Comment aimer ? / How to love ?

[Caetel]

I have been wondering about that lately. I am reading a book called "Teachings about love" written by a buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. It is a book about love and compassion. I have just read a chapter talking about motherly love where he says that people learn how to love through their mother's love for them.
V and I obviously do not know how to love, how to express love. He has been physically and psychologically abused by his mother. I have been psychologically abused by my mother and abandoned to my father's incestuous will by her. So V and I have had very few experiences of love. We have started our life full of pain, sadness, frustration and rage. We obviouslly carried a burden that was also our parents' (sadness, anger, frustration...). How can we learn how to love when the foundations are just inexistant ?
I have been doing a lot of work on myself lately about that, through meditation and readings. I have read amazing books on buddhism, tantra and christianism. I have been trying to get away from a love that is based on attachment. I know the answer is within me just like it is within V. but the thickness of all the "crap" seems never ending. I feel sometimes that all the emotions are locked in my throat. Sometimes I had the feeling that everytime V wanted to express something important about loving he was being trapped. All the good things were locked too and in the end he remained silent.
Does it mean that without our mothers' love we are doomed to be forever silent and unable to love in a way that a relationship is possible ?
Anyway these are just my thoughts for today.
Loving regards
Caroline

 

[beautifuldisaster]

Hi there,
I understand what you are saying. I too had a mother who didnt know how to love, and a father who abandoned me. Luckily I had a wonderful grandmother who lived love the way it should be. She taught me great lessons in her selflessness. My children are so lucky, because I had her. They will never have to wonder what love.
The love I have for my children is far different than the love I have for my spouse. They will never abandon or hurt me in a way my spouse can. So, being open and loving and free with them is so easy in comparison to how I love my husband.
I work so hard to love him in a more unconditional manner...the way it is described in the Biblical sense. Like you, I feel like I dont know how. I almost bait and trap him and have a fit if he doesnt do what I think he should do. For instance, if I feel very loving and vunerable (which is so hard it is unbelieveable) and I say something or do something that is me trying to show him that I am feeling that way, and he DOESNT respond very quickly and the way I am looking for him to respond.....then I am infuriated. I get mad, and basically throw a fit.
I did this yesterday. I text messaged him a whole bunch of really vunerable words. Words I really meant. When I didnt get it recipricated.....well, then I got mad about something else. We tend to not know how to respond to the other being vunerable. So he walked in the door and we ended up quarreling. Not a big fight, but enough that he went to bed scratching his head wondering what happened.
It is so awful to feel this way. And here I am, trying to support my MS. Geesh, sometimes it feels like a never ending circle.
In the book ALLIES IN HEALING by Laura Davis she discusses how people basically hook up. She talks about how we take our dysfunctions and somehow mesh with the one who feeds it.
It is an awful thing....but for my hubby and I, it is so dang true.
As much as I love him, he is the perfect one for me in the way that we both have vunerablity issues...and we both know what the other needs, we know how to give it, and we know how better than anyone else to hurt each other.
We have been working so hard on these issues, and still as much as we try...and as much as we really do love each other, they find their way to resurfacing. This has been the hardest job I have ever had. Changing not my core beliefs, because I know what is right from wrong.....but changing the way I have been dysfunctionally programmed to react.
It is exhausting....but the effort is starting to pay off. I just wish I could say that someday with this much effort we would be 'FIXED'...but it seems like something that will always be an effort.
Good luck!

 

[SAR]

Caro,

Does it mean that without our mothers' love we are doomed to be forever silent and unable to love in a way that a relationship is possible ?

No.

Part of what no one else gets about those of us who grow up without mother's love is how much of the shared symbolism of "mothers' love" is totally lost on us.

What the monk means is that people learn to love through their experience with a certain kind of love which most people describe by comparing it to the love that children experience with their mothers.

The task for those of us who get nothing from this comparison is to 1)find out exactly what everyone else is talking about when they say "mothers love" and 2)think about where and how we've experienced that, and build on it. That is what beautifuldisaster is doing when she talks about her grandmother who loved in a selfless way.

Selflessness is part of that love-- so is forgiveness and acceptance, so is a balance between protection and trust, so is a balance between indulgence and responsibility.

To me, the single biggest part of "mother's love" is the balance between the total committment and security of the mother, and the autonomy of the child. A mother has to let her children see that nothing can change her love for them, but also let her children grow away from that love into their own people-- and for a mother not so secure in her own ability to give/receive love, I think that can seem hurtful or abandoning.

beautifuldisaster, forgive me if I'm putting words in your mouth--

They will never abandon or hurt me in a way my spouse can. So, being open and loving and free with them is so easy

But unless your children are all too small to physically talk back to you or walk out of the room you're in, I'm sure I don't have to tell you -- on some level, yes, kids can hurt you, they can abandon you, and it isn't always "easy" to love them. When I read your statement though, I don't see denial of that-- I see that you feel confident in your love for them, and in how that love will be unshaken by anything they could do.

And maybe, like me, you feel awed and grateful by the way that those kids just keep loving you back and affirming the love you give them, so easily and totally, not because they "have to" or because they are worried about the consequences, but because it feels good to them.

SAR

 

[An]

This strand made me think of the "Self-Parenting" workbooks and all I did when first going through my own Codepency recovery many many years ago. And I still have to make a conscious effort. but I was also thinking this afternoon that in a way, our female friends often become little pieces of substitute mother love. I too have never felt loved by my mother. and that's my kindest way of stating it.
And like others have said, I remember one day sitting down and looking at who did give me the pieces of myself that pulled my sanity and soul through enough to even make me become the adult who could get to recovery- i realized the importance little acts from one of my mother's friends meant throughout my child- and some from some aunt's. I tried to find my mother's friend to thank her at that point but learned she had since died. It made me aware though, that the smallest things we do for children at times, may 40 years later be recognized as what "pulled them through".
In a way, I think loving mothers just become the models for their chldren teaching them that they are lovable- and we just have to find the way to do that same thing for ourselves from within - yes, easier said than done. but slowly it builds and it happens and I see the growth and change and am thankful- thanks all for your sharing too