Today, my eldest daughter is getting married. Simultaneously, my father lies dying. This tensile experience of hope and loss in my body has me thinking a lot about love. The self we bring into any relationship is complicated. Add love to the mix and we can get so messy…if we let ourselves. To really understand how we love, we need to embrace the unloved self with as much intention and attention as we do the part of us that knows and understands love.
All of us grow up with different experiences of love in childhood. Some of us knew unequivocally that we were loved. Some of us felt the need to earn or perform to be loved. Some of us felt the compulsion to manipulate into being loved or hoping for love. Some of us felt abandoned in love. There is no such thing as raising an unwounded child.
Any experience of trauma underlines our experience of love, twisting the impulse to be loved into something painful or shameful. How love was available in our family body taught us what parts of our self can be effortlessly loved, and what parts need to be rejected or hidden because they are intrinsically unloveable.
Love is complicated. Lust and new love are exciting. Established love is softer, compromised, flexible. Love grows more in knowing what storms can be weathered, what situations can be endured. Knowing that someone has made a choice towards you when that choice was difficult shows strength to love. Expecting love to be easy does a disservice to the act of loving.
When I look at my husband, I see him in his faults and his struggles just as much as I see his strengths and his value. The love I hold for him goes beyond the good and positive. It embraces his difficulties because they make him more complicated and alive. His struggles make him interesting! Love without tests is young. Over time, the issues we have in relationships create a deep standing love even in spite of that which has hurt and destroyed. Conflict when metabolized into love proves that love can heal and mend.
When Childhood Love Is Missing
Every single need eventually flows back into the need for pure love in childhood. Whether we define the need as being seen, heard, acknowledged, respected, etc., the common ground for every need is the need to be loved unconditionally. We need to know that we are loved when we are perfect and imperfect, good and bad, in all moods and all states of emotional expression.
How you were primarily shown love in childhood is the way you are going to default into expressing and feeling love in your own relationships. This can be difficult for your friends and lovers, as their own childhood may have taught them something completely different about love. If we expect people in relationship to love us the way we know love, this puts a pretty big demand on any relationship we have.
As an example, if your child-self felt love was not available, this provided you with very little understanding for how to meet your need for love. This essential part of you lived in a state of constant starvation, deprivation and habitual rejection, so the places you feel most challenged in your relationships reflect these parts of you that you do not feel can be loved.
It is easy to get triggered by a partner who cannot metabolize or notice love, and who feels existentially unloved. To challenge the persona that has developed around this pain threatens to shatter all that has been created to survive the deprivation that existed in upbringing. In these cases, it is incredibly difficult for loved ones to help heal what’s missing. With steady and persistent love, however, there is the possibility of having your needs met, even if it is hard.
Both people in the beginning of a relationship have a limited idea of how to relate to love in the other’s unique way, yet we each expect that love will be felt and expressed within our own comfort zones.
Both people in the beginning of a relationship have a limited idea of how to relate to love in the other’s unique way, yet we each expect that love will be felt and expressed within our own comfort zones. We expect needs to be met, and often blame the other when a need goes unmet. Open conversations on what is expected of love are necessary if you seek fulfillment of love in your relationship.
Conditional Love Patterning
Conditional love can also be thought about as earned love based on what we do, how we act, what we say. Deviating from expressing the loved self, such as the overachieving first child, the obedient son, the vivacious daughter, is a risk. These children feel safe in a box, but outside the box is the unlovable. It is normal, though, that the unlovable self is expressed in other negative ways, while the lovable self has been curated to express itself through the positive.
Conditional love tells us that we are only as good as our actions. It teaches us that our actions need to be acceptable to earn love. Conditional love creates a questioning sense of self, making us think that we have to perform to earn love. We have to either express a very narrow part of ourself or become something other than self to be lovable. In relationship, this will mean that we tend to perform to show love.
Those who perform acts of service as a love language point towards someone who likely grew up with conditional love. There is a sense of needing to prove love through action rather than a comfort in showing love through the relational self. The true self does not feel inherently safe being expressed without validation.
A person who does not believe they can be loved for who they are is not going to easily be lovable or meet a partner’s deeper need for love outside acts of service or care. It is in the moments of insecurity that it is most important for a partner or friend to show up, settle in, and love unconditionally. Helping those wounded by conditional love means slowing down and letting them see that you love them when it is hard for them to love themselves or when they are testing love. What a conundrum.
When a loved one is pushing away or emanating insecurity, they expect to be rejected. If we react in the expected way, we have lost a chance to allow the person we love to trust their unlovable with us. When our loved one is the ugliest, the pull can be strongest to react in a way that is not supportive. Being a partner sometimes means we have to observe more than what is being said, and feel for something deeper. Perhaps there is a chance to shift something. Insecurity is a sign that support and acceptance are necessary to create a deepening in the relationship.
The Manipulative Lover
Manipulative love can often be unconsciously cultivated on the part of the parent. A parent, for example, who is primarily narcissistic or mentally unstable may not know they are only able to love a child who fits into their own story of reality, and do not give the child space to be an individual.
Lack of attention and love forces a child to create a story to survive. Learning how to get attention through the manipulation of acting out, being bad, or becoming invisible all create a sense that the unloved self has more value than the loved self in our life. How exactly is one able to grow into an adult who trusts love and knows how to be themselves in loving relationships? Most likely friends and partners are put through a gauntlet of games, challenges, and manipulations that hide the insatiable need for unconditional love, as well as the true internalized belief of self as unlovable.
If we were raised without safe love, relationships themselves do not feel safe even when love is present. There will be an inherent distrust, a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop, or a suspicious questioning of motives within the love aspect of the relationship. Any time deepening is available and love is starting to be relied upon, a test or a sabotage will emerge. The story of self is that the self is unlovable or needs to be other than self to be loved. Both of these realities create a smokescreen that hides the pain of the unloved self. Drama is so interesting, isn’t it?
The healing response for a manipulative lover we are in relationship with requires a lack of interest in the drama and a deeper interest in what is being built in the relationship.
The healing response for this aspect of a person we are in relationship with requires a lack of interest in the drama and a deeper interest in what is being built in the relationship. The person who feels unloved is going to demand that we look at the destruction. Yet if we can patiently point out that this aspect feels less important than what is being built, we support the potential for development into some aspect of self being loved just a tiny bit. Baby steps are all that is possible in this wound.
It is very easy for people who primarily know manipulative love to burn bridges and find reasons to leave anyone who could unconditionally love them. Self-sabotage sows the seeds of distrust in loving relationships to eventually destroy the relationship and prove that the unlovable is justified. The projection of distrust whittles its way into anyone in love with an unlovable person. It is inevitable in the face of so much distrust for the love of the relationship itself to be questioned. It is a challenge for anyone to stay in a clear space of love for the person who constantly and unexpectedly manipulates the love that is present inside the relationship.
A person who knows manipulative love is going to find numerous ways to not trust love due to the huge insecurity and pain that exists around rejection. A person who primarily knows this kind of love fully doubts their own capacity to be loved. There is so much hurt, fear, and worthlessness around love that needs to be expressed and understood before love can be trusted. It is inevitably going to show up as neediness, distance, or rejection. The irony here is that if you are in a loving relationship with someone who knows themselves to be manipulatively loved, the only way you know that you are getting closer to them is when these impulses to reject surface.
A direct channel to your unconditional love is necessary to withstand these rejection impulses, which will test your capacity to love. Calling on your own deeply unloved self can be useful as a resonant guiding force. To respond with the part of us that also understands the plight of manipulative love builds a bridge toward the self that can see the bigger picture and radiate compassion. Patiently withstanding the one step forward ten steps back reality is essential.
Saying we all deserve love is an ideal that creates a struggle inside the parts of us that do not believe love is even possible. When we can love others, we are bridging the loved and unloved self of another in service to their deepest need, as well as our own. One cannot possibly do this bridging alone. We need each other.
Four years ago, Nessa Emrys shifted her personal paradigm and became a digital nomad. Nowadays she works as a multidimensional therapist and writer, using travel to embody compassion and challenge personal perspectives. You can read more of her work at her Transcend The Mental substack.
Find holistic Counseling and Therapy in the Spirit of Change online Alternative Health Directory.
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