This thing we call love is formed and affected by multiple factors. We watch romantic movies, we listen to love songs, we hear fairytales. While the portrayals of love in movies and songs shape our expectations, the most lasting and deeply embedded ideas about love come from our childhood experiences. To understand our patterns in love, we must go to the beginning, our childhood.
Family is where we first learn what love is and how it feels to be loved. We watch our parents interact with each other, or with their partners, and unconsciously we start to realize that "ah okay, that's what love is." But our parents sometimes are not the best people to learn about love, even if they have the best intentions for each other. As children, we are fragile and vulnerable, and we should naturally expect to be loved and cared for. When love and care are absent, plus we experience neglect and/or abuse, trauma happens.
When our traumas are not healed, our ideas of love that we got from our childhood are not challenged, we find ourselves in relationships in which we experience over and over what was familiar in our childhood rather that what is healthy now. If we have experienced or witnessed abuse growing up, we start to associate abuse with love. If we were neglected, we associate neglect with love. Normal, healthy behavior does not stir the same level of emotional excitement that these patterns do.
One way to understand how trauma keeps us stuck in these patterns is through the lens of Internal Family Systems (IFS). According to IFS, a therapeutic model that views the mind as made up of different 'parts', suggests that we all have parts, and one of the key parts is called the protector. The task of the protector is to protect us from getting hurt. And when we find ourselves in situations in which we are hurt, protectors take over. These protectors, our little guardians, do their best to keep us in our comfort zone, clinging to what is familiar to prevent further hurt. They even create these little stories, echoing from the speakers that are in the prison of our mind. And when we hear the same slogan every day, the world starts to mirror itself back to us.
It is not our fault that we experienced traumatic events, but we have the choice. Freedom only awaits us when we start to parent ourselves, showing up to ourselves in ways our family didn't, nor did our romantic partners.
It often takes years of therapy, but therapy itself is not enough. Healing from these patterns and showing up for ourselves often requires more than external support. No matter how much therapy or meditation we have experienced, even pioneers in the spiritual and therapeutic worlds check in with themselves daily, to see which part of them is present and which story is playing in their mind. Just like how we can quickly have decaying teeth if we don't brush them, our soul needs daily brushing as well, in the form of reminders. That's when we start to heal, that's when we start to love.