“Love involves more than just feelings. It is also a way of behaving. When Sandy said, “My parents don’t know how to love me,” she was saying that they don’t know how to behave in loving ways. If you were to ask Sandy’s parents, or almost any other toxic parents, if they love their children, most of them would answer emphatically that they do. Yet, sadly, most of their children have always felt unloved. What toxic parents call “love” rarely translates into nourishing, comforting behaviour.
Most adult children of toxic parents grow up feeling tremendous confusion about what love means and how it’s supposed to feel. Their parents did extremely unloving things to them in the name of love. They came to understand love as something chaotic, dramatic, confusing, and often painful–something they had to give up their own dreams and desires for. Obviously, that’s not what love is all about.
Loving behaviour doesn’t grind you down, keep you off balance, or create feelings of self-hatred. Love doesn’t hurt, it feels good. Loving behaviour nourishes your emotional well-being. When someone is being loving to you, you feel accepted, cared for, valued, and respected. Genuine love creates feelings of warmth, pleasure, safety, stability, and inner peace.
Once you understand what love is, you may come to the realisation that your parents couldn’t or didn’t know how to be loving. This is one of the saddest truths you will ever have to accept. But when you clearly define and acknowledge your parents’ limitations, and the losses you suffered because of them, you open a door in your life for people who will love you the way you deserve to be loved–the real way.” – an excerpt from Toxic Parents: Overcoming their hurtful legacy and reclaiming your life by Susan Forward
When we begin to see love clearly — to name what it is and what it isn’t — we often encounter another truth: our nervous system learned to equate love with danger. Which brings me to a question I often hear in inner child work: ‘Why do I look for a safe haven in dangerous places?’
From birth, safety is our centre of gravity. We are hard wired for safety above all else. When we rely for protection on parents whose expression of love doesn’t align with our intuitive experience of love – a conflict arises within. Our vision of love and our parent’s expression of it – lay on two different sides of the spectrum. Moving towards our inherent knowing, takes us away from our caregivers, therefore away from physical safety. To stay physically safe, we learned to suppress the parts of us that sought authentic love. We adapted to the terrain of conditional love — one that felt safer, but cost us our aliveness.
The path back to our heart’s ground might be faded, but it never ever fades completely. In fact it illuminates more vividly in moments of charge, moments of trigger. These are the moments when we can be guided by the light that shines through the spaces between tree canopies. Moreover, there is a spontaneous impulse in this world that will always support a move towards us manifesting our true essence.
As children we encountered situations, where a resolution to a potential life threat was missing at the time. There was no possibility to fight the threat and no way of escaping it either, so we froze in the state of danger. Remaining unresolved, these are now dark corners, neglected, dusty, stagnant. Our shadows.
In inner child therapy, we are guided by a charge of a trigger, like an electricity current pointing us towards the source of the electrical disruption. We discover spaces, where imbalance hasn’t been restored yet. Spaces, where love hasn’t been felt yet.
“Sometimes life hides gifts in the darkest of places.”
— Anne Shirley
These situations that cast a dark and scary shadow, were originally filled with light of potential. They were originally invitations to grow bigger roots! Moments of resistance, where we were invited to grow, widen, unravel. Just like trees’ roots need to penetrate the resistance of the bed of earth and rock in order to anchor. Anchored deeper, we are able to dance wilder, when the life’s blows, winds and breezes come. The larger the tree grows, the richer this world. Just as mother nature guides and role models growth for a young tree, we need healthy growth role modelled around us in order to recognise and follow the same flow of vitality. We need to feel that our environment is cheering us on, that we are a precious part of the ecosystem, that we belong to a bigger constellation.
Pain is an inevitable part of life, and it is through the experiences of pain in early life – that we can discover what our own tailored remedy for pain is. That remedy is what we call love. It arrives in so many different shapes and forms. Love can sometimes look like safety in a form of a firm boundary, and other times like a sense of belonging in a form of boundless acceptance. Adverse situations have the capacity to equip us in important cushioning to soften our experience of life’s tough soils.
Invaluable wisdoms remain hibernated in those past situations that linger frozen in time.
They have always been messages addressed exclusively to us. The answers will manifest through our inner child. The wisdom our inner child holds is humbling, exciting, tender and inherent.
When we begin to listen to those frozen moments with compassion, our inner child teaches us what real love feels like — love that protects without controlling, that holds without silencing. In remembering what love truly feels like, we come home — not to our parents’ idea of love, but to our own heart’s original blueprint.
Our vision of love and our expression of love towards ourselves – can unite.
