Do you know what love is?
Lets talk about love
We all want to be loved and to love, it’s part of being human but do we really know what love is? Thich Nhat Hanh once gave an inspiring teaching about love in which he said
“To love without knowing how to love wounds the ones we love”
If we thought deeply about those words, we might begin to better understand what love is.
After my divorce it was easier to blame my ex-husband for everything, but sooner or later I had to own up to my part in the story. What I had to accept was that the event that ended the marriage wasn’t the cause, it was the excuse that we both needed to walk away from a partnership that wasn’t working anymore. For the next few years, I looked at my life to try to understand why I made the choices I made when I was young, especially why I married at such a young age. Finally, I came to the conclusion that I had to go back further into my childhood to gain clarity about my adult life.
In the late 1950’s Erik Erikson a German psychologist explained child development as 8 Stages of Psychosocial Development. In his theory, he ascertains that it is as early as one year old that we start to try to work out if the world is a safe, caring place and with this, we move from “trust to mistrust”. Our view is formed based on the relationship we have with those that care for us, especially our mother and he concluded that
“I am what I am given”
Child psychologist Anna Tardos expands on this with her observation that “if the adult does not have a real, genuine interest in the child, even the best technique won’t help”. She also stated that
“It’s not enough to say you love the child, the child must feel the results of your care”.
Of course, the argument of nature versus nurture is probably one that will never be totally agreed however I’m prone to believe more in the nurture argument because nature implies that we cannot change. And my view is that change is always possible if we know what needs to change!
Own Your Baggage
After reading the work of Anna Tardos and Erik Erikson I had a really deep talk with myself (yes I do that!!) and I began to explore why I’ve pushed the idea of getting into a new relationship so far back in my mind. I usually joke about it by saying things like “I’m commitment phobic!” but deep down I know I have trust issues.
So, I continued to dig deeper to see what else might come up for me. It’s not that I didn’t try, in fact, I had a short relationship a few years after my divorce which ended badly. That only served to strengthen my distrust and feed my insecurities. However, I live by one important philosophy which is explained in Buddhism like so:
If something appears in your life that you like, don’t pull it towards you because one day it will pull away. The more you pull at it, the further it goes.
If something appears in your life that you do not like, don’t push it away because over time it will come closer to you.
With this in mind, I knew that I had to face that thing I keep avoiding if it’s ever going to go away.
Eventually, it hit me “I am the problem!”.
And by that I don’t mean I’m to blame for everything that’s ever happened to me, I just mean as Jon Kabat Zinn puts it “wherever I go, there I am”. This led me to see that:
It’s not that I don’t trust others, alright I do have a bit of that too but more than anything, I don’t trust myself. I don’t trust myself to make the right choices because I haven’t in the past.
I came to realise that every new relationship is impacted by our past experiences and that goes for everyone involved. So not only do I take my baggage with me, but I must also cope with the baggage of the other person in the relationship. That’s a tough ask!
We are attracted to what we know, and, in my case, it was emotionally unavailable men, just like my dad. I am sure I developed the “do not trust” trait when I was around three!! As I said at the start when we don’t know how to love we only hurt the ones we love and that is no more evident than in relationships between children and their parents.
And perhaps the most important thing was to accept that everything that ever happened to me has served its purpose and has always been for my greater good. Hard as it may be for us to see things this way, it is how life works.
It’s like a merry-go-round that we can only step off if we do the work on ourselves. If we want to know how to love and to love authentically, we must take the time to get to know ourselves. We must work on our baggage, trauma and past experiences so we can allow our relationships to flourish.
Over the last three years, I’ve spent a lot of time alone, getting really comfortable with myself and now I no longer feel that I “need” to be in a relationship. I’m good just as I am.
Now here’s the punch line, as soon as I stopped needing it, suddenly it became a possibility. Who knew right?
Until next time.
PS: Why not join me on my next free, live, online workshop for more on this topic?