“all about love”

I talked a lot about stress in my last post, and being unable to write about it.  After that difficult inlaw visit, I picked up bell hooks’ “all about love” for the first time, which I think is just amazing and I highly recommend it.  I’ve been thinking about her words a lot, both in regards to my own struggle to express love for others, and in regards to the consequences we suffer at the hands of people who say they love us but act like they really don’t. 

She writes about her reactions to M. Scott Peck’s definition of love, which follows:

“[Love is] the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” 

Peck goes on to say, “Love is an act of will – namely, both an intention and an action.  Will also implies choice.  We do not have to love.  We choose to love.”

I find this definition to be incredibly challenging but also inspiring.  I really like the idea that loving someone is about choosing to extend one’s self to nurture spiritual growth, for one’s self or another.

At a writing workshop I attended some weeks ago, I found myself writing about love, about how I see myself in the world as someone who loves other people; not just people that the world agrees are lovable, but the people the world doesn’t love.  People who are hard to love.  I suppose it’s like a personal challenge to myself – if I truly believe in the inherent worth and dignity of every living being, [yes this is a remnant of my childhood religious upbringing – who recognizes it?] then if I can’t love everyone at least a little bit, I’m doing something wrong.

hooks makes another excellent, resonant point:

“An overwhelming majority of us come from dysfunctional families in which we were taught we were not okay, where we were shamed, verbally and/or physically abused, and emotionally neglected even as were also taught to believe that we were loved.  For most folks it is just too threatening to embrace a definition of love that would no longer enable us to see love as present in our families.  Too may of us need to cling to a notion of love that either makes abuse acceptable or at least makes it seem that whatever happened was not that bad.” (p. 6)  [emphasis added]

I was put in a position to raise my little sister who is four years younger than myself at the age of 12, when my older sister moved out to go to college.  I imitated the destructive patterns that were already set in my family, even as I also provided love and care for her.  Sometimes I did nurture her spiritual growth.  Sometimes I treated her very badly.  I have gotten to the point (finally!) where I can ease some of the guilt that goes along with that statement – at 12, who is ready to raise an eight-year-old?  I know I did the best I could, and have always, always tried to be there for her whenever she needed me.  No matter what.  We are very close now, and I have apologized to her for the things I did wrong.  But she has never wanted to talk about it, and I haven’t wanted to push her.

bell hooks says that we must heal from the wounds left by being unloved as children before we can truly give love to another, and that we must realize that what we were told was love really wasn’t, if it included these patterns of abuse and pain at the hands of those who said they loved us.   But I think that being the one with the power can also leave wounds that need to be healed.  There is at least the responsibility to acknowledge the pain that was caused to another, and express remorse and regret.  A promise to never do it again.  I don’t see this being talked about very much. 

The common discourse around abuse seems to conclude that it is terrible, and the person who is being abused must leave the situation immediately.  This presupposes a few things though:  that the abuser is completely consciously choosing to abuse the other; that the abuser is all bad; that the victim is better off without the abuser.  If that is really true, then we have a society of people who should never be in any kind of relationship.  I believe we all have done things that could count as abuse.  I think it would be more productive to talk about how to create healthy relationships that don’t include treating each other badly.  We hear all about how survivors heal from the abuse in their past, but how do abusers heal?  What does that process look like?  And how do the perpetrator and the victim go forward, if both of them want to try again?

I guess these are pretty heavy questions, but I’d love to hear what you all think.  First and foremost, what do you think of this definition of love?  How would you define love?  Would you say that someone who has abused another in the past can redeem themself?