THIS Is Not Love. But What Is?

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I’ve done many hard things in my life- medical school, losing both of my parents far too young, raising a child and helping her fly the nest, writing 8 books…but nothing in my life has been as hard as trying to get love right and make it a practice worth living for. I’ve learned the hard way all the things that love is not. Love is not transactional. It’s not a hall pass to let someone else get away with mistreating you. It’s not what they show you in the rom com movies that end just as the thing I’m calling love might have a chance to actually get started.

I wrote a whole essay called THIS Is Not Love about what love is not. But the quest to figure out a trauma-informed lens on love has been the work of a lifetime for me.

A friend was telling me about how someone she loves treats her. Her stories sounded painful and brutalizing, even abusive. I wondered why she tolerated such apparent disrespect. She was describing someone who obviously doesn’t appreciate the gift of this friend of mine, who is such a love bomb. When I asked her why she didn’t give herself the gift of distancing herself from this person and make space in her life for someone who treated her with more affection, appreciation, and care, she said, “But he loves me.”

I looked her squarely in the eye and said one of the most confronting and painful things I’ve ever said to her. “Sweetheart, THIS is not love. This is abuse. You need to learn to recognize the difference.”

I realized as I said it that this was good advice for myself because I sometimes mistake neglect or abuse for love like my friend does, and so—I suspect—do you.

Let me give you a few examples of what I mean.

What Love Isn’t

A mother can’t handle her colicky baby, so she gives him away when he’s six months old to his grandmother, who loves him with all his heart until the mother takes him back at five years old and proceeds to let her boyfriend beat the shit out of him until he’s nine years old, when the mother bypasses Grandma and drops him at an orphanage door, never to return. When this child confronts his mother as a teenager, she tells him, “But I still love you.”

No. THIS is not love. This is abuse. This is mental illness or addiction, maybe. But this is definitely NOT love.

A father works all the time in the hospital, clocking in endless hours in the emergency room. In his free time, he flies his airplane, talks to strangers on his “ham” radio, and plays with his gadgets. When his little girl begs for some of the limited time he could have given her when he wasn’t at the hospital, he pushes her away, more interested in his airplanes and technology than in showing up for his baby. When she comes down with a cold and seeks him out, wanting comfort from her Daddy, he tells her there are sicker children in the hospital and leaves her crying and neglected. When she begs him to hold her, he refuses, but he says, “I love you, darling.”

THIS is not love either. This is neglect.

A mother scrutinizes her daughter constantly, judging and criticizing every single thing she does. Her daughter can never please her. Her nose is too big and her mother insists she needs a nose job. Her mother tells her that her imaginative ideas are stupid and not aligned with what’s in the Bible. Her singing voice isn’t quite as good as it should be. She needs to practice more. No matter how many straight A report cards she earns, no matter how pretty she tries to look, no matter how many solos she sings in the church choir or how many of the 10 Commandments she fiercely obeys, her mother always finds fault with her. As a high schooler, the girl doesn’t drink, use drugs, or experiment with her sexuality the way her friends do, because her mother has warned her that such things will result in her getting kicked out of the house. Even still, she has to come upstairs after her 11 o’clock curfew (her friends all get to stay out until after midnight) to breathe on her mother in order to prove that she hasn’t been drinking, even though she hasn’t ever had one single drop of alcohol. As the enraged, mistrusted but trustworthy teen turns to go to bed, her mother says, “I love you.”

THIS is not love either. This is control, manipulation, and perfectionism. This is why girls get eating disorders and attempt suicide or become addicts, because obsessive, perfectionistic mothers micromanage every detail of their life and these girls are never good enough in their mother’s eyes.

A man falls in “love” with a woman, insisting that she is the love of his life, showering her with attention and gifts, flattering her 24/7, but he smothers her with the hungry ghost of his neediness. She tries to set boundaries, to protect her sovereignty and avoid the hook he is offering her into the Narcissus/Echo dance. When she triggers his childhood trauma by refusing to accept the hook, he attacks her in a fit of jealousy, demanding that she make him stop feeling the pain he’s feeling. He keeps repeating, “I love you. I love you. Can’t you see I love you?” When she breaks up with him because she’s hurting, but she asks him to stay part of the circle of love, to join the family and bring the kids for Thanksgiving and Christmas, to stay her friend, he disappears, instantly transferring all of his attention and love onto another woman he just met. He stops returning the phone calls of the woman he allegedly loved.

LOVE does not do this. He did not love her. He was using “I love you” as a weapon, and love does not use itself as an act of war.

Don’t Confuse Love & Abuse

When our parents treat us abusively and then tack on “I love you,” they confuse our young, influential, easily programmable minds. The subconscious mind learns a messed up program—when someone treats you badly, they love you. The child fails to install the healthy program that says “Move away from abusive behavior.” A child will learn not to touch a hot stove after getting burned, but you will not learn to move away from people that will burn you if your parents installed a toxic program, and you conflate abuse with love. This damaging pattern will play out for your entire life if you don’t delete the program and install a new, healthier understanding of what love is and what love is not. This means facing what can be a painful realization—that some of the people you care about do not actually love you, not because they’re bad people but because they don’t know how to love (usually because they’ve been traumatized themselves).

Children who are abused in this way grow up confused about love, and they tend to repeat the mistakes of their parents, treating people disrespectfully, neglectfully, or even abusively and then covering up the shame they inevitably feel with a harmful Band-Aid of “I love you.” Or they’re vulnerable to others who do this.

The boy whose mother put him in the orphanage grows up, falls for a girl, becomes her lover, and then abandons her with no explanation. “But I love you,” he says, as if to reassure her that it’s not her fault.

The little girl whose Daddy neglected her grows up to expect neglect from men who supposedly love her, so when her lover leaves her without any explanation about why he’s abandoning her, she clings to his words, “But I love you,” not realizing that love doesn’t just walk away without any explanation.

The girl whose mother scrutinized her learns to hate herself, to judge herself, to scrutinize herself mercilessly. So she does the same to the men she loves, adding at the end of her criticism, “I love you.” Because she cannot love her imperfect self, she cannot possibly love anyone else.

And so it goes as we break each others hearts—over and over and over—in the name of “I love you.” We know not what we do. This is not an excuse to shame ourselves or judge someone else. This is an opportunity for compassion, for understanding, for seeing what is love and what is not love with clear-seeing. It is an opportunity to reckon with our relationship to love—and to one another.

It’s no wonder we’re confused about love, given all the romantic comedies, tortured “love” songs, and mixed messages about love we’re given by our culture, our parents, and each other. We have had so few role models of what actual love is.

Please Stop Blaspheming Love

A while back, when I was dancing with dance church, I was dancing with someone I didn’t know, a man with strong, loving, powerful masculine energy, someone who I felt like I could fully surrender into in the dance. Perhaps it was the safety evoked by his groundedness that allowed me to let go, but what transpired took me by surprise. Something ripped through my body when I let go like that—a fury that thrust me wildly across the dance floor, flinging arms and legs, rage coursing through me like Jesus turning over the merchant tables in the temples, howling, “Not in my Father’s house!” What moved through me was a mantra—THIS is not love. THIS is not love. THIS is not love. Everything that was not love was coursing through me, boiling and roiling inside of me, then exploding like the Balinese volcano I hiked last year, releasing into the Open Floor, pouring through me like a waterfall of lava and nearly flooding me with the intensity of emotion I experienced in a very embodied way.

Scenes of abuse flashed through my consciousness as I danced, as if I were watching a slide show of trauma.

Immature parenting that messes up innocent children because they’re not vulnerable enough to admit their mistakes or go to therapy—THIS is not love.

Self-absorbed narcissists who use and abuse people who care about them and then throw them the bone of “I love you,” THIS is not love.

Passive-aggressive, manipulative co-dependents who give until they’re depleted, sick, and resentful and rationalize their overfunctioning as “I’m so spiritual and loving”—THIS is not love.

Our polarizing political situation, which casts people on the opposite side of the political divide as “other” and therefore dehumanizes them as “less than”—THIS is not love.

The silencing of women when they say #MeToo—THIS is not love.

Donald Trump doing pretty much everything he’s doing right now- THIS is not love.

To call such disrespectful, divisive, neglectful, and abusive behavior “LOVE” is to blaspheme love.

Make no mistake about it, dear ones. LOVE WILL NOT TOLERATE BEING BLASPHEMED ANY LONGER.

What if we just stop saying “I love you” when we really want to say something more honest, like “I feel shame” or “I just made a mistake” or “I’m really angry at you right now but I’m afraid to confront you” or “I love you, but I hate what you just did.” Loving someone doesn’t mean you won’t screw up. The violation of love doesn’t negate the love that might be real. But don’t defile something as sacred as love by saying “I love you” when you’ve done something unloving or when someone else is not demonstrating love to you.

Love is a feeling, but love is also a collage of actions. If someone says “I love you” but their actions are not consistent with their declaration, trust the actions more than the words. Words are easy. Actions put skin in the game. When someone who is treating me badly tries to silver line the painful behavior with “I love you,” my response is, “Show me, don’t tell me.” We all have different love languages, but if someone’s love language doesn’t include loving, respectful, considerate, mature behavior, it’s not really love.

So…What IS Love?

I have exciting news. My partner Jeff Rediger and I just turned in the first draft of our new book about optimizing physical health issues by rebalancing unbalanced relationships! We'll be previewing some of our cutting edge, previously unreleased ideas on Monday in our very first inaugural session of LOVE SCHOOL, a Zoom continuity program gathering where we can take some of the conversations we’re having here on Substack and bring them to life on Zoom! I would LOVE to see some of you, so please join us.

Learn more and join LOVE SCHOOL here.

It takes a village to live a love-filled life. This Internal Family Systems practice group focuses on healing relational trauma, improving relational skills, easing loneliness, supporting one another around vulnerable relationship struggles, writing, and having real, honest conversation about the challenges trauma survivors wrestle with in our relationships.

We're also going to have some fun! Times are hard right now, and we need to find safe, brave, creative spaces for healing, spirituality, growth, and community. This will be an ongoing continuity program, so we'll have some time to get to know one another, hear each other's stories, rumble with our relationships, get down and dirty (with good boundaries!) around the issues we struggle with, and learn how to have more joy, more depth, more pleasure, more intimacy, more healing, more fairness, more play, and more fun in our relationships, not just romantic ones, but with our kids, our friends, our colleagues, our neighbors, and each other.

Each 2 hour Zoom session will include:

PSYCHOEDUCATION
A brief lesson from Lissa Rankin, or a guest facilitator to help you understand Internal Family Systems (IFS), relational trauma, spiritual bypassing recovery, attachment theory, healthy boundaries, dissociation, narcissism and codependence, cult recovery, polyvagal theory, the art of authentic apology, non-bypassing forgiveness, healthy rupture and repair, how to fight right, and other psycho-education that might help you better understand what’s happening in your relationships

IFS GUIDED PRACTICE
A guided IFS practice to help you go inside and find out how your parts are feeling about your relationships and what your parts need from you and from the community of practice to show up more authentically in your relationships and in life

WRITING & ART
Each session, you’ll be offered at least one creative prompt to help you write, make art, compose a song or otherwise creatively express yourself regarding whatever arises in your relational healing journey

WITNESSING, MIRRORING & VALIDATING
Trauma survivors and those who love them often suffer from a paucity of positive validation, active listening, and supportive feedback. LOVE SCHOOL will give you the opportunity to participate in group shares to help you normalize (and depersonalize, since so much of what’s hard isn’t about you) what you’re going through.

GET YOUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED
Each session has a Q&A and spot coaching section. Questions will be often answered in the following sessions or in our Facebook group.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION
Join breakout groups with your peers to share what’s coming up for you. Breakout groups follow a safe protocol that celebrates your presence and contribution. Breakout groups are always optional.

MOVE, BABY!
Song, dance, meditation, readings or movement practice to help the community create a unified field of heart and brain coherence that activates the healing journey;

I can't wait to get this started! I hope to see you on Monday.

Join LOVE SCHOOL here. And if you know someone who might want to be part of this conversation, please invite them!

I’d love to hear what IS or IS NOT love for you, dear ones. Share your reflections please!