Healing Conditional Love
When we love the way we learned to love from people who had unhealed childhood trauma, our love is conditional. It is a trauma response. What we think of as love is actually a set of conditions that influence our thoughts, emotions, body sensations, impulses, choices, reactions, and behaviors in love relationships.
The Conditions of Love for the Adult Child
Those who survived dysfunctional childhoods are referred to as Adult Children (see AdultChildren.org ) The conditions adult children learned about love make up the beliefs, values, and rules for their love relationships. For the unhealed adult child, what it means to love someone is to take responsibility for their:
choices,
emotions,
actions,
reactions,
consequences,
problems,
needs,
requests,
expectations,
demands,
emotions, and
suffering.
Who you are attracted to
If you were raised in an alcoholic or otherwise dysfunctional home, there’s a good chance that you have been attracted to those who experience love in the same way.
If you feel insecure, it may be because the people in your life aren’t “loving” you enough. They aren’t making you feel the way you believe they should if they really love you.
If those you love feel unloved by you, it may be because you aren’t “loving” them enough. You aren’t making them feel the way they believe you should if you really love them.
Meeting these conditions is impossible. We don’t actually make others think, feel, act, or react. We are responsible solely for our own thoughts, feelings, and actions. But those who grew up with caretakers who modeled the opposite can only know this conceptually until they have recovered. Recovery means letting go of beliefs formed in trauma.
Healthy loving relationships are possible when two people are free of the trauma-response meaning-making attached to love. As you let go of the trauma-informed conditions of love, true connection and presence can emerge.
The Internal Family Systems model (IFS) makes this possible.
How does IFS help heal conditional love?
Dr. Richard Schwartz, the founder of IFS learned from his clients that our psyche is made up of parts and a Self. There are protective parts and vulnerable parts. Self is who we are at our core. A healthy psyche is one led by Self. An unhealthy psyche is one led by parts.
The IFS model is designed to help unhealthy psyches become healthy.
Parts take over the psyche when we have experiences that leave emotional wounds. Most, but not all these wounds happen in childhood when we rely heavily upon caretakers to make meaning out of the difficulties and challenges of life. When our caretakers were deprived of the resources essential to their sense of safety, security, and value, they were ill-equipped to help us resolve our own hurts and internal struggles.
Growing up without the essential resources needed to form a solid sense of safety, security, and value leaves wounds. Until they are healed, these wounds require protection in whatever form can be devised.
In the IFS model, the psychological and emotional wounds are seen as “burdens” that are carried by vulnerable parts of the psyche. These vulnerable parts are referred to as exiles. The parts that attempt to provide protection to the wounded exiles are referred to as protectors. Protectors are burdened with the beliefs formed when the wound occurred and with the responsibility of protecting the exiles that hold those wounds.
IFS therapy family systems helps us understand and appreciate what our parts have done to help us survive our unhealed wounds. It gives us a way to form relationships with those parts and help them heal.
As our wounds are healed and our burdens are released, our parts yield to the leadership of the core Self which provides valuable resources to the internal community that makes up a healthy psyche.
No longer burdened with the conditions developed to survive unmet needs, we are free to love and be loved as fully resourced-adults.
