It’s not always easy to open your heart and be vulnerable in a new relationship…especially if your heart has been broken in the past. It’s a natural reaction to want to protect your heart to evade further emotional pain.

So you close it off with a protective wall so you don’t have to feel emotions such as pain, unworthiness and sorrow.

The problem is that deep down you really want to be open to love. In fact it’s the one thing you are craving the most in life – to have that deep, reciprocated love with another. So you feel kinda stuck. You definitely don’t want to to experience the pain of having your heartbroken again yet you do want to be open to receiving love.

It’s a catch 22 but you’ve gotta take the risk, beautiful.

Letting go of fear…

Trust me gorgeous, I know all about broken hearts. Even though I feel lucky to have experienced deep love four times now, my love life in my 20s and early 30s often left me in a puddle of tears.

Most recently, about six months before I started dating my fiancé, I had a couple of dating disasters in a row. I found out that both guys were two-timing me. Yep, even in my early 30s guys the same age were still doing this shitty thing.

These experiences along with my other tales of heartbreak, meant that when I began to have feelings for Gav, I got scared and pulled back emotionally.

I was fearful of letting my guard down and being potentially hurt again. I kept telling myself not to let my past experiences sabotage something that was moving in the right direction, but it was tough.

Even though our relationship moved very quickly, it took months for me to fully open my heart. If Gav hadn’t reminded me several times a day of how much he loved me and if I had let my fear of potential heartbreak again completely override my feelings, I probably wouldn’t have felt secure enough to let my heart go where it wanted to and I wouldn’t be writing this blog post with a beautiful engagement ring on my finger!

Fear really does it’s best to keep you playing small…if you let it.

How to open your heart…

• Allow yourself to be vulnerable. If you’re feeling sensitive and scared about letting your guard down, let him know about it. Gav and I had countless conversations about my fears and my past experiences. I truly believe it was these open and honest discussions that allowed me to open my heart, as there was full disclosure from both of us about the way we were feeling without any judgement.
•  Allow yourself to trust again. This is a biggie, especially if you’ve been led down the river like I was. You’ve got to trust your intuition with this one. Go by how he makes you feel. Does he make you feel safe and secure? Does he make you feel special and adored? If you’ve been betrayed in the past, I can totally understand how opening your heart to trusting someone again can be very difficult; but being untrusting leads to so many problems in a relationship and it really robs you of fully experiencing deep love with another.
• Don’t future trip. If you look into the future and only envision yourself getting your heartbroken again, well that’s quite possibly what might happen. Visualise what you really want to happen. See the beautiful relationship, the companionship, the hot sex, the sweet love between the two of you. Let it bring a smile to your face…always.
• Just jump straight in. The truth of the matter is that you may get your heart broken again. But then again you may not. You just don’t know lovely, so my advice is just go for it! Trust that the right partner will enter your life at exactly the right time. If that means you need to kiss a few frogs and mend a few broken hearts in the meantime, so be it. You know, there’s some people that go through their whole life without ever experiencing true love. I’d rather love love many times and feel the pain of heart ache than never love at all. Somthin’ to think about.

As always, I’d love to hear from you. Do you struggle with opening your heart in a new relationship? Do tell. Scroll down below to leave a comment.