On why there is no love in abuse

A science experiment in my kitchen :: ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED JANUARY 9th 2023

For a couple of years there, I was extremely curious about what LOVE was. I even took so much ongoing education in nervous system health and science around deeper concepts of attachment, such as the reasons and the mechanisms behind pair bonding.

The jisk was this: when we are pair bonded with family, a lover, a friend, we take that person into our relational field as part of ourselves. We operate under the biological wiring that what happens to them, happens to me. What happens to me, happens to them. In a lot of our (toxic) culture, we have lost touch with the fact that this is the healthiest form of co-regulation. In fact, even in a lot of psychological spaces, we are encouraged to not include others into our own selves like this, as it would be “co-dependent”. But as we know, we demystified codependence in the fall on this newsletter here.

What I learnt from a nervous system perspective was that it is quite healthy to co-regulate like this with people who actually LOVE us and who we actually LOVE. But then my question came back, what is love? How do we know it’s present for sure, and that it’s safe to co-regulate in this profound and life enriching way with someone based on if they do love us and us them?

There was even a point in time I thought maybe I should write an investigative journalistic book about what love is from a nervous system perspective because I was consumed with trying to understand this properly, and then I found out bell hooks had written that book and it was called: All About Love: New Visions.

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.”

-bell hooks in all about love

It was in this book that I learnt what “cathexis” meant and the difference between cathexis and love.

Cathexis occurs when someone is deeply drawn to you, where they think about you a lot, where they invest emotion, or feelings or even time in you.

Love is made of many active ingredients, such as respect, care, recognition, affection, commitment & trust…

So both things are not the same. Because someone can have cathexis, or “cathect” you but love may not be present.

One can do both cathexis and love however. But they are not always present at the same time. Often, they are not.

And for me, this was an important distinction.

It answered a lot of my questions. For one, it showed me that one person in a two person relationship can have love for the other, while that other person in the relationship may not be in love back. It taught me that love originates from us because it is a way of relating rather than simply a feeling. If we are capable of things such as recognition, we are capable of love, love is present. If we are not capable of things such as care and respect, chances are that we are not experiencing love, and love is not there.

It made me think about everything I know about narcissists and how they can mislabel love for objectifying or gaining supply. A person who is operating from a narcissistic framework may literally think and even feel like they love you, but what they are actually feeling is cathexis. They may feel an emotion or a feeling directed toward you or associated with you sure, but they may not be relating in or with love.

So this may mean they spend a lot of their time with you, but that does not mean they love you. Love has to have recognition, commitment, respect, care and trust to be present. This does not mean people in love or who share love don’t make mistakes or slip up. Of course, we all make mistakes and sometimes that means we aren’t able to see or hear our people, etc. But what happens post mistake(s)? Is there love there? Now that you know exactly what it is?

Abused children have been taught that love can coexist with abuse. This shapes our adult perceptions of love. As we would cling to the notion that those who hurt us as children loved us, we rationalize being hurt by other adults by insisting that they love us. -bell hooks

bell hooks taught me that love and abuse are like oil and water, they never mix. I once went to my kitchen and put oil and water together in a mason jar with a lid and gave the container a real huge shake, just to prove to myself, literally, even though I probably did this is experiment in elementary school, that the two wouldn’t mix even if I tried.

I put in the water and I said, this is love, and I put in the oil, and I said, this is abuse, and I tried to make them co-exist together, and they physically, never did. They always stayed separate.

Because they are fundamentally different things that cannot co-exist together because of how different they truly are - being considered opposites.

I recommend doing this if you need the visual and the physical proof that abuse and love are not and will never be the same thing. When abuse is present, love is not with it.

love,

em