TRANSCRIPT
Today the subject I want to talk about is love. Healthy love versus unhealthy love. I see love as running on a real extreme, from one end being really unhealthy to the other end being quite healthy. And how do we define what this range is and what are these poles?
So to me, the thing that really defines whether love is healthy or unhealthy is what’s behind it. And from what I’ve seen, what’s behind it is the degree of unresolved childhood need, basically traumas that block someone from getting their needs met as a kid. And those needs still play out in their adult life, and they play out a lot through this lens called love.
Now, the really extreme of unhealthy is when love plays out completely as need. And people really don’t see the difference a lot. They say, “I love you,” but what they’re really saying is “I need you.” Some other ways that they can say “I need you” is “I’m in love with you.” That’s a real extreme of this need feeling, this belief that someone else is there to meet my needs. I call this parental rescue fantasy.
So really what it is, is it’s projecting the needs that we never got met by our parents when we were a child because they failed us in so many ways. And this is so common. This happens with everyone to some degree. But these needs didn’t get resolved, didn’t get work done, didn’t get healed, didn’t get grieved through any sort of healing process. So they live on in the adult. They live on exactly like they always did, but they get separated from the person’s awareness that they actually are unresolved childhood needs. And they feel very present today.
And so they get projected onto a person, and this person becomes a loved object. And this person’s job, according to the person who’s feeling the really unhealthy needy love, is that this person’s job is to take care of me, to make me feel good, to resolve my needs, to fill that deep, deep hole that’s inside of me.
And when the person gets this feeling going of being in love, this feeling of really heavy need, need, need called love, it’s a great feeling for a lot of people because it’s really a fantasy. And it’s a strong fantasy. And the fantasy is that this person actually is going to do it. This person is finally going to meet my childhood needs, and it’s the most tantalizing, wonderful feeling. It’s gonna weigh like the ultimate addiction. And this is why it’s like everybody wants to be in love. Every song, all these songs, oh, it’s all about being in love and in love and magic and flowers and romance. And it does feel good.
The problem is underneath it, it’s based on a lot of unhealthiness, and this can lead to a lot of problems. First of all, it can be very fragile. What if this person doesn’t really love you back? What if this person doesn’t want to meet your needs? What if this person is incapable of meeting your needs? And basically, the problem is pretty much anybody out there is incapable of meeting your unresolved childhood needs. It’s our job to heal our own childhood needs, but it’s really hard.
So what happens if the other person isn’t capable, or you start to realize, you start to figure it out, or the other person? So you may be in love with me, but I don’t like you that way. I’m not into it at all. It can be crushing. It can be devastating. It can be like everything can collapse. It can be horrible, and it can be very, very, very painful because what happens is all those childhood needs are up there, and they’ve erupted, and yet they’re not being met. And it can feel like being a rejected kid all over again.
But often people are very, very disconnected with what happened to them as children, so they don’t really say, “Oh, it’s like being a kid all over again.” All they know is they just feel horrible, and it feels like very much in the here and the now, just like the world’s worst abandonment.
Now what happens if the other person has that same feeling of needy “I love you” back, that unhealthy need back? Then it can become a mutual delusion, and that can become an incredible love romance, this wonderful feeling. Oh my god, it’s just magic! And these two people are so massively in love with each other. But really what it is, is they’re both projecting their unresolved childhood need onto each other.
Then it can get really wild. That’s like a mutual delusion, a shared delusion, and it can seem like the most amazing thing. In many ways, it’s like a cultural ideal that we have of being in love in this way and that person’s going to meet my needs and I’m going to meet their needs, and it goes on and on. But often it can get pretty ugly and pretty quickly if things don’t go right, especially when you start mixing things like sex in there and then having children, things like this. It can become very, very complicated, and often there can be lots and lots of feelings of betrayal.
Another thing that often happens is when there’s that feeling of this mutual feeling of being in love that’s really both based on unresolved childhood need, what if one person falls out of love and the other person stays in it? Ooh, the feelings of abandonment and betrayal can be so, so horrible. Really underneath it, it’s like, “Wait a second, I thought you committed to meeting my unconscious unresolved childhood needs.” This is what’s going on deep down in the person, and now you’re not doing it. People can become very angry, very hostile, very enraged. What about all this love that they supposedly felt, all this wonderful warm caring? You’re the most wonderful person in my life, and suddenly very quickly it can turn into anger and rage and even hatred, violence sometimes.
Now some other things that can go along with this unresolved need is this feeling of love at first sight. It can happen very, very quickly with some people. Oh, they just quickly project this love onto sometimes a complete stranger. In the really extreme situations, it can be a stranger on television or a famous person. People can feel like, “Oh my god, I’m so in love with them.” And when it really can get really kind of super disturbed is when people get into the delusion of the fantasy that that person actually loves them back.
And a lot of people in that state of being really in love can become very, very entitled. They can feel like, “I deserve this person to love me. This is their job, is to do that.” And sometimes people actually project that onto complete strangers. More commonly, they project that sense of entitlement onto people who they’re closer with. This is more normal, but certainly it can go in the extreme way, like stalkers who feel like, “Oh god, that person really owes me. I love them, and they love me, and we have a relationship, and their job is to love me,” whereas the reality, the other person may not even know them at all.
So that’s one side. What is the other pole? The other pole, totally at the other extreme, is when the person has healed their childhood need, and their love is coming from a place of being centered, being much more of a real true self within themselves and not looking for someone else to give them what they don’t have. Instead, they already have it. They do have their needs met from within, and what they’re doing is actually loving themselves first and then loving someone else as a surplus.
So when they say “I love you,” or when they behave in a way that even better shows that they love another person, what they’re doing is nurturing someone else, nurturing the other person’s growth process, their healing process. They’re caring about them. They’re thinking about the other person’s well-being as equal to their own well-being.
Another thing about real love is that it’s much more stable. It’s not so fragile. It’s not going to burst so easily, and it also grows over time. It doesn’t take that risk of crashing and burning when someone else doesn’t meet your needs. It’s actually much more strong. It can withstand a lot of painful stuff. Also, since it’s not coming with an expectation of the other person giving, it’s much more freely given. It’s much more spontaneous and real.
It doesn’t just come instantaneously. It takes time to develop. It’s not just a love at first sight. A lot of times, from what I’ve seen, people don’t even necessarily realize they love someone until, whoa, it sort of hits them. And it can take a real while to realize, “How I really love that person.”
Now, an interesting thing that I’ve observed is that people, myself included, can have both of these types of love sometimes, rather extreme versions, going on at the same time. Which goes to show that we can have different sides of ourself that are at different places in a healing process. There can be very needy sides of us, and there can be much more stable and loving sides of us—real loving sides of us.
And what I’ve seen sometimes is people can be really, really in love with someone, and in that sort of clingy, needy way that they want that other person to love them. But underneath it, they actually, other parts of them, really do love that person. And it can be kind of confusing.
So this brings us to our job as adults: to work to heal ourselves, to figure out what are our unresolved childhood needs, and to turn our surplus parts of ourselves, our healthy parts of ourselves, toward ourselves, toward the unhealthy parts. And to try to work out how to nurture ourselves as opposed to turning it out, expecting someone else to do it, and creating all this drama and chaos that often goes along with the unhealthy love.
And from what I see, it’s hard. It’s really hard to turn that love toward our unresolved needy sides, but it’s possible.
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You.