Love between Adults Needs to be Earned

Hi M,

Thank you for writing and sharing your thoughts and feelings. Don’t worry about your English. Your English is 100 times better than mine. I have a lot of difficulty in expressing myself in writing. Writing is one of the hardest things for me to do in life. And I apologize for my poor English. I paid a lot of money to professional writers/editors to help me write my book! Thanks for being so understanding.

About unconditional love. Only children need and must have unconditional love and protection no matter what, it’s their birthright and the parents’ obligation to love and protect them. But adults can never be loved unconditionally. You would not love a rapist or dictator. The love between adults needs to be earned. 

The most important thing I can tell you is to trust your feelings about your father and not fall into any illusions he will change. From my experience with people on the internet, most people are stuck in the repressed hatred of the child they once were and unconsciously and compulsively looking for scapegoats or poison containers to temporally alleviate their repressed hatred, a lot of people out there are time bombs, that you never know what might trigger them. If you remind them in any way of their childhood abusers, maybe you just walk, smell, talk, or breathe like them, just that might be enough to set them off. Most people out there are not able to put and feel their intense feelings within the context of their own childhood and will take it out on the triggers that remind them of their own childhood abusers.

It’s understandable the child within you still wants to hold on to the illusion of her father changing and finally giving you the love you needed as a child, but even if he did change and apologized for the damage done to you when you were a defenseless little girl, could never make up for it, just like your boyfriend could not make up for it, even if he stayed home on your birthday and didn’t go to work if he had stayed it would just have helped you to keep these emotions repressed and numbed one more day and by him going to work, it triggered the intense repressed emotions of the child you once were, and by understanding what took place, it enlightened you and not be as emotionally blind, so you can recognize red flags and not get into intimate relationships with people that they will reenact yours or you reenact their own childhood drama. 

No one else in the external world can now make up for what we needed as children, but ourselves. People who were never loved as children will go through life longing for love and this longing will not weaken with age, but instead increase making them more desperate trying to satisfy this need with people symbolizing their parents, especially with their children. The only thing that will free us is to let go of all illusions and feel the pain that we were never loved. As long we are dependent and longing for our parents' love or from people symbolizing them, we will remain stuck in the emotional prison of our childhood reenacting our childhood drama, where we either play the role of mother/father figure over others or we play the role of the child. If you read Alice Miller’s book The Body Never Lies you will know that dependency increases hatred. This is a vicious cycle most parents and children remain stuck forever because parents try to get their childhood needs fulfilled through their children, things their children can never do, and their children remain stuck waiting for their parents or people symbolizing them to fulfill their childhood needs. Once we are adults no one out there can make up for what we needed as children, but never got.

The reason it gets harder to connect to people as we get older is because of people’s lifetime of repressing themselves and with old age being the perfect trigger of childhood fears they become desperate, and like a drowning person they try to hold on to someone, anyone to use as a form of medication to manage those fears and is not really a gender issue. I know women who have just as hard a time connecting with their authentic feelings as men. Maybe some men and some women act out their childhood repression in different ways --they wear different disguises -- and maybe more men have a tendency to wear similar disguises, but the pain and suffering they cause themselves and others is the same. As you say women sabotage other women more and the reason they do, that's because of their own unresolved childhood repression. From my experience, I have found that maybe more women are better at falsifying their feelings giving the impression that are more caring and loving, but they just give the illusion of love and they manipulate the people in their lives, especially their own children with their illusion of love, so they can keep their own repression intact and don’t have to face and feel their own fears, but instead delegate it into their children and others under the disguise of help and the illusion of love. A lot of women and some men have mastered the art of manipulation to perfection.

I agree with you that we are all humans but we are animals as well! And I love my animal side because animals are the best! :-) They are real, they don't wear any masks!!!

I don’t think we need to have our childhood abusers to acknowledge and ask for our forgiveness for us to be free, that is giving them our power, if that were the case I would not be free today, because my older sisters will never be able to really see how damaging they were to their younger sisters and they will never ask for forgiveness, but facing the reality that they will never change and let go of their illusion of love and the false hope they sometimes give us to suck us in. Letting go of all illusions that’s what liberates us.

Good luck and again thank you for writing,

Sylvie