We can learn to love ourselves unconditionally

Finding the unconditional love for ourselves inside that we missed as children is perhaps our greatest adult recovery task.  The pain of not being met or loved unconditionally or in an open receptive way can haunt many of us well into adulthood.  The yearning for this love and deep disappointment over its absence may or may not be fully conscious.  It may be triggered by what brings up the hurt we felt when we were not loved in this way.  Re reading the Chapter I Forgive Myself in Michael Brown’s book The Presence Process this morning is reminding me of this as I read back some of my blogs from yesterday as well as comments left.

I think of my Dad’s generation and what they went through. Dad’s solution to the poverty and loss of his childhood was to get as far away from his family and war torn country as he could.  He only went back to Holland briefly after Mum was sent there with my brother to try and get healing for his rickets after they were stationed in Indonesia during the late 1940s and eary 1950s.  He found it too small and too confined.  My mother was left there with my brother and sister who were only small for 13 months.  She had to learn to speak Dutch in order to communicate.  My father was nearly killed a couple of times at the hands of resistence fighters in Indonesia where during those years the Indonesia freedom fighters were engaged in a violent fight for independence.    He never told me a lot about it but in later years my Godfather, Uncle Piet did.   I was lucky to have the later connection with Piet who began to open up his own inner child’s grief and vulnerability in way my father could not.

Dad was taught to smoke at the age of 8 and could never give it up because when he did his feelings would start to get unmanageable.  I remember one family member saying they wished he would start smoking again so his behaviour would be more placid again.  Exactly what was he defending against?   He kept a remote distance from us, was not unkind but he was not demonstrative and often our needs were neglected or denied or we we taught we needed to supress them.  The two times we hugged where after we nearly lost our lives in a road accident and on the evening Dad revealed his cancer dignosis to me in 1984.  He cried then too, as I hugged him.  I value that one tender moment.

It may be hard to feel an emotionally distant parent’s love.  The other parent may engage with you in unloving and hard ways, as my Mum did then you feel unprotected.   Its harder to hate or be upset by the parent you cant figure out and in any case should we hate them or just what they did to us.  If they had known unconditional love themselves only then would they be able to give it or if they felt it deep inside.

The point that Michael makes in this chapter I am reading at the moment is no matter how hard we search for unconditional love outside, our healing only happens as we learn to give it to ourselves.   If we were raised in dysfunctional ways with upside down ideas about love, we carry that through.  We attract those who will spark our wounds so we can feel them and understand them and heal.  We can blame the person but he makes the point they are only the messenger.   We are the ones who have to try to attune to the inner child in us that gets hurt in these kind of relationships and help her or him to be set free without shame or blame.  Unconscious people attract unconscious people, or people working towards inner connection attract someone who alerts them to the need to love themselves.  Its only at the end of the relationship we have the choice to deal with the emotional fallout and understand the deeper resonances of why we were attracted to this person in the first place.

Learning to show ourselves compassion and hold our own hand when we are hurting is so important.   We dont have to lash out at others who dont give us what we want even if it does hurt. That said its okay to lash out too, as we are only human.   The hurt we feel covers over the denied pain we long for.  Passing that hurt on to others or ourselves over and over will never break us out of the destructive cycle,   Only self love, self compassion and unconditional love for ourselves will, and we can apply loving discipline in this process of learning to be fully present to any pain our inner child holds in order we can feel, release it and heal.