Love Through a Looking Glass

Source: Aliceabc/Pixabay

Allison never needed to learn to feel or to recognize love. Surrounded by people who cared about her needs, her comfort, and her changes as she developed from the time that she was in the womb, she knew what love was. Her resulting “secure attachment” allowed her to explore with curiosity and to seek support when danger lurked. She did not need to discover love; she recognized what it was.

Not all children are so lucky. Experiences of abuse, neglect, or rejection can leave them feeling unwanted. They may ask themselves: “What makes me lovable?” “How can I be loving?” or “What relationships can give my life meaning?”

Babies come into the world with biological givens—genetics leading to temperament, which later consolidates into personality; a set of drives like hunger, thirst, and survival; mechanisms of protection embedded in the fight, flight, or freeze responses to stress; and an urge to seek comfort through sensory gratification, and drive toward mastery.

Yet, decades of research document the damage done by adverse childhood experiences, whether suffered from neglect, harm, or cultural conditions. Findings supplement developmental studies that shed light on ways children learn naturally when enveloped in love. Findings also can help us identify strategies to try when natural processes are disrupted. Just as a dyslexic child needs alternative techniques to master reading, the person who grows up without the exposures, engagements, supports, and affections that allow one to thrive encounters different sets of challenges as they travel through life.

Appreciating ways in which we learn, act upon, and can consciously change our understanding of love opens up an alternative route to meaning in our relationships.

How do we learn to love and be loved?

In his work investigating relationships’ impact on behavior, Harlow documented the importance of warmth and touch. Without them, primates fail to thrive. In humans, the relative helplessness of newborns guarantees attachment to those with whom they come into contact.

When those interactions are positive, they foster reciprocity and affection, a sense of belonging, identification, and loving. When others bring deprivation, pain, and fear, idiosyncratic patterns of trauma responses emerge. They provide some defense, depending upon the age and maturity level of the child, the nature of the offenses, and the alternate pathways to stability that are available.

Source: Bessi/Pixabay

Erikson talked about progressively mastering basic trust (vs. mistrust), then autonomy (vs. shame and doubt), and then initiative (vs. guilt) as a child moves through nonverbal (what Piaget called sensorimotor) learning to language and action (preoperational thought) to a capacity for symbolism (language and thought). Only later, during adolescence, does the reversibility of thought (reflecting on an experience or idea from multiple points of view) replace the egocentrism of the child, allowing conscious decisions to become possible.

Until then, we learn from what we see, what we are told, what we try, and what we extract from the environment in which we live. And, thus, we learn to define “love” by what we have experienced as warmth and nurturing, or by what we have been told is loving behavior, or what the people in the world around us seem to define as “love” and “loving."

How do we act lovingly?

When early development is optimal, we tend to act in ways that are motivated by drives, instincts, and attraction, as well as by learning from personal experience and what the world we live in has punished or rewarded. Behaviors we interpret or express as “loving” can fall into broad categories defined by Robert Sternberg, who identified three major components that 20th-century Americans (as well as ancient Greeks) believe singly and/or together make up what we label “love”:

• Passion, what the Greeks called Eros, is connection based in sexual desire, pursuit, and surrender. Attachment is intense, often stems from primitive attraction, tends to elicit jealousy, and offers a specific set of rewards.
• Intimacy, what the Greeks called Philia, is the friendship type of loving, loaded with companionship, confiding, teamwork, and sharing of trials, tribulations, and triumphs. Its hallmarks are sharing and a willingness to repair misunderstandings or to smooth transitions as people grow and evolve over time.
• Commitment, the Greek Agape, is selfless or altruistic loving, prominently shown through compassion and caregiving, often sacrifice. Based upon our innate capacity to empathically grasp another person’s needs, and especially distress, it is rooted in a desire to extend whatever comfort human support or intervention can bring to ease another’s strife. Here, teamwork of a different sort is required. The recipient must allow dependence, and the provider must accept both the need to care for themselves (or they become unable to provide care to anyone else) and the blessing of being able to help another person who struggles with their specific challenges.

Adverse Childhood Experiences Essential Reads

Attitude Is (Not Always) a Choice

Sibling Aggression and Abuse Are ACEs

How do we change what we believe?

When must we move on in a love relationship? Changing the course of our lives when a shift in loving demands it can come with the consciousness and complexity comprehensible and accessible to mature minds. Three common motivators are

• Loss. Whether from death or from physical, cultural, or maturational distance that takes people in opposite directions, and whether sudden or expected, loss always requires a response before one can metabolize grief and allow space to love again.
• Damage. When the needs or demands of the relationship cause harm and survival becomes threatened, an appreciation that loving is not always safe can emerge and lead to movement toward a less destructive, more sustainable situation.
• Revision of identity. A person may come to view themself or their life through a new palette of goals, desires, and purposes. Loving and being loved can force understanding and growth to take place. Now it is time to appreciate the experiences and move on to the next lessons that life can provide.

Wherever you are in your journey of learning and living a loving life, may you be blessed with the joys, beauty, and meaning that loving can bring to your life.

Copyright 2024 Roni Beth Tower