5 Steps to Rewire Your Brain for the Love You Want

We are continually rewiring our brain all day long. Whenever we do something different in our routine, or when we have to deal with a new situation, we are retraining our brain to think about it in a new way so we can access some further information. Pro Athletes and high performers do it all the time. And I’ll show you how to rewire your brain for the love you want in 5 steps.

So why is it so hard to rewire our brain for the love that we want?

Here’s what I want you to realize. You cannot have a beautiful romantic weak-in-the-knees kind of love if you have been taught that love is dangerous or untrustworthy or shameful. No matter how many romance novels or how-to books on relationships you’ve read, if your initial examples of love you got from your primary caregivers were the opposite story to these novels, then you have to do some rewiring.

You can learn techniques or particular phrases to attract your “perfect” lovers. But the desired outcomes will only last for a specific time because they are superficial. And they only serve to deceive and cover up the underlying cracks in your foundation of love. Let me make my point clear.

Rewire your foundation

If you have grown up in a household where the parents were too busy and didn’t pay any attention to you or abandoned you in some way, or were violent, you most likely have a story that says, “I’m not worthy of the attention I need.” You may be anxious and suffer from abandonment issues and most likely are an anxious or disordered attachment style. You would have grown up with the feeling that you have to do things to get attention or manipulate people somehow to get your emotional needs met. This becomes your foundational story.

But as an adult, living by this story only serves to create relationships whereby you pick partners that will feed into your story of abandonment and unworthiness always abandoning you making you feel they don’t appreciate you. That’s all you know, and on a subconscious level, you will create a world that reinforces that story. Your story is where you live in your comfortable discomfort. It’s comfortable here because its familiar. But it’s not what you want in a relationship.

We all do this on some level.

We all have stories of what love means to us from what we experienced as early as our time in utero. The very first time you felt your mother’s anxiety or fear, this was implanted in your psyche and you are hardwired this way.

This isn’t about finding someone to blame. We tend to blame our mothers for everything. Even if our fathers abused us, we would blame the mothers for not coming to the rescue.

It certainly wasn’t your fault. You were just a fetus after all. When we feel victimized, we need someone to blame. Let’s park that thought for a moment and get back to the story.

The stories we tell ourselves about what we observed our parents say and do, become our defining stories about who we are in this life. These stories are our foundation and everything we do and say comes from these stories — this is where we rewire our brain for the love we want.

Just to make this clear.

If you had parents who were neglectful emotionally, who didn’t ask you how you felt about things or left you alone a lot, then you might have developed a story about yourself that went like this, “no one has time to take care of my needs, I am not important, life is hard.”

This implants into your subconscious along with all the other traumatic events in your childhood. It will run in the background just like your phone apps get your data location to sell you something. It will take all the real-life experiences you have and rework them to fit into these foundational stories. And this will form your perception of your reality.

For example, you will pick a romantic partner who has a demanding job and doesn’t have much time for you. They might be neglectful, forget your birthday or forget to acknowledge you. This reinforces the story you have about yourself that proves that you aren’t important.
Or you may pick a job that is difficult or unpleasant which reinforces the story that life is hard.

Rewire the background story

The stories we create are sometimes so deeply ingrained that we can’t recall events of our childhood because they are so traumatic.

I do not intend to re-traumatize you here, but to give you tools to renovate your foundational beliefs because you know that something has to shift when you keep picking the same type of partner/friend/boss. They may look different every time, and you swear to yourself that they are, but they end up being just a different version of your story. Now is your opportunity to see that rewiring your brain for the love you want is possible.

You deserve to be loved unconditionally, amazingly, completed. And you can’t if you have a story of unworthiness running all your decisions. Are you ready to change this perception?

Demolition time!

So, let’s demo these stories and rewrite them for the person you are now; A grown-up and not that little child you once were.

This is a writing exercise, so get out your favorite pen, paper, or journal. Grab some tea and make your cat or dog sit beside you.

5 Steps to Rewire Your Brain

Step 1. First, relax and take 3 deep belly breaths.

Step 2. Recall your earliest childhood memory with your parents-

As early as when you were a baby in the cradle if your memory access is that open. Or it could be when you were a toddler or little child.

This memory will most likely be one that was traumatic in some way. If your mind remembered it, that means it made an impression on you. This could also be a happy memory. Try to remember the trauma in it. What about it was most significant. Take your time. And remember you are now an adult and not that little child, so you don’t have to relive it, but only remember it as if you were the observer.

Step 3. Write down the memory in as much detail as you can.

What was it that made you sad or feel bad. Were you scared? Did you feel shame? What did the parent figure do or say to you, and how did you feel? Write down all the words that want to emerge. Let them all flow out now.

Step 4. Now pick out those words and make feeling sentences out of them.

For example, if you wrote the word, frightened. You will then write, “I felt frightened.” Then expand this feeling sentence to include the situation. “I felt frightened when my father yelled.” Then more in-depth, “I felt frightened when my father yelled at me when I did something wrong.” Then “my father was angry at me when I was playing and broke the lamp by accident.” Then “my father didn’t like it when I played.”

This story about your childhood event may translate into a foundational belief that goes like this, “I am not allowed to be happy and have fun around the males in my life for fear of being reprimanded” or “It’s not safe to enjoy life.” This may lead to you picking a partner who is intense or easy to anger.

Side Note

So, let’s back up for a sec.  You may have had an amazing father who loved you to bits. But if that traumatic event wasn’t resolved and, your father didn’t make it right by apologizing or explaining why he got angry with you, then you will make up your own stories. These become your foundational love stories.

Do you now see how the story of an event which may or may not be life-threatening, could be misconstrued to mean something else? We all do this all the time. That’s what our mind and psyche does; protect us and makeup stories to help us cope.

Now that we’ve done the excavating let’s rebuild.

You have your words and the story behind it. The only way to rebuild is to retrain your brain to see it differently. We can’t change what happened, but we can change how you perceived the event. And when we change the perception, then you can change your feelings around it.

When you change your feelings, then you change your energy. When you change your energy, instead of sending out signals to attract your old story characters, then you start to attract your new story characters.

Your thoughts are electric, and your feelings are magnetic, and this is the energy that manifests your thoughts. It’s not just your thoughts but your feelings that are the essential factor here.

So, let’s change your feelings to start attracting what you want in your relationships. This is where we rewire your brain for the love you want.

Step 5 – Take those feeling sentences and reframe them to be the opposite.

For example.” It’s not safe to enjoy life” can be reframed to “it is safe to enjoy my life to the fullest” or “life is safe and fun” or “I am safe when I enjoy my life.” Make sense?

FINAL STEP- Repeat this new phrase over and over again.

The more you repeat, the quicker your mind will accept it as real. Make this new statement your mantra throughout your day.

When you retrain your mind to accept these new statements as real, you will have successfully rebuilt your foundation of love.

Take your time with this exercise. You may go back and do this as many times as with many events that stuck out for you when you were young. And then you may continue to do this for later years when you were an adolescent and young adult. But by then, the stories are already ingrained, and you’re starting to reinforce them.

The real gold is when you dig into your early childhood because that is where those foundational love stories were formed.

It’s easy for me to say, “Don’t be afraid to dig deep,” but that would be bullshit. You can’t help but be afraid of digging up a traumatic event. No one wants to relive trauma or sadness. We do everything we can to avoid it and numb ourselves from feeling the pain.

This isn’t about experiencing the past hurts.

Remember to place yourself as the observer looking at a situation as if you are tasked with solving a problem.

Honestly, if the pain does come up for you when you do this exercise, let it. It’s screaming to be let out, witnessed and released finally from your subconscious. You know it. And I’ve seen it with hundreds of my clients. The release they have when they do this exercise is transformational.

The only way to change who you are picking and finally get the love that you deserve is by digging up your foundational stories of love. By looking at them, dissecting them, learning from them, and then making new stories from them, you will be able to rewire your brain for the love you want and finally shift your energy and attract the love you deserve.

Want to do this work in person? Join me here.

Diana xo