Got love?

[Lupita]

Everybody talks about love. We are humans. We cant do something we have not been taught to. Everything we do is learned. Unless it is something natural like reproduction or eating or physiological needs.
The point is according to Einstein nothing cant be made from nothing. A fat woman cannot say I do not know why I am fat, I do not eat. That is impossible. 2+2=4. If you eat 1500 calories and sit all day long, in an office, on the coach if you do not have to work, watch TV, etc. You are going to get fat. In order for a person not to get fat has to eat the same amount that consumes. The point is, if you did not receive love, you do not have love to give. You will be able to give love unless somebody gave it to you. Like consolation. I never received consolation in my life, and when somebody is suffering, even if I am sympathetic with the person, I do not know what to say. I was not taught to give consolation. Here I am learning some literacy, like I am so sorry for your pain, I hear you, I know what you feel, I have been there, etc. The point, how can you be expected to give something you do not have? To give something, you have to have it first, to be able to give it.
The worst thing is that love is like the bank. Banks loan money to people who have money, properties, etc. Banks do not loan money to people who do not have a way to pay back. In other words, to people who most need it. Have you been rejected a credit card application? I was in my first year in the USA. No credit history. And god I needed so much to have a credit card. Now, I have tones of offers. I do not need it anymore. I want to get rid of the one credit card I have.  Well, same with love, if you need love, nobody wants to be with you. If you are bubbling and joyful, and full of love everybody wants to be with you. But how can you have something you do not have? Like the banks, and lenders. If you need money they wont give it to you. If you need love nobody wants to be with you.

[CB123]

The point is, if you did not receive love, you do not have love to give. You will be able to give love unless somebody gave it to you. Like consolation.

I know you truly believe this, Lupita.  I don't know if it will help, but you should know that even though this is a truth that you have owned, it may not be true truth.

There are very few people who have received no love at all in their lives.  Perhaps those people who have not are as emotionally crippled as you describe here.  I think that these emotional skills can be learned many ways though.  Just as some Mexican people learn to speak another language in classrooms, and some because of their workplace, and others from watching TV and others from their friends, and some learn very young and others learn when much older--so you can learn the emotional skills in all kinds of ways.

I just know too many people who have grown up in very hard situations and who have loved me very much.  Not perfectly.  And I have known people who grew up in much easier places--doted on, even--who were very hateful.  I think, Lupita, that what you receive from others might make it harder or easier to love.  But in the long run, I think you choose to love. 

I hope that knowing that there is another truth available, Lupita, will give you the courage to search for it.

Love,
CB 

[Lupita]

If I understand what you say, I have a pile of dishes to wash from all week of semester exams and grading papers. I do not want to wash them. I force my self to wash them. I will "choose" to wash them because worms will grow there if I dont.

Or when a kindergarden student does something bad and you make him appologize to the other student. They are forced to do it. You see the face, they do not want. I have seem Mr. V last year make a student appologize to another teacher for being thisrespectful. You could see obeviously there was no remource.

I dont know if I understand.

[Lupita]

I believe you can choose actiosn, but not feelings. You can try to control your thoughts and thgough that your feelings, thoughts produce feelings, but I do not believe you can choose feelings.

I choose to keep writing to my mother because I do not want to abandone her. I believe that I will protect my slef some how but I cannot abandone my mother, so I keep writing. I choose to do that. I choose no to do anything against the people I dislike, just pray for a change. But the feeling?

I guess I do not understand.

[Hopalong]

Would it help to start with love you know you feel, and then extrapolate, Lupita?

For example, the love you feel for your son.
If you took that feeling, took some time to sit with it...

and then intentionally turn it around (like a searchlight) and shine it back into yourself. Your loneliness.

Can you take your own love, and turn it into yourself?
For five minutes each day of your vacation?

Maybe for the first few days nothing would happen, you won't "get" it.
But maybe if you keep doing it, a meditation like this, it will change.

I think a flash of love (not needy desperation, but affection/delight/compassion love) for yourself, is what you need to begin.

Hoping for you,
Hops

[Ami]

Lupita,
 That is a really good question--very logical . I sense you having a feeling of an ocean of emptiness(no love) and your question is a cry from it's depths
  I would say that there are two answers. One is that God can send us people(seemimgly out of the blue--- to love us). That is simply a Divine gift ,which cannot be controlled.but we can be open to it.I bet that you have had this in your life. Am I correct? There are some people ,in the world, who are filled with love and WANT  to give it to others unselfishly. I have had many,many examples of this .My friend ,Maria,is one.She loves me in a sweet ,unconditional way b/c SHE is filled with love and  gives it out.
 The other way is to really, really get God's love in your heart. To me, Laura is an example of that(IMO). Laura is an example of both ways(IMO)
  To me, when I see the difference in Laura , I KNOW that God's love is real b/c she went from a caterpillar(sorry,Laura-lol)  to a beautiful butterfly(IMO)
                                          Ami

PS  Laura ----I am still a catepillar (lol)

[Lupita]

Well, the EDD emotional deprivation disorder, says that you have to experience to be loved unconditionally to be able to heal.
Still, you need to have something to give it. Somebody has to love you.
I love my son. I did not need anybody to teach me how to love my son. But that comes natural. Is part of nature, animals protect their puppies. Try to get close to an animal who recently had babies, they will bite you. Loving your son is not an effort.
Some mothers are abnormal and never develop attachement with their babies, some drown them in the tobe like that Jessica who killed six children, or that other woman who put them in a car and threw them to a lake, or like N mothers who never love anybody.

Anyway, still I insist, you have to have something first to be able to give it.

That thing of you choose to love, you choose to do things. Feeling is a different matter.

[Lupita]

I think I know the secret. When you are welcome in to this world, you are going to love others. When you are not welcome in to this world, you will feel an emptiness.

I biggest mistake was to be born. I was not welcome in to the world.

There is where the problem is. In your birth.

I do believe, there, is where the secret rests. Your birth. And it will determine the rest of your life.

[Certain Hope]

Dear Lupita,

I think you're right about the need for unconditional love.
I had no idea what genuine love even was until once I realized what a self-occupied bitch I could be and how much forgiveness I needed.
That's why I believe that the person who knows how much she's been forgiven is the one who can love alot.

With love,
Carolyn

[Lupita]

People who don't feel unconditionally loved are desperate and will do almost anything to eliminate the pain of their emptiness. Unfortunately, as they struggle to get the things that give them temporary relief - approval, money, sex, power, and so on - their behavior often has a negative effect on the people around them, including you. But that is not their first intent. Other people hurt us only because they're reacting badly to the pain of feeling unloved and alone. When we truly understand that, our feelings toward people, and our relationships with them, will change dramatically.
Without Real Love, we feel like we're drowning all the time. In that condition, almost everything seems threatening to us, even the most innocent behaviors. When people get angry or criticize us, we don't see them as drowning and protecting themselves. We become afraid, defensive, and angry, and we respond by using behaviors that may hurt them. Naturally, they react by protecting themselves and hurting us with even greater intensity, and until we understand that Real Love is the solution, we can only perpetuate this cycle of self-protection and injury.
Most relationships fail because we become

[Lupita]

Why do so many patients fail to respond to psychiatric therapy? Because not all disorders are caused by the repression of emotions. The authors have shown convincingly that a specific syndrome develops when a person has been deprived of affirming love. Analytic or solely cognitive or behavioral therapies do not bring lasting healing, or are of no avail in these unaffirmed persons, since they have never repressed their feelings. Anti-depressants, shock therapy, or other therapeutic interventions often only worsen their suffering. What the unaffirmed person needs is affirmation therapy, which entails far more than simply giving "T.L.C." (Tender Loving Care). Rather, this therapy involves the healing of the whole person -- body, mind and spirit. Recognizing emotional deprivation disorder is the first step in correcting, through affirmation, many grave individual and global ills. Authentic affirmation brings about peace, self-confidence and joy.

[Hopalong]

Hi Lupita,
What I meant with starting with the love you feel for your son was that in that, you do already have an internal model of how it might feel to love yourself. I think you just haven't touched it yet. So you don't experience it as real.

What I think it takes while you search for other sources (such as the wise book you're reading, wise friends, a compassionate counselor), is an act of the imagination.

I'm not saying you can simply mentally say, I love myself. I think you need to fake it first. So I was imagining a mental exercise you could practive every day. I believe that in going through the motions of that meditation -- thinking of your kindest, most compassionate love for your son, then imagining turning that beam of outward-directed love around like a flashlight, and aiming it at your own chest -- if you repeat it and repeat it, you will begin to feel it.

I know you need the unconditional love of others too. So do I. But I believe we still have the raw material of self-love inside -- even when our mothers are not capable of love. You just haven't experienced the alchemy yet. That's why I think a meditation like that, which is an action, a practice, not an intellectual thing, might possibly help.

Sometimes when I am offered some new way to heal my pain, I will ask myself, what do I have to lose? When I describe this to you I am also talking to myself. Because I need to re-experience it, and do it intentionally, and remind myself over and over that I have this choice.

Hope that made some sense. But either way, I'm sending you love.

Hops

[Ami]

Dear Lupita,
 This simple thought 'hit " me. It might be dumb,but often the most helpful things can appear 'silly. If I met "me" at a party( as another person),I would love myself, honor myself and treat myself well. SO why don't I just do it to me?Do you understand what I am saying, Lupita.
  It is a  thought that just hit me ,so I thought I would share it. The bottom line in it is that we are JUST as important as anyone else. Also, we all share the same set of emotions ,as humans--good and bad.
 We,as abused people distorted  our perceptions of ourselves to see others as good and ourselves as  bad.
  Truth is the healer,but it is slow. I am going slowly BUT I am going.You are going forward,too ,Lupita.          Ami
 

[Lupita]

Deep within us all is the need to love our parents. We need to know that above all else our parents love us. Without this, there is a ‘soul emptiness’, a disconnection from our selves.We all need our childhood memories of love. Without them we feel incomplete.
Just as childhood memories of love are a part of who we are, and their absence leaves us with a sense of being incomplete, empty.
That beautiful, talented, brilliant child that you were has been smothered and retarded by mis-information, humiliation, restrictions, criticism and boredom. Our parents, schools, the world, teach us a lot about failure, comparison, unfairness and quite often cruelty. For many people school and childhood are the original sources of self-doubt. Many people have never known such cruelty and injustice as  found during school years.

As many people say if you do not like this compost it, I got this reaadings and composted them. Just a couple of parragrphs from an article by Sonya Green.

[Lupita]

Self-esteem is all about how much we feel valued, loved, accepted, and thought well of by others — and how much we value, love, and accept ourselves. People with healthy self-esteem are able to feel good about themselves, appreciate their own worth, and take pride in their abilities, skills, and accomplishments. People with low self-esteem may feel as if no one will like them or accept them or that they can't do well in anything.
Parents, teachers, and other authority figures influence the ideas we develop about ourselves — particularly when we are little kids. If parents spend more time criticizing than praising a child, it can be harder for a kid to develop good self-esteem. Because teens are still forming their own values and beliefs, it's easy to build self-image around what a parent, coach, or other person says.

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