids, repair, and emotional attunement

can give us language and insight into what happens inside us when we get close to someone, when we feel threatened, or when we feel unseen.

And that gives us considerable leverage. Rather than being overwhelmed by our own emotions or our partner’s reactions, we have a foundation that allows us to navigate the intensity that arises between two people, stay present long enough to sense what’s happening inside us, and respond with greater clarity and intention. Instead of falling back into old patterns, we begin relating in ways that actually move the connection forward.

Connecting with the body

Most of us were never truly connected to our bodies to begin with. We’ve lived in our heads for much of our lives — dissociated, armored, bracing against pain, or emotionally shut down. For many of us, “connecting with the body” isn’t returning to something we lost. It’s learning, often for the first time, how to show up with greater presence and awareness.

We cannot give or receive love when we’re disconnected from our bodies. That’s because love doesn’t live in our thoughts — it lives in our emotional warmth, our ability to feel, to soften, and to be vulnerable. Practices such as the form of meditation I teach — which is about working directly with our feelings and bodily sensations — along with therapeutic interventions like deep-tissue bodywork, the individual sessions I facilitate, and the vision quest, all help dissolve the armor and bring more of us into our bodies. As we become more embodied, our capacity to love and be loved expands.

Begin the work of emotional digestion

Like most people, you’re not just dealing with present-day hurt. You’re carrying a backlog of undigested emotion — old heartbreaks, betrayals, losses, childhood pain, and attachment wounds. And as long as that backlog sits in your body, congealed into stagnation and armor, it limits your capacity to love.

Emotional digestion means allowing yourself to feel grief, sadness, anger, fear, and shame, along with the sensations that arise in your body — breathing softly and deeply as you stay present with what you’re feeling. In doing so, you’re gradually metabolizing the emotional residue you’ve been holding.

It’s important to understand this isn’t something that happens in a single session. It’s an ongoing process — a steady unwinding and gradual attuning to yourself over time. As you continue to digest more of what you’ve been carrying, you’re able to show up more fully present, which naturally expands your capacity for intimacy.

Practice love in small, consistent ways

The Gottmans’ research shows that relationships thrive on small, consistent acts of love — not the occasional grand gesture. If we’re partnered with someone, this is where we begin. And if we’re not, these are capacities we can practice every day with the people already in our lives.

Here are a few examples of how we can practice love in daily life:

Turning toward people instead of pulling away

When someone reaches for us — emotionally or otherwise — we stay engaged rather than distancing, distracting ourselves, or shutting down.

Listening without immediately making it about us

We let the other person fully express what they’re feeling without interrupting, defending, or shifting the focus to our own experience.

Being honest when we’re hurt or vulnerable instead of punishing or withdrawing

Rather than using silence, sarcasm, or anger to protect ourselves, we do our best to articulate clearly what we’re actually thinking and feeling.

Allowing someone to help us — even to care for us — without shrinking or resisting

We soften enough to receive support when it’s offered, rather than reflexively pushing it away, minimizing our needs, or insisting we don’t need anything.

Making things right when we’ve been reactive or unkind

We take responsibility, acknowledge the impact of our words and actions, and repair any damage done — without excuses, defensiveness, or self-flagellation.

These actions may seem small, but they build the internal capacities that make healthy relating possible. Over time, they strengthen our ability to love, to stay connected, and to remain present with the people who matter.

Deficits and Capacities Needed to Be Developed

When we’ve grown up in highly dysfunctional families — and even worse, when we’ve suffered abuse, whether verbal, emotional, physical, sexual, or some combination of these — we become fixated in the distorted patterns through which we relate to others. It’s a kind of shaping, a forced molding of our relational capacity. It reminds me of the way women’s feet were once bound in Japan — the disfigurement, the pain, the lifelong disability. Our emotional and relational lives can become just as constricted.

Making matters worse in our current digital age is how we’re becoming increasingly disconnected from our emotions, our bodies, and the core of our being. And this disconnection is only intensifying as we spend ever more time on our devices and scrolling through our social feeds. Instead of being rooted in our own inner experience — our thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations — our point of reference is now external. Our attention is continually pulled outward by the digital content being fed to us, drawing us away from ourselves.

As a result, we have far less bandwidth available to do the deep processing of our lived experiences and emotional responses. And when we lose touch with what’s happening inside us, we become incapable of effecting the healing we need, and we remain frozen in our woundedness.

Because we’re more isolated now — relying on text instead of real conversation, working remotely, and spending far less time directly engaged with one another — many of the capacities we need for healthy relationships never fully develop, or they begin to atrophy.

Our ability to read social cues, attune to another person’s emotional state, sense subtle shifts in tone and facial expression, and stay present in moments of discomfort or vulnerability weakens over time. Parts of the brain that govern empathy, emotional responsiveness, and relational intelligence simply don’t get the stimulation they need, and like any unused capacity, they begin to wither.

That’s why it takes a more conscientious effort on our part to engage with people, to practice these skills, and to rebuild what has gone dormant. Many of us are also operating with profound deficits — we need intervention not only to heal what we cannot heal on our own, but to help us develop capacities that have yet to fully emerge.

You Can’t Do It Alone

There are deeply wounded parts of ourselves that we simply cannot access — let alone heal — on our own. The attachment wounds we’ve carried since childhood, the more recent relational traumas we’ve internalized, the deeper layers of grief, sadness, hurt, and anger held in the body as stagnation and armor — these cannot be fully healed through willpower or insight alone.

We will invariably form attachments to people who put us in touch with our deepest vulnerabilities. When that happens, we need to acknowledge what’s coming up, feel what’s arising in response, center our awareness in the depths of that experience, and breathe softly and deeply as we follow the feelings and bodily sensations through their progression.

When my mentor, Horace Daukei — one of the last surviving traditional doctors, medicine men, of the Kiowa Tribe — passed portions of his healing gifts to me, he had me go on the vision quest to earn the right to work with them. Over the years, as I continued to go on the vision quest, there were many times when I could feel this extraordinarily powerful presence descending into my body. When that happened, I would at times find myself reliving the traumas of my childhood and adolescence, along with more recent heartbreaks and the challenges I was facing at the time — feeling the full range of sensory impressions, bodily sensations, and the emotions tied to those experiences.

As all of this moves through me, I can feel myself digesting the past — the traumas, the grief, the confusion, the disappointments, the things I didn’t have the capacity to process when they first happened. I come out the other side feeling lighter, with a new foundation taking shape inside me — more present in my interactions, more empathetic and understanding, a better friend and companion.

Because I’ve trained with a traditional Native doctor, have gone through so many vision quests, and have done the hard internal work to heal my own wounding, I’m able to work as a conduit — as Indigenous healers have done for thousands of years.

Those who work with me over time experience many of the same kinds of changes that unfolded in me. They’re able to let go of unhealthy attachments to individuals or relationships that don’t serve them. I watch as these same individuals develop a greater warmth, become more caring, and become more fully embodied. They grow more receptive to love and more capable of being a good partner. I see how that enables them to show up with greater clarity and empathy, and to communicate more honestly.

They’re not just feeling better — they’re becoming someone who can truly form loving, meaningful, deeply fulfilling intimate relationships.

If you’re resonating with what you’re hearing and feel ready to take the next step in your healing, I offer individual sessions by phone or in person. Message or call me at (332) 333-5155, or visit benoofana.com, teachmetomeditate.com, or healmyheartache.com to learn more.