“Love does not eat at me
leaving spiritual holes.
Love only asks that I let it
enter my soul.”
- m. brady
Normally, I only include a poem written by myself, but I feel that this quote is also a great one for today’s theme:
“Keep love in your heart.
A life without it is like
a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.”
- Oscar Wilde
What Is Love? (Baby, Don’t Hurt Me!)
First of all, I would like to apologize for my brief absence. I probably should have clarified that sometimes I have family that demands (lovingly) my presence around holiday times, and that on those weeks, it may be harder for me to write. However, we’re here now, so what’s the harm?
Let’s get into the real meat of the day. We all want it, we all have it, yet we’re all still searching for it: Love.
Being completely raw and honest, conversation about Love could go on for several newsletters. It is a hard concept to define that means different things to different people. This one article alone may end up being longer than usual. Since this will probably be broken up into several sections, let’s refer to this particular article as Section One of the Love Theory. We’ll move together, analyzing Love chronologically as we move through life.
Today, we’ll begin with our childhoods.
Don’t worry, I won’t separate them out across months. Next week, we’ll move into Section Two and discuss Adolescence. Section Three and Four will be Adulthood, broken into Young Adulthood and The Rest of Life’s Journey. This way, we inevitably end up discussing Love & the Love Theory once a week chronologically for the entire month.
However, for us to move forward in our healing journeys together, it is imperative that we understand Love in all it’s forms across all our periods of life. Love means different things to different people, and it’s impact changes over the course of our lives. To understand Love intimately is to shape our relationships. To shape our relationships is to change our perspective. To change our perspective is to change our lives. And that is the whole goal, I believe, yeah?
In that case, today we are discussing The Love Theory in terms of childhood.
But first…
What is “The Love Theory”?
The Love Theory is my own self-proclaimed notion that Love, ultimately, can entirely sway the course of ones life depending on ones perception of Love itself. I believe wholeheartedly that by harnessing Love and understanding it, we can grasp even more control over how we move through this life, the choices we make, and the path we are on.
Childhood is arguably the most important part of our lives to focus on for multiple reasons:
It is in this period of life that we have the least amount of control.
It is in this period of life that we have the smallest circle of people impacting our processing of what love is.
It is in this period of life that we begin to even learn what love is supposed to look or feel like.
Within childhood, people may learn many different ways to love. Some of those include:
Love for family, parents, siblings, and relatives.
Love for God, Allah, the Universe, or any other applicable religious figure.
Romantic love on a minor scale.
The way people treat us during this time may shape how we perceive love and express it for the rest of our lives if we do not do the work to become aware of how we have gotten to where we are in life.
Familial Love.
Love for family is arguably the most influential form featured in the above list. Our parents and close relatives immediately shape how we perceive love and choose to express it.
When analyzing Love and choosing to look at it objectively, we must look for Red Flags. A Red Flag applies to circumstances that can critically change how we see Love. Some of these would include:
Growing up in an abusive home.
Being abandoned or in some fashion disconnected from family.
Seeing drug or alcohol abuse as a child.
SA or other physically violating abuse.
Cheating or infidelity in the home.
Love being talked down upon, emotions being made out to be weakness, or any sort of negative talk regarding feelings and expression of them.
These Red Flags can result in negative relationships with Love later in life. People will try to tell you that this can be resolved in complicated ways with extensive therapy, and in many cases unpacking this trauma does require a professional’s intervention, but we need to see that we have our own individual power and that there are things we can do in our own lives to make a difference.
One of these things is self awareness. Having the self awareness to recognize that we experienced these things and having the will power to try to do things a different way despite what our instincts tell us to do.
If you’ve experienced one of the above Red Flags, you may notice some of the following things in your own love life:
An unwillingness to rely or trust upon others.
A lack of verbalizing or expressing emotions; issues with communication.
An aversion to physical intimacy, or alternatively, a fight-or-flight response to emotional intimacy.
Outright refusal to participate in romantic or platonic relationships.
Over attachment or fear of abandonment.
Lack of awareness in terms of equality or working together with friends and partners. Not being perceptive of whether or not you are doing too much or too little.
Emotional outbursts or strong reactions to any kind of negative behavior.
Disordered priorities; work coming before family, or friends coming above children, or hobbies coming before your partner.
If these Red Flags are bothering you, if you have them and don’t know what to do about them, that is what we are going to try and resolve today.
So, what do I do?
With the Love Theory, analyzing our childhood is crucial. Following the below steps will help you create a better path to loving people earnestly in your day to day life.
Make a list of the ways you saw Love expressed at home and to you between the ages of 5 years old to 13 years old. Write down anything truly memorable that stuck with you. Write down as many as you can. Then, rank the top five that stuck with you the most. The ones you remember the most clearly. The ones that you maybe still think about today. Try to include both positive and negative memories if you can.
With those five memories, analyze if any of them include Red Flag moments. If they do, list what those Red Flags were.
If they don’t, congratulations for now! If you still feel that your perception of Love is skewed, then it implies that moment may have happened later in life or alternatively is a perception that is easier to shift.
Now, write down the names of the five people who are closest to you. This can be family, friends, partners, anyone. Write down the names of five people who used to be the closest to you but perhaps are no longer in your life anymore.
Next to those ten names, write down three words you would use to describe each person. For the five people no longer in your life, write down why the relationship ended.
Check for synchronicity.
If you are in a position where the five people who left your life left because of their own negative traits and behaviors, you don’t need to blame yourself for that. This workshop is not a blame game. It is a way to become self aware of our own traits when interacting with Love.
Did something end because you consistently attract cheaters or abusive partners and friends? Consider if that may be because those people feel familiar to you, and if perhaps you need to venture outside your Comfort Zone to find people who will treat you better.
Did a lot of those relationships end because they did something and you immediately were unwilling to work through it? Perhaps it’s time to figure out if your emotions are getting the best of you. If they are, it is OK. You are still not at fault.
This is the issue far too many people run into. When we realize our own actions may have had a role in people leaving our lives, we shield ourselves from it. We get angry that someone could even imply that we had anything to do with it. We desperately search for anyone but ourselves to be the cause of something that hurt us so greatly.
However, the greatest gift we can get from Love is introspection. There is nothing to be afraid of when it comes to self awareness. With self awareness, unless you share it, the only person who knows about it is you. If you realize something and you ignore it, it does not disappear.
More often than not, you’re simply giving it time to grow.
I urge you not to take offense that part of your actions could be a part of some of your problems. I encourage you even to embrace that idea and truly analyze whether or not that fact is true. If you find yourself able to become aware of it, you are significantly closer to shifting your perspective.
Take this parting anecdote before we move on. My father once screamed a bunch of slurs at me and called me names as a result of me not liking the music he was playing when I was only six years old. My father was also one of the only people I interacted with as we lived in a remote part of Florida further away from the rest of our family. As a result, for the majority of my childhood and adolescence, I legitimately believed this was how parents spoke to their children and how people spoke to each other. I also learned that I was not meant to speak up when I didn’t like something, as it would result in Love being taken away from me. I was also taught, in this one experience alone, that Love was dependent on my compliance. I was not taught how to respectfully say I didn’t like something. I was not taught how to communicate effectively. And I was taught that emotional outbursts were acceptable regardless of who they were directed to.
This all followed me into my adulthood until I recognized that the only person responsible for my healing and my actions was me.
OK, so maybe I have some Red Flags… Now What?
Break the cycle.
Warning: You will be uncomfortable. You might get frustrated. You might find yourself wondering what you’re doing it all for. You might want to revert back to old behaviors; you might do so. You might think this is all pointless…
But if you’ve read this far, you’re either really interested in psychology, or you know deep down that this is not pointless.
I can’t give examples for every single scenario; there are far too many for that. Instead, I will share what I found when I did this experiment myself and the actions I took to change. Perhaps in sharing my own faults, you can feel more comfortable in recognizing and changing your own.
I found that a lot of my relationships ended or were damaged due to my emotions being wild and out of my control. It legitimately took years and some therapy (because of circumstances I have been put in) to be willing to accept this truth. Once I came to understand this, I began to treat my emotions like children. I listened to them and I validated them, but in the way you would talk to a child, I spoke to myself. I explained to my own self the way that things in the world worked and how I could find different ways to handle problems. I also found that I tended to be attracted to reserved people with a lack of emotional expression and needed to do the work to understand that they perceived the world differently; that their choices and actions were not some kind of betrayal, instead were simply indicative of us just being different people. I made a concerted effort during this time to recognize that the only validation I needed should come from myself.
I also found that a lot of my relationships were damaged or dissolved by my lack of awareness. I thought I was doing so much, but really, I wasn’t doing nearly enough. I was doing what I thought would show love, not really considering what the other person would consider love. So whereas I thought being an emotional support for the other person and being very physically open was good enough, that other person perhaps preferred acts of service or me participating and helping more with practical tasks. When I took the time to look at the people I loved the most, I realized it wasn’t that I wasn’t showing love… I was showing it in a way they didn’t understand.
Finally, I found that a lot of my relationships suffered due to my fear of abandonment. My mind would create situations that simply either did not happen or weren’t there. But, because I truly believed them, I acted on those assumptions. By acting on those assumptions, I made the people around me feel uneasy as they felt they were never trusted despite never doing anything wrong. This made them leave. Understandably. I had to do the work with myself to learn how to harness my anxiety. I had to force myself to accept that Communication is necessary, that I am not a mind reader, and that if someone needs something from me, they have to say it. If they don’t say it and they get mad at me for not assuming what they need, that is a reflection on them and not me. This particular example has actually helped me in the whole of my entire life, from career to personal relationships. I firmly recommend doing this even if you do not have issues with Love.
What if I don’t have issues with Love?
If you don’t have Red Flags or you don’t have issues with Love, this article can still be extremely beneficial in terms of helping you understand the people around you.
If you love other people, odds are one of them has been through situations like this.
By sharing this awareness with them, you might be able to help them out.
Do you have Red Flags in Love?
Are you seeing traits in yourself or in others that you think could shift?
How has your perception changed from now versus when you were a child?
Next week, we’ll discuss Adolescence in Love Theory.
Until then,
M. Brady
so good! i loved this!