God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn’t do.

Many people say that “everything is love”, that “the answer to everything is love” and that, in the end, “it’s all about love”. The concept of love is used, misused and overused. People obsess over love. People kill for love. People commit suicide because of the scarcity of love. People accept virtually anything, including the most depraved situations, because of their intense craving for love. Why this? Why this vulnerability – so to speak? Why this “currency” is so much overvalued?

In this article I will attempt to tell you the story of love. I never read this anywhere so I’m creating this article from my experience with myself and the people around me, on the dim background of my psychotherapy training many years ago.

We will start by going back in time, at birth. Imagine that you are a newborn child, someone who came into this world a couple of moments ago. You have no idea where you are, who you are or what is expected from you. You will also forget most of what happens to and with you during the first years. Moreover, you don’t have yet the ability to think rationally and you don’t have the language to express what you understand… in case you understand something altogether. Therefore, the only option you have is to see… and perceive… and feel… We are going to look at the world through your newborn eyes and perceive through your newborn body. And we are going to feel… Why feeling comes before thinking in life? Think about an animal, a pet: it feels but it doesn’t think too much or too obviously. The same goes for the newborn child: no thinking yet, but a lot of feeling happening inside.

We are born with instincts but we are also born with a desire to live, with a Love for Life. I never saw or heard of a child that opened his eyes, saw the world around him and then died instantly, refusing to live or to “play the game” of life. Every single child loves life; it is simply so. I don’t know why but, when we’re born, we are “fully equipped” to love life and love the world. As a result, the Capacity to Love is with us from our first breath.

Love is the root for many other types of love (or capacities emerging from love, as I was trained to didactically separate in my mind so as to make my professional work easier). The story of love is the story of these subtypes of love: how they appear, how they develop, the name they take. We will call them abilities from now on, for simplicity, but you will recognize them as concepts, values or traits, depending on what you have read or encountered.

We learn what love is through what we see that the others do. That is, we learn love through the behavior of other people, typically the people around us, our family and relatives. A newborn child is not lectured about love; a newborn child sees and feels. A newborn child perceives. Like, from the first moments of his life. And the behavior of his parents fundamentally shapes what the child will understand by love and being loved. And here is where things get serious…

The parental behavior lies at the crossroads; it defines a lot of abilities emerging from love. A repeated behavior becomes a fingerprint, it is learned quickly by the child, since the survival of the child depends on his ability to be a fast learner.

One of the first things a newborn experiences is to be taken and held by his mother in her hands. And fed. Breastfed. Or bottle-fed. And caressed… or not. And then have his diapers changed. And so on. Therefore, one of the first ways through which love is experienced is by Contact. We’re talking about a physical contact (hand, nipple, etc.) but also about the quality of this physical contact (lovingly caressed or not, for instance). Later in life, the Contact diversifies immensely: the way people talk to the child, the way people talk to each other, the sound of their voice (if they shout or not, for instance), the gestures they make in front of the child, how they make contact with each other in front of the child (who copies them by imitation and later makes contact with himself, internally)… the sky is the limit for the diversity and the nuances of the ability to have a Contact. Also, the lack of contact, the lack of affectionate or tender behavior, the negligence, the coldness, the emotional scarcity, the awkwardness of touch, the void(s) of a schizoid, borderline or narcissistic mother (or father), the “absence from the landscape” of the parents – all these – shape the defective ability to initiate or to maintain the contact. Yes, I know you already meditate on your own life… I also had to do the same on mine. The reality is that the ability of Contact, as a subtype of love, is one of the strongest elements in one’s psyche; it shapes our life, how we relate to others, our success and our failure in life.

Let’s imagine that the child has a problem and begins to cry. The mother – a very pragmatic and restless mother – comes quickly, admonishes the child, trivializes the reasons of his distress, grabs the child and takes him with her. Few or no words follow as some sort of explanation; the mother doesn’t have Time. To put it in a different way, the child learns that “when he has a problem, this is how you deal with it”. That is, “you don’t lose your time with stupid things”. And this is how the child learns “(not) to give himself time”. I think you have met online the over-quoted motto “G I V E  Y O U R S E L F  T I M E !” , typically written this way. Time is what we know but it is also an ability, a subtype of love; we learn to give Time to us or for us, following the examples in the family. We also learn to use Time seeing how parents interact with other people, with the world, but also with themselves (do they have time for themselves?). And if you need an anchor (a symbol or item to facilitate memory), just remember the restless and forever in a hurry white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, the one with the clock: he is always lacking Time…

The ability to have/give Time generates, with the passing of time, another subtype of love: the Patience. We look at our parents and, if they have time for us, we will also have time for us. We imitate them. This is Patience with/for oneself. Yes, to have patience for yourself is a sign of love for yourself, because there are moments in life when you need/must have patience (and not say to yourself that you’re an idiot, just like your parents perhaps told you in the past). Quite obviously, there is also Patience with/for the others, which imitates the degree of patience our parent(s) had with other people. For instance, you will have patience with your old grandma in the same way you saw that your own mother had patience with the great-grandmother when it took her ages to move with the crutch from one room to another. And again, yes, being patient with the others is a way of expressing your love for them…

One of the most disturbing experiences of the human life is the contact with the Unknown. The unknown can be many things; it can be whether you’re going to have a plane accident or not (and your East-Europe mother is freaking out about this); it can be whether that nodule you feel is cancer or not; it can be whether an unforeseen financial crash will wipe out your savings in your bank account; it can be the very length of your own life (you don’t have a contract and there are no guarantees!). People come into Contact with the unknown, not only with each other. At the interface between the unknown and our ability of Contact it is born another important ability: the Faith. Yes, you often think about Faith as “religious faith”, and you are right, since God (the Divine or the Sacred, as a general term) is, obviously, unknown (nobody saw God, and those who saw him are psychiatric patients or mystical fanatics). Faith is your relationship with the unknown – take it as the simplest definition of faith – and you believe in the same way you saw your parents did, in the same way you saw them reacting to the unknown… or initiating contact with it. Brave parents (in the face of the unknown, be it disease, war, various aggressors or even invasive hallucinations) will typically raise courageous children, while coward parents often educate children lacking the ability to be bold or, mildly put, children who are not able to “take a leap of faith”. So yes, Faith is a subtype of love, and also, for this reason, those who seek proofs of the existence of God are plagued by a lack of love, whereas those who have a decent ability to have faith don’t care too much about the scriptures and the sacred texts, as they know deep in their heart that God is there, somewhere, watching over them…

The ability of Contact also gives birth to another ability, often mistaken for faith: the Hope. If Faith is born at the interface (Contact) between the child and the unknown, Hope is born at the interface between the child and the Future – and you can save this simple definition as well. The future is a construct and a thought; it doesn’t exist in the present and also, it doesn’t exist in reality (the reality only happens in the present). Yet, everyone in the world is obsessed with the future and the lack of control over it. The child will see how his parents are relating with the unknown future (yes, we might say that the future is a subtype of unknown, but I digress) and he will imitate them. Optimistic parents will induce optimism and positive expectations in their children, “faith in their future” as some people like to say. Pessimistic parents, scared parents or, on the contrary, controlling parents, will induce both fear of future and an excessive propensity to control… the uncontrollable… A decent cohort of anxious, avoidant and obsessive patients populate many psychotherapy or psychiatry waiting rooms, and perhaps they should be “thankful” to their parents for “their good guidance”… Actually, there is a well-known connection between anxiety and hope, and it is also known that, when you lose hope, anxiety often vanishes, since the unknown future is often replaced by positive or negative certitudes.

Now, since there is a contact with the future, there must also be a contact with the past. As time passes, the child develops the ability to remember his life around the age of 3, depending on the child. Memory means experience… life-experience. The passing of time means also that what is initially unknown gets transformed into known stuff, and therefore, Doubt becomes Certitude. But… before having a cognitive (rational) experience around the age of 3, the child has an emotional (affective) experience, beginning immediately after his own birth. The ability to have Doubts/Certitudes is a subtype of love that is born at the interface between Contact (yes, again, the Contact) and the emotional legacy from the very first years. If your dog gets beaten several times, it will learn to avoid you even if it doesn’t think a lot; the same goes with a child: by try and error, by punishment and loving soothing, the child learns to have Certitudes about you and your love, but also Doubts about you and your love. Such as, for instance, doubts about your emotional availability, behavioral predictability, and pretty much everything that we know in psychology about attachment patterns. “I always had Doubts about the love of my mother, even if she said the contrary, until one day when I discovered that my fears were true and, from that moment, I had the Certitude that she doesn’t love me”.

Up until now, we covered Contact, Time, Patience (for self & others), Faith, Hope, Doubt and Certitude. All these together mix in various constellations and give birth to the Trust in others and the Confidence in oneself. If the others are predictable, patient, the contact is good, we encounter the unknown and the future with good faith and hope, we can Trust. It is said that “to be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved” and I wholeheartedly agree. Similarly, if we have faith in ourselves, we give ourselves time, patience, we are in contact with our needs in a proper way and we know, for certain, that we can rely on ourselves, we develop Confidence. Sometimes we use the term self-esteem as a replacement for confidence… and it is often the same thing. Poor self-esteem (self-respect, self-love) is the most frequent complaint one hears in a psychotherapy office, something way too general and annoying for the therapist, as a long process of dissection often follows, so as to make this complaint more specific and find what exactly causes “the general feeling of low self-esteem”… Obviously by now, Trust and Confidence have absolutely nothing to do with the rational side of someone, with one’s studies, the university degrees, previous cognitive efforts and so on. For this reasons, we often choose socially unsuitable partners (to put it nicely), weirdoes and rapists, violent drunk husbands and nymphomaniac wives who do not seem to have enough so as to adjust their self-esteem and appease their completely out-of-control animus (masculine side of a woman).

Now, summarizing, it appears that a lot of how love is perceived, felt and ultimately lived in our lives, is shaped by the way the contact is established between our caregivers and us. But our parents do not only provide us with the blessing or, in certain cases, the curse of our emotional constellation. They provide us with the legacy of their familial, cultural, ethnical and national background. They provide us with the Model. When a child is born, he is more or less a virgin terrain, innocent and pure. Then, things get very messy. You hate (hate is an emotion) an Arab or a Jew not because an Arab or a Jew did something to you directly, but because you have taken the Model from your family or your inner circle of friends. You get ideologically parasitized and you can commit murders (or become a suicidal martyr) because your family unconsciously taught you whom to love and whom to hate. You “have been educated” to feel a certain way, something that is sometimes undistinguishable from being brainwashed. Just remember that the Holocaust happened to one of the most rational nations in the world, the Germans; obviously, there wasn’t any trace of reason involved, but only altered perceptions and frenzied emotions. The ability to follow and transmit a Model is at the basis of our die-hard habits and a reason for the difficulty of fundamentally change ourselves (provided that this is still possible after some time).

If we’re going back to the beginning and to the love that is at the root of the abilities discussed above, there are aspects of love that have distinct qualities and are not so much linked to Contact (although everything is rather intertwined in practice). Joy/Enthusiasm is an ability originating from love that is a separate category in itself. Joy is something you feel and joy is something you do. It can be inhibited, repressed, or left free and wild. Children are naturally happy; it’s only after they encounter the world and their parents that they learn to be sad and even depressed, often when they are shamed or abused. Or when their natural Joy is not shared by grumpy or overworked parents (read: frozen or dead inside).

Another stand-alone ability is the one of Attraction/Pleasure. It is not rational, as we cannot say why we are passionate or attracted by a certain hobby or person. We just do it. I just write. I just take photos. I just listen to music. And I don’t know why. Some passions are copied from the members of the family. Gambling or drinking for instance. Or doing drugs. Other passions are discovered spontaneously and are rather universal: the sexual attraction for instance. Although there is a subtle separation between Sexuality and Attraction, they are often taken together, as it is rare to have sex and not be attracted, at least not unconsciously. It is known that disgust and attraction are often the two sides of the same coin, and what seems morally unacceptable, medically dubious and sometimes legally forbidden, is also heavenly enjoyable. Anal sex could be an example.

The ability to experience Attraction gives birth to other two abilities, quite helpful in psychotherapy, always stimulated ad nauseam in every client or patient: Curiosity and Creativity. The impulse of Curiosity cannot be well described in words; it’s a rapture. A child will explore… and there is (almost) nothing we can do about this… although some bitter parents have found “solutions” and “cures” for this “disease”, producing obedient, well-behaved children that are unable to feel anything, “a brick in the wall” as Pink Floyd would say. Creativity is also an obsession, an addiction, something vital, stimulating, having an arousing effect. Think about Picasso who created art far away into his retirement, defying reason, old age or common-sense…

One of the most difficult abilities to grasp is the Unity. It can be understood if we learn to look at a child not only as a powerless being that needs our protection, but also as the wise human being that has travelled millions of years, through countless ancestors, so as to open his eyes into our world now… There is an inner emotional wisdom in every human being, a kind of harmonious common-sense, something transmitted from generation to generation. The human species did not appear some thousands of years ago; we are on Earth for an incredibly long time, and therefore, there is inside us a built-in ability to self-regulate and integrate experience in a balanced way. We instinctively, intuitively, affectively know things. And we tend to mix our abilities into a coherent experience.

Perhaps related to Unity, there is also a (nowadays) problematic ability, the one of Acceptance. Children of different colors of the skin, from different backgrounds, put together, will play. This is something that one needs to witness. Children are color-blind when it comes to ideologies that poison the brains of the adults. They would also be politically-blind if politics would be mentally accessible at their developmental stage. And they wouldn’t care about religion either. Acceptance is deeply emotional… and if you need reasons to accept someone, you’re not accepting them… (and God knows what you’re doing but definitely you’re not in acceptance). Acceptance is based on the awareness that we are together in this thing called life (but again, this is a thought and a judgement). It comes from the perception of the child that there is someone else in front of him, someone with whom he might play and have a good time. And this is nothing else but a manifestation of love… Paradoxically, for the (damaged) adults, Acceptance is one of the most difficult things to achieve in one’s life, as it includes aspects such as the acceptance of oneself (the stupid stuff we did in the past, the stupid stuff we still do, the stupid stuff we will keep doing until we die), the acceptance of others, the acceptance of situations that are beyond our control, the acceptance of the fact that we had little choice in life and others have chosen for us… just to name a few challenges that might arise…

The last ability born out of love is… Love itself, as we commonly identify it. It is known in two versions – friendship and romantic love – and defies any definition I might attempt. Love is something you have or you don’t have. Love is something you feel or you don’t feel. And any attempts from other persons to demand your love or to examine its intensity are laughable, as this is way beyond any form of control (although there are always some folks out there who force themselves to love the others… or to love them more… not to mention those who force others to love them back…).

I wanted to write this article for some years but I needed a lot of focus and energy. We could say that it’s the genealogy of love, but I will keep its final title because it’s the story of love’s development and its branching out into the abilities that some of us value (or treasure) so much. I believe that, fundamentally, love and its derived forms are what makes us human and what makes us withstand the vicissitudes of this life.

It was my pleasure to cover this subject so dear to my heart.

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