by John Welwood
According to the saints and mystics, love is the very fabric of what we are; we are fashioned out of its warmth and openness. We don’t have to be great sages to recognize this. All we need to do is take an honest look at what makes our life worthwhile. When the presence of love is alive and moving in us, there is no doubt that our life is on target and meaningful, regardless of our outer circumstances. We feel that we’re in touch, connected with something larger than our small self. This lifts the burden of isolation and alienation off our shoulders, filling us with peace and well-being. But when the presence of love is absent, something often feels sad, not quite right; something seems to be missing, and it’s hard to find much joy, even in the midst of favorable circumstances. We easily fall prey to meaninglessness, anxiety, or despair.
These simple truths are also upheld by neuroscience research,1 which confirms that our connections with others affect the healthy development and functioning of the brain, the endocrine and immune systems, and our emotional balance. In short, love is the central force that holds our whole life together and allows it to function. In the words of the Indian sage Nisargadatta Maharaj, “Life is love and love is life.”2
While women generally recognize the central place of love in everything, men are more often more reluctant to acknowledge this. “Please don’t reduce everything to that,” I can hear many male readers groaning. “I have more important business to attend to than feeling loved.” But think about it: The author who writes a best-seller, the politician who wins an election, the businessman who gains a promotion or an important contract—all feel good about themselves because a little love has flowed their way, in the form of recognition, praise, or appreciation. Even the trader who reaps a stock market windfall feels that the gods are smiling on him.
At bottom, most of the things we strive for—security, success, wealth, status, power, recognition, validation, praise—are ways of trying to fill a gaping hole within us, a hole formed out of our separation from love. As ways of trying to win love indirectly, these substitute gratifications do not truly nourish us, because they do not deliver the real thing. In that sense, they are like junk food. Their failure to truly nourish only intensifies our inner hunger, driving us to run all the harder on the hamster wheel of success, desperately hoping to win some reward that will truly satisfy.
Yet if love is so central to who we are, why do we often feel so separated from it? All the great spiritual traditions have addressed the question of why people treat each other so badly and the world is such a mess. They have provided various explanations for this, such as ignorance, bad karma, original sin, egocentricity, or the failure to recognize love as our very nature. Yet what is the root cause of these afflictions?
The Wound of the Heart
If we take an honest look within, we may notice a certain guardedness around our heart. For some people, this is a thick, impenetrable barricade. For others, it is a thinner, subtler protective shield or contraction that only emerges under threatening conditions. And nothing triggers this sense of threat so strongly as the suspicion discussed earlier: that we are not truly loved or acceptable as we are. Numbing or shutting down the heart is an attempt to deflect the pain of that.
Not knowing that we can be loved for who we are prevents us from trusting in love itself, and this in turn causes us to turn away from life and doubt its benevolence. We may tell ourselves that love is not really available. But the deeper truth is that we don’t entirely trust it, and therefore have a hard time fully opening to it or letting it all the way into us. This disconnects us from our own heart, exacerbating our sense of love’s scarcity.
This disconnection from love most often grows out of not feeling fully embraced or accepted in our family of origin—whether through neglect, lack of attunement, or outright abuse. Not feeling securely held in the arms of love, we fall into the grip of fear. Inadequate love and nurturance directly impact the child’s sensitive nervous system, resulting in a certain degree of shock or trauma that will affect us for the rest of our life.
Sometimes the wounding or separation from love happens in more subtle ways. Some parents seem loving enough, yet they covertly or unconsciously dispense their love in controlling or manipulative ways. Or they may not be attuned to the child as someone different from them, a separate being in his or her own right. Such children may feel loved for certain attributes—but not for who they really are. In their need to please their parents and fit in, they come to regard love as something outside themselves, which they have to earn by living up to certain standards.
Children naturally try to protect themselves from the pain of inadequate love as best they can. They learn to separate and distance themselves from what causes them pain by contracting or shutting down. The technical term for this is dissociation.
Dissociation is our mind’s way of saying no to and turning away from our pain, our sensitivity, our need for love, our grief and anger about not getting enough of it, and from our body as well, where these feelings reside. This is one of the most basic and effective of all the defensive strategies in the child’s repertoire. Yet it also has a major downside: It constricts or shuts off access to two main areas of our body: the vital center in the belly3—the source of desire energy, eros, vital power, and instinctual knowing—and the heart center—where we respond to love and feel things most deeply. In saying no to the pain of unlove, we block the pathways through which love flows in the body and thus deprive ourselves of the very nutrient that would allow our whole life to flourish. And so we wind up severing our connection to life itself.
This leaves us in a strange and painful dilemma. On one hand we hunger for love—we cannot help that. Yet at the same time, we also deflect it and refuse to fully open to it because we don’t trust in it.
This whole pattern—not knowing we’re loved as we are, then numbing our heart to ward off this pain, thereby shutting down the pathways through which love can flow into and through us—is the wound of the heart. Although this love-wound grows out of childhood conditioning, it becomes in time a much larger spiritual problem—a disconnection from the loving openness that is our very nature.
This universal human wound shows up in the body as emptiness, anxiety, trauma, or depression, and in relationships as the mood of unlove, with its attendant insecurity, guardedness, mistrust, and resentment. And all relationship problems follow from there.
Love and the wound of the heart always seem to go hand in hand, like light and shadow. No matter how powerfully we fall in love with someone, we rarely soar above our fear and distrust for very long. Indeed, the more brightly another person lights us up, the more this activates the shadow of our wounding and brings it to the fore. As soon as conflict, misunderstanding, and disappointment arise, a certain insecurity wells up from the dark recesses of the mind, whispering, “See, you’re not really loved after all.”
On the collective level, this deep wound in the human psyche leads to a world wracked by struggle, stress, and dissension. Communities and social institutions at every level—marriages, families, schools, churches, corporations, and nations all across the globe—are in disarray, divided against themselves. The greatest ills on the planet—war, poverty, economic injustice, ecological degradation—all stem from our inability to trust one another, honor differences, engage in respectful dialogue, and reach mutual understanding.
Thus all the beauty and the horrors of this world arise from the same root: the presence or absence of love. Not feeling loved and then taking that to heart is the only wound there is. It cripples us, causing us to shrivel and contract. Thus, apart from a few biochemical imbalances and neurological disorders, the diagnostic manual for psychological afflictions known as the DSM might as well begin: “Herein are described all the wretched ways people feel and behave when they do not know that they are loved.” All hatred of ourselves and others; all our fear, egoism, communication problems, and sexual insecurities; all the pathology, neurosis, and destructiveness in the world; and
the whole nightmare of history, with all its bloodshed and cruelty, boil down to one simple fact: Not knowing we are loved and lovable makes the heart grow cold. And all the tragedy of human life follows from there.
When people do not know they are loved, a cold black hole forms in the psyche, where they start to harbor beliefs that they’re insignificant, unimportant, or lacking in beauty and goodness. This icy place of fear is what gives rise to terrorist attacks of all kinds—not just in the form of bombs going off, but also in the emotional assaults that go on within ourselves and our relationships.
Outer terror is but a symptom of inner terror. When people feel unloved or mistreated, they look for someone to blame, someone on whom they can take out their bad feelings. Though war and terrorism are usually regarded as political issues, the fact is that people in whom love is flowing freely do not throw bombs. Terrorism, like war itself, is a symptom of the disconnect from love that infects our world.
Unless we can eradicate this plague by healing the mood of unlove that has been passed down through the generations, the rule of fear and terror will never be overcome on this earth. A “war on terrorism” is an oxymoron, an impossibility, because you cannot eliminate terror through war, which only creates more terror. Only in an environment of love can we ever feel truly secure from attack. “We must love one another or die,”4 as W. H. Auden wrote in a poem at the outbreak of World War II.
I recognize that some readers may regard it as naïve and unrealistic to introduce truths about love into discussions of political issues such as war and terrorism. Of course, wars, ethnic conflicts, and social injustice require political solutions. At the same time, political settlements that lack genuine caring and respect for all parties eventually fall apart and lead to new conflicts.5
Leading religious and social activists have often understood the proclivity to war as a symptom of alienation from love, and emphasized the central role that love must play in solving the problems of the world. For example, Martin Luther King Jr.6 recognized the role that grievance plays in generating wars, arguing that only love can cure this illness: “Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace. . . . If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.”
This is a noble sentiment, yet how can humanity actually overcome its addiction to violence and its cynicism about love? What I suggest in this book is that war arises from grievance against others, and that this grievance is rooted in our love-wound—which we blame on others, taking it out on them. This book lays out a practical path for deeply understanding and addressing this core human problem.
Love and Grievance
My initial response to the terrorist attacks of 2001 and the war fever they unleashed was anger and indignation. Yet I soon saw that my reaction was part of the same problem that troubled me in the world at large. The terrorists had their righteous grievance against America; the American government had its righteous grievance against the terrorists. And like these warring parties, I too had a righteous grievance—against a world addicted to war and vengeance, and against purveyors of hatred on all sides. Despite my fervent wish for a world at peace, as long as I regarded terrorists and warmongers as some kind of adversary to harbor a grievance against, I too was putting on the mantle of war. Seeing how my investment in grievance was the very same thing that drives all the hatred and violence in the world catapulted me into a process of soul-searching and inner discovery.
My desire to understand how love’s gold turns into lead forced me to take a long, hard look at grievance. In studying my own investment in grievance and how it operated in my relationships, I saw that something in me found great satisfaction in setting up an other—someone or something over against myself—and then making this other wrong, while making myself the injured party standing in righteous judgment. There was something about harboring a grievance, I had to admit, that was really quite compelling.
Everywhere we look, we find people indulging in the mind-set of grievance. Our marriages and families, schools and workplaces, have all become battlegrounds where people spend large amounts of precious life energy at war with one another, blaming and getting even. Then there is “grievance politics,”7 where political campaigns manipulate people’s dissatisfaction and anger, targeting convenient scapegoats as a way to win votes. Meanwhile, on the world stage various religious and ethnic groups continually engage in recrimination and retaliation against one another.
This tendency to set up adversaries to contend with is also at work inside ourselves. Perhaps you do daily battle with your job, regarding it as a devouring monster that threatens to consume you. Or maybe you struggle with your to-do lists, the various pressures in your life, the traffic, the weather, the difficult feelings coursing through you, or even life itself. Most painful of all is the inner battle that rages within your mind and body when you make yourself wrong or bad—which generates tremendous emotional stress and self-hatred. Some people even become so pitted against themselves that they wind up killing the monster they imagine themselves to be.
Why this compulsion to create adversaries and nurse grievances, when it only winds up destroying us and those around us? As I sifted through the layers of my grievance against the world in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, I recognized an old sense of not belonging to this world—which I could trace back to childhood. I had felt like an alien while growing up because the adults around me seemed more interested in fitting me into their own agendas than in finding out who I might be. As a result of having to push my mother away because she could not let me be me, I had separated myself from love and remained on guard against it throughout the early decades of my life.
Consequently, I had learned to develop my intellect, at least in part, as a way of dissociating from the pain of this disconnection from love. Yet much deeper than any need to write, to accomplish, or to make a mark in the world, there was an undeniable longing that was humbling when I faced it in its unvarnished simplicity: At the root of everything I did, I had to admit, what I most wanted was to love and be loved.
At the bottom of my grievance against a world gone mad, I discovered the vulnerable child who still didn’t know that love was fully available or truly reliable. Even though I seemingly had plenty of love in my life and had explored and written about intimate relationship for many years, I nonetheless uncovered a dark, hidden corner in myself where I did not entirely trust love. And I saw that this was where grievance took root—in this place where I stood pitted against a world that didn’t seem friendly. Here in myself I was face-to-face with the same resentment that poisons the whole world, breeding all the blame and recrimination that eventually lead to violence, divorce, vendettas, and war. Recognizing this link between the mood of unlove and the mood of grievance within myself gave me a deeper understanding of why love continually goes awry in human relationships.
Wanting to explore this further, I decided to bring the question of grievance to the students in a class I was teaching while the terrorist attacks were still fresh and the level of fear and outrage was running high. I began by asking them to focus on a stressful situation in their lives. Then I asked them to look at how their current stress was linked to setting themselves in opposition to something they treated as an adversary. Some people chose a relationship or work-related situation to focus on; others took the terrorist acts, our government’s response, or the chaos in the world.
My students found it illuminating to see how, in each case, their tension grew out of saying no to something they were treating as an adversary. Next I asked them to see if they could find in this struggle some old, familiar grievance against others that went back all their life. And I asked them to state this grievance in one sentence, in the present tense, starting with “You . . .” Here are some of the grievance statements they came up with:
“You want to take advantage
of me.”
“You don’t value me for who I am.”
“You don’t care about me; you’re only interested in yourself.”
“You want to control me.”
“You don’t see me.”
“You don’t respect me.”
“You want to do me in.”
“You don’t accept me unless I fit into your agenda.”
“You use me for your own ends.”
“You don’t give me your time and attention.”
“You make me wrong for what I need.”
“You don’t recognize my goodness.”
As people took turns stating their grievance, it became clear that these were all different forms of the same complaint, the most fundamental sorrow that there is: You don’t love me. More specifically: You don’t love me as I am. This is the universal wound that fuels our fight with the world.
Love is the recognition of beauty. Each of us longs to know and feel confident in the beauty and goodness that lies within us. Especially as children, we needed someone else to see the beauty of our soul and to reflect this beauty back to us, like a mirror, so we could see and appreciate it ourselves. When the beauty of who we are was not recognized, we felt the absence of love, and our system went into shock and shut down.
For reasons we could not fathom, other people, God, or life itself seemed to be depriving us of the recognition and understanding we instinctively knew we needed in order to thrive. This was maddening. We knew that love was rightfully ours and that we needed to be at one with it, to feel it filling and permeating us, through and through. Someone or something was surely to blame! So we formed a grievance against other people or life itself for not providing the love we needed, or against ourselves for not having succeeded at winning that love.