Just recently I was listening to a radio program ‘Steve Wright’s Sunday Love songs’. It was a celebration weekend of the Beatles music. He played a song that so many of us remember, “All you need is Love”. This article is about Love and also an attempt to discuss that very statement made in the song.
The Oxford English dictionary says about love:
"Love is to have a great attachment to and affection for. To have a passionate desire, longing and feeling for. It is an intense desire or emotion for another, to feel warmth, fondness and regard for the other person or thing."
I believe love is an immense sense of compassion, a deep understanding and acceptance of the other, and concern and empathy for whatever the other is experiencing in the moment to moment interaction. Whilst also being an identification with the other as like yourself.
The distortion of love comes when the search for unity becomes a struggle within the relationship. This struggle begins within the family system, that same struggle although modified is then taken through life in a repeated pattern of behaviour. In other words how we were loved as children and how we were recognised in the family will influence the way in which we continue to see love. How the family members behave towards each other in intimate relationships will be the model for how we ourselves then interact with others throughout life. We will see it either in the way of loving others or simply seeing ourselves as loveable or not as the case may be.
Being loveable embodies the whole aspect of self-esteem, self worth, self-confidence and so on. So many clients come to therapy with a desire to, “find myself,” “be myself” and “be more confident about what I have to offer”. Most of the problems that people bring to therapy are about how they feel about themselves or how they feel about other people. How they find it difficult to love and be loved or maintain lasting relationships. Even in the work situation the individual might have to prove their worth in order to get seen, work hard to be recognised or even withdraw inside them-selves in order to escape the rejection or humiliation that goes hand in hand with self-doubt.
We are born into a family and we are automatically geared to seek out an attachment and this attachment is a means to survival. Without an attachment of sorts we would not survive in the world. For many that first attachment is a welcoming, happy and healthy environment but for some, to a greater or lesser degree it is chaotic, insecure, unstable and all too often violent and abusive.
We will automatically become a part of the culture in the family or community situation. We will do this through learning from others and observing others modelling for us how to be in the world, our self-development will be influenced by the environment we are brought up in.
As I open up for you the ideas and aspects of love, let us consider what there is to be afraid of? So many people are afraid, either consciously or unconsciously. Afraid to give and/or afraid to receive love. Many people are afraid to love or take love for a variety of reasons and most of them are about how they were loved or not as the case may be.
Consider the following
Do you fear being engulfed or swamped by others?
Are you afraid that you might lose yourself in relationships with others not only sexual relationships but friendships and close intimate relationships?
So often instead of unifying the individual becomes afraid that they will be overcome, lose them-selves get lost in the others needs and wants and lose sight of their own. Does this apply in anyway to you?
Do you think that what you get or have in your relationships is conditional?
Do you believe that you always have to give in order to get and that nothing is for nothing?
Are you afraid of not being loved?
Do you find yourself being clingy, or are you accused of being clingy with someone you care about?
Are you jealous of others?
Do you over-adapt to others and lose sight of your own needs?
If you meet someone you really like do you decide not to let him or her know how important they are to you?
There are many more questions like this but they all rest on one major aspect:
What happened to you as a child that you have developed a particular attitude towards giving and receiving love? What took place in your family situation that has influenced your view of yourself in relation to others? What occurred in your childhood environment to influence your view of yourself either as loveable or unlovable as the case may be?
Throughout life we build a framework from which to function. In Transactional Analysis we call this a frame of reference, a life position or script. It can also be defined as a defence mechanism. We build a set of defences that helps us to function in life, help us to get on with a way of life that feels like it’s the ‘real self’ but in fact is a front or ‘false self’ in order to face the world. We build a suit of armour in order to protect ourselves from a repeat of the early rejection, shame, and hurt that we experienced as children. Very early on in childhood there can be ruptures to the contact we had with the significant others in our life. These ruptures cause emotional and physical pain to the sense of self and cause us to be wary of the other. From here the injured self begins to protect itself from further injuries and those early wounds fail to heal completely but the defence gets thicker.
For example as a child, if the environment in which you lived was hostile or violent or even indifferent to who or what you were. If expectations of you where very high and made the world a difficult place to live in, then you will build a defence that will protect you and help you cope with the emotional pain. Your defence will be in readiness for that history repeating itself. You will build a wall of indifference to other people, or a suit of armour bearing the sign ‘I am strong you cannot hurt me’. Or maybe you will unconsciously wear a sign saying
‘I will do anything you want because I am afraid of your rejection or your abandonment’.
Perhaps on the surface you may appear as conforming, but underneath you might be rebelling. Perhaps you will use illness or acting stupid to protect yourself, perhaps you will harm yourself because you do not know how to deal with life and its difficulties. Maybe if you self harm at least you will be in control of the inner pain that cannot be express or controlled. As you are reading this article perhaps you can identify your own particular defence.
Our defences go some way to protect us and they do so in a very unique way. Each of us makes our own particular model to fit around the early injuries. This protection will effect how we relate to others in life. It becomes a way of manufacturing our world, making our world happen. If you expect me to shame you then of course I will. It is inevitable because that was your early wound, although hidden beneath your defence it is the still raw and unhealed area, so as you connect with me or someone in your life, you will be waiting in readiness for the shame, humiliation, abandonment just as your early carers did. It is just as if you have grown an extra set of antennae, seeking out the opportunity to recognise the Ah ha! in yourself. Ah ha! Is when you experience some faint sense of satisfaction because you had known what “they” would do, you just knew that “they” would eventually hurt you, you just knew that eventually “they” would leave you and that “they” couldn’t be trusted.
You can continue to reinforce this belief of what happens if you let yourself care about someone, and so on, think how many times you get what you expect from people in your life. Think about what you expect, what you fear from those you love and care about?
Because we come into the world seeking dependency in order to survive we are born vulnerable and endeavour to gain autonomy through dependency. Early research has shown that what we seek is emotional contact with another human being, that we have a drive to attach and this attachment is for love and survival and is a path to health and autonomy. It would seem to follow that we must be dependent in order to become independent. In order to find our own inner security and stable sense of who we are we must have experienced a good enough early attachment. Through the other we find ourselves. Throughout development we are pushing towards autonomy yet all the while seeking to exchange loving energy with others. If in a healthy environment we can grow up striving for autonomy in order to become who we are then our energy is channelled like a plant, a tree, a bird or anything else in nature towards the fulfilment of it’s purpose.
As children we are merely seeking to make our contact safe where it is not safe, the need to survive is the driving force. As an infant instinctively I may recognise that if I do not adapt to my environment then I may not survive. If I don’t conform, suppress my inner needs and desires I may not be acceptable in this environment, if I am not acceptable then ‘they’ may reject me.
The social and psychological messages passed on from parents and parent figures are the key to suppression of ‘self’ in the child and the child’s natural ability for love and intimacy. A need to survive becomes the block to autonomy, to spontaneity and that natural ability to feel free of restrictions.
The difficulty with an unhealthy dependency in those early years is that it can manifest expectancy to distrust, feel ashamed, feel afraid of relationships, feel fear within the relationship. Because of our relationship needs from those we depend upon we can grow up expecting and fearing shame, experiencing ourselves as having done something wrong and thus learning how to feel guilty or maybe even experiencing ourselves as ‘being wrong’ and feeling shame, for example:
“I must be a very bad person”
“There is something wrong with me”
Think what your own sayings are about life’s predictable outcomes in relation to others.
One of the most significant issues that emerge in therapy is the fear of attachment, fear of intimacy, anxiety about getting close or being seen to need others. Research has shown that the individuals who experience attachment issues have been exposed to disruptions in the attachment process as a child. We develop our ways of attaching through our observations as children. We take note of how the grownups do it? What are they like with each other? Are they close to each other, to me, to my brothers and sisters etc?
John Bowlby in his work on Attachment Theory talks differing ways we learn to attach. He says that those who are avoiding attaching to others could be described as the compulsive self -reliant type, inhibiting attachment feelings and behaviour with others and disclaiming and even mocking any desire for close relationships. They are distrustful and frightened of allowing them-selves to rely upon others but would not let you see their inner fear. Many times this is because they wish to avoid the pain of rejection and in some cases in a bid to avoid becoming someone else's caregiver.
Then there are those who are anxiously attached who may be described as the compulsive caregiver. Taking care of others as if compelled to do so, sometimes seen as a rescuer. Rushing in to look after others and dashing over with the tissues or numerous cups of tea. Very often taking care of those who neither seek nor want care. This individual is anxious to please and worriers about not pleasing, more often than not experiencing chronic levels of anxiety that they learn to live with.
As we grow we need to be dependent in order to be able to walk away from dependency with a sense of inner security. An early healthy dependency enables us to develop and take in that early sense of security, what John Bowlby called the secure base. This secure base is the foundation for self-confidence and self worth. We may hopefully be at ease with our relationships because we were at ease with our early dependency needs. If we are born into a good-enough loving environment then growing and receiving love will be relatively easy.
However if we are born into a situation where receiving and giving love is tenuous and uncertain, unhealthy and costly we develop the defences to protect the inner self. We develop a false self or adapted self, so we split between who we really are and the self constructed as a way of surviving or getting approval or reinforcing the early environmental beliefs. Repeating history in the here and now playing out old patterns of behaviour in order to maintain the familiarity of the past.
I believe that in order to give and receive love within relationships we need to let go of the fear of dependency. We need to work out how the dependency in the here and now is different from there and then. In my title ‘Show me I’m loveable and I’ll know how to love’ I simply mean that the injuries you experienced as a child have influenced the way you love today. The way others reacted and responded to you as a child is the way you will react and respond both to yourselves and to others. If you are to change this process you will need to grieve and let go of the past hurts and move into the present in order to see that people in your here and now world are not the same as those from the ‘there and then’. Eventually you can let go of the shadow of those from your past that are in the way of those in your life now.
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