Living in the COVID World ... and Beyond #80: Love?

I love you. 

Do I love you?   Do you love me?

These are big questions.

Some, maybe most of the answer, goes back to our early childhoods.   What was your early childhood like in relationship to love?

In my early life, you could say that love was expressed in very practical ways.   I was fed and bathed.   My material needs were all provided.   There was no physical violence.   This all sounds pretty good compared to many other people’s stories that I have heard.   However, I don’t have any memory of anyone saying to me: “I love you.”   Not my parents or my grandparents.  Maybe it was just assumed but the absence of the communication created a void.  I knew that people were concerned about me and wanted things to go well for me, but I did not grow with the feeling that I was loved, with the feeling that I was warmly cared about just for being me.  I certainly did not feel that I was loved unconditionally, and it is not even clear that I felt like I was loved under certain conditions.   I felt accepted … but love is something deeper than that.   Likely because of that void, I also did not communicate that I loved people.  I don’t remember ever telling my parents that I loved them when I was growing up.  

Since my teenage years, I have been on a journey of personal growth.  One aspect of that journey has been becoming connected to the reality that I love people and am loved by others.   It is abundantly clear to me now.   And I can go back and look at my childhood and find evidence of the love back there too.

This is important work to do.  It seems like far too many of us struggle with debates in our minds about whether we are loved.   Many of us struggle to know that we love ourselves and for some of us, we carry that further into self-hatred.

I recently came across an interesting website, “Letters from Love with Elizabeth Gilbert.”   (https://elizabethgilbert.substack.com)  I recognized her name and maybe you do too – she is the author of Eat Pray Love.   Anyway, Gilbert challenges us to write letters to ourselves from the position of love.   She writes:  “I believe there is an ocean of warm, affectionate, and outrageously unconditional love available to us all — and that it is conveniently accessible from within. I don’t believe anyone is excluded from this ocean of love; it is only a question of learning how to hear it, how to feel it, how to trust it.”   She asks us this question: “Dear Love – What would you have me know today?”  And then let yourself write the letter to yourself as it is coming from Love.   On her website there are examples of letters from many people (including famous people).    The idea is to tap into what the spirit of unconditional love would tell you.

I have now done this a few times and found it useful for myself.

I encourage you to check out the website and give it a try.

I love you.