Feeling loved and loveable are purely abstract concepts to a large number of people. While the world around them expresses love in various ways, they feel excluded from this aspect of humanity. This exclusion makes them feel different from other people (often not equal to, somehow less than) and an outsider as they do not share in the lived experiences of love.
Such individuals often feel that they are not capable of loving another person and often they also feel unable to receive love from another (manifested by not believing the realness of being told “I love you”). This does not mean that they are indifferent to love; most long for it and experience its absence as a lack in their lives. They often suffer from profound loneliness even when among people. Many may use work, internet, TV series, drugs or other substitutes to fill the emptiness inside. A core belief, underlying their lack of sense of belonging in the world and their impaired ability to love, may be that they are deeply flawed.
What would the origins of such suffering be? Children who did not receive enough positive attention from their parent/s may as a consequence not have felt loved. It is too terrible for children to contemplate that their parent/s might not love them, as their parent/s are the center of their world and they are in awe of them – at least initially. The next “logical” conclusion to draw is that they (the child) are not loveable; and they are not loveable because they are bad; and to be bad means to be deeply flawed as a human being. The sad story is that the parent/s often have an impaired ability to love (being cut-off emotionally themselves) which has been transmitted from generation to generation.
But what is love? It is more than a warm fuzzy feeling; it is a genuine and powerful sense of deep connection to another person. It manifests as attention to each other which affirms and validates each other’s sense of self and sense of being loved. This attention from a parent to a child manifests not only as meeting basic needs; but more importantly as genuine praise and admiration of the child’s feats in the world, as emotional and physical affection and moments of shared intimacy looking at the outside world together. Earlier generations (and some parents today) were often hard, cold and emotionally unresponsive and had little time to engage with their children. It is therefore not only outright abusive environments that cause harm to children, but sometimes the more subtle chronic insidious neglect.
Attachment theories, neuroscience as well as earlier psychological theories stress the importance of the first early relationship as being the foundation of the person’s sense of self later in life. We grow in the presence of another’s mind (originally the mother or other primary caregiver) thinking about us, keeping us in mind and giving us enough attention to thrive - not just survive. It needn’t be the perfect mother/caregiver, actually the perfect mother/caregiver may also be bad for our development as we need some frustrations; but a mother/caregiver that is attentive and responsive to the physical, mental and emotional needs of a child. While negative attention, such as verbal abuse and humiliation, adversely affects the growing child’s self-esteem and sense of worth, the most profound effect is due to the absence of positive attention and the consequent experience of feeling loved.
Psychotherapy is one method of working with those frozen parts of the self. Psychotherapy constitutes an attachment relationship and focused attention on the patient in a warm, genuine and authentic human connection. In this type of relationship a patient may safely explore the areas of their self that did not develop due a lack of lived experiences in that area. Such an inward journey “may be the only way to mend the poverty of wasted years” as John Tarrant puts in his book “The light inside the dark”.
Such individuals often feel that they are not capable of loving another person and often they also feel unable to receive love from another (manifested by not believing the realness of being told “I love you”). This does not mean that they are indifferent to love; most long for it and experience its absence as a lack in their lives. They often suffer from profound loneliness even when among people. Many may use work, internet, TV series, drugs or other substitutes to fill the emptiness inside. A core belief, underlying their lack of sense of belonging in the world and their impaired ability to love, may be that they are deeply flawed.
What would the origins of such suffering be? Children who did not receive enough positive attention from their parent/s may as a consequence not have felt loved. It is too terrible for children to contemplate that their parent/s might not love them, as their parent/s are the center of their world and they are in awe of them – at least initially. The next “logical” conclusion to draw is that they (the child) are not loveable; and they are not loveable because they are bad; and to be bad means to be deeply flawed as a human being. The sad story is that the parent/s often have an impaired ability to love (being cut-off emotionally themselves) which has been transmitted from generation to generation.
But what is love? It is more than a warm fuzzy feeling; it is a genuine and powerful sense of deep connection to another person. It manifests as attention to each other which affirms and validates each other’s sense of self and sense of being loved. This attention from a parent to a child manifests not only as meeting basic needs; but more importantly as genuine praise and admiration of the child’s feats in the world, as emotional and physical affection and moments of shared intimacy looking at the outside world together. Earlier generations (and some parents today) were often hard, cold and emotionally unresponsive and had little time to engage with their children. It is therefore not only outright abusive environments that cause harm to children, but sometimes the more subtle chronic insidious neglect.
Attachment theories, neuroscience as well as earlier psychological theories stress the importance of the first early relationship as being the foundation of the person’s sense of self later in life. We grow in the presence of another’s mind (originally the mother or other primary caregiver) thinking about us, keeping us in mind and giving us enough attention to thrive - not just survive. It needn’t be the perfect mother/caregiver, actually the perfect mother/caregiver may also be bad for our development as we need some frustrations; but a mother/caregiver that is attentive and responsive to the physical, mental and emotional needs of a child. While negative attention, such as verbal abuse and humiliation, adversely affects the growing child’s self-esteem and sense of worth, the most profound effect is due to the absence of positive attention and the consequent experience of feeling loved.
Psychotherapy is one method of working with those frozen parts of the self. Psychotherapy constitutes an attachment relationship and focused attention on the patient in a warm, genuine and authentic human connection. In this type of relationship a patient may safely explore the areas of their self that did not develop due a lack of lived experiences in that area. Such an inward journey “may be the only way to mend the poverty of wasted years” as John Tarrant puts in his book “The light inside the dark”.
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