How Do You Know Love?
Our capacity to love is defined by what we know of love. This creates its own challenges in loving relationships. Here is your chance to compassionately understand your unloved self.
All of us grow up with different experiences of love in childhood. Some of us knew unequivocally that we were loved. Some of us felt the need to earn or perform to be loved. Some of us felt the compulsion to manipulate into being loved or hoping for love. Some of us felt abandoned in love.
Any sort of experienced trauma underlines our experience of love, twisting the impulse to be loved into something painful or shameful. How love was available in our family body taught us what parts of our self can be effortlessly loved and what parts need to be rejected or hidden because they are intrinsically unloveable. There is an overarching theme of tension in life towards the lovable and the unlovable.
Love is complicated. Our ability to feel love deepening into a solid foundation of trust and surrender is even more complicated. Lust and new love are exciting. Established love is softer, compromised, and flexible. Expecting love to be easy does love a disservice. Love grows more in knowing what storms can be weathered, what situations can be endured. Knowing that someone has made a choice towards you when that choice was difficult shows strength in love. An easy decision towards the shiny in another person questions the capacity to love fully.
When I look at my husband, I see him in his faults and his struggles just as much as I see his strengths and his value. The love I hold for him goes beyond the good and positive. It embraces his difficulties because they make him more complicated and alive. Love without tests is young. Over time, the issues we have in relationships create a deep standing love even in spite of that which has hurt and destroyed. Struggles when metabolized into love prove that love can heal and mend.
Let’s go back in time and explore our initial experiences of love as a way of understanding more clearly how we may go wrong in trying to love others. Just take a moment to close your eyes and breathe into yourself right now. With a breath, bring your family of origin all around you. Notice what happens when you do this to your breath, your body, your heart and your being. What part of you feels loved? Where is the part of you that doesn’t?
Remember: How you were primarily shown love in childhood is the way you are going to default into expressing and feeling love in your own relationships. This can be difficult for our friends and lovers as their own childhood may have taught them something completely different about love. If we expect people in relationship to love us the way WE know love, we are likely to end up disappointed or have a strong part of us that feels alone in the relationship.
Availability Versus Deficit of Love
Every single need eventually flows back into the need for love. Whether we define the need as being seen, heard, acknowledged, respected, etc the common ground for every single need is the need to be loved. We need to know that we are loved when we are perfect and imperfect, good and bad, in all moods and all states of emotional expression. This puts a pretty big demand on any relationship we have. Of course we do not believe in our own being that all of us is lovable. The places we are most challenged in relationship reflect the parts of us we do not feel can be loved. Where love was available in our upbringing, there is the possibility of meeting our needs even if it is hard. Where love was not available, we have no patterning for meeting our needs and live in constant starvation and deprivation.
I have observed that parents know that they are doing a good job if their children are all different in their woundings and defenses. Why is this? A family body that is incapable of creating a different reality for each child has more deficit and dysfunction. When a person knows that their experience of childhood was different than that of their siblings, it points towards the person’s own inability to metabolize something that was available. Needs were capable of being met but not capable of being taken up. Somewhere in the body is the possibility of patterning for what was missing. The ability to meet the need is present but skewed.
It is different for someone whose siblings and parents all hold the same wounding. This is a more difficult situation. There is potentially no patterning at all internally for the need to be met. This develops into a space of constant yearning or habitual rejection. In these cases, it is incredibly difficult for loved ones to help heal what’s missing. It is easy to get triggered by a loved one who cannot metabolize or notice love. The person who has no patterning for being met feels existentially unloved. To challenge the persona that has developed around this pain threatens to shatter all that has been created to survive the lack that existed in upbringing.
Can you imagine that in a relationship both people have a limited idea of how to relate to love in the same way? Yet we demand of each other that love is felt and expressed inside our own comfort zones. We expect all needs to be met and often blame the other when the need goes unmet. This goes beyond love language, although love language plays a part.
Without open conversations on what is known of love and what is expected of love, it is too easy to feel like something is essentially missing in relationship.
In romantic relationships, we may choose to complicate an already tenuous sense of love by raising children and demonstrating our own ideas of love to them. If one parent expresses love completely different than the other, our own childhood woundings around love come to the surface. Transference, in which our own unresolved wounding around love in childhood arises and is not acknowledged, creates a consistent strife and repeated patterns of wounding in the relationship.
Conditional Love
Conditional love can also be thought about as earned love. The ability to feel loved is based on what we do, how we act, what we say. While there can be a level of authentic expression of self in conditional love, this expression has clear set ways of being. Deviating from the expressed loved self is a risk. Families that primarily conditionally love create children who feel safe in a box. Outside the box there is the unlovable. Because love is felt and known there is a bridge between lovable and unlovable self. It is normal that the unlovable self is expressed though in negative ways and the lovable self has been curated to express itself through the positive.
Conditional love tells us that we are only as good as our actions. It teaches us that our actions need to be acceptable to earn love.
In some cases, there may have been verbal, emotional, or physical abuse if the terms of the conditional love were not met. Ignoring is also a form of conditional love. When our environment habitually responds to us with any form of demand that we need to be different than who we are, we learn that we have to inherently change ourself to be loved. Our lovable self becomes a reflection of the external rather than having a trusting dynamic with our true self.
Conditional love creates a questioning of self. Conditional love makes us think that we have to perform or earn love. We have to either express a very narrow part of ourself or become something other than self to be lovable.
For those who were raised with parents that showed love primarily through conditional love, it is harder to know who the authentic self is or even to be interested in the true self. It is too entwined with earning love. True self is a lonely being rejected and avoided in the pain of the unacknowledged. The self that is safe to be loved is the one that works hard, tries to be seen, and has a sense of fake brevity in it’s expression. Here the neediest self is going to be the one that steps out of the bounds of acceptable behavior.
In relationship, this will mean that we tend to perform to show love. Acts of service as a love language actually point towards someone who likely grew up with conditional love. There is a sense of needing to prove love through action rather than a comfort in showing love through the relational self. Expression of true self has insecurity and push-pull because it is a test. The true self does not feel inherently safe being expressed.
A person who does not believe they can be loved for who they are is not going to easily be lovable or meet a partner’s deeper need for love outside of action. It is in the moments of insecurity that it is most important for a partner or friend to show up, settle in, and love unconditionally. Helping those wounded by conditional love means slowing down and letting them see that you love them when it is hard for them to love themselves or when they are test the love. What a conundrum.
When a loved one is pushing away or emanating insecurity the expectation put on the other is rejection. If we react in the expected way, we have lost a chance to allow the person we love to trust their unlovable with us. Yet the pull is so strong to react in a way that is not supportive. Being a partner sometimes means we have to observe more than is being said and look for the underlying pattern. Perhaps here is the chance to change something.
Mentally bookmark this observation. Insecurity is a sign that support and love is necessary to create a deepening in relationship. No matter how easy it may be to reject, acceptance is the healing response to a partner’s insecurity.
Thinking about our educational system and the inherent way value is expressed in it, I believe our parents would have had to compensate heroically to create a child that does not feel conditionally loved. Just consider taking a report card home to parents and noting the reaction of good grades, mediocre grades, and bad grades. What gets the most attention? If parents give attention to the bad grades they are proving conditional love just as much as if the attention is given to the good grades. No attention to either is a different mine pit of being unseen and therefore unloved. I don’t know about you but I know my parents didn’t spend hours trying to figure out psychologically how they might be damaging me by their reactions to my performance in school.
I know that many of my peers actually have spent a lot of thought towards this and made a point of raising children differently. While I respect this attempt to offset an inherent unavoidable wounding around love and self expression, I also know that conditional love is part of being an authentic parent. Wounding children is inevitable. Every child is going to take feedback about their behavior and make it a sign of conditional love.
I was an incredibly good student academically but handwriting and art were a struggle for me growing up. I feel confident in my rational mind and my athletic prowess. Sharing my art and creativity fills me with a sense that I am doing something wrong. Simply, I feel as if I have something to earn in this realm. I lose confidence. I am insecure. I get needy. The image that comes to mind of my sense of self here is No Face from Miyazaki’s Spirited Away asking for gold. I am asking for more than just feedback, I am asking to be loved. Any place that I feel conditionally loved creates push-pull between need and insecurity. Identifying these places helps me slow down with my friends and family so that I can say, “This is important, give me space to grow.”
Manipulative Love and Neglect
I would call manipulative love and neglect a subset of conditional love. These form their own issues that entwine the loved and unloved aspects of self into a complex of distrust and abandonment. Manipulative love can often be unconscious on the part of the parent. A parent, for example, who is primarily narcissistic or mentally unstable may not know that they are only able to love a child who fits into their own story of reality. They may not realize that they retell the child’s experience to fit into that story and do not give the child space to be an individual.
Neglect in the form of lack of attention and love forces the child to create a story to survive. All a person who has been neglected knows is manipulation itself not just for love but for attention and identity. The self has no place in relationship for a person who was raise in neglect. The true self is inherently unlovable as a whole, not a part.
Learning how to get attention through the manipulation of acting out, being bad, or becoming invisible all create a sense that the unloved has more value in life. How exactly is one able to grow into an adult who trusts love and knows how to be themselves in loving relationships? Most likely friends and partners are put through a gauntlet of games, challenges, and manipulations that hide the insatiable need for unconditional love as well as the true internalized belief of self as unlovable.
If we were raised without safe love, relationships themselves do not feel actually safe when love is present. Ironic, right? There will be an inherent distrust, a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop, or a suspicious questioning of motives within the love aspect of the relationship. Any time deepening is available to be loved or the love is starting to be relied upon, a test or a sabotage will emerge. The story of self is that the self is unlovable or needs to be other than self to be loved. Both of these realities create a smokescreen that hides the pain of the unloved self.
Often drama comes up in the relationship when the story of self is being challenged. This means that the unlovable person will demand the content around the drama is more important than the terrifying possibility of the developing reliabiliy and trust happening underneath it. Drama is so interesting, right? It keeps us from paying attention to the greater dilemmas of reliance, trust, and need being met in a loving relationship. Again the healing response for this aspect of a person we are in relationship with requires a lack of interest in the drama and a deeper interest in what is being built in the relationship. The person who feels unloved is going to demand that we look at the destruction. Yet if we can patiently point out that this aspect feels less important than what is being built, we support the potential for development into some aspect of self being loved just a tiny bit. Baby steps are all that is possible in this wound.
This is hard to understand for those who may love without reservation or more openly. Love has to be questioned and distrusted in order to grow. It is very easy in people who primarily know manipulative love to burn bridges and find reasons to leave anyone who could unconditionally love them. Self sabotage sows the seeds of distrust in loving relationships to eventually destroy the relationship and prove that the unlovable is justified. The projection of distrust whittles its way into anyone in love with an unlovable person. It is inevitable in the face of so much distrust for the love of the relationship itself to be questioned. It is hard for one person to stay in a clear inner authority of love for the person who constantly and unexpectedly manipulates the love that is present inside the relationship.
A person who knows manipulated love is going to find numerous ways to not trust love. This is because of the huge insecurity and pain that exists around rejection. A person who primarily knows this kind of love fully doubts their own capacity to be loved. There is so much hurt, fear, and worthlessness around love that needs to be expressed and understood before love can be trusted. It is inevitably going to show up as neediness, distance, or rejection. The irony here is that if you are in a loving relationship with someone who knows themselves to be manipulatively loved, the only way you know that you are getting closer to them is when these impulses to reject surface. To withstand these impulses and not react to them is so difficult.
I sometimes feel that an inhuman capacity to love needs to be channeled for these tests. Accessibility to unconditional divine love can be called upon during these tests. Calling on our own deeply unloved self at the same time as a guiding force may be necessary for resonance. To respond with the part of us that also understands the plight of manipulative love builds a bridge toward the self that can see the bigger picture and radiate compassion.
The hard part about manipulative love is that there may not even be an idea that love is trustworthy. The internal sense of being on edge trumps the unknown potential for feeling safety within love. Love is not seen as a weakness. It brings up the outsider, the part that does not belong. Perhaps love can be touched on and momentarily trusted but foundational trust is almost impossible to build. The earthquake of doubts lurk in the projection of the inevitable being proven. How do you love someone who cannot love their own self? Patiently withstanding the one step forward ten steps back reality is essential.
