Maybe some of us have a lot of learning to go through around love. Maybe at times we miss each other on this path of seeking love or seeking to love. Some of us may have got to associated a desire for love with hurt, mistreatment or frustration. We may not have understood how our own parents struggled to be loving when they lacked tools or had other matters that were more pressing to attend to.
I had a lovely conversation with a family friend yesterday whose father left Holland in 1938 with my father. Uncle Piet was her father and he was my God father a man I adored in childhood because he was so happy and fun, unlike my own father who was often pretty self preoccupied authoritarian and serious. I remember every time Uncle Piet would visit us he would say as soon as he came in the door and saw me. “holy smoke, you’ve grown” I was a gangly tall kid who shot up rapidly and was often teased having constant struggles to find clothes that fit my long body and shoes that fit my long, long narrow feet.
Uncle Piet and his wife were the ones to take me in after my mother remarried within a month of me returning to Australia 2 and a half years after my father died of stomach cancer. Uncle Piet was pretty upset with the way my Mum abandoned me and later in life before he died he cut Mum out of his life, I was to learn in later years as he found out about my entering sobriety that he lost his own mother when young. Later in life his family tried to have him diagnosed with dementia because he was expressing anger, after years and years and years of being the nice accommodating guy he got fed up. He was more like a father to me than my own father and he was able to give me insights into the forces that drove my Dad I would never have got from anywhere else. Dad left his entire family behind in 1938 and only went back to the Netherlands briefly for visits his closest sister Lies pined for him something I shared with my cousin’s son today who is the grandson of my father’s younger brother.
Anyway for me my experience of love has always been distant and somewhat confused. Having the warmest member of my family leave when I was only 3 and be cut down painfully at the age of 34 was truly devastating for me. Seeing her abandoned and try to take her life cut me to pieces inside and taught me that love was very very dangerous.
Anyway it wasn’t until Piet and I bonded that I got to know what an intimate fatherly relationship might consist of (this was from the age of 25 when I returned to Australia and we were in a lot of contact after I got sober at 31).
When I left my ex husband for 6 months to go back overseas to pursue my therapy in 2002 they took Jonathan in as well. For some reason all this is coming up in a post I initially wanted to write about love. I think because I got more active demonstration of a present emotionally available love from my god parents than from my own father and mother.
I know that it has not always been easy to feel the love from my family. We are not a demonstrative family but I am a very affectionate and friendly person but as I look back now (and it seems that lately some blinkers have been pulled away from my eyes) I got to only really know how to be formal with others. I fear that at any time I could be cut off, dropped or abandoned. In the days of my alcoholism of course this happened to me all of the time as I realise I lacked emotional insight and literacy or emotional intelligence or the skills to truly bond or attach t others. My life has pretty much been riven with broken attachments. Sometimes I think I only know how to leave others or deny I actually need or long for connection.
Only slowly over time have I began to see how sometimes I pushed love away but only when people lacked the capacity to read me emotionally. It is something I was talking about with Uncle Piet’s daughter yesterday, she was saying how our parent’s generation had such a struggle to survive materially that they really just put emotions to one side. Practical realities became more important than the expression of love towards children and when a parent has been emotionally neglected or not responded to emotionally they then lack the skills to provide that for their children.
I read on a co-dependency recovery website a few years back how it is believed that the wounded or trauma child of the parent is passed down. The generations born since the 1960s carried this trauma child along with the collective experiences of the suffering of war. Many of them may have lacked emotional intelligence and not been able to express love. In my family appearance and ‘doing the right thing’ became all important. We never got to have fun much as it was all about work, everything was geared around business. There wasn’t ever a lot of time just to goof off, hang loose and interact informally and play. And I read recently that humour, fun and play are such important ingredients in achieving a healthy balanced emotional life.
It is said of narcissists and covert narcissists that everything is about control and gets to be deathly serious. The capacity to be loose, free and openhearted gets lost, vulnerability is feared and pretence and controlling emotions becomes the order of the day. We see the height of this seriousness and shadow repression heightened around the end of the 19th century and carry in through Nazism and other dominant dictator movements which were attempts to wrest back a semblance of power and control in very very challenging circumstances where forces of rebellion and transition were powering forward.
I do believe that no matter what our wound our capacity to love can be improved, we can open our hearts to the areas of hurt that feel sore and discover what the missing panacea is … to my mind it is love, and this only comes in time often through great suffering and ignorance. I went to see the movie Red Joan yesterday about the British ‘granny’ spy who passed atomic secrets to the Russians in the 1940s. I really recommend this movie as it touches on so many themes of suffering and ignorance and naivety and judgement. We often judge what we don’t fully understand and judgement often hides from us our own depth of ignorance and blind spots as well as our lack of awareness of the influences others are subject to.
To love opens us to a far more unified view that is less polarised into black and white one that can encompass the more complex shades and hidden nuances that comprise our collective shared experience. Loving ourselves and others better means we open to understand what it is that stands in the way of experiencing and expressing love and feeling it for our fellow humans often due to the fact we misunderstand things. Or else we just long for love but have not yet learned what it might mean to express and experience it deeply both within ourselves and both extended towards or received from others.
Surely love will be the answer in so many situations. Love wins through separation, fear and judgement at the end of the movie Red Joan. I don’t know how true to the life of the real granny spy the movie is having been based on a novel that portrays in a fictionalised version the true events. Never the less I broke down in the final scene. You may have to see it to know why as I cannot reveal the ending.
Emerging From The Dark Night 