This whole pattern — not knowing we're loved as we are, then numbing our heart to ward off this pain, thereby shutting down the pathways through which love can flow into and through us — is the wound of the heart. Although this love-wound grows out of childhood conditioning, it becomes in time a much larger spiritual problem — a disconnection from the loving openness that is our very nature.
This universal human wound shows up in the body as emptiness, anxiety, trauma, depression, and in relationships as the mood of unlove, with its attendant insecurity, guardedness, mistrust, and resentment. And all relationship problems follow from there.
— John Welwood, Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships