love

Love V: Love Problems

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, happiness, love, mindfulness, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

This is (probably) the last of the blogs on love. Previously, we looked at a bit of theory of love, “not being love right”, temperament-based love, and being “seen” so you could be loved.  This blog will be devoted to a very basic concept that we have developed about feelings, emotions, and love. If you have read our blogs or the books we have written, you will be familiar with the concept of “love problems,” but allow me to summarize.

Theory of feelings

We propose that “feelings” are a central ingredient of human existence, that they are an so important that they are undefinable, like time, space, and love, and that they are never wrong because they emanate from our souls, which are most certainly never wrong. That having been said, the expression of these feelings can be “wrong,” or at the very least, inadequate. We experience our feelings sequentially physically, emotionally, cognitively, and actively (which includes speaking). The physical and emotional aspects of our experience of feelings are both unconscious, while the cognitive and active experiences are conscious. Furthermore, we usually have a natural tendency to note the experience of feelings in one of these ways, and then we may have the same or a different means of expressing these feelings. Perhaps the most prominent element in the experience and expression of feelings is within the emotional range although many people are much more cognitive or active, and some are almost entirely physical.

Theory of emotions

You will note that we make an important distinction between feelings and emotions, with emotions being a subset of feelings. We propose that there are four basic emotions, and then combinations, cognates, and expressions of these emotions. Importantly, all of the emotions have to do with love in some way. These four basic emotions have to do with time, namely:

  • Joy is the experience in of loving something in the present
  • Sadness is the experience of losing something that I love in the present
  • Anger is the experience of feeling the loss of something in the past
  • Fear is the experience of feeling the possible loss of something in the future.

Note that all of the emotions relate in some way to something that I love. Note further that three of these four emotions have to do with loss: present loss leads to sadness, past loss leads to anger, and future loss leads to fear.

Love problems and emotions

So, why do we talk about “problems” with love? We do that because we have so much difficulty with the emotions surrounding sadness, anger, and fear. We somehow think that we should be joyful all the time. Two important facts are related to this theory of feelings and emotions: (1) love is at center of life and (2) we lose everything we love…eventually. We find that people have trouble losing something that they love, whether that loss is in the past, the present, or the future. We try to help people (1) trust that their feelings are never wrong, (2) that their feelings erupt towards loving something, and (3) this love always leads to some kind of joy.

What we love is very important to notice because we do not restrict the concept of love to the love people. Rather, we suggest that we can love anything with equal passion. Many people have a primary orientation towards love of people, but many more have just as deep a love for nature, property, ideas, history, science, or something else, whether physical or theoretical. I wrote a bit about this in the Love III blog, Temperamental Love. Expanding love beyond the love of people is very important if we are to understand each other. Thus, it is hard for people with what we call the “lover” temperament to understand “caretaker” people who love property more deeply than people. As you can see, this can lead to relational problems, but I am not speaking so much about relationships as I am speaking of just what happens when we love something. Importantly, whatever we love, we will eventually lose. That is the “love problem.”

Sadness: this is the natural emotion that erupts from losing something. When I am sad, I am in the present. I may be thinking of something that I loved and lost in the past, but if I am sad about that loss, I experience it in the present. We will examine potential loss in the future momentarily.

Anger: this is very important because anger is also a “love problem.” If I am angry, I have lost something in the past, the past being a few minutes ago or a few years ago. We refer to anger as delusional, namely being an emotion that erupts as a way of changing the past. Why do I throw the hammer and swear when I missed the nail? Because I (delusionally) think that this hammer-throwing expression of anger will change the fact that I missed the hammer.

Fear: this is equally important because if I am afraid that I will lose something in the future. This “something” could be a dollar on a bet, a good friendship, a job, or anything. Fear is also delusional because if I think/worry/fret about what I might lose in the future, this anxiety will somehow change the future.

As you can see, all losses have to do with love. So, how do we cope with loss?

Coping with loss is a love problem

We normally cope with loss with sadness, anger, or fear. We content that we need to be sadder and hence less angry and less afraid. But this is no easy task. The difficulty with facing loss, at least in America, is the fact that our culture is not particularly emotionally mature. We do not generally understand emotions and allow them to run their natural course. Particularly, we tend to get angry way too easily and stay angry longer, and likewise we get way too worried and stay with worry way too long. Both emotions are hard on one’s health, work, play, relationships, and life at large.

It is hard enough to allow to be sad, especially for us men because sadness is normally portrayed as weakness. Indeed, there are some people that come to sadness and tears so easily that it seems to be an escape from reality. But the larger number of people simply haven’t found a way to be sad, which means loving, losing, feeling sad, and getting over being sad. Getting over being sad? What does that mean? It means allowing sadness to run its course. The key of all of these emotions is that sadness ends. Anger doesn’t end. Fear doesn’t end. Sadness ends…if we allow it to run its course and finish. However, this is a challenge because I am truly sad, that moment of my existence is filled with the feeling (= intuition) that I will be sad forever. Simply put, I need to allow myself the freedom to be sad frequently enough to get familiar with the process:

  • Love something
  • Enjoy this something
  • Lose this something for some reason
  • Feel sad
  • Allow sadness to run its course
  • Finish being sad
  • Love again
  • Love better knowing that whatever I love, I will lose.

Dealing with anger and fear are more difficult but the “cure” for these emotions (the subtitle of our book, The Positive Power of Sadness, is to learn to be sad. It is easier with anger, but it is not easy. Whenever I am angry, I have a “love problem,” i.e. I have lost something that I loved, whether it is the nail I was hammering or my favorite friend. I got angry because I raced right past the sadness of losing my friend or hammer and got “delusionally” angry. Unfortunately, anger doesn’t end like sadness. It just metastasizes into my physical, cognitive, emotional, and relational systems and becomes an unfortunate and harmful part of those systems. The cure for anger is to realize that I love something and lost it. I have a love problem when I’m angry.

If anger is hard to move back to sadness, fear is much harder largely because when I am afraid, my brain gets into the action and “protects” me by churning up cortisol so that I can be prepared to fight. The brain doesn’t know that I am thinking/worrying about something in the future because the brain, as a machine, doesn’t understand the future. The brain is singularly in the present and has all it can do in order to keep you alive with blood flow and breathing. So, while fear is also a love problem, it is much harder to “cure”.

Curing anger and fear

I say what many patients think is an outrageous statement: “I am going to help you get to the place where you are never afraid and never angry. Just how will I propose to do that? I will help you feel the sadness that is under both fear and anger, and the love that is under the sadness.

It’s easier to “cure” anger than fear. If I am angry, I can point to a specific loss, like someone who hated me for some reason. I lost his/her approval. Curing the anger I feel towards him will simply be facing the fact that I loved him and loved our relationship, but now I have lost both. I have a love problem. If I stick with the love, I will eventually feel sad, my sadness will run a course, I will finish being sad, and then I can go on with my life. Perhaps, I will find a way to reinstate my friendship with my friend or establish another friendship. Or maybe I will just fix the garage up as a way of loving a fixed up garage. I will replace anger with sadness and when sadness, I will love something better, perhaps realizing that garages have a nasty tendency to deteriorate over time leading to…sadness.

It’s harder to cure fear, but this is how we try to help people do it. I ask the individual to picture the potential loss, attempt to replace the fear of loss with actual loss and allow the feeling of sadness to erupt. This is simple but very hard to do. It is hard because people (their brains) are so use to worrying that doing this anticipatory loss feeling of sadness is quite a challenge. Properly done, you will actually feel the potential loss and sadness and love in the present. This will cure your anxiety. A lot harder than it sounds because you are going against the brain, the culture, and the individual’s resistance to feeling anticipatory sadness.

Sadness is a lover problem. So are anger and fear. But sadness ends and makes you a better person and a more loving person because you know that you love but for a moment, however long that moment is. Anger and fear do no such thing.

Love IV: I See You

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, love, marital, mindfulness, relationships, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

Deb and I have many statements that occasionally comprise elements of our many conversations, some of which I noted in a previous blog called Racks and Cutters. Thinking and writing about love these days reminded me of a statement that we heard in a movie that has stuck with us. The movie is Avatar and the statement is “I see you.” The natives of the planet sometimes greeted each other with what amounts to a “hello” or “how are you” with a deeper statement: “I see you,” which meant that they “saw” (= understood, valued, and loved) the other person. Deb and I frequently “see” each other in this way, and I invite you to consider doing the same with the people you love. Perhaps you will “see” them better. So, how does one see people better, and how can I make myself seen better? And what does seeing have to do with loving? Perhaps this “seeing” thing is another undefinable thing, like feelings, time, and love. It seems so important in my trade, but even more important in daily life, especially around people who are important to us. “Seeing” is based on how you feel, what you see, how you react to what you see, what you do, and what you say. However, seeing someone also is dependent on whether that person is “seeable.” We will first discuss what you see and then discuss the being seen part of this process.

Seeing

What you feel

Again, I dare refer you to our little book, I Want to Tell You How I Feel, where we suggested the heart of saying how you feel is to know that there is a “something” inside of you that you want to say or otherwise express. Likewise, in this business of seeing other people, the element of knowing how you feel is the first and most important ingredient of “seeing” someone. Deb and I often tell budding therapists that the most important thing that they have to do is know how they feel when they are with a patient. But what does it mean to “feel”?

When we wrote the feelings book, we spent a good deal of time thinking and eventually writing about what this feeling thing actually means. Briefly stated, feelings erupt first in the unconscious elements of physical sensations and emotions, and then move into the conscious elements of cognition. To know what you feel, note these four elements: physical, emotional, cognitive, and active (or verbal). You will note that you always have these four elements of feelings but likely you gravitate towards one of them, say cognition or emotion. When you feel “something,” this something is not wrong, but it may not be clear to you why you feel it. I often feel quite emotionally moved, often to tears, when I hear someone tell me about themselves in my office. This is because I “see” the individual in front of me, something that we will shortly discuss.

What you see

When you understand how you feel, the next item in “seeing” is really believing what you see with the other person. You may see one of the four elements of feeling: physical, emotional, cognitive, or active. You may see what the person does. You may “see” what the person says. You may “see” something that doesn’t fit into physical/emotional/cognitive/active: you may have a “sense” or an intuition about the other person. If you are interested in the whole matter of relationships, which are always founded on some kind of love, you may see something that you really love, whether it is your friends’ actions, words, or otherwise. This kind of intuitional seeing is perhaps the most important of all because ideally your intuition does not depend on what you see physically, think logically, or feel emotionally.

Intuitional seeing be quite brilliant. It tends to come at what we must call a “spiritual” level. People often say something like, “I just feel…” or “I just know…” when they see something in someone by intuition. I must advise you that there are two very important matters when you have an intuition of someone, one beautiful and valuable, one dangerous. If your intuitional seeing is truly spiritual, i.e. godly and true, it is not wrong. The words that you come up with in this kind of seeing may be wrong. Everything we ever say that is primarily emotional is wrong in the sense of an imperfect reflection of inner feeling. But be careful with this kind of seeing because you will have an inclination to think too much or feel emotional too much. If thinking and feeling are fused into an intuition, you cannot trust the intuition. Thinking and feeling are part of you and your inner self, not a part of the other person. It is very hard to focus on true seeing rather than seeing through your own lens, like emotion, cognition, or some other judgment. This is not to say that you shouldn’t have emotion and thought but rather a recognition that when you see someone, it is not about you at all. It is not about what you feel emotionally or think cognitively. It is about the other person.

What you do with what you see

This is very delicate because if you really see something in another person, something deeply spiritual has happened: you have seen the person’s soul. When you see someone’s soul, you see God, or perhaps a part of God or a reflection of God. You are in the holy of holies that is spoken of in the Hebrew Scriptures. This is a very sacred place and you need to see it as godly and sacred. It is also a very private place, not one that you enter without great respect and caution. Hopefully, you see that this kind of seeing is deeply spiritual and very real but not something that we very often do for many reasons, not the least of which is that most people do not allow themselves to be seen. So, if you really see your friend, hold your breath, hold your thoughts, hold your feelings, and just observe this wonder. It will be wonderful.

Wonderful as it is to see someone, this is not generally a time to say anything. Rather, it is a time to feel something. I use the term “feeling” in its four components (physical, emotional, cognitive, and active), so depending on your own tendency to experience and express your own feelings, you will “feel” one of these four things. Keep your feelings to yourself. This is not a recommendation to repress your feelings but rather to value them and govern them so you can keep your focus on “seeing” your friend.

If you trust your intuition and keep your own feelings at bay, you have the opportunity to see the person…if that person is “see-able” (we’ll get there in a minute). Now comes the remarkable thing about seeing someone: You will love the person you see. No doubt about it: if you see someone, really see the person, you will be compelled to love the person. I won’t attempt to define this basic human need/experience of love because it is simply to profound to be defined. Love can be felt, and it can be carefully expressed. But love has to first be felt before you can decide if and when you say something about it. If you see someone and come to have this godly experience of loving the person, this experience is good in and of itself. You don’t have to say it; you don’t have to do anything. You just need to feel it. People tend to do this kind of seeing and loving with infants and animals although people with what we call naturalistic intelligence can also do this kind of seeing and loving with nature. Other people have love for property, ideas, or activity. But our focus is not so much on non-personal elements of love but rather the love that comes naturally and unavoidably when you see someone. Grasp it. Name it. Feel it. If it is good for you to see and love, it is good for your friend to be seen and loved.

When you see and ultimately love your friend, you are being something like a therapist to that person. The English word “therapist” comes from the Greek word, therapeuo, which means healing. Good therapy is healing, and the best of therapy comes from seeing…and the natural addition of loving the person you see. This happens to me all the time, in fact so often that I feel truly privileged to see and love the people I see. Sometimes, granted, I get lost in my thoughts or emotions, but when I’m at my best I see and love without trying to do so. The best therapists have found ways to encourage a spirit of openness to being seen. Unfortunately, many therapists don’t know how to understand and value this seeing, much less manage it. This leads us to our next discussion: how can we be “seen”?

Being seen

I want to be seen

There is a real oddity about this whole business of being “seen” because it seems that sometimes we want to be seen and other times we don’t want to be seen. Let me try to make some sense of this conundrum because it really does make sense. Furthermore, there are people who want to be seen by everyone and there are people who want to be seen by only a few people. We call the former “external” people, otherwise known as extraverts, and we call the latter “internal” people, otherwise known as introverts. Furthermore, there are times when I want to be seen and there are times that I don’t want to be seen. And there are things about me that I want to keep private and others that I want to be public. Setting aside these differences in psychological type for a moment, I will assert that everyone wants to be seen, but at the same time don’t want to be seen. Finally, there is the further paradox of wanting to be seen but not wanting to be open enough to be able to be seen. This is what I see with most of the people I see. This is wanting it both ways, something that often plagues us as humans, like I want to have a job I like but I want to make a lot of money that doesn’t come with doing what I like. Or, I want to be safe at all times but I want the things that come from stepping out of my safety zone. Let’s examine this paradox.

I am afraid of being seen

A book written not long ago was entitled, Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am (J. Power, 1969), but there have been many more books and articles written about why people are afraid to be open. In a nutshell, I am afraid to be seen because I have been hurt in the past when I was seen and I don’t want to be hurt again. Sometimes, people can remember why they are afraid to be open and some cannot, but more importantly, most people have been hurt many times over many years when they have been open, so it is natural that they would be reticent about being open again. I won’t elaborate on this experience of how people have been hurt in the past because it lies beyond the scope of our current discussion aside from stating that resistance to being open is always related to unfinished hurts. I must also defer you to previous writings about what the term “unfinished hurts” means.

So, if I am reticent to be open, how can I be seen, how can I be loved, and how can I be healed? I can’t be. I can’t be loved, really loved, healingly loved without being seen This is why people with so-called mental health problems (a term I almost never use because of its negative implications) rarely overcome these problems: they can’t be open, so they can’t be loved, so they can’t be healed. Good therapy makes an attempt to engage this process of seeing-come-loving-come healing. Good parenting, good friendships, good partnerships, and good marriages do the same. But even in the best of therapists’ offices, it is difficult for people to be open because they have just been too hurt over too many years and to go there is frightening. Just as often as people actively resist being open, they don’t actually know how to be open.

I don’t know how to allow someone to see me

Why is it that people don’t know how to be open? Basically and simply because they have been hurt too much when they have been open. The hurt that people have experienced has been in the form of criticism and judgment. They had times when they have been open but the person with whom they were open was not capable of loving them. More importantly, the other person didn’t really see them, much less love them. The other person saw something that they didn’t understand or didn’t like. But they didn’t actually see the person: they only saw something that was a reflection of that person, like what they wore, what they said, or what they did. Most failure to develop a spirit of openness comes from a myriad of times of having been open only to have been criticized and judged. You see, when someone criticizes you or judges you, they are not seeing you; they see something about you, like what you said or did, but they didn’t see your soul. In some cases, people have never been seen, which is the tragedy that often leads to what used to be called a character disorder, now called a personality disorder. These people are not truly disordered; rather, they are not developed. They have not developed because they have not been loved, and they have not been loved because they have not been seen. Whether in a therapist’s office, the living room with a family member, or in a park with a friend, they need to be seen. It is very hard for people to be open when they have long ago forgotten what it was like to be seen and loved, if that ever even happened. They have to learn to be open. And it will be painful.

Learning to be open

This is intrinsically difficult for most people, difficult for many reasons, not the least of which is the aforementioned personal history of having been criticized or judged, or worse yet never haven seen. What happens in these circumstances is that the brain takes over and protects you from further hurt and harm. By the way, the brain does not distinguish hurt and harm; it is all the same to the brain and it is to be avoided, quite naturally if you think about it. Furthermore, the brain does not know time, so everything that is potentially hurtful or harmful is felt by the brain to be in the present. This is the cause of all anxiety, which is fear of future hurt, while anger is the feeling of past hurt. But the brain does not distinguish past and future from the present. It is all in the present. So the fear of openness is a brain function that has to be challenged by the mind, and it is not easy to do. This brain/mind duality is the cause of your “being of two minds,” “feeling one thing and thinking another,” “thinking in two directions” and many more paradoxes of mind/brain functioning. Learning to be open is a challenge because your brain is protecting you from hurt/harm thinking that the danger is in the present. The brain has logged the hurt that you experienced when you were open and damaged as a result.

Learning to be open needs to come in stages. You have to learn when to be open (not when you’re drinking or at 2 o’clock in the morning), where to be open (not in the grocery store), what to say, if anything, when you’re open, and with whom to be open. Importantly, most people are intrinsically dangerous to you when you are open because most people simply don’t trust what they see, much the love that seeing might engender. Rather, they get overwhelmed with their own thoughts and feelings and possibly their own hurts. So, when I suggest you need to be open to be seen and loved, I offer this suggestion with great caution because you shouldn’t do it with most people at most times and in most places. Know your audience and you will be seen.

If you are going to try to be open, you might need to instruct the person in front of you how to see, how to keep criticism and suggestion out of the picture and just see. Try this once or twice and you will likely fail, or the listener might fail. Then try again, maybe with the same person, maybe with a different person, maybe in a different place. You need practice. What you will find is that you will be hurt many times, but then you will also be seen and love at other times. It is worth the risk. Then there is the possibility that you and your friend can see each other, know each other, and ultimately love each other…better. Remember the previous blog: Not Loved Right. Perhaps you can be loved right for the first time in a long time.

Being open with each other

This is the ideal, especially in intimate relationships and it can be done. For instance in my current and recent past I have seen many couples who do not see one another because each of the partners does not allow themselves to be open for fear of being hurt, which is itself based on some earlier life event that was very damaging. Then over time, each of these people hurt each other more leading them to come to my office for “marriage counseling.” They don’t need marriage counseling. They need therapy, they need to be healed, and most importantly, they need each other to heal each other. For example:

  • Couple A. She is a very successful professional person who lived with a very angry father. As a result she comes to anger too quickly skipping the hurt that always underlies anger. The man came from a very abusive and restrictive family with a stepparent who was clearly abusive. This led to him being afraid of being open and being hurt more.
  • Couple B. He is a very devote pastor who came from a sexually abusive family with all that goes with it, namely sexual dysfunction. She came from a family much like the previous man’s family where she could do no right and learned to be so careful with what she said or did that she essentially never says what she feels…again, for fear of being hurt again.
  • Couple C. She is very extraverted and outspoken having been raised in a largely good family but one in which he was given the permission to speak his thoughts and feelings, so much so that she has a tendency of expressing herself with little understanding, much less any regard for the impact of his speech. He is much more introverted and came into the family without much privilege to say how he feels. Unfortunately, he saw that his potential wife was a stable and fun person but most probably did not really love him. Rather she saw her as a good partner. Over time they both hurt each other, so much so that the man is divorcing his “good” wife with a great amount of hostility
  • Couple D. Both parties came into the marriage with wounds from their previous marriages and saw the goodness of each other but not the wounds. Unfortunately, these wounds not only failed to heal, the people in the marriage hurt each other for years without meaning to do so and with little awareness of how what they said or did was hurtful, adding flames to the fire of hurt from their previous marriages.

These are but a few examples (identifying information adjusted) of how people fail to be open and thus fail to be seen and eventually loved. In my work with all of these couples I am attempting to help them be open with each other so they can be seen, loved, and healed. I can’t do it myself.

I leave you with the admonition previously stated that you need to be loved as we all do. To be loved you need to be seen. To be seen, you need to be open. To be open, you will be vulnerable to hurt and love with about a 50-50 chance for either. It is worth the bet. You are older now, and even if you were terribly wounded as a child, as an adolescent, or in your previous relationship, you can weather the storm of hurt better. Moreover, you just might be loved…and healed

Love III: Not Loved Right

Ron Johnson Development, emotional maturity, Feelings, love, mindfulness, Personality, Positive psychology, relationships, Self-Awareness

This is the third of several blogs on love. Previously, I introduced this series noting that love is so important that it is undefinable, like other undefinable basic elements of life such as “feelings” which is so central to human existence and relationships, as well as time, distance, and mass, which are also undefined but are the basic ingredients of the universe. Having admitted that love is undefinable, we proposed that we learn about love from experience, just as we learn about time and feelings from experience. In fact, the more we experience love, both in the giving and in the receiving, the more we understand it. In the immediately previous blog we studied different approaches to love that people of different temperaments have. In this blog I want to discuss how everyone is love to some degree but that no one is loved perfectly. And there are consequences of “not being loved right.”

Not loved right

No one is loved right, if by “right” we mean perfect. Love is simply too complex, too godly, and too unique to ever be rendered perfect. “Not loved right” doesn’t mean that the person wasn’t loved, nor does it mean there is something intrinsically wrong with the person who attempted to love the person, nor does it mean that the individual who was not loved right was somehow unlovable. So what does this “not loved right” actually mean? It means that there are always elements of the loving process that are missing however much the person was loved. I often tell patients that they were loved right, and I have found that they are able to accept this statement without disparaging their parents or other loved ones. Somehow, people intrinsically know that they were not loved right because they feel it in their souls. I find it important to help people find how they were not loved right and consequently identifiable the results of this phenomenon, to come to terms with this apparent fact, and find ways to adapt and accommodate to having a good life without forever looking for someone to love them perfectly.

There are many ways that people are not loved right. Some folks were, sadly, raised in families where they were not loved at all, while others were loved in families where they were cherished beyond all reason. Let’s look at some of these ways of not having been loved right.

Not loved at all

You may have heard of the tragedy that occurred in Romania 30-odd years ago when the dictator under the Soviet-based regime fostered a program of excessive births in the country. Sadly, many of these children were placed in orphanages, or just “left on the doorstep” of these orphanages that were already overcrowded with children who had been abandoned by parents who simply could not afford to raise them. The tragic result of this overcrowding was that many of these children were simply not loved for at all. They were fed and occasionally diapered, but they often went hours or days without any kind of human comforting touch. The result of this was that many of these children were neurologically impaired, meaning that their brains did not develop adequately. They may have developed some cognitive skills, but many of them did not even do that. The conclusion of researchers of these neglected children was that they simply and profoundly had missed the essential ingredient of physical touch that somehow stimulated the brain to grow normally. While we don’t quite understand the interaction of physical touch, we now know that without it, the infant will not mature normally, and this lack of maturity may be permanent. My daughter, Jenny, volunteered a couple of weeks in an orphanage in Romania simply caring for some of these children, something for what I will be forever grateful as she possibly saved one or more children from a life without much hope.

While few children in America suffer such a tragic fate aside from the occasional situations that we have all heard about where a child was chained in a basement or something for months or years. You might also have heard about the instance of a child having been raised in the wilderness by some animal group and was discovered naked and completely unaware of her (I believe the child was female) humanity, much less any kind of human speech. This poor child matured in human ways after she was captured but never achieved anything like a normal life. Aside from the oddities of terrible parents doing terrible parenting, we do not have many such tragedies although we might consider what it might be like to live in a primitive society or in a society with a primitive religious orientation that does not allow for normal infant care.

While there are a few of these tragedies in America and in the other developed countries, there are many examples of less severe shortage of love that occur. In fact, as I previously stated, none of us have been loved perfectly right despite our parents doing stellar jobs with us. Let’s look at some of the ways we have not been loved right.

Indulged

It is with great concern that I observe a plethora of inadequate loving that many parents afford their children in the form of indulgence. Having been privileged to have grown up somewhat in the 40’s and mostly in the 50’s, I went “out to play” for most of these years perhaps beginning as early as three. I lived in Clearfield, PA at the time on the edge of town not a stone’s throw from an old coal mine as well as a myriad of Pennsylvania hills and streams. My brother, a couple years my senior, and I would often be gone for hours just playing in the words, the hills, and yes, in the coal mine. Such things are unheard of today. I agree that there were dangers in such free play, as it is called, but also much freedom that I think formatted by basic groundwork of self-confidence having had to get myself out of dangerous places and all the rest of free play. I see few kids who “just go out and play today.” This freedom of movement, which was a kind of libertarian parenting, continued into my adolescent years and often led me to understand consequences more than punishment, reward, and restriction. There is great value of freedom in such parenting but also dangers. I had the freedom to debate with my parents, and while rarely arguing with them, I was allowed talk back to my parents as if I were their equal. This indulgence did not prepare me well for the real world where I had to slowly learn to keep my mouth shut. So, I was indulged with freedom.

Some kids are indulged in other ways, often with material things. I dare say that my daughter, Krissie, indulged both of her kids, particularly her older child, Gavin, who yet struggles to find out how the world is not his mother. He has yet to find a balance of work, play, listening and talking that is essential in the real world. Many parents protect their children, seemingly out of love, that these children do not learn to face the uncertainties, failures, criticism, and other disappointments because they have been too shielded from such things. Aside from the indulgence of freedom and of protection there is the obvious indulgence of toys. I am always surprised that the bulk of items at garage sales are the plastic toys that have been purchased, used briefly, and tossed in a corner before they ended up on the sidewalk. I talked to a young man who said that his mother had given him four drones, each costing more than the previous one, to the point that he was simply not interested in it drones anymore. This indulgence can last into adulthood came in the form of a 23-year old who admitted that he had spent thousands of dollars on sophisticated motorized play cars and trucks before his friends and he lost interest in them.

We don’t normally think of indulgence as “not being loved right,” but it is indeed the case. I admit that I indulged my daughter Krissie, largely because of her “player” nature without knowing I was doing that. I attempted to give her the libertarian freedom that I had, but the world of the 80’s was substantially different from the 50’s, and it didn’t work for her. I think she never recovered from my indulgence, something that may have contributed to her untimely death two years ago. We will discuss the effects of indulgence and ways to correct it at another time, but first we need to attend to some other forms of “not being loved right.”

Neglect

Quite different from indulgence is neglect. While there are (hopefully) few children who are truly not loved at all like the Romanian infants and the poor children who are housed by profoundly disturbed people, there are many children who are neglected. They may have a “roof over the head and necessary food” for survival, they are not loved to a degree that allows them to fully grow up. With few exceptions children who are raised in truly neglectful homes have little success in the world. Theirs is an attitude of surviving, not thriving. As a result of their neglect and the consequences of their seeing the world as a place to survive, they often end up with very damaging intimate relationships, unemployment, and quazi-criminal activities. While we need to find ways to help these people, unfortunately, the culture also needs to protect itself from people who are surviving because they are dangerous. They are dangerous not because they are intrinsically bad, but they are like an animal cornered in some way. Such an animal will be dangerous because the fight instinct dominates when the flight instinct cannot be accessed. People who have been significantly neglected rarely find a way to thrive in the world because of the secondary problems they have created in their lives. We will discuss how to deal with such people at another time because many of these people end up in some kind of incarceration, financial difficulties, or in counseling offices with little hope of finding a meaningful life.

While there are many people who have been neglected to a profound degree, there are many more who have been neglected for a period of time in their lives or have been neglected by otherwise very good parents. Sometimes well-meaning parents restrict their children to such a degree that these children fail to thrive in childhood and hence fail to thrive in adulthood.

Restriction

Restrictions and limitations are absolutely necessary in life. We discussed the danger of indulgence in some homes where children do not have sufficient boundaries to feel safe and to prepare themselves for adulthood. Many more children are restricted from some of the essential ingredients of a home that include the three basic ingredients of life: feeling, thinking, and doing.

The most emotionally damaging restriction is that where the child is not given sufficient time to feel. As we discussed in I Want You to Know How I Feel, “feelings” are more than emotion. We suggest that feelings themselves are never wrong, but when we use the word feelings we are talking about the basic core that everyone has. Feelings are the most basic expression of our inner selves. When feelings erupt, they do so in the sequence of physical, emotional, cognitive, and active. Children can be unduly limited in any of these ways. Some children are restricted physically by their not being able to go outside, listen to radio or TV, go to school, go with friends, or simply run. Parents who restrict the actual movement of children are keeping them from understanding how their bodies work.

More significant restrictions comes in the form of emotions. Many children are not allowed the normal expression of emotions, like joy, sadness, fear and anger. I have many people in my office who report that they were not allowed to cry, sometimes with the addendum, “If you start crying, I’ll give you something to cry about,” meaning some kind of spanking. In some homes there is a danger of indulging children by allowing them to cry excessively, express anger excessively, or express fear excessively, or even express joy excessively however odd that sounds. More often, homes fail to allow their children a relatively free expression of emotions where they learn the value and the dangers of expressing emotions. Such homes are more than stoic. They are repressive, and the repression of emotions can leave a lifelong mark on an individual. I currently see a man who is in his 70’s and cannot think of a single time he has made a mistake despite the fact that he has grossly low self-esteem and is consequently afraid of doing anything that could be determined to be “wrong” by someone else, and for the most part can’t even say something that might seem to someone to be untoward.

The largest damage that is done by restriction comes with people who have not been given many opportunities to express a breadth of emotions, but some children are restricted from thinking in some ways or doing certain things. Many homes are so restrictive of what one says that it seems impossible to even think in a way that might be different from what the parents believe. The more visible restriction, however, is in what children are allowed to do. I was raised in a distinctively evangelical Christian home, but I did not receive the restrictions that other kids at our church had, namely no alcohol, smoking and swearing that might seem reasonable, but also no movies, dancing, playing cards, “mixed” (heterosexual) bathing, and in some cases no TV or radio.

Many of these restrictions are valuable and necessary but many are potentially damaging to people in their formative years. But most people have had at least a modicum of freedom in childhood, and yet everyone has had some experience of “not being loved right” that occurs from the best of people with the best of intentions. This failure of adequate loving comes largely from how different people love.

Limitations in loving due to temperament

A quick review of the way that people of different temperaments love in my previous blog might be in order. Roughly,

  • Lovers love by establishing and maintaining connection
  • Caretakers love by providing safety in their care of property
  • Analysts love by providing understanding and meaning
  • Players love by providing experience

All of these ways of loving are good and godly but none of them is perfect. Furthermore, people who love primarily, or perhaps even singularly in one of these ways of loving may, indeed, fail to love their children “right.” Let me give you some examples:

  • I know of many parents who have a lover temperament that are unable to understand why their player children, analyst children, or caretaker children seem not to want the kind of love that they offer. In fact, of all four of these temperaments I have the hardest time explaining to lovers that not all people want connection, and in some cases they might actively not want it. This comes as patently wrong to people whose primary goal in life is to connect and in so doing offer personal sacrifice to the people they love. In fact, children of lover parents who are, themselves, not lovers, can feel smothered by a lover parent who wants more physical and emotional contact than the child wants. How odd is it to say that many lover parents fail to love their children right.
  • Caretakers, like me are equally at fault for failing to love right. It’s easier for me see how caretaker love can lead to people around him/her not being loved right. We caretakers, remember, have a primary orientation to the care of property. I could even say that we love property the way lovers love people, but this would not be entirely true because our love of people is intrinsic in the taking care of property. Than having been said, it is easy for caretakers to get lost in the care of property and lose sight of the use of property for humankind, which includes family and friends. I made mistakes with both of my girls with my caretaking-based love: for Krissie, the older and the player, I gave her too much freedom and not enough keeping her nose to the grindstone. For Jenny, the younger, introverted and lover by nature often got left because of her extraverted more demanding sister. More importantly, however, I took advantage of her accepting, loving ways but undoubtedly didn’t love her the way lovers need to be loved.
  • Analysts also fail to love people right not out of some pernicious nature but rather due to their tendency to make the world a better place by looking for problems to solve and prevent. Analysts tend to speak much more about what is not right than what is right, not because they are intrinsically mean-spirited and critical, but because they always see how something…or someone…could be better. As I noted in my temperamental loving blog I noted how analysts tend to be the least liked of the four temperaments because of this tendency to comment on what is wrong, not right.
  • Players are so interested in experience and excitement that they can get lost in these two realms. Players are at their best in the matter of loving when they can help people play, experience, and find joy in life. That having been said, they can be the worst, or even dangerous, when they play because they tend to throw caution to the wind. I have seen players drag people into some activity that their friends had no interest in just because the player thought it would be fun. So, while players bring the most joy to people when they are at their best, they are often fail to love people right.

It should be implicit in how temperamental differences can lead people to love in the wrong ways, love to a fault, or even resist loving at all because they have been misunderstood in the past or hurt someone in the past. The key is to “know thyself,” namely to know who you are, how you love, and then add to that knowledge of knowing other people. A failure to love right is not a failure to love.

Some examples of not having been loved right include:

  • The caretaker raised by a lover who wanted his daughter to just sit and cuddle more than just do something
  • The man who never heard that his father loved him because his father had never heard such things from his father
  • The child who was raised in a restrictive environment and never learned how to value and express her feelings
  • The man who was so good at loving his wife that he gave in too much to her and ended up in bankruptcy at their senior years
  • The man who was not loved much at all because his mother was a drug addict
  • The woman who was loved so much that she never learned how to deal with people who didn’t love her
  • The lesbian woman who was raised in a “loving” and evangelical Christian family and couldn’t “come out” until she was 45 only to be rejected by this same family.
  • The man who learned to push all his feelings into alcohol just like his father did
  • The extraverted man who was raised in such a good accepting family that it never occurred to him that someone might actually not lake him
  • The analyst man who was raised by a caretaker father who couldn’t understand why his son would rather read than mow the lawn
  • The brilliant professional introverted analyst man who has never felt loved by his lover wife because neither understood their profound differences
  • The woman who ended up promiscuous because she didn’t have a meaningful relationship with her mother.
  • The child who was loved right by father but not by mother

All of these people, all of their spouses, and all of their parents were good people, not abusive, not indulgent, and not neglectful. All of them are real people although the particulars have been adjusted to protect their identities.

Live right. That is first rule. Love right. That is the second rule. Consider how you were loved but not loved right. We will tackle that next:

Next up: Love IV: I See You (being open to being loved)