Loving Like You've Never Been Hurt: How One Book Helped Me Face My Avoidant Heart

If you had asked me a few years ago, heck even 6 months ago, what love looked like, I would have given you a surface-level answer.

Smile. Show up. Keep your walls up just enough to protect yourself.

And if it got too real — if someone tried getting too close — I ran.

It wasn’t that I didn’t love deeply. I just didn’t know how to stay when fear took over.

That’s what avoidant attachment does to you.

It convinces you that distance is safer than vulnerability.

It makes you believe that leaving first hurts less than being left.

That belief cost me the love of someone I cared about more than I ever admitted out loud — until it was too late.

And it robbed me of precious time with my mom before she passed, too, because walls don’t just keep pain out... they also keep love out.

In the middle of that grief — grieving my relationship, grieving my mom, grieving the version of me that kept sabotaging the love I desperately wanted — my sister sent me a book.

It was Love Like You’ve Never Been Hurt by Jentezen Franklin.

And it wrecked me — in the best way.

Franklin didn’t offer cheap forgiveness or empty platitudes.

He talked about the real kind of love — the kind that chooses grace over resentment, even when you've been deeply wounded.

The kind that keeps loving, even when your instincts scream for self-protection.

He wrote:

“Forgiveness is not about keeping score. It’s about losing count.”

That one line undid me.

Because I had spent years keeping score — with others, with myself, even with God.

I kept a tally of every hurt.

Every regret.

Every “what if” I couldn’t fix.

Loving like I had never been hurt felt impossible.

Didn’t they need to apologize first?

Didn’t they need to come back?

Didn’t I need to feel ready?

But this book showed me that love isn’t a transaction — it’s a decision.

Forgiveness isn't a feeling — it's an act of faith.

Slowly, I began to see that healing from my avoidant patterns wasn’t just about learning how to stay.

It was about learning how to love, even if staying hurt.

Even if reconciliation never came.

Even if the relationship with my mom, or the relationship I lost, couldn’t be healed on this side of heaven.

Forgiveness didn’t mean forgetting the pain.

It meant releasing the grip it had on my heart.

It meant learning to love freely, even if it cost me something.

Because real love always costs something — but the price of bitterness is even higher.

Through Franklin’s words, and even more through God’s quiet work in my heart, I realized something I had missed for far too long:

Walls don’t just protect you from pain. They keep you from love.

And the life God is calling me to?

It’s not a life hidden behind fear.

It’s a life marked by the same radical love and grace He has poured over me — a love that risks again, even knowing it might break again.

If you’re sitting here reading this, feeling like you’ve lost too much, failed too deeply, or hardened your heart too long — hear me:

It’s not too late.

Healing is messy.

Love is risky.

Forgiveness is hard.

But freedom is worth every tear, every scar, every surrender.

We love because He first loved us. (1 John 4:19)

And that love is bigger than every mistake we’ve made.

It’s bigger than every goodbye.It’s bigger than every wall we’ve ever built.

Love like you’ve never been hurt.

It might just save your heart — the way it’s saving mine.