The Way To Relating, Part 4: Love Versus Possession
Are you possessive? learn the difference between love and possession
This is the 4th article in a series of five discussing natural emotions and their unnatural counterparts. Any time our natural emotions are repressed they create unnatural reactions and responses. The natural emotions are repressed in the majority of people. Our emotions are our gifts, our friends and allies. They are our soul representatives. They represent the world of each person’s private inner life. Because emotions are universal we best relate to each other on the level of the emotions. The best way to have productive communication is to come from our natural emotions. We do not need to become better communicators. We need to be in touch with our natural responses and relate to the other from how we feel. The natural emotions are never violent, threatening, crazy-making or controlling.
Violence, circular fighting, stonewalling, and not listening is what most people call communication. Our first emotions represent our truth. Our secondary emotions represent our defenses. Our first emotions show up in open discussions, our secondary emotions end up in non-productive fighting. Our first emotions allow each partner to be smart and understood. They allow our discussions to grow and for each person to learn more about the other. Our secondary emotions create a right and wrong platform where no one is heard and each person looks crazy. Understanding is halted with the use of the secondary emotions.
This article is going to discuss love and its fixed counterpart, possessiveness. Love is our most consistent and present natural emotion. Love is the first emotion we experience. Love is also our most powerful emotion. When love is allowed to be expressed we feel free within. Love is the natural expression of who we really are, and is the one emotion that brings us all together. When a natural disaster occurs it is love that unites the world. No other emotion has this power. Love unites and branches off into other emotions such as compassion, tolerance, forgiveness, understanding, softness and mutuality.
The emotions are the first way in which preverbal babies communicate. They are dependent upon the emotions of the caregiver to provide them an experience. It is called felt-thought. Babies coo and smile and the caregiver coos and smiles back. This is called mirroring. When we receive mirroring we bond through this emotional sharing. We know we exist. If babies are hungry and they cry, the caregiver will respond to the emotion of hunger, connect, and feed the baby. This is how trust and mutuality are established and love grows. Love grows and trust and mutuality grow. Love is the first and most natural form of communication that allows us to bond with others.
If, as children, we had our emotions mirrored, were made to feel our love was special, we know we exist in the world of love and relationship. If it was ok to express it, receive it without limitation and condition, humiliation, and rejection, love would be experienced as normal, free and unlimited as an emotional state. Love is an emotion that is best experienced when there is giving and receiving. Love is meant to grow when this interaction occurs. Love requires mirroring. If you give to someone there is the joy of seeing the other’s happiness upon receiving, and it feels exhilarating to receive in return. Love can be felt by receiving and through giving. Love’s natural desire is increase. Just like a baby cooing and the mother cooing back, when we give and receive, love can increase. The more love is mirrored the more love will grow. There is no score keeping, no judgment, just mirroring, playfulness and joy. If love is left to be free, love is the most simplistic emotion, the most capable, the most healing, the most bonding, and the easiest, so why then is love so hard?
Most of us have not been raised to be free with our love, and nor did we have consistent or positive mirroring of the emotion growing up. Most of us experienced love to be tied into performance. We were given love based on agreement, negotiations, and a bartering system. We learned there was not enough love that it could run out, so we had better be “good” in order to receive our portion. We had to be sure not to need “too much” so as to not run our quota past its limit. Most of us have been humiliated in our love and our desires for it, we have been told we are needy, that we give too much, take too much, require too much, that we are annoying, or we are not enough. Sometimes we are ignored in our efforts to give and receive love and this tells us we do not exist. There is not a more lonely feeling than to feel like we do not exist. When we are lonely, we are without love. People commit suicide out of loneliness.
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When we have been raised in this type of quota system we can become possessive of love. We get controlling of those we try to be in loving relationships with. We sit impatiently at love’s table waiting for love to come, so we can capture it and maybe make it stay a little longer by sneaking up on it and not letting it out of our sight. We haven’t experienced love to be a consistent emotional experience, so we look to other people to be our love-givers. In doing this, we want to own them and determine who and how they should give love, when and where they give love, and to whom they should express love. We may feel if they express love for someone else that they somehow have given part of our love quota away to that other person. This turns to anger, demands, control, blaming, insecurity and circular fighting. We cannot own another person. People are not possessions.
The purpose of mirroring our babies is to develop in them an unlimited capacity to feel and exist in the emotion of love. When we have love-deficits we are constantly telling people how to love, when to love, how they love wrong, what they need to do to love right, and we begin the score card system. It is equally possessive to be non-sharing of the love you feel because in this instance you are possessive of the emotion of love rather than the person. You will withhold your love based on the goodness or badness of the other. Possessiveness comes in all forms. We give love only if the other ‘deserves’ love. Let me tell you this, everyone deserves love. Not everyone will be the right ‘love’ for you but never mistake that all people deserve love. If you were told in any way that you did not deserve love you are likely to do that same thing to other people. If you did not receive much love as a child you are not likely to receive love as an adult. You may find those who want to give you love to be needy rather than loving.
More songs are written about the loss of love than any other emotion. Cheryl Crow in one of her songs sings “is love the illness and disease the cure.” This is often the experience of love. Love and pain seem to be endlessly intertwined. We cannot control anyone else’s issues with love, how the receive it, perceive it and operate within it. Do they withhold it, over-give it, and are they too needy of it? What if we as partners and individuals could first look at our own issues with how we operate in love, examine what we were taught about love, we could at least begin to see what our holes are and not project them onto the other.
The only way to cure problems in love is to take a close look at what you believe about love, become the kind of love you think you deserve and start to practice that. Instead of looking to the other to meet your love demands you need to take responsibility yourself to be more loving, and loving in the true sense of the word. To be possessive is not loving. It is suffocating, controlling, demanding and love-killing. If you are possessive of the love you think you embody then you will be unavailable, demeaning to the other, continue to humiliate the other and the way they love. This is emotional abuse. To be possessive of this great love you think you possess simply gives you a big ego. Your love is not better than anyone else’s. Love is love. If you think your love is to be guarded and only given for the other person being what you think they should be then I will tell you what you are feeling is not love but possession. Most of us are totally confused when it comes to love and this is the emotion that makes us feel the most empty, abandoned and alone in the world.
Solution: Step back, examine and reflect on how you love, what you do with your love, and how you can become better in your relationship with yourself. There is nothing sexier than a person who is self-assured. When one is self-assured one has a quiet dignity about them. There is no ego, and there is no submission. The only way to be healthy in love is to undo what you were taught about love as a child and become the vision of the loving person that you demand in the other.
Little Life Lesson: If you are not ‘good at love’ study the subject. Remember it is not what you do once in a while that makes the difference, it is consistent action and study that produces true and lasting change. If you ever want to get better at something, do the work, the research and change yourself. To be loving and self-assured is the way of love. Love must come from within you before you can receive it from the other.