by John Welwood
The question here is, are we ourselves acting with love when we try to get others to love us the way we think they should? Isn’t this a form of control? Expectations in relationships can often be a subtle form of violence, for they can be a demand that others conform to our will.
In all of these ways, then, relative love makes for a bumpy ride. After an intimate moment of I-Thou communion, we inevitably return to seeing the one we love as “other,” someone “over there” who becomes the object of our needs, reactions, or designs. “This is the exalted melancholy of our fate,”13 writes Buber, “that every Thou in our world must become an It. . . . Genuine contemplation never lasts long . . . and love cannot persist [in a pure state]. Every Thou in the world is doomed to become a thing or enter into thinghood again and again.” Even though pure love may be our heart essence, its expression is continually subject to past conditioning and present conditions. Though a mother may love her child unconditionally, if she suddenly becomes upset by something he just did, or if she is having a bad day, she may treat him unkindly.
We cannot avoid this fate, this fall into separateness, where we make ourselves and everything we love into an object of our hopes and fears. Thus relationships continually stray from the joy of I-Thou communion into the turbulence of like and dislike, agreement and disagreement, closeness and distance. Your husband might be kind and patient today, but tomorrow all of his hidden rage may come spilling out. One moment pure love sparkles through your beloved’s eyes, while the next moment you say the wrong thing and she is glaring at you.
Pure love operates on the absolute plane, while like and dislike operate on a different level, on the relative, personal plane. Understanding that we live on both of these levels helps to relieve the confusion of feeling “I love you, but right now I can’t stand you.” We cannot help liking those aspects of other people that accord with our tastes and preferences while disliking things in them that rub us the wrong way. Only at an advanced level of spiritual development can human beings ever become free from the push and pull of like and dislike. This means that relative love inevitably contains a certain amount of ambivalence, or mixed feelings.
Thus husband and wife, parent and child, friend and friend, can never maintain a steady state of harmony or communion. It is in the nature of things that every movement of coming together is followed by moving apart. This is not a design flaw or fault—of love, of human beings, or of the universe. It doesn’t mean you’re bad or others are bad or life’s unfair or anything like that. The pulse of life forever moves in cycles of up and down, back and forth, expansion and contraction, synergy and entropy.
Energy moves in waves, and waves by definition have peaks and troughs. You cannot have a peak unless it is preceded by a trough. Coming together can only happen when it is preceded by separation, and understanding when it is preceded by lack of understanding.
Indeed, if relationship did not rise and fall like this, it would become stagnation and bondage rather than a dynamic dance. Relative human love is imperfect and impermanent, just like everything else on this earth. And human experience is always raw, unfinished, messy. Nothing lasts. Nothing stays the same. There is no final fulfillment that maintains itself once and for all. Everything is subject to revision.
When the delightful high points of new love are followed by low points of conflict and suffering, however, we often regard this as a disaster that shouldn’t be happening. But if we can recognize these lows as the unavoidable troughs of relative love’s wave, then misunderstanding and separation can more readily become a springboard for new understanding and connection.
If we look honestly at our lives, most likely we will see that no one has ever been there for us in a totally reliable, continuous way. Though we might like to imagine that somebody, somewhere—maybe movie stars or spiritual people—has an ideal relationship, this is mostly the stuff of fantasy. Looking more closely, we can see that everyone has his or her own fears, blind spots, hidden agendas, insecurities, aggressive and manipulative tendencies, and emotional trigger-points—which block the channels through which great love can freely flow. Much as we might want to love with a pure heart, our limitations inevitably cause our love to fluctuate and waver.
Yet our yearning for perfect love and perfect union does have its place and its own beauty. Arising out of an intuitive knowing of the perfection that lies within the heart, it points toward something beyond what ordinary mortals can usually provide. We yearn to heal our separation from life, from God, from our own heart. When understood correctly, this longing can inspire us to reach beyond ourselves, give ourselves wholeheartedly, or turn toward the life of the spirit. It is a key, as we shall see, that opens the doorway through which absolute love can enter fully into us.
We invariably fall into trouble, however, when we transfer this longing onto another person. That is why it’s important to distinguish between absolute and relative love—so we don’t go around seeking perfect love from imperfect situations. Although intimate connections can provide dazzling flashes of absolute oneness, we simply cannot count on them for that. The only reliable source of perfect love is that which is perfect—the open, awake heart at the core of being. This alone allows us to know perfect union, where all belongs to us because we belong to all. Expecting this from relationships only sets us up to feel betrayed, disheartened, or aggrieved.
The Genesis of the Wound
Riding the waves of relationship becomes particularly difficult when the troughs of misunderstanding, disharmony, or separation reactivate our core wound, bringing up old frustration and hurt from childhood. In the first few months of our life, our parents most likely gave us the largest dose of unconditional love and devotion they were capable of. We were so adorable as babies, they probably felt blessed to have such a precious, lovely being come into their lives. So if we were fortunate enough to have a mother who could care for us at all—a “good enough” mother—we probably had some initial experiences of basking in love’s pure, unfiltered sunshine.
When held in the loving arms of their mother, babies relax into the blissful current of warmth that is love as it flows freely through them from the absolute source of all. The mother’s caring is the outer condition that lets the child experience the love and joy that is the essence of its own being. When the mother’s love is present, the infant can soften and settle into its very own nature as warmth and openness.
Neuropsychology research reveals that the mother-infant bond fosters the infant’s development in a number of important ways. At first the mother’s physical presence and care help the baby learn to soothe and regulate its nervous system. Healthy maternal attachment also fosters the child’s cognitive, behavioral, and somatic development. And it directly affects the development of the limbic brain, with its capacities for interpersonal and emotional responsiveness. Even the health of the endocrine and immune systems is correlated with early maternal attachment or the lack thereof.
Infants experience their mother’s presence, and the way her care regulates their nervous system, as something much more tangible and concrete than their connection to the ground of their own being. Since the maternal bond plays such a crucial role in every aspect of the infant’s development, it’s not surprising that children come to see their mother as the very source of love itself, and in some parts of the world, such as India, as something close to a deity.
Yet this also gives rise to one of the most fundamental of all human illusions: that the source of happiness and well-being lies outside us,14 in other people’s acceptance, approval, or caring. As a child, this was indeed the case, since we were at first so entirely dependent on others for our very life. Under ideal circumstances, the parents’ love would gradually become internalized, allowing us to feel our own inner connection to love. But the less experience we have of being loved as we are, the less we feel at home in our own heart. And this leaves us looking to others for the most essential connection of all—with the native sense of rightness an
d joy that arises only out of being rooted in ourselves.
As the child develops into a separate person, the early blissful moments of oneness with the mother fade away. We are no longer this amazing little being who dropped in from outer space. Instead, for our parents, we become “their child,” an object of their hopes and fears. Their acceptance and support become conditional on our meeting their expectations. And this undermines our trust: in ourselves, that we are acceptable as we are; in others, that they can see and value us for who we are; and in love itself, that it is reliably there for us.
Even if at the deepest level our parents did love us unconditionally, it was impossible for them to express this consistently, given their human limitations. This was not their fault. It doesn’t mean they were bad parents or bad people. Like everyone, they had their share of fears, worries, cares, and burdens, as well as their own wounding around love. Like all of us, they were imperfect vessels for perfect love.
In entering this world, children naturally want to feel greeted by an unconditional yes and grow up in that kind of environment. This is perfectly understandable. Yet even if parents can provide this to some extent, most often they cannot sustain it. This is also perfectly understandable, since everyone has difficulty remaining open and saying yes to themselves and their life. Being able to sustain an unconditional yes is a highly advanced human capacity that usually develops only through dedicated intention or spiritual practice. Our parents’ inability to be fully open naturally limited their capacity to transmit unconditional love to us.
Yet when children experience love as conditional or unreliable or manipulative, this causes a knot of fear to form in the heart, for they can only conclude, “I am not truly loved.” This creates a state of panic or “freak-out” that causes the body and mind to freeze up. This basic love trauma is known as “narcissistic injury” in the language of psychotherapy because it damages our sense of self and our ability to feel good about ourselves. It affects our whole sense of who we are by causing us to doubt whether our nature is lovable. As Emily Dickinson describes this universal wound in one of her poems: “There is a pain so utter, it swallows Being up.”
This wounding hurts so much that children try to push it out of consciousness. Eventually a psychic scab forms. That scab is our grievance. Grievance against others serves a defensive function, by hardening us so we don’t have to experience the underlying pain of not feeling fully loved. And so we grow up with an isolated, disconnected ego, at the core of which is a central wound, freak-out, and shutdown. And all of this is covered over with some resentment, which becomes a major weapon in our defense arsenal.
What keeps the wound from healing is not knowing that we are lovely and lovable just as we are, while imagining that other people hold the key to this. We would like, and often expect, relative human love to be absolute, providing a reliable, steady flow of attunement, unconditional acceptance, and understanding. When this doesn’t happen, we take it personally, regarding this as someone’s fault—our own, for not being good enough, or others’, for not loving us enough. But the imperfect way our parents—or anyone else—loved us has nothing to do with whether love is trustworthy or whether we are lovable. It doesn’t have the slightest bearing on who we really are. It is simply a sign of ordinary human limitation, and nothing more. Other people cannot love us any more purely than their character structure allows.
Searching for the Source of Love
Fortunately, the storminess of our relationships in no way diminishes or undermines the unwavering presence of great love, absolute love, which is ever present in the background. Even when the sky is filled with thick, dark clouds, the sun never stops shining.
This isn’t how it usually appears, of course. Love’s radiant presence often seems lost behind clouds of hurt, misunderstanding, disenchantment, and betrayal. Even though the sun is infinitely more powerful than any cloud cover, the overcast does manage to temporarily block its warming rays. This is relative truth—how things appear to the ego when disconnected from its essential foundation, the ground of openness and loving presence. Yet the larger, absolute truth is that the sun never wanes or flickers. It only appears to flicker when clouds pass across its face.
This is why it is helpful to look more closely and see what actually happens within us when we feel loved by others. One middle-aged woman I was seeing in therapy was obsessed with winning other people’s approval and admiration—so much so that she would literally make herself sick striving and straining to prove herself to others, while worrying about potential loss of esteem in their eyes. One day I asked Anna what actually happened in her body in moments when she managed to win approval or praise.
“I feel great,” Anna said.
“And exactly how does that feel in your body? Check it out.”
“I relax. I feel bigger somehow,” she said, lifting and stretching her elbows behind her head.
“Where in your body do you feel that relaxation and expansion most strongly?”
“Right here,” she said, lowering her arms and circling one hand around the center of her chest.
“In your heart.”
“Yes.”
“So when someone appreciates you, this allows you to feel your own heart.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling broadly.
“Your heart opens.”
“Yes.”
“Think about it for a minute. You knock yourself out trying to win approval, and when you finally get it, you experience your heart opening and expanding. Even though you’re focused on obtaining something from outside you, it’s that inner experience that makes you feel so good. So it seems like what you really most want is to feel your own heart.”
Having already had a few powerful glimpses of the presence of her heart in our work together, Anna understood this immediately.
“I never saw that before.” Anna paused for a moment, then quickly asked, “How can I hold on to this feeling?” Since this was a new realization, she was afraid she would quickly lose it and fall under the old compulsion to find her lovability through others. Since her family hadn’t provided a holding environment where she could relax and trust in love, she had learned early on that she could only get what she needed through trying to please. A go-getter ego had developed precociously in her, supplanting her young girl’s heart. Abandoning her heart, she started to live instead from her busy, overactive mind. So it was not surprising that the moment she felt her heart, she started trying to figure out how to hold on to it with her mind.
I encouraged Anna instead to let the realization sink in—that it was the expansive warmth and openness of her heart that she most wanted and that winning approval was merely a means to that end. Learning to recognize this longing for her own heart helped her start to shift her orientation from grasping at love outside to finding love within.
In the same way, you might take a moment and notice how feeling loved allows you to connect with something rich and powerful in yourself. When someone shows you love, it’s not that this person is handing something over to you. What really happens is that a window opens inside you, allowing great love to enter and touch you. Another’s openness inspires the window of your heart to open, and then love becomes available, as your own inner experience. This is what turns you on—this sense of expansive warmth illuminating you from within. Feeling this, you then naturally resonate with the person who is loving you, as you are both sharing in the same experience.
Conversely, if your lover is affectionate at a moment when your heart is burdened by worries, overwhelmed with fear, or frozen shut, you probably won’t be able to feel his or her love. For love can touch you only when your own heart is accessible. To be loved, then, is to be love. The musician Miten describes this experience of landing in the heart in one of his songs:
You gave me the greatest gift:
You made my heart my home.
The problems in relationships begin when we imagine that the warmth ignited in our heart isn’t
really ours, that it’s transferred into us by the other person. Then we become obsessed with the other as the provider of love, when in truth the warmth we feel comes from the sunlight of great love entering our heart.
“Those who go on a search for love,” D. H. Lawrence writes, “find only their own lovelessness.” Here is a simple way to experience for yourself what Lawrence means. Fix your attention on someone you’d like to love you more, and notice how it feels to want that. If you observe this carefully, you will notice that looking to another for love creates a certain tension or congestion in your body, most noticeably in the chest. It constricts the heart. And as a result you feel your own lovelessness.
No one else can ever provide the connection that finally puts the soul at ease. We find that connection when the window of the heart opens, allowing us to bask in the warmth and openness that is our deepest nature. When we look to others for this ground, we wind up trying to control and manipulate them into being there for us in a way that allows us to settle into ourselves. Yet this very focus on trying to get something from them prevents us from resting in our own ground, leaving us outwardly dependent and inwardly disconnected.
Imagining others to be the source of love condemns us to wander lost in the desert of hurt, abandonment, and betrayal, where human relationship appears to be hopelessly tragic and flawed. Yet hidden within these trials is a certain gift. Our pain at the hands of others forces us to go deeper in search of the true source of love. If other people were perfect vehicles for absolute love, then it would be easy to remain addicted to them as the ultimate source of fulfillment. Becoming totally dependent on others, we would have no incentive to find the great love that is perfectly present within the core of ourselves. We would remain trapped in the consciousness of a child seeking someone to make up for what we didn’t receive in childhood.