Dear Crystal:

Thank you for your last note to me. I liked reading it.

You wrote: “My heart says please love me”- isn’t it amazing, how simple the heart is? Just love me. Just love me.

And love is not complicated. A child instinctively detects love. It feels good, it feels safe.

Here is where the complication is: when a child is not loved, she can not handle this truth. It is not possible for a child to endure the distress involved in such reality. For the child, time is endless. Living without love means not being taken care of, forever. And that is unthinkable. So the child makes believe, best she can, that she is loved after all.

Making un-love look like love takes complicated thinking, twisting and turning reality so it looks like love. It makes life livable for the child, gives her moments of comfort, moments that are necessary.

As an adult, the heart still longs for love. The heart says: “Just love me”- it knows it wasn’t and isn’t loved. But the head is not untwisted yet, from all the mental acrobatics of making-believe love was there.

anita

Dear Crystal:

You are very welcome, anytime. About the “ton of past traumas that need to come out of the closet”: when you process enough of the core, early trauma (it is a long, gradual, non-linear, patient process), you will not have to process ALL of the traumas, the ton of them. The rest will dissolve by themselves, an emotional understanding here, an emotional understanding there.

anita

* Dear Steve:Looking forward to your own thread-

anita