By: Lawrence S. Freundlich
You always hurt the one you love
By Allan Roberts and Doris Fisher – 1944
The one you shouldn’t hurt at all
You always take the sweetest rose
And crush it till the petals fall
You always break the kindest heart
With a hasty word you can’t recall –
So If I broke your heart last night,
It’s because I love you most of all.
The words to the American pop standard seem to express a self-evident emotional truth: The more you love someone, the more vulnerable you are to rejection or underappreciation. The more someone loves you, the more power you have to deprive them.
The Vulnerable Power of Love
Perhaps we want sex now, but our partner thinks it’s the wrong time. Perhaps, because our mother abandoned us, we traumatize our children with smothering affection and wonder why they’re ungrateful. Perhaps, we want our lovers to be as obsessed with us as we are with them — flying off the handle when they act independently.
Maybe we want our lovers to stop drinking or be tender to the children, sensible with money, monogamous, or less dominated by their elderly, tyrannical mothers. If we didn’t love them, we wouldn’t care. That’s why the song rings true: “You always hurt the ones you love.” Not only that, our lovers always hurt us. Isn’t that why you feel emotional pain when the children don’t call.
Astonishingly, anyone would want to be in love or praise it as a desirable emotion if it makes us vulnerable to the power of another, putting our self-esteem in constant danger. Astonishingly, we’d take pride in passionately loving one another if we knew that our continued happiness depended on having a love slave.
Relational Issues and The Perception of Love
That’s how so many people who have relational issues think of love. Without receiving the love they demand, they go into dysfunction. They feel reduced and inadequate. They can’t bear the pain of such inadequacy and feel the post-traumatic stress of childhood wounds. They act out with the adaptations they learned as children to survive shame. They go one-up or down, walled-in or boundaryless, controlling or dependent, needy or caretaking. They always hurt the ones they love and the ones they love hurt them in return. It gives love a bad name.
What is going on is that they’re calling “love” is a thing called “need.” When you need something, it’s because you don’t have it. If you need love, it’s because you don’t have love. The only people who don’t have love are those who don’t have self-love, and that’s relational trauma more severe than which spiritual and relational issues don’t get.
It’s only when I stop needing you to provide me with self-esteem that I can love you. Only when you stop needing me to provide you with self-esteem can you love me. “Make me whole. Without you, I’m insufficient. I cannot stand alone.” Needy love is blasphemy because God created me inadequately. Blasphemous love gives the songwriters a field day. Not only do you hurt the ones you love, but “Without You, I am Nothing.”
Emotional Trauma and Practicing Boundaries
Everyone struggles with self-esteem. Need, masquerading as love, has taken up residence in all of us. Those of us who have become aware of the childhood origins of emotional trauma know that relationships are what trigger our lack of self-esteem. But we have also learned that there’s a way to live with our trauma histories and recover from them to have genuinely loving relationships. We must understand the truth of our trauma histories and learn the practice of boundaries.
With these boundaries in place, we feel the pain when our partner doesn’t give us what we want, but practicing boundaries control our vulnerability. We feel the pain without being personally diminished. The pain isn’t stupid or undignified but legitimate. It’ll never wholly disappear. But, our containment boundary keeps us from lashing out at our partner for what we’re feeling and destroying the relationship. Instead, we turn our spiritual eyes inward and take full responsibility for what we’re feeling.
What Are Emotional Boundaries?
Emotional boundaries are limits you set of what you’ll accept from another person’s words or actions. There are many misconceptions, but establishing healthy boundaries keep people together in a healthy way, eliminating harmful elements such as cruelty, abuse, harassment, and manipulation. Healthy emotional boundaries help people communicate more respectively and work together, making it less likely for them to fight or leave the relationship.
It’s essential to separate your feelings from another person’s feelings when setting emotional boundaries. Many codependent people have indistinct emotional boundaries. You shouldn’t ever feel like you have to take on another person’s emotions. Your feelings are a choice, and so are theirs. You’re responsible for how you treat people but not for their emotions, so you should never have to carry the weight of their feelings. When you get consumed by other people’s feelings, you can become more vulnerable and easier to manipulate. As a result, this can cause relational issues.
The Role of Emotional Boundaries in Relationships
When we felt the pain, we allowed ourselves to propel backward into our emotional trauma history and felt the residue of our childhood pain. Our partner didn’t cause us to feel it. As we took account of our pain, we let our recovering adult look the pain in the eye. We took a deep breath and let it go into the heart of the pain, and we felt the pain disappear. We were ready to get back into a relationship.
We maintained our love for our partner or, at minimum, our respect for our partner. We were prepared to discuss our painful emotions with our partner. We told our partner that we felt a certain way when they did something. We didn’t blame our partner for having made us feel that way. If our partner had learned the same spiritual, psychological lessons, he’d listen without defending or attacking, even though he felt emotional pain. We were in a relationship, talking and listening with a safe boundary of self-esteem.
We didn’t hurt the ones we loved. In fact, we demonstrated that we’d always love the ones we loved if first we loved ourselves. You may wonder what appropriate action would be if our partner couldn’t practice boundaries even after we had tried patiently (even prayed) that he would. We leave the relationship.
Copyright Lawrence S. Freundlich 2013.