Love is what we were born with. Fear is what we learned here.
Marianne Williamson
Loving can cost a lot, but not loving always costs more…
Merle Shain
There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer, with passion, excitement, and acceptance.
John Lennon
Love is the only engine of survival.
Leonard Cohen
All human beings have a deep longing for the same fundamental experiences: to belong, to know and be known, to love and be loved, to hold and be held, to nourish and be nourished, to create and be created, to experience deep, unimpeded connection, and engage in free expression.
And yet, when we come face to face with real love, when a loving partner stands before us, we may notice an alarming urge to withdraw, pull away, to shield ourselves, or even to turn away. Love can be very scary.
It’s an incredible act of courage to love wholeheartedly. It is our deepest longing, and it can also trigger our deepest fears.
Though I had convinced myself otherwise, I did once love fully, many years ago, in the manner described above. The object of this love was my mother, thirty-one years young and already the mother of two boys and two girls – all under the age of eight – when I was born.
My parents met at University College Dublin in the early fifties. Without leaving the island of Ireland, they had, after completing their respective degrees, ventured out into the world to start their family. They moved to a strange city, finding themselves in a non-native culture and a foreign jurisdiction. Daddy had established his own private practice as a dental surgeon, with Mammy – four years his junior, – supporting him in this venture as much as she could.
I imagine she was a very busy woman, perhaps even overwhelmed by the circumstances in which she found herself. Just one year after my birth, Dad had an accident which led to the loss of vision in one eye. Unnerved by this experience, the decision was made to return to the Republic in an endeavour to get more secure and pensionable full-time employment as a dental surgeon in the public, state-funded health system.
Almost a year after the accident, we decamped to our new home in the Irish Republic and started from scratch, Dad earning only a fraction of what his private practice had yielded in the North. The interim period had seen him working away from home for several months, leaving Mammy to run the ship on her own between weekends. In hindsight, I can’t imagine how she managed.
In the process of getting settled in Limerick, we moved house twice on the same housing estate and my two older brothers were sent to boarding school to learn Irish. I have no direct recollection of these early events. Exactly two years after arriving in Limerick, Mammy gave birth to her next child, my younger brother, the first of five further boys who would be born in the space of eight years.
I believe there may also have been a failed pregnancy between myself and my younger brother, a hunch of mine which is no longer possible to verify due to the subsequent early death, from cancer, of both parents many years ago, each having just turned fifty.
Why all these details? To provide the backdrop for the abandonment I experienced in my early years. To love fully, only to experience being abandoned, at such a tender age, can profoundly affect our happiness and outlook on life. It can be daunting to be at the receiving end of human behaviour, intentional or not, which culminates in abandonment.
As an infant, we have no choice but to love. Loving our mothers is the nature of our being. We have no control and are at the mercy of the unpredictability of emotions of those on whom we utterly depend. Stress, chaos, worry, and emotional volatility were part and parcel of our family life.
Ultimately, the fear of loving and being loved wholeheartedly later in life may be the fear of a repetition of unbearable experiences we have attempted to supress for many years, only for them to pop up and hijack us later in life, throwing us completely off course. Such hidden fears, kept well out of sight, may prove to produce exactly the effect we aimed to avoid. They become self-fulfilling prophesies.
The only way to love with your whole heart, I have learned, is to make peace with the possibility that you might get hurt. In my case it was first necessary to uncover, to discover, and accept that I had been grievously wounded so early in this incarnation.
Without uncovering, subsequently befriending, and tending this wound – the Greek word is trauma – we will be hampered in all subsequent efforts to establish intimacy in human relations. Because when we open our hearts completely, we are stepping into the unknown and giving another person access to the most vulnerable parts of ourselves. There is always a chance of getting hurt, rejected, ridiculed, humiliated, of being misunderstood, or abandoned, once again.
How had I hidden this wound from myself for so long? By convincing myself that I did not, in fact, love my mother, did not need her, could do fine on my own, thank you very much! This extreme form of self-reliance is a common trauma response. It helps us survive the adversity of the moment but can only lead to isolation and loneliness in the long run.
It did work for quite some time, fuelled by anger, resentment, and judgement. It was a self-righteous approach which cost me much energy and caused a lot of pain. To deaden the pain, I had resorted for years to self-medication with alcohol and other substance and process addictions, a pattern which is so prevalent in our society today.
It is only in the past two decades, having crossed the threshold of mid life and deciding to relinquish the self-medication, that this process of unveiling, embracing, befriending, tending, and forgiving the wound has begun to unfurl. Healing takes time. The process can’t be rushed or shaped. It requires trust to let go of self reliance and place our faith in the indomitable powers of emotional and spiritual healing, which reside in and can work through each of us.
What have I learned along the way? The most painful realisation was that I had indeed loved my mother deeply and she was not there for me as I had needed her.
That, rather than being a source of shame and guilt, my anger, rage, and pain were a natural and healthy response to the situation at the time. That it is important to accept and respect these as natural components of the human condition, and to work through them. And the realisation that misfortune is part of the mystery of life which we may choose to accept rather than insisting that life be fair, according to our own metrics.
Furthermore, what I experienced as my mother’s abandonment of me was not a personal matter. It happened to me but was not intentionally directed at me. She had many other children, besides me, to take care of. She had her own challenges. Typical of her generation, she had little or no concept for what we today call self care. Her needs remained unmet. She was a product of different times.
With a better understanding of neurology, trauma, and child development, we now have so many tools and resources that were not available to previous generations. When applied in my own life, they not only reduce the probability of transmitting pain and suffering to the next generation but also help me avail of the gift of healing by working through childhood adversity, developing compassion, and forgiving self, others, and circumstances for whatever suffering was generated.
In this compassion and forgiveness, the love between the infant and the mother has been restored.
The new-found ability and willingness to embrace this risk of loving wholeheartedly makes love authentic and transformative. By making peace with the possibility of pain, we get to choose to prioritize connection over self-protection, trust over fear, and growth over comfort.
It is paradoxical that it’s only when we relinquish the need to guard against the potential hurt that we can experience the richness, intimacy, and joy of real love. We all experience loss as we go through life. Ego believes the loss will hurt less if we shut down the passageways of the heart. It doesn’t work that way. Loss hurts, no matter what.
So, we may as well love fully while we have the chance and trust that, somehow, we will recover from the shattering heartbreak of loss. A look back in time will show us that, even in the darkest of times, we were guided, protected, and sometimes even carried, by forces we may not see or understand. Otherwise, we would not be here to tell the tale.
Even when relationships fail, or heartbreak makes a return, the preciousness of what was shared cannot be diminished. Pain is always a potential outcome. Deep pain is also a testament to the depth and authenticity of what you were willing to give, to risk, and to experience.
So, the true strength of wholehearted love lies in not avoiding pain but in embracing it as a possible consequence, while still choosing to show up, give our best, and keep our hearts open. When you love like this, even when it ends, you know you did so fully — and that’s what makes life worthwhile.
Paradoxically, the more fully we love, the more deeply we will grieve when we lose the ones we love, and perhaps the more likely we’ll be able to love wholeheartedly again. Going back and dealing with the unfinished business of unresolved grief work has been an indispensable element in my process of healing and growth.
There is no greater risk than loving wholeheartedly. It is worth the risk and the effort, even if these appear sometimes immense, daunting, or even overwhelming.
