How do you unlearn what you first learned about love?

[justnothing]

Yesterday evening I had been chatting with a friend online and we got around to talking about our mothers. She and I both had very similar ones. We were talking about parental love (the healthy kind vs. the unhealthy kind) and how some parents can’t always give adequate love and the results of that and also about boundaries. For some reason that conversation lit a couple of light bulbs that had never been lit for me before… one of them was about boundaries; all of a sudden it became clear to me how come children of healthy parents grow up to have healthy boundaries: the child gets used to having his rights always respected by his parents and by the people around him… so if one day someone suddenly violates them, of course the child will suddenly rise up in protest! It’s something out of the ordinary and shocking! “Hey Dad! What are you doing in my room?” “Mom! I’m taking a shower ffs!” but when your needs and boundaries are constantly ignored and trampled on, obviously you won’t put up a fight after enough time, it won’t be something out of the ordinary, instead you’ll just tell yourself that you have no right to them (probably nothing new to most people here but for some reason this was the first time I felt like I fully understood about boundaries and how/why they get messed up).

The other one was about love (relationships) and why I seem to be afraid of it. This concept wasn’t exactly new to me, I had already known for a long while that I’m afraid of relationships and that I’m afraid of them because I’m afraid of being manipulated and/or abused (again). It wasn’t a new concept but for the first time it struck me on an emotional level, enough for me to have a nightmare about it.

I don’t really want to go into all the gory details of it tbh, it would be too triggering and probably not appropriate anyway… but the jist of it was a story of a guy and a girl in a “relationship” and the guy had control over the girls’ mind and as a result he could do to her whatever he wanted and make her do whatever he wanted and he used this power to abuse her in every way imaginable.

Now the thing is, most people’s first reaction to this kind of thing is “but most people aren’t abusive like that” and it’s true, I know most people aren’t abusers… but that’s not the point… the point isn’t what was done or can be done to me, the point is what I’m capable of allowing others to do to me. I have “done” it in the past and I can “do it” again.

I know this may sound kind of like victim-self-blaming or something like that… but hey… we are responsible for ourselves after all, right? and I believe in taking personal responsibility… and for that matter, statistics show that people who have been abused in their childhoods tend to “seek it” later on in their adult relationships, as so many people here are all too painfully aware of… so how do I not do it to myself?

The idea of “love” that I think I might have, in the back of my mind, that I learned from my mother, is: “if you love me, you have to prove it by surrendering your every will to me” and my idea of “trust” is “trust me blindly, regardless of the evidence, never question me, if you question me that means you don’t really trust me and that means you don’t really love me” (the last part was an actual quote from my mother). I think this is what I expect men to expect from me when they say “I love you”, that’s what “I love you” means to me.

How do I learn to not think like this?

[fromheeltoheal]

Hi just-

My first thought is to get very selfish.  A very common theme here and on the planet is for us to wonder if we're inherently lovable and not think we're enough.  Think about it: when we're a baby we can puke and cry and sht our pants, and adults are still fawning all over us, talking to us in baby talk, and calling us cute.  And then at some point that all changes, expectations rise, the love becomes 'conditional', and we make the assumption that now we have to do something, to perform a certain way, to get love, to be loved.  We form the belief that we have to 'do' or 'be' something to be loved, instead of being inherently lovable.  So what if we just decide that we are inherently lovable, and that everything we need is within us now?  Try this: look yourself in the eye in a mirror and say "I love you" and mean it.  Weird at first, but look at yourself the way you'd look at someone you genuinely love and say it; it becomes profound with repetition.

Do you love your mother?  I love my mother, I wouldn't be here without her, but I don't like her, and we've never been friends.  And what is friendship?  A relationship based on mutual trust and respect.  It's said that a way to maintain boundaries is to share-check-share, meaning share a little vulnerability with someone, see how it's received and if it's reciprocated, and if it is, share some more, on the way to building a real relationship.  Lately I've said screw that; I've been blurting out my truth from the git-go and if it isn't reciprocated or received well I'm gone, on to the next.  That is so much easier for me and takes a lot less work, and fortunately I'm really good at removing people from my life.  Of course some you can't totally, like family, but if I focus on getting my needs met, for a change, it informs the relationship, and becomes easier to maintain boundaries; those relationships devolve into superficial bantering about the weather, a waste of time really, but at least I don't need to tolerate disrespect or boundary busting.

So what do you want?  How do you want to be treated?  It's a focus thing, and a belief that life is too short to tolerate people who don't treat us well.  And a belief that we are not shackled by our upbringing; every day above ground is a good day, life is now, we're perfectly imperfect, and we're only willing to make room in our lives for people who bring us up, not down.  Take care of you!

[claudiaduffy]

I'm no professional, but I think being as aware of the dynamics of it as you are has got to be a really good start. 

I know, for me, it's been a slow process. Even after I stopped letting my uBPDm rule my life and my emotions, even after I'd had good counseling over several years, even after I'd learned how to trust in healthy friendships, my first long-term relationship was nearly disastrous to me because I did not know what love looked like when I was looking to be loved. I had figured out good boundaries and intimacy practices with good friends, but when it came to loving my boyfriend, I could not tell the difference between being selfish/demanding and being sensible/aware of my actual needs. So I let the relationship continue for many months longer than I should have, because I had internalized from my FOO that to complain would be to condemn him, that to say, "No, BF, this isn't working out for me; you're a good guy, but we are not a good match" would be the same as saying "BF, you are a bad human being who can't love anyone." So I ended up protecting him and letting myself be emotionally starved, just as I did to survive my childhood, even though my BF was not a disordered or abusive person and would not have wanted this for me if he had known it was happening.

Anyway, I did end up breaking up with him and took several years to think through my own obvious tendencies and hangups. I got more counseling. I went on LOTS of first dates and a few second dates, and practiced a lot of trusting my gut instead of giving everyone a second or third chance to get closer to me. This is the opposite of what some people need to do (I've had friends who needed to learn to give people a chance instead of rejecting everyone outright), but for me, I really did need to learn to trust myself on decisions of intimacy before I could learn to trust someone else with my vulnerability in a romantic context.

Many years later, I am now in a happy marriage where love, in part, means my husband and I each assume the other means goodwill towards us, but are not afraid to speak up for our needs. Trust means, in part, that we are not individually crafting an "image" of ourselves for the other to see. Love means listening and believing and respecting each other, and trust means fully expecting and giving honesty to each other. Love means having great patience with each other. Trust means allowing the other to be an adult responsible for their own decisions.

Regardless of what your inner conditioning defines as "love" and "trust", what do you - in your conscious, free, health-pursuing mind - WANT those words to mean for your life? Can you begin by defining that?

[Pingo]

Justnothing, I think the experience of conditional love and the lack of boundaries being respected are the same thing.  In my childhood my feelings were not respected, I was told what to think and not think, what to feel and not feel.  I wasn't allowed to develop a 'self', I was an extension of my mother.  And to get her love was to behave in a way that she approved of.  Don't challenge her.  Otherwise I was emotionally abandoned.  I wasn't allowed to have negative emotions, I wasn't allowed to express myself.  It's no wonder I ended up in such a dysfunctional r/s as an adult where I didn't even recognise that I was being abused.  And like Claudiaduffy said above, I could establish good boundaries with friends/co-workers, even my kids but not in a romantic r/s.  My sense of self goes right out the window.

How to change your thinking?  I have been doing a lot of reading on healing the past wounds, especially from the FOO.  What I have been working on is going back into my childhood, trying to access the memories of those difficult times, trying to access the feelings (this is where I have the most difficulty), grieving the loss that I experienced and re-parenting myself, giving myself the unconditional love and respect that I so desperately needed back then.  It is a work in progress.  With help from my T and lots and lots of reading and journaling, this has helped me a lot on my road to recovery.

[Perfidy]

Hi justsomething, hope all is well with you today. Learning love from another person is almost impossible because of our tendencies as humans to be selfish when it comes to other people. There is almost always a personal agenda when giving. When we give we expect something in return other than a loveable, healthy person. It takes a real saint to give selflessly. So it's a personal lesson that can only be taught and learned by you, unless you happen to know a guru, saint, or other mystic. What we've commonly learned isn't love. Control. That's what we've learned. We know very little about love. At our core is love. It is indestructible. Find that,and meet someone else that knows this, then, you could be in love with another person. Best wishes.

[justnothing]

Thanks for all the good advice and feedback. Sorry it took so long to reply… I started writing a long, long (2 Word page long) reply the other day but ended up not posting it because it was just too… idk…

A couple of you asked what it is that I would want in a relationship. This gave me quite a lot to think about because I’d never really, seriously asked myself what I wanted before… the thing that made it so hard to reply for several days were A) all the “I want this… but I don’t deserve it… and I want that… but that wouldn’t be realistic” and… B) the realization that part of what I want might not be healthy… and C) I find myself wanting several completely contradictory things.

When it comes to nevertheless forcing myself to come up with something possibly reasonable and healthy I did manage to come up with: space, respect (as an equal), understanding, acceptance and dependability… but for some reason those still seem selfish and unrealistic.

For some reason I’m also soo afraid of letting the other person down but idk how to avoid doing that and I’m not even sure if I can…

[claudiaduffy]

When it comes to nevertheless forcing myself to come up with something possibly reasonable and healthy I did manage to come up with: space, respect (as an equal), understanding, acceptance and dependability… but for some reason those still seem selfish and unrealistic.

Dear person,

That's not a selfish and unrealistic list. As long as you're not expecting a person to be perfect at all those things, there's no reason to settle for a person who isn't pretty good at them. =) And this is a good list because minor failings in one area are made up for in other areas. For example, my husband and I have a few areas where we don't understand each other, but we accept each other in those areas. Conversely, there are some areas we understand perfectly well, but don't "accept" because we both know we want to change in those areas - which is part of us respecting each other and spurring each other to be better in ways that we know the other wants. We also give each other space to not have to be dependable 100% of the time.

I like your list a lot.

[justnothing]

Dear person,

That's not a selfish and unrealistic list. As long as you're not expecting a person to be perfect at all those things, there's no reason to settle for a person who isn't pretty good at them. =) And this is a good list because minor failings in one area are made up for in other areas. For example, my husband and I have a few areas where we don't understand each other, but we accept each other in those areas. Conversely, there are some areas we understand perfectly well, but don't "accept" because we both know we want to change in those areas - which is part of us respecting each other and spurring each other to be better in ways that we know the other wants. We also give each other space to not have to be dependable 100% of the time.

I like your list a lot.

Thank you and I think you just pin pointed the thing I had a problem with… the fact that it doesn’t need to be perfect… either on his part or on mine… I’ll try to keep that in mind…

Maybe another thing to add to the list is ‘flexibility’ and stress that it's a list that goes both ways