But I Love Him…

Do you ever find yourself saying, “But I love him!” (Or her.) You are unhappy with the pain they are causing, (and yes, it is abuse. See abuse defined. ) but you just can’t make the leap out of the relationship because you feel a powerful, mysterious, unquantifiable force has taken over your free will. You call this love. It feels like love. You will climb and mountain, swim any sea, and on and on. Isn’t this what love is? I am about to become pretty unpopular with die hard fans of chick flicks.

True love is not a noun. It’s a verb. It is not something that is. It is something you do.

There is this magical, crazy, against all odds, all consuming, passionate, self sacrificing thing they call love. We spend billions per year to pay Hollywood to perpetuate this ideal, and we think this is the thing that we must find to be happy. Here’s the bubble buster… in almost every case, this thing (the noun)… it’s not true love. This is a simple combination of hormones (physical chemistry) and your subconscious telling you need this person. Your subconscious can pick them for many different reasons and it’s different for each person.

The question is… Can you trust your subconscious to choose for you?

The danger in letting your subconscious mind choose your partner is that it doesn’t have the same motives you do. Sometimes it can seem like you are two entirely different beings. Your subconscious mind is where all your hurts are hidden. It has very different drives than your conscious mind, because it goes about trying to fix your inside through quite illogical ways. There is no logic in your subconscious. That’s why you can dream you are talking to a giant pickle and it doesn’t seem weird at all.. at the time. You have many issues, things you may have even forgotten about, things that hurt or confused you. Things happened in your childhood, from your family of origin, or even well into your adulthood that your subconscious is trying to run about fixing, and processing.

No one likes to be abused. No one ever chooses it on purpose. (Well… almost no one!) But if you grew up in a household where someone abused someone, your red flag system is likely not to function very well. Things that would generally warn a healthy person, “Hey this person could be dangerous! Don’t go out with him (or her) again!” often don’t get triggered. You might see things you don’t like about them, and you might be uncomfortable with something they did, but on some level, you don’t recognize how abnormal the behavior is.  You have spent so many years deadening your “this is not right” sense, just from repeated exposure. Additionally, you might have been told often by the abuser of your past,”That’s not what I said./ That’s not what I meant./ That’s not what happened! You are over reacting./ Being a drama queen/ Judging me wrong!”  These messages might have been verbal or subversively implied, but you still got the intended message; which is you can’t trust yourself.

Or you might have just developed a coping mechanism of self doubt because you didn’t want to see the person of your past that you loved as bad (because it’s too painful for a child to think their parent might be bad), so you told yourself those same things. You taught yourself not to believe your senses. You are too full of self doubt to now see these things for what they are. You question every negative thought you have about them, and you end up giving them the benefit of the doubt. When your subconscious mind sees a pattern that remind it of a past unresolved hurt (often from a parent but not always), it latches onto key personality traits or types of abuse and says, “Wait! I know this! Maybe this time I can fix it!” and wham… cupid’s arrow in your gluteus maximus! You really never had a chance. You are in love with an abuser.  BUT… your subconscious picking your partner in attempt to try to fix the childhood hurts you received from your parent or someone else in your past… not true love.

Trauma bonding is a very strange coping mechanism but it is very real. Think Stockholm Syndrome. People bond through trauma. This is natural and normal. Think of someone you went through something tough with, but you faced it together, and the bonds of your friendship became so much stronger. (At least temporarily.) Trauma creates bonds. Also, finding relief from trauma creates bonds. Think of 3 hours in the summer heat with no water. How good does it feel when you finally get a tall cold bottle of water?  How grateful are you for the person who handed it to you? Trauma bonding, in the case of abuse, has been proven over and over again. The problem is our subconscious mind doesn’t always get it right. Remember, it’s not really logical. What often happens in abuse is you have just gone on a really rough emotional ride, and when the relief comes, even if the relief is given by the same person who caused the pain,…. a bond is formed. No; not logical, but real nonetheless. The reason the cycles of abuse are so effective is because it works. Your subconscious mind looks at all the hell it has gone through, and looks at the sweet relief of the flowers and chocolates phase or great sex (or whatever that cycle looks for your relationship) and it thinks, “Look at all I have gone through with this person. What a bond! I need this person! I love this person!” BUT… trauma bonding is not true love.

Another factor at work here is cognitive dissonance. It creates quite a bit of pain and confusion to our emotional minds to think one thing and act another. Usually, to resolve the disconnect, the subconscious will come in and try to fix that by modifying our feelings. When we have been beaten emotionally, we are hurt. We may at that moment want to leave. We may or may not feel love for the person who hurt us. But we don’t leave. We stay. Often abusers turn themselves into the victims by saying things like, “You don’t see anything I do right!” (Or some other version of turning the tables, with them breaking down and acting like a kicked puppy.) Then, instead thinking about how much they just hurt us, we are launching into empathy mode, which includes things like pointing out what they do right or proclaiming our love for them. Our subconscious is then confused. How can I both love them and still put up with abuse? How can I feel I want to run away right now but I am telling them I love them? He/she hurt me, but I am protecting and nurturing them?” It doesn’t add up. Something has to change, or the state of instability in the subconscious creates too much pain. So it thinks, “I must love this person!” BUT… subconscious coping mechanisms are not true love.

True love loves a whole, real, non-idealized person. It’s the whole human being, not just the good parts. Often when we fall in love with someone, we see only what that person wants us to see. They already have made a conscious decision to deceive you. Although this is ideally a wrong behavior, most people are guilty of this on one level or another. They know what parts of them to show and what parts they should hide. You probably didn’t show up for your first date in stained sweats and no make-up or (unshaven) with no deodorant. They spent time appearing to be their best selves while hiding the real/natural parts of who they are.

Now take into account the amplifying factor of BPD. Everything with them is exaggerated to the extreme. Because of the black and white thinking, in their own mind, they must either be all good or all bad. It almost seems like they have multiple personalities after you know them for a while. They do not. Each part of the person is an integral part of the real them. They just have separated their modes in an extreme polarized fashion so that you generally only see one at a time. This is frequently referred to by people who know BPDs as “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” It is eerie how after you have reached a level of comfort with them, and they start showing showing you Hyde, how fast they can flip from one to the other and back again. They can do that because they are both modes. There is no Jekyll without Hyde, and no Hyde without Jekyll. Because of the extremity of the behavior, you compartmentalize and try to see the good without the bad. It takes us quite a while to get our heads around this, and some of us never do. We sometimes stay forever in denial thinking if we can just do or say the right thing, or learn the BPD rules, that we can get just Jekyll. There is no way. The BPD game is rigged for you to fail. You cannot control the appearance of Hyde. It is who they are. But in the beginning, they know they can’t show you their ugly. In fact, because you are idealizing them like most normal people do in the early dating phases, they delude themselves into thinking they are Jekyll and only Jekyll. Like a mirror facing a mirror, they think their good self can last forever. They are on a high with this illusion and they “fall in love” with you. You may be everything they ever wanted in a partner, but that’s not why they love you. In fact they can barely see you at all. Really, it’s all about them. You make them feel better about themselves, and they think you can sustain this level of almost worship… forever. Finally, you are the one person who helped them change. (Not.) They may or may not verbalize this with you, but it’s what their attraction to you is really all about.

This is the half of the person you fall in love with. Your partner was funny, and charming, and kind, and all that you have been looking for. They feel good, you feel good, everyone is in a perpetual state of happiness. Until you aren’t. Something happens that reminds the BPD that Hyde is still there. Maybe it’s something you did or said, and maybe it isn’t. They suddenly fear you will see that side of them, the side that is very really a part of them, and you won’t love them anymore. And like a porcupine who perceives a threat, whether the threat is real or not, the quills go up and you get stabbed. The abuse comes out. At some point, they compartmentalize their behavior, you compartmentalize their behavior, and Mr Hyde is safely packed away into denial again. Until he’s not.

The problem with this dichotomy is that we often don’t realize how actually whole it all is. It is not two different people at all. We take on some of the BPD’s black and white thinking, and we believe them. The intermittent reinforcement is very effective at forging a trauma bond, and at causing cognitive dissonance, and at keeping us always trying to please them and take care of only their wants and needs. We never thought we could become that person who puts up with so much abuse. But we do. We do it because we think we are in love with the good parts of them. We look back and think about how very much in love we were with that person we met. Over the years, that person came about less and less, and stayed shorter and shorter periods. But if you ask us, we will say we are in love with that first person, and we stay because we just want to get that person back. We believe it is possible, because we knew them, loved them, slept with them, and shared secrets with them. But that is not the true them. That is only parts of them at best. They are every bit the dark one as they are the light one. You cannot separate the two. True love is whole and loves whole people. But…. loving just parts of people…. is not true love.

Sometimes when we are in love, we are actually in love with the potential we believe that person can be. It isn’t really so much who they are, but who we think they can become. (Usually with a little bit of our love and healing powers!) But people will either reach their potential or they won’t, and it doesn’t usually make a huge difference who is standing beside them. (Or behind pushing!) Yes, a person who is already on a path to greatness can magnify his (or her) strength in a loving, healthy relationship. But a person who wanders through life just trying to figure out who they are is not going to be able to reach their moon, no matter how much love and encouragement someone is putting behind them. Everyone’s journey is their own and no one else but them can make it. Besides, it is impossible for you to provide them with a healthy relationship. An unhealthy person cannot have a healthy relationship. Period. There is no way to hold the disease to only their end. Potential (Hope) is not a true, real part of a person. Sometimes it is more a reflection of part of us than it is part of them. Even if it is part of them, again, it’s only a part. And people are not parts. True love requires love of the whole. Loving just parts… is not true love.

There is something else that maybe you have experienced that mimics true love. Most people understand a parent/child love, and also understand that love is a different kind of love than partner love. It is different. In a healthy parent/child relationship, it is a healthy and unconditional love. You once had this love as a child, even if it went all one way. All children unconditionally love their parents… for a while. There is a point developmentally that this changes if the relationship is unhealthy. But for a time, when children are very little, they love their mommies and daddies no matter what, and they believe their mommies and daddies love them. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that way. Not all parents love their children unconditionally. But that is a tangent for another day. For now, let’s just stay on the topic that a parent/child love is usually thought of to be unconditional in a real true love way.

Enter the BPD. The BPD frequently upsets the natural partner dynamics, and causes roles to shift from partners to parent/child roles. They flip back and forth between parent and child and back to parent again wildly, and almost never stay in the partner role. You can’t, in fact, even have a partner relationship with someone who consistently takes parent or child roles. because the roles are completely incompatible. But BPDs assume the role as parent and you as child when they wish to control your behavior/ thoughts/ feelings etc. They switch to child role and force you to be the parent when they cannot make real world decisions and deal with the consequences, or when they demand to be babied and taken care of, or when they throw tantrums to make everything all about them. You subconsciously associate parent/child love with true love. It causes love type feelings, although in a very inappropriate place. All this yet again from your subconscious mind. Yet you feel it just the same. But…feeling you need to take care of someone, save them or fix them… is not true love. Feeling you need someone to take care of you is also not true love.

True love (healthy love) is not magic and it can be chosen. It changes and evolves as you change and evolve. Sometimes it is work. It works best if you also have chemistry for the sexual spark, but it’s so much more than that. You love someone because you choose them, because they are a good choice for you and your future. It is based on a strongly formed friendship. It is a partnership between equals. You will always have times, even in the healthiest relationships, that you just aren’t feeling it. Sometimes you won’t be a fan of the person you chose. Sometimes you need to work at it, and it can be hard, but you do it anyway because you choose them and it’s right. And when you look back after 10, 20 years and you look at the person whose hand you are holding, and you know they are your best friend, and lover, and you can trust them with your heart, mind and soul… that is true love. You sacrifice in healthy ways, and they for you. You give yourself, but you don’t give up yourself. That is true love. You know that even when you have just had the worst fight, they will still have your back. They will be there for you when you are sick, even till the end. You will also do that for them. Your partner does not complete you, because you are already complete, but their presence makes your life more full and happy. They are in your life because they amplify your joy, not because you can’t find joy without them. The key is they are in your life, not they are your life. That is true love. True love is a two way street, always. You can’t have true love on one side and disease on the other. The disease knows no such imaginary lines and eats into everything else. True love is not finicky and turned off and on over the course of a few weeks or even days or hours. True love requires that you never have to prove yourself. You are already loved as your true whole, non-idealized self. You also love their whole, true non-idealized self. Not parts, and no buts. You must have it coming in to have it going out. The reciprocal nature is core. That is true love.

So why don’t we know this stuff? There is no real requirement in schools to teach mental health and relationships. There is no required formal education. I argue that there should be, but really there isn’t. Not just that, but many of these things are only now being recognized and understood in mental health. Not even all therapists get it!

We learn mental health and relationship concepts from watching our parents (sometimes) and from Hollywood. That’s right– Hollywood. We know the fairies in the fairy tales are not real, but we tend to believe the concepts and relationship dynamics are real. We believe it because we want to. And Hollywood gives us what we want because it sells. Who would watch a movie about some emotionally healthy regular couple who forges a solid friendship over the course of a year or two decides to nurture their feelings of love and get married? How boring is that? No, we want the crazy wild characters who meet and within days or weeks are overcome with an unexplainable, passionate, against all odds infatuation. Damn the whole rest of the world and everyone else in it. This is what we think we are supposed to find, and we are not complete without it. We much prefer the stories where the abusive, offensive, selfish but usually strikingly handsome bad guy suddenly melts with the right touch. The love of the right woman was all he needed!

These concepts are false. More women (and men) find themselves in abusive relationships than can be counted, because this is really what we want to believe. Truth is, reality sucks and it’s boring. Love never changes anyone. Fully grown adults can only change themselves, and even then they usually don’t. Few are even capable of self actualization on any level, and that is an amplified truth for PDs. No amount of love applied liberally heals someone whose hurts are too deep to be healed. People have to heal themselves from the inside, or they just don’t heal. They just end up injuring the person who gets close enough to try.

So do you have true love?

     So can you trust your subconscious to choose your partner for you? If you can’t explain it… if you say “I don’t know WHY I love him (or her), I just do.” Then you probably have already let it pick the wrong person. You haven’t done the self work to understand your own inner workings, which means… you probably aren’t in, or even ready for, true love.

For more on why you are pulled into this toxic relationship, I highly recommend “The Human Magent Syndrome” By Ross Rosenberg.