Buried Love. Not the usual love story
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~
Buried Love begins:
There are so many confessions from all kinds of addicts - heroin, crack, sex, love, grass, alcohol. People hooked on too much of something.
My story is different ...
I'm a love-not junkie. Somehow or other, so long ago that I have no memory of things ever having been different, I got hooked on not loving...
This is what I've lived. Buried Love: Confessions of a Love-Not Junkie comes from my experience of having had a very hard time with love, my long experience of living with buried love, and often feeling no love.
So very different from fairy tales. Instant forever love.
Also very different from love-trouble stories - people hooked on people who are abusers of one sort or another.
Why so little general attention to people living with buried love?
Maybe it’s a case of “the squeaky wheel gets the oil.” A drug junkie - trouble. A love junkie - trouble.
My guess: people with buried love are different - largely no-trouble people.
I did my first serious delving into living with buried love a dozen years ago now. I started with the somewhat dismissive term - love-not junkie. And I initially called my exploration: Confessions of a Love-Not Junkie - drawing on titles like True Confessions.
But really, it’s about buried love.
Even as a child, I had the sense that, for instance, I didn’t love my parents.
I knew they were the very best parents they could be. They had each had lots of hard times in their childhood, and being the very best parents was very important to both of them.
I cared. But love . . . that feeling . . . it just didn’t resonate for me.
I have three things for you:
Buried Love: Confessions of a Love-Not Junkie - my personal quest,
Full Flourishing - the personal growth approach I’ve developed,
If you like, you can read, and even listen to, the first pages of my personal quest.
Here’s my main thought - damaged loving, hurt loving, buried love - is something huge for many people. It means living with seeds within us that somehow have not sprouted. It means living without fully flourishing.
Of course there are also many other ways of not flourishing. Very many. Millions of people are hooked on texting, blah-blah-blah - that isn’t flourishing, full living, full loving. Millions upon millions of people are hooked on the fear narratives put out by the mainstream media - that sure isn’t flourishing.
My belief: all of us, or anyway most of us - have a deep desire to be living and loving fully.
How do we get there?
A traditional way is through powerful writings - maybe most of all, powerful novels. These bring many people to complex rich feelings, including intense feelings of love. A few novels that come to mind are Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jane Eyre, The Mill on the Floss, The Diviners, Crackpot, The Stone Angel, Barry Lyndon.
I found that novel reading, while amazingly gripping, didn’t open things within me in the everyday world.
Currently the many forms of self development, personal growth are the most widely used paths.
My experience is that is isn’t easy to unearth deeply buried aspects of oneself.
Most powerful for me has been experience, especially the experience of loss, of grief. Suddenly the barriers to feeling love melted away.
A movie has just come to mind, Shadowlands (1993), about the love between C. S. Lewis, author of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and the poet, Joy Davidman. His buried love - buried since his mother died when he was 9 - came out when he learned she was dying of cancer.
But there is far from just one route to unburying love.
For me, also vital has been an ongoing commitment to exploring, to seeing what might work.
That exploration of what might work brought me to create Full Flourishing, my own model of personal development, and A.C.E., awareness, caring, engagement, a gentle process of moving toward our heart’s desire.
I’ve also put together 9 Free Quick Tips. A good starting point. Click to get them.
I’m going to repeat the quote I started with:
For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~
Quite some task! Worth undertaking.
What are your thoughts on love?
Posted Sept 21, 2022