"Your visions will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes." — Carl Jung
I Don't Know Love at All
In her iconic song Both Sides Now, Joni Mitchell sings: 'I've looked at love from both sides now... It's love's illusions I recall... I really don't know love at all.' Those lines capture something profound about human relationships: we often fall in love not only with people, but with possibilities. We often fall in love with what people could become. With who we imagine ourselves to be in their presence. With the story of what might happen.
These fantasies can feel intoxicating, hopeful, and meaningful. They help us survive difficult attachment experiences, fill emotional gaps, or give us a sense of stability when reality has been painful. But as relationship theorist Pia Melody teaches, the fantasy version of love — the "idealised other," the perfect rescuer, the imagined soulmate — often prevents us from seeing relationships clearly and caring for ourselves within them.
In Internal Family Systems (IFS), these fantasies are understood as parts-driven constructions — inner protectors trying to soothe, distract, or compensate for exiled pain. Fantasy is not weakness. It is intelligence in the face of emotional deprivation. It is the power of the dreamer. But it can also keep us stuck and prevent us from seeing truth.
This is very vividly depicted in the original story of the little mermaid when a lady of the waters decides it's a good idea to take her voice away and her tail in the name of love. This story ends with her throwing herself over board - effectively committing suicide because she can't swim anymore - because that love is not.
There's Another Way
Healing often requires facing the illusion, grieving what never was, and creating room for real love — including love from within — to take its rightful place. Essentially you are the one you have been waiting for and when this is realised things change.
Why We Fantasise
Fantasy is one of the psyche's oldest coping strategies. When reality is too painful, unpredictable, or rejecting, parts of us create a world where:
- We are finally chosen
- Someone finally sees our worth
- Painful histories are rewritten
- The unavailable person becomes available
- The chaotic person becomes stable
- The critical person becomes kind
- Our loneliness ends
Pia Melody describes this as "addiction to the dream" — the attempt to use idealisation to manage unmet childhood needs for nurturing, attunement, or safety. In IFS terms, protective parts construct these fantasies to keep exiles soothed or hidden. They offer:
- Hope where there was fear
- Control where there was powerlessness
- Meaning where there was neglect
- Connection where there was emotional absence
Fantasy is a brilliant short-term solution but it becomes suffering when we try to live there. This is not to say that healthy romantic relationships can't meet needs in this way. The problem lies in the system depending on a source outside of itself as the primary care giver when we are adults. Other people can be secondary care givers but the role of primary care has to be ours. This can be liberating for us - because this is in our power to change - and heart breaking for younger parts waiting for mum or dad to return.
Fantasy as a Barrier to Letting Go
Fantasy prevents grief and grief is what allows us to see. When we remain attached to what could have been, we can't fully acknowledge:
- What wasn't
- What isn't
- What the other person cannot give
- What the relationship cannot hold
- What our hearts truly need
Holding on to the fantasy feels safer than touching the ache beneath it. But as long as the fantasy is alive, the grief stays unprocessed, the system cannot move forward and often history repeats itself.
We remain split between hope and truth, longing and reality. IFS sees this as a polarisation between protectors (holding on to the fantasy) and exiles (holding the grief, the shame, the emptiness, the sense of unworthiness).
Healing Requires Honouring Both the "Loveless Place" and the Exiles Who Wait There
Every fantasy is covering a "loveless place" inside — a room in the psyche where a younger part was abandoned, ignored, or unseen. The fantasy is the internal promise that: "Someone will come back for you. Someone will rescue you. Someone will finally love you." Until you are able to return to the exile a fantasy can keep that child in some level of comfort.
Part of the witnessing process must involve validating the loss - sitting in the space of lovelessness with the child and gently with Self presence the parts discover a greater love. The attunement that they sought from another but never received can be found within.
IFS invites us to do the unthinkable: to go to that place in ourselves, with Self energy — to be calm, courageous, compassionate — and meet the part who were left there. This is the beginning of relinquishing illusion. Not through force but through fulfilment. The fantasy becomes unnecessary when the exile is attended to in this way and when the grief has a chance to move through and away.
Living in Truth Rather Than Extremes
Pia Melody explains that fantasy and denial keep us in relational extremes:
- Over-functioning or under-functioning
- Idealising or devaluing
- Clinging or avoiding
- Self-sacrificing or self-protecting
- Perfection or uselessness
IFS helps the system move out of these polarities and into truth, through:
- Self-led witnessing
- Compassion for protectors
- Unburdening of exiles
- Integration of worth
- Reconnection with core qualities
We stop trying to earn love through perfection. We stop shaping ourselves around others' wounds. We stop waiting for someone who cannot show up. As we return to ourselves, love stops being a performance or a rescue mission and becomes a way of life.
Relinquishing the Fantasy and Restoring What Was Lost
Letting go of the fantasy is painful — it asks us to grieve not only a person or a relationship, but a version of ourselves our parts hoped to become. But relinquishing the fantasy and processing grief is only half the journey.
The other half is restoration:
- Restoring truth
- Restoring boundaries
- Restoring self-worth
- Restoring internal connection
- Restoring the ability to choose relationships that nourish
- Restoring trust in our own inner compass
- Restoring the core Self as leader, guide, and source of love
- Restoring parts so they are free to express their natural tendencies
When these inner structures are restored, we are no longer vulnerable to love's illusions and compulsive choices that might come from that. We see more clearly, choose more carefully, and relate more authentically. The spell is broken.
The Healing Arc: From Illusion to Truth, From Fantasy to Self
In the end, the real story is not about the person we imagined. It is about the selves we abandoned in the imagining. Healing is the process of:
- Going back to those parts
- Understanding our coping strategies
- Witnessing the pain
- Releasing the burdens
- Integrating worth
- Allowing Self to lead
- Allowing love to return from the inside out
Fantasy dissolves not through rejection, but through fulfilment — when the younger parts finally receive the love, presence, and protection they've been waiting for. This is how illusions soften. This is how grief moves. This is how truth takes root. This is how love returns. In that place you do know what love is and you can embody it, express it and feel it in the world.
"This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted." — C.S. Lewis
