What is the Nature of Love?

Recently I was discussing the nature of love with a friend. Specifically what love looks like. Of course the general consensus is that love appears to be gentle and nurturing; it inspires feelings of warmth, affection, physical attraction, or safety. But what we as a culture often neglect to observe (and often to our children's detriment) is that love can be harsh and unyielding when it is manifesting as a form of protection.

Hypothetical case in point: a young girl is getting involved in drugs and her parents discover this. Her parents are faced with some difficult choices. They love their daughter and they fear for her because she is engaging in risky and illegal behavior. She not only endangers herself, she endangers her family by exposing her younger siblings to the drug culture and by introducing her family to drug users who may steal from them or assault them. (If you think I am exaggerating, please know that in Glendale, Arizona, four people out of a family of five were slain by gang members in a dispute with the oldest brother over drug money. The brother survived because he wasn't home at the time, but his parents, sixteen year old sister and eight year old brother were tortured, raped and stabbed to death.) These parents must now decide how to handle their drug-using daughter's behavior. Do they punish her themselves, protecting her from the judicial system, hoping that her behavior will stop? Do they send her to an inpatient, locked treatment facility where she will be introduced to hardened addicts and troubled teens who could end up teaching her more about hiding her habits than the counselors could teach her about overcoming them? Or do they turn her in to the police, exposing her to a prison system that does more for teaching kids how to be criminals than it does for rehabilitating them?

These parents may decide to punish her themselves thinking that is the more "loving" way of handling the situation. I'm not certain that it is. I guess it largely depends on the parent's ability to maintain the terms of the punishment. If the child is grounded and not allowed to leave the home except for school and not allowed to make personal phone calls, then it is 100% necessary that the parents stringently stick to the terms of the punishment. If they can be jailors to their daughter for the length of the grounding, then maybe there is a chance that the punishment might deter the negative behavior in the future.

But if the parents are like most parents I know, overworked and exhausted, then they might not be controlling their daughter as well as they should, and she's going to make phone calls to friends and sneak out without the parents knowing. Another thing to consider: how much time have the parents been investing in paying attention to their daughter prior to this problem erupting? Kids don't fall into drugs overnight. Have the parents been neglecting their daughter and not noticed the crowd she's fallen in with? Regardless of the relationship between parents and child, the punishment is going to be about as effective as a band-aid over a gaping chest wound if the parents cannot enforce it consistantly; all the daughter will learn from the experience is that she can get away with anything without any serious consequences.

It is not more loving to teach your child that there are no serious consequences for criminal or dangerous activity. If my daughter was using drugs and hanging out with a dangerous crowd, I would not hesitate to put her in a 45 day treatment center. And I say this as someone who was put in a 45 day treatment center/locked mental facility at the age of 15 because my parents did not know what to do with me and my oppositional-defiant behavior (no drug use). I would rather my daughter be emotionally scarred from being locked in a treatment facility for a month and a half than see her get scarred from rape, drug overdose, or murder.

Of course, the consequence of locking your child up in a facility is a loss of trust and rapport between yourself and your child. Your child may intellectually understand how they ended up in a facility, but they will still feel emotionally abandoned by you. There is also the danger that the other patients in the facility may encourage the continuance of negative behaviors by teaching your child better ways to hide their habit or new and "better" ways to get high that are easier to hide from parents. Another negative to consider is that the facility's staff may be abusive towards your child. I don't know if this is so much an issue now, but when I was in a facility in 1989, the staff was psychologically abusive towards the children.

In all fairness, I should explain that what they were doing was attempting to force the teens to be accountable for their actions; however, I believe it is necessary after breaking someone down psychologically to help build them up again in a positive way. The staff at the facility I went to broke us down, but then they left us mired in a depression feeling badly about ourselves. We became accountable, but we also became depressed at what stupid assholes we thought ourselves to be.

It is possible that therapy has evolved now to a point where they recognize that you can't just break a person down and leave them in the psychological gutter. I also think that given a choice between having my child use drugs and engage in criminal activity and having my child experience a treatment facility, I would choose the facility. They have a chance of getting help there; they have little chance of getting help at home or at school. I believe love is being willing to temporarily cause emotional pain to someone in order to help them get themself out of a bad situation.

In his letters to Corinthians, Paul goes on at great length about love and how it is selfless and giving (forgive me for not knowing it by heart…I haven't been Christian since I was 11). I have some ideas about what I think love is:

Love is gentle. Love is joyful. Love is given without expectations and love is generous. Love is spiritual, a contract between yourself, the object of your love, and the Gods. Love is nurturing and nourishing. Love is a balm for suffering.

But love is also determined. Love is firm and unyielding. Love is willing to do the right thing, even if it means doing it alone and without support. Love is being willing to say no when yes could lead to suffering. Love is critical when someone is practicing self deception. Love is being willing to cut someone off when he or she is being abusive. Love is standing up and saying "I don't agree with your behavior" when you see someone self destructing. Love is setting and maintaining boundaries. Love can hurt. But when love hurts, it should hurt the way it does when you clean a wound; you drain out the infection so healing can occur.

Love is setting aside your egoic, personal desires to help yourself and others stay true to our higher selves.

I would hope a parent would choose to try a treatment facility first before involving the judicial system; however, if a treatment center is tried and the child still returns to the negative behavior that endangers him or her self and the family, then it may be necessary to involve the police. I would hope that it would never have to come to that, but if it came down to it, wouldn't it be better to put one child in the judicial system rather than enable that same child to invite drugs, violence and danger into the lives of your other children? For some, jail is a wake up call. It is that moment where the person can no longer deny they are truly messing up their life. One of the benefits to incarceration is that the person is forced to get off the drugs; of course one of the negatives to incarceration is drugs still find their way into the jails and the child may be exposed to other drugs while there. The child may also be exposed to a whole new level of criminals who would be more than willing to exploit your child and teach them all new criminal skills. Then there is that added bonus (sarcasm intended) of a criminal record.

I imagine that some people never do reach that point of accepting responsibility for their own actions, and jail time merely reinforces their feelings of being persecuted and low self esteem. And maybe it is callous of me to say this since I have never had a child in jail or use drugs or do anything worse than get in-school suspension for selling newsletters of student-penned fiction on campus (nerd crime at its most entrepreneurial), but I would prefer a child that hardened to be locked up, even if it hurt me and that child. At least if he or she was locked up, they wouldn't be able to hurt themselves or anyone else. I don't know if I could live with myself if my neglect as a parent led to my child hurting or killing someone, either a stranger or someone I know and possibly love.

Whatever the parents do, they are going to put the rapport they have with their child at risk; they can't be helped. If a parent loves their child, they have to be willing to be hated by their child when they step in and enforce boundaries. If they can manage to save the child, the child will thank them for it in the long term. Love means not requiring that love to be returned. If you love your child, do what you need to do to protect him or her from him or herself.

Just as a point of interest: I attended a seven day long intensive conference called Source Seminars: The Journey in Idyllwild , California and it worked near miracles for the participants in helping them heal the psychological damage from their childhoods and poor teen and adult decisions like promiscuity, drug abuse, alcoholism, incest, rape, molestation and child and domestic abuse. The program is strongly based in Gestalt techniques and it helps participants to experience and release the negative emotions they have had locked deep within them for years and years. I went to it thinking it was going to be a funky fruit-bat, new age woo-woo hugfest; I was wrong. It actually helped me deal with so much that I have been struggling with in conventional therapy for years. I would recommend anyone struggling with issues of their children using drugs or committing crimes to look into sending them to it. They take people 13 and older. It is an expensive program, but cheaper and more effective than a treatment facility!!!! We had a sixteen year old boy in the training I attended and it was awesome to see him change from sullen and angry to smiling and filled with light and hope again. If this sounds at all interesting to you (whether for yourself or your child), see the following web page for more info:

www.sourceseminars.com

Disclaimer: There are religious elements to their training, but they are not dogma specific. The people who facilitate the training are both members of the Self Realization Fellowship (SRF), but they tweak their approach to your experience so it fits within the boundaries of your personal religious choices. I was the only Pagan there and I experienced no condescension, judgment or proselytizing from *anyone* while I was there. Everyone was inclusive and accepting, especially as the training neared its end and they understood more about what I believed. We had Church of Christ Christians, SRF devotees, agnostics, atheists, nominal Christians and Hindus at my training and everyone was respected equally.

Silence

When we sit in silence, we create space for inspiration to flow into. I used to think that sitting in a quiet, depressed state was to sit in silence. But you are not sitting in silence when you sit unresponsive in depression. Your head is full of feeling. You may not be thinking coherent thoughts, but you are feeling, and those feelings are loud and demand your full attention.

Sitting in silence is different. Whereas the silence of depression is deafening, oppressive, and insulating, true silence is light and open. It's almost as if you can feel the inspiration cascading into your being, drawn in by the vacuum created when emptying the mind and stilling the internal dialogue.

Silence has an interesting quality to it; it feels like love. I don't mean the sort of love you feel when you are around your significant other. It's not even the sort of love you feel for your child. It's the love you feel when you are accepted and safe. It's the love I feel in meditation when I actually connect with Spirit.

This is the love we idealize as children. It is the love we sought from our parents. Instinctively, we know that that love is our birthright; however, when we seek it from our earthly parents we often know disappointment. Only our Divine parent/s are capable of such an awesome, unconditional love and acceptance.

It is intoxicating. You have heard the cliché about rosy-lensed glasses? This love filters all that you experience through a rosy lens. It transforms anger into forgiveness, pain into understanding, and grief into peace. You fall in love with everything and everyone.

Silence is like that too. In the silence you are filled with understanding. You can feel the strands of fate that interconnect all of life like a spider's web. You lose your separation from everything else and know yourself to be One with all. No longer deafened by the demands of the ego, in silence you can hear your soul; and beyond that, you can hear Spirit.

As a child, I believed that in death we find the answers to all of life's questions. As an adult, I understand that in death, we achieve silence, and in the silence the answers become more apparent. So much of our struggle for understanding comes from the deafening cacophony of our thoughts; if we were to just fall silent we might find our answers.

At one time I thought that thoughts were responsible for the disorganized jabbering in my mind. I have since realized that thoughts are merely my mind's attempt to make sense of the flood of chaotic feelings that are continuously bombarding me.