For those of you who have been hurt or who grew up with trauma you may know the word love, but you may not understand what it means. Or maybe you understand what it means in fiction, or movies, or other people, but you don’t know what it feels like. When people say they love you—you can think about the word love, you have an idea of what they are trying to say, you know they are trying to be nice, but your body feels numb, or you feel like you are watching the whole conversation from the outside. Love is something other people understand. Love is an abstraction.

Survival mode makes it hard to experience and understand love. Where survival is an experience of tension or tightness, love is an experience of openness and expansiveness. Where survival is an experience of longing, grasping, clinging, or vigilance—love is an experience of patience, of being able to breathe and look around. There is a brittleness and stiffness with survival. There is an elasticity to love.

It can be so hard to feel alone with your experience. You are a stranger in a land that expects you to understand love.

The people who love you and the people who are trying to help you often can’t understand why their acts of love and kindness aren’t taken in, absorbed—why you can’t hang on to the experience. They can’t understand why it’s so hard for you to trust them, believe in them or lean on them. Or why it seems like they are always starting from the beginning again. And it can be hard for you to feel like you are hurting them or disappointing them when you doubt them or don’t understand.

Here’s the thing: trying to understand love when it hasn’t been your experience is like trying to understand gravity when all you have ever experienced is weightlessness.

You can see that people trust gravity. You can see them effortlessly putting one foot in front of the other onto solid ground. But you have no idea what that might feel like—that kind of solidity. That kind of pull or connection.

You pretend that you do. You stuff every pocket and bag with as much weight as you can: hope, expectation, want. You can kind of look like you are walking like the others. Trying to make your feet touch the ground like the others. Trying to sit solidly on the couch, instead of floating away. But it’s all such hard work and effort. While they are talking to you, you are trying to look like you are tethered to the earth. They are frustrated with you. And you are exhausted.

If you have been hurt, I want to offer you the hope that love is possible to learn and experience. You will need to find someone trustworthy and patient. Not perfect. Constant and consistent. Perhaps boringly so. And you will need to build these capacities in yourself: patience, trustworthiness, constancy, consistency.

You learn love by showing up again and again: to your healing, to your learning, to your relationships, and to the simple daily caring of yourself. You do this by appreciating and celebrating the smallest acts of trust and kindness. You do this in the smallest and most incremental ways.

The problem is that movies make love look exciting. But learning love when you are an adult is quiet, tedious, and repetitive. Love is reflexive. Love is practice. Love is a motor skill. Learning love in adulthood is like learning to swim in adulthood: you are surrounded by a substance you don’t trust or understand and the only way you get good at it is jumping in over and over. The only way you learn is to surrender to it a thousand times over: lap by lap.

The thing about quiet repetition is that it kind of sneaks up on you. Many days of practice feel like nothing at all and then one day you suddenly feel space and openness where you had previously been curled up tightly. You suddenly feel like you can lean back and relax, where previously you sat rigidly on the edge of your seat. You suddenly notice you forgot to pay attention and had let your mind wander for minutes or days.

Remember that in the best of circumstances, infants learn unconditional love in an endless repetition of care over days, nights, and years. And yet somehow the message that is given to you is that you should be able to weave a new capacity to love in days, or weeks or months. And that’s not the way it happens. Love is the most powerful element in the world and it’s meant to be built over time. No one learns love fast. It’s meant to be a strength we build over years, one small act at a time, with patience, repair and kindness.

©2024 Gretchen L. Schmelzer, PhD