I’m 42 years old and I’ve never been loved.
Don’t get me wrong. I’ve had
relationships – long term ones and very short lived ones. I’ve even said the words ‘I love you’ and I have heard them back, and of course I have had platonic love with friends and family… but have I truly experienced what true romantic love really is? At this point, I really do not believe so.
Growing up, my childhood consisted of a very enmeshed family dynamic with a narcissist father and a codependent mother. Their dance made it impossible for either of them to give unconditional love to their children. I did not experience secure attachment or bonding. For me in particular, being a very sensitive soul, this impacted me far greater than I realized. All of which I am so wonderfully discovering now. This continued into my later years. I avoided dating until my last year of high school. I never dated long and pulled away pretty quickly; finding faults easily and retreating instantly. I am learning now in my healing that I have a very Dismissive Avoidant dating style. I feel anxious when I am smothered or fawned over and if someone seems really into me, then I back off. All behavior that someone might find sweet is what will in fact, send me reeling and feel immediately turned off. Unless, of course, that person is a Narcissist themselves. In those cases, I never really stood a chance. You see, I was primed for such relationships. Those relationships were the *sweet spot* so to speak; It was total engulfment and I did the dance that I learned so well all my life, my codependent meeting their narcissist in a toxic waltz that left me riddled with scars and trauma. I knew these steps. It was unconscious and effortless. The stage was already laid out with the scars and trauma already existing, buried and yet to be discovered.
It wasn’t until my second long term relationship with a narcissist when I started to clue in that something was amiss. That none of this was, in fact, love. That is also when I learned the harsh truth that at the root of it all, I did not, in fact, feel love for myself. Instead of Love, there were these other strong feelings in its place: shame, guilt and deep feelings of unworthiness. Children learn how to love themselves and develop a healthy relationship with self when their parents/caregivers display those healthy dynamics to them from infancy. We learn love by patterns and behaviors. Behaviors towards us and behaviors between our parents. Neural pathways and patterns are created pretty early on in our lives and continue to be reinforced as we grow IF we continue to stay in the same environments. They become tracks with very deep grooves and so we adopt those same behaviors and dynamics in our own lives. It shows up in how we treat ourselves and it shows up in how we interact with everyone else: our friendships, co-workers, peers and romantic relationships. We will continue to play out the roles that we learned when we were children. If you were raised in a dysfunctional home environment, that usually will look like you playing out your traumas over and over again. You might take on the role of one parent and exhibit their behaviors in your relationships or you can go back and forth between both roles.
Here is the thing: We will continue to seek out that dynamic in all our love interests and will feel a pull towards those who mirror back to us that same energy we experienced as infants. We do this for two reasons: Because our neural pathways basically run on autopilot and we seek out the familiar in all aspects of our lives constantly. It’s a type of muscle memory that our brains do because it’s easier. This has been shown through many psychology texts and you’re welcome to search to learn the science behind that, but it is the second reason that gives me much needed insight in all of this. We inadvertently will seek out the things that recreate our traumas and wounding patterns so that we can LEARN how to overcome it. Think of it this way. Your inner child is trapped in that loop of when those traumas occurred, most likely at a very tender age. As a child, you were not seen, you were invalidated, you were rejected, abandoned or something else or all of the above even! But our inner child has no concept of time. It’s as if we are creating a redo of the same experience in hopes that we can find a way out of that pain loop. We seek out the ones who will SHOW us the parts of us that need to be healed. We want to be seen, validated, accepted and LOVED by someone else because we didn’t have any or some of those things reflected back to us when we were children. So, we recreate scenarios where we will feel the SAME things that we felt during those times hoping for a different outcome.
The problem is that we lack the awareness to bring us there. It often takes a multitude of trauma experiences or one that is big enough to finally get us to a point where we can pause and take a closer look at what is actually going on.
That point was a few years ago for me. I learned about narcissists and trauma bonding and quite frankly, it was a bit of a relief because I realized that none of what I experienced was love. The reason that I felt relieved was because I could not bring myself to believe that what I had previously experienced was real love. How could love cause you that amount of pain? How can love destroy you? It isn’t that I had some weird fairytale notion of what love should be like and I most certainly did not want someone to swoop in and save me… but I just knew that the things I had previously experienced, could not have been love. And I was so glad when I learned about trauma bonding because it confirmed that what I was feeling was not in fact love; That it had a lot more to do with my brain reacting to dopamine kicks and that high chemistry with others was really just a trauma response.
There was only one time in my life that I felt like I experienced a connection that could possibly have turned into real love. It wasn’t intense and high chemistry like my toxic ex’s. It was calm and felt really deep and it was nothing I really could explain or could make sense of. However, he did not feel the same about me and I had to eventually choose to part ways with him because my feelings were too strong to continue being just friends with him. In fact, 15 years later, I still have deep feelings for this person. It’s been incredibly confusing because I did not understand why I was feeling these strong feelings for someone and I could not logically explain it in any way. I couldn’t even see how we would have been compatible as there were some differences that I thought were too big to put aside. Not to mention that I clearly knew that I wasn’t trauma bonded with him so, I just could not make any sense of the pull that I had with him and at some point, I was even convinced he was my Twin Flame and perhaps that was the reason that I could not let this go. But at the same time, I was also feeling incredibly hurt and angry for the way that things went down. So, I couldn’t be on board with any of that because I don’t believe a spiritual connection with someone you’re meant to be with, would leave you feeling so much heart ache. But once again, even though I was not in relationship with this person, I am still in the same place as I was in my previous abusive relationships: I was left wanting love from someone who simply could not give it back to me in the way that I wanted. The experience has been heart crushing for me and I still don’t know why and it has left me googling reasons why I couldn’t let go of someone. I learned about ‘Limerence’ and was starting to wonder if this was me. Was my trauma making me cling to someone because he was the first friend that I had who I felt safe with and didn’t try to hit on me? Was I obsessed? Was I delusional? All the thoughts that constantly plagued my mind over this connection. And though the jury is still out on all of these things, I DO know one thing. And that is that none of this was love either. And that if I was going to experience someone loving me then, this sure as hell wasn’t how it was going to be.
So, what can we do? Not much in that respect.. but what we CAN do is continue our healing journey and peel back the layers so that we can reach that inner child and connect with them. Because the reality is, the more we connect with our inner child and learn how to show our own selves unconditional love, the less we will try to seek it outside of us in dysfunctional ways that will keep making us relive our trauma; The less we will chase avoidant love or situations that will reject us, abandon us, abuse us or disregard us. It’s up to us to show up for ourselves. I might not have been responsible for the trauma incurred when I was a child growing up, but I am most certainly responsible for healing it now. I know that seems like such a raw deal here and I absolutely get it. But, the alternative is just far worse to imagine. My last relationship nearly killed me and I know that I could never return to that. What I definitely know now is that I want to be alive; I want to feel joy; I want to feel love. And I deserve it truly and completely.. in the most authentic way possible. In order for that to happen, we need to define what true love means and feel like to us.
True love is love with boundaries and respect. It is love with support, and empathy. It is sweet nothings and deep admiration. It is a safe place where you can show up as yourself, authentically. It is the space where you don’t have to wear a mask and be different versions of yourself in order to be loved and where you don’t have to put up defenses in order to protect yourself. It is accountability on both sides. It is room to grow, to evolve and to thrive with the absence of control, manipulation and prohibition. It’s a space where you can not only be seen by someone else, but where you can see yourself and be yourself. It is a space where the walls can come down and you can allow yourself to be vulnerable and where play and fun can come in as well as strength and hard work. It is mutual and it is a collaboration. It is having each other’s back and knowing that there will be hardships and that it won’t always be perfect but having enough care and commitment to continue on. It is true love because it is where truth lives and where both your truth and their truth can co-exist in harmonious balance without lessening the other. This is a conscious partnership to me and the kind of true love that I will wait for.
Will I ever experience true love in my lifetime? I’d like to think that I will. Though I don’t know when that will be, or if I’ll even ever meet that special someone who can reciprocate the kind of love I want to create, I can certainly start by searching for it inside of myself. I can start by doing all of those marvelous things that I did for those who were very undeserving, for myself. I can speak to myself with love. I can care for myself lovingly. All of those ways we can start showing up for ourselves will help to grow our own unconditional love for Self and eventually, we start to attract that same vibration back to us. The upside is that I have a great starting point. I finally know how deserving I am and I won’t accept anything less than what I deserve. And though I have spent the entire half of my life thus far, never having experienced that real and authentic kind of healthy love, I am never without hope and I am excited and look forward to living the other half of my life receiving all of that love, two-fold. I trust myself. I trust the universe. And most importantly, I trust that love will find me when it is meant to. What’s most important to remember though is that I am whole and complete on my own and I do not need another to fulfill my life. So in the meantime, I will continue to enjoy and savour my journey towards loving me.
Giuseppina Barberi
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