What’s missing?
We were not taught how to love. We must find how.
How do we relate to love?
The people that most likely loved us were our family. Our parents and grandparents. Our siblings. The people that cared for us, and gave us our first home. The women who bore us, and the men that provided for us.
When we were children, if we were lucky, many of experienced receiving love. If we weren’t lucky, we got mostly pain.
But that’s for another story…
But we were probably never really taught HOW to give love.
At least not the well balanced kind.
We received various kinds of warped love, that came through the constrictions of spirit caused by living a life out of balance with one’s self. The torturous kind of love.
The love that humans try to give when life has hurt them.
The well-meaning, but still somewhat damaging kind of love.
The kind of love we ourselves were unknowingly learning how to give, later in life as adults. To our partners, our children, and our selves.
Dads were conditioned to take on the PROVIDER role, and spent their time working, and taking care of things. The other parent, usually Mom was conditioned to hold the CAREGIVER role. They cleaned, cooked, took care of kids, and the house. If they were lucky.
Later, things shifted so Moms entered the workforce. Sometimes, Mom now ADDED working outside the home to their tasks. They still did all the other work too.
Men were conditioned to not show their emotions. They were discouraged from the caregiving and nurturing roles.
My grandmother told me that one of my granddad’s commanding officers told her in the military that, “Real men don’t carry purses, and real men don’t carry babies.”
My grandparents had 5 kids. 4 boys, 2 years apart each, and then a 5th daughter four years after the last boy. I think my grandmother told me she used to drink a little bit of sherry.
So men grew distant and women grew overwhelmed…
Why can’t he just meet my needs! Why am I the one who doesn’t get a pass on being “not it?” Why am I responsible for so much, and he gets to workout and hang out with his friends? WtF?
This amazing post by Laura Sievers says so much.
And the men grew frustrated by not knowing HOW to meet the women’s needs, because they had been conditioned since birth, NOT to meet the needs of others, but rather to be strong, stoic, and self-reliant.
Men had been put in the #ManBox, as Mark Greene so eloquently puts it in this article about the history of this trend, which proved to be so disastrous for our current times.
People, it’s not just you. The glitch in the matrix goes across the whole system.
The deep disconnect, between who we are told to be, and who we really are inside. It’s at the root of just about every problem we are currently facing as a species today.
It’s all breaking because we were not taught to love
Our broken family structures left our parents as broken people. They became people who learned to love- from parents, who themselves were recipients of the coping mechanisms. The ones we humans so cleverly create.
Anger
Fear
Violence
Frustration
Raised Voices
And so on…
We have been loved by fallible, fragile human beings — who developed compensational strategies in the struggle to relate to our world.
Mom constantly overextends herself, and doesn’t take care of herself in the process. She was taught that this was how to love. So as children, we get love from her that teaches us to sacrifice ourselves for others. If we are lucky.
Dad figured out that it was easier to leave, and disconnect, and let his spirit wither away within him, rather than continuing to fail over and over at the challenge of connecting to his children and wife. So as children, we get love from him that teaches us to disconnect, retreat, and distract ourselves. To never want to feel emotions. To use sex and violence as the only acceptable means of expressing our selves and our emotions. To dissociate. If we are lucky.
Grandpa used to beat your Dad, because he didn’t know how to deal with him in a compassionate, loving, and vulnerable way. There was no Brene Brown around those days to stand as the brave champion of love, courage, and vulnerability. Dad learned to love the way he ended up loving you.
But don’t let me bum you out…
It’s not game over. It’s actually ready player one. But the game is a challenge to all of us. Heart, mind, soul, and everything else.
We are the generation who is tasked with making change. We are the generation that is being asked to help our species move from childhood into adulthood. To start choosing to be responsible for this place we all call home.
If you haven’t watched Sacred-Economics yet, do yourself a favor. Takes a little over 12 minutes to watch this one.
We aren’t special, transformational agents of change for nothing. We have been tasked with raising the morphic resonance field of the people. All the people.
We are being challenged to raise the bar, in the ways that we live, love, and learn.
It’s not that we are individually, special creatures. I believe it’s that we are living at a time in our age where we are being called to create great change.
As John Gorman so eloquently puts it in this poetic piece about identity:
The self is an image. It is a picture. It is not what we’ve done, what we’ve said, or how we feel. It’s deeper than that. It’s below that. And it’s above it.
It’s an unbroken dialogue between the “you” and the “universe.” We absorb, we grow and we experience, we change with the climate yet remain still and unchanging at our deepest depths. All we need to do is let the light in and release. Read the whole piece below if you like.
Are you up for the challenge? Are you ready to learn HOW to love? It is time.
See you on the other side.
Kaia Tingley is a writer, artist, podcaster, digital strategy nerd, and sometimes hot-tempered supernova with a wild, free soul. You can find her on Instagram here or on LinkedIn here.