Are You Afraid to Love?
When Ahmad called me for help, he was beside himself.
He was a handsome, successful, forty-year-old Middle Eastern doctor from an elegant, well-to-do family, with very specific ideas about the kind of woman he should be with. He had been in a relationship with a feisty, funny Mexican hairdresser named Jenny, who was, frankly, smarter than he was, and who had absolutely zero interest in getting a PhD to make herself more presentable to his parents.
She loved her work. She loved her life. She didn’t need Ahmad to complete her.
So, because his family wasn’t impressed and his friends kept whispering that he could “do better,” he started treating her disrespectfully. He took her for granted. He kept himself emotionally at arm’s length.
So she left him.
Just like that. Cold.
And Ahmad was shocked.
“I’m a doctor!” he kept saying. “I’m a doctor! Why would she leave me?”
He genuinely couldn’t understand it. But here’s what I noticed: underneath the wounded pride was a real question. A deeper one. Because Ahmad is, at his core, a good man, and he knew it.
He knew he hadn’t really let himself love her. He knew he’d kept himself aloof, not just with Jenny, but in every relationship he’d ever had. And he wanted to know why.
“Why am I so afraid to love?”
When the Answer Lives in Another Lifetime
Ahmad came to me for past-life regression therapy, which I practice alongside hypnotherapy, because sometimes the patterns running your life didn’t start in this one.
I’ll be honest: the first few sessions, we didn’t get far. Ahmad’s control issues, very common in high-achieving, type-A personalities, made it hard for him to relax into the focused concentration that regression requires. Even my own teacher, the psychiatrist Brian Weiss, M.D., spent nearly three months working with his first regression client before breaking through. This is why I don’t do “hit and run” regressions. You can’t walk into a stranger’s office, hand over control of your inner world, and expect to feel safe in the first hour. Trust takes time.
It wasn’t until his third regression that Ahmad let go of control and dropped deep.
I asked him to walk through the door in his mind marked Recent Times and tell me what he saw.
“I have really expensive shoes on,” he said. “I’m male. Wow! I’m so tall! I’m in my office, high above New York City. I’m a very powerful newspaper publisher. I’m blond and so tall!”
(Ahmad, in this life, is not particularly tall. He was delighted.)
The era: late 1940s. I walked him back through the life. He was a Nebraska farm boy, a Princeton scholarship recipient, in the war, and then back to that corner office above the city. I asked him to look at his desk.
“My wife!” His face broke into the biggest smile I’d seen from him. “I love her so much.”
I took him home to her. She was gorgeous, opinionated, totally devoted, and she greeted him in a cheerful, good-natured rush because he was late (as usual) and they were due at a charity event. His seven-year-old son came bounding in. Ahmad was grinning ear to ear.
“Do you recognize your son?”
“Yes! He’s my best friend in this life! My god, we’re such a happy family. She’s got both of us wrapped around her little finger, and we love it.”
We moved forward through the life. His son grew up and married. A granddaughter was born.
“Do you recognize her?”
A pause. “It’s Jenny.” He almost laughed. “The hairdresser. Weird.”
And then I moved him to the next pivotal event.
His breathing changed immediately. “I’m at Bellevue! I know it. I did my residency there. My wife’s collapsed.” His voice tightened. “Where are all the f**ing doctors?”
It was too late. His wife died in his arms.
As it happened, Ahmad grabbed at his own shirt, physically, there in my office, as if trying to tear out his heart.
Heartbreak Is Not a Metaphor
Here’s something the science has caught up with: heartbreak is real. The book Heartbreak by Florence Williams documents what actually happens in the body when we lose a primary attachment, the neurological dysregulation, the immune suppression, and the way grief lives in the body as trauma. We now know that social pain activates the same neural pathways as physical pain. The heart doesn’t just feel broken. In a very measurable sense, it is.
Ahmad’s soul, or whatever part of him carries memory across lifetimes, knew this. He had loved completely once. He had been cracked open by that loss in a way that didn’t heal in one lifetime.
And so, coming back in, he built a wall. Not consciously. Not cruelly. Just protectively. I will not love like that again. It costs too much.
Jenny, in this life, was the echo of that granddaughter. Someone connected to the great love. Someone his soul recognized, even if his conscious mind kept making excuses.
When Ahmad came back to full awareness, he sat quietly for a moment.
Then he said: “Wow! I see it. I was afraid to feel that much pain again.”
Yes. Exactly that.
Courage Is the Other Word for Love
Loving someone, really loving them, not managing them or performing a relationship, requires the willingness to be devastated. That’s not a design flaw. That’s the whole point.
What I see in my practice, again and again, is that the people most defended against love are the ones who have loved most deeply, in this life or in others. The wound is real. The protection made sense once. But protection has a way of becoming a prison, and eventually the soul gets tired of living behind the wall.
Ahmad understood this. He left my office knowing that what stood between him and love wasn’t a flaw in his character. It was grief he hadn’t finished grieving. Fear he hadn’t finished feeling.
That’s workable. That’s something we can actually do something about.
If you find yourself keeping people at arm’s length or if you’re the one who always has a reason the relationship won’t work, who pulls away right when things get good, who stays just comfortable enough not to be alone but never quite all in, I want you to know: there’s a reason. And the reason is almost always older and more understandable than you think.
You’re not broken. You’re protecting something.
The question is whether you’re ready to find out what.
I work with clients using hypnotherapy, past-life regression, and the latest science on trauma and healing. If this resonates, I’d love to talk. Please give me a call. 323.933.4377
And if you want to go deeper into what love, loss, and the soul actually have to do with each other — that’s what Love From Both Sides is for.
Sending hope and love,
Stephanie
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