Do you struggle in your love relationships? Love relationships come in many forms. Our love relationships as adults often carry the imprint of our love relationships with our parents. Are you able to fully take in the love of your mother and your father just the way it is offered to you? Are you waiting for mother and/or father to change in some way? Do you judge your parents for not loving you enough? Have you rejected the love of your mother and/or your father and put energetic or physical distance between yourself and them?
Within systemic healing and the systemic constellation approach to wellbeing, we speak of the orders of love. For a healthy flow of love in the family system, love is meant to pass down from the grandparent to the parent to the child. Frequently, the baby or child innately senses the emotional woundedness of the parent and offers to sacrifice him or herself to carry the emotional burdens of the parent. That is how deep the love relationship is between the child and the parent. This natural healthy order of love is reversed and the child gives to the parent rather than taking love from the parent, creating an energetic entanglement. The child does not learn to receive love from others and becomes a constant giver. Living in agency with the parent in this way is energy deadening for the child. The child may struggle in their love relationships in life.
Each family system seeks to create balance and a healthy flow of love between and amongst family members. Each family member has a right to belong in the family system regardless of what they may have done or not done and inclusion of all members contributes to family and individual wellbeing. We look back at the family system without blame or judgement. If you are trapped in a mindset of judgement, you may need to temporarily suspend judgement to open your eyes and heart to the love patterns within your family system. Once you have looked back and developed compassion for the emotional journey of your parents and grandparents, you may gain the emotional capacity to let go of the judgement altogether. When an individual or group of individuals is missing, excluded, forgotten, rejected, caste out, or shunned by the family system, it is time to bring them back into the fold and to open the flow of love in the family system. Be aware, you may be the one missing from the family system creating a blockage to the flow of love in your own life. It’s up to you to transform your world.
Love for Mother
There are many aspects to love. You come to life deeply entangled in your first love relationship with your biological mother. Your mother is your first love experience of the feminine. Long before birth, during birth, and in early childhood, through circumstance and your energetic relationship with your mother, you begin to experience your first energetic and emotional wounds; you develop your first fears; you establish your sense of wellbeing, safety, and worthiness, or lack thereof; you set your emotional response strategies and patterns in motion; you learn patterns of giving and receiving; you learn ways of being in the world; and you develop a template for your relationships in life. This love is held deeply and unconsciously in the cellular memory of your body. If you consciously reject your mother, this unconscious love and loyalty remains as a felt sensation in your body and it may impact your life in many ways. The love relationship with mother is very complex. You may carry your love for your mother unconsciously as sadness, anxiety, depression, physical symptoms, unhappiness, unworthiness, inadequacy, rejection, perfectionism, or many other symptoms or conditions. The development of a healthy relationship with mother is directly related to your own wellbeing in life.
As well, it is critical for you to understand that it is through your mother that you are able to get to our father energetically and emotionally. If you are energetically too close to mother in some way, you may find it difficult to connect with your father and you may have intimate relationship difficulties. A healthy love relationship with mother develops when she steps back energetically allowing the child to experience a healthy process of individuation during childhood. The child is permitted to develop a healthy identity and energy boundary separate from mother. The child learns to self-soothe, self-parent, and self-love. When healthy individuation does not occur, the child may enter adulthood entangled energetically with mother. The child becomes entangled with mother to ensure his or her own survival.
Love for Father
At the cellular level you also experience love and loyalty to your father. You are 50% mother and 50% father through your cellular DNA structure and gene expression. Your relationship with father tends to be your first love experience of the masculine. Through your mother, you may feel connection or disconnection, rejection, or merging with your father. If your mother has put down your father in any way, either consciously or unconsciously, you may feel disconnected from him. Out of loyalty to your mother you may not consciously feel your father’s love. However, your body may unconsciously show love and loyalty to your father in some way. You may find you are like him in some way that is not always positive. This may highlight the unresolved emotional trauma that seeks to be healed. If your father put down your mother in any way you may be torn between loyalty to mother and father, consciously rejecting one or the other in response.
If you remain tightly in the energy boundary of your mother, entangled in an unhealthy relationship, you may struggle to connect emotionally with your father. Mother may be energetically and emotionally too close. Since the love of mother is a deep primal and primary love, and your first priority is to her for your own survival, you may experience father as emotionally distant. You may not feel his love. You may not be able to accept his love as it is given to you. If you feel disconnection with father, you may subversively show your love and loyalty to him in many different ways through your beliefs, actions, mannerisms, and gene expression. You may carry father’s unhappiness, anger, abusiveness, emotional distance, guilt, sense of humour, work ethic, financial behaviours, addictive behaviours, or depression. Regardless of the state of your relationship with your father, you carry unconscious love and loyalty to his family system and to him.
Love for the Family System
You also come to life carrying unconscious love and loyalty to your family system. Your family system includes the family systems of both your biological mother and your biological father. Individuals who have been raised by others may also find that the family systems of their caregivers or adoptive parents are also mirroring or reflecting unresolved emotional wounds seeking to be healed. Family systems come together for a reason. Regardless of the state of the relationship between your mother and your father, you carry unconscious love and loyalty to each of their family systems. You may be unconsciously carrying, sharing, following, or atoning for some unresolved transgenerational ancestral emotional trauma out of love and loyalty to your family system.
Intimate Love Relationships
Whether you are a man or a woman, if you are unconsciously entangled in the energy boundary of your mother well into adulthood, or you have an unhealthy relationship with mother in any way, you may struggle in your intimate relationships with others. This entanglement may not be recognized consciously because it developed very early in life. Mother may not have been there for you energetically because she was turned away with her own unresolved early emotional trauma. You felt alone, unwanted, or unloved. Mother was very busy with other children and/or work within or outside the home. You felt unseen and unheard and took on emotional response patterns of overachieving, perfectionism, procrastination, over-responsibility, over-giving, eating disorders, or acting out to be seen, heard, and acknowledged within the family system. Mother may have been struggling emotionally when she carried you in the womb. Mother may have experienced emotional trauma around your birth. Mother may have been medicated during your birth. There are many subtle unconscious ways that the child experiences a separation wound from mother. The separation injury does not have to be as explicit as being given up for adoption or death of mother.
Whether you experienced too little or too much energetically from mother may also create feelings of abandonment or emotional overwhelm. The love relationship with mother is often mirrored or reflected in the intimate relationships you have with others. Do you pull people in and then push them away? Do you constantly need space and keep people at a distance? Do you constantly need others with you? Do you let anyone into your personal space? All of these patterns develop through the mother-child love relationship and they may impact your other love relationships. Unresolved emotional wounds seek to be healed, and ongoing relationship drama in relationship with mother, father, siblings, extended family members, intimate partners, grandparents, children, coworkers, and/or friends acts as a spotlight on the unresolved transgenerational ancestral emotional trauma that desires to be healed in the family system.
Child and Parent Love Relationships
Our attitudes, perceptions, and behaviour in intimate love relationships often reflect the love relationship we had with our biological parents in childhood. Whether you left childhood feeling loved by your parents or not, or whether you carry an unresolved ancestral trauma, it may have a bearing on your decision to have children or not. It may also reflect on how you parent your children, if you have chosen to have any. The child’s perception of love is developed through the first intimate love relationship experienced in life and that is frequently the relationship with mother.
The child rarely understands the love relationship of the parents. The child’s experience of life is too narrow to understand this relationship. The child develops one narrow perception of love, and frequently, the parent’s love for the child may be judged as not enough or lacking. The energy dynamics between parents and children vary greatly. Sometimes it feels like there is not enough love and sometimes there is too much unhealthy love. This may impact future relationships. Sometimes parents are put on pedestals and future intimate partners are unable to live up to this illusion. Love relationships with parents that are too close may create intimacy difficulties in intimate partner relationships. The individual may consciously feel like they are betraying the parent when they get too close to the partner. The emotional response is to pull away. Sometimes the child shows love for the parent by taking on the parent’s worst attributes or by carrying a similar illness or dis-ease.
It is common for individuals to trigger old emotional response patterns from childhood when they become parents or grandparents. Also, the death of parents or grandparents may also trigger old emotional wounds to surface. Each of these huge emotional life experiences may be the catalyst for physical, psychological, spiritual, emotional, financial, or relational challenges to emerge. Often symptoms occur within the first year or so following the traumatic emotional life experience. Did you resist your parents’ love or did you embrace it just the way it was given to you?
Love Differs within Families and Cultures
Showing love is transgenerational over family systems and cultures. Patterns of love can be identified in family systems. Patterns of love can be identified in cultures. Today, mothering and fathering roles are altering in many family systems. Family systems are struggling to adapt to new individual and societal expectations. Who in your family system is designated consciously or unconsciously the child caregiver, the homemaker, the connection to extended family, and the connection to the outside world of commerce? Does this differ from the norms within your family system generation after generation into the past? Children (who may be adults) may struggle energetically if they attempt to be different, more, or less than the family system can tolerate. For example, if the women in your family have always been homemakers, working outside the home may trigger emotional entanglements. If the women of your family system have always been nurses or teachers (use of stereotypical careers is intentional), then a career in high power finance may yield unconscious emotional entanglements or challenges. If the men in the family have always been police officers, farmers, office workers, clergy, teachers, soldiers, doctors, accountants, firefighters, athletes, or factory workers, shifting in a different direction may trigger emotional entanglements. Today, it may be the father who is the one who stays home caring for the children and the home and it is the mother who works outside the home. Some families today have same gender parents. The shifting away from old traditional transgenerational roles is happening in many different ways. These shifts may create tension between the generations. Transition may be felt energetically and emotionally as rejection by the parents and grandparents and friction may occur. It may be necessary for the wellbeing of individuals and the overall family system to seek the blessing of the parents and ancestors (whether they are alive or not) to be different from them or to forge a new path moving forward. This can be done in an honouring ritual or ceremony you create yourself.
Love has Many Faces
Energetically, the love of mother and father is often rejected as it is given to the children. The children often energetically and emotionally feel that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. They feel the love of the parents as lacking. Children struggle in life in some way when they reject the love of the parents as it is offered. Any higher or different expectations of the parent may create life challenges for the child. The parent gives love the way they were taught through their family system. They cannot be expected to do it differently. For example, some mothers show love through baking tasty treats and delicious meals, or they take the time to hand sew new clothes. Some show love through pampering the child even when the child can do these things for themselves. Some show love by driving their children to all their activities on time and some show love by being physically there for the child with a meal prepared breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Some fathers show love by holding down a steady job that pays all the family bills. Sometimes fathers work long hours or hold down several jobs to show their love as a good provider. Some fathers show love by providing structure and discipline to keep from spoiling the child. Some fathers show love by showing their child how to play a sport.
Some parents smother their children with too much. Some parents attempt to keep their children from experiencing mistakes or failures. Some parents show their love by giving their children independence. Some parents show love by attending all the activities of their children. Some parents with great material wealth give little material benefit to their children and others with little material wealth spend everything on their children. Some parents sacrifice their own interests to provide their children with their heart’s desires.
These examples are intentionally somewhat stereotypical of older generations because it is usually adults that begin to recognize their repetitive life patterns and struggles that don’t serve them well. If the stereotypical nature of the examples triggered annoyance or anger in you, then you may have some entanglement with your parents involving the conscious or unconscious rejection of their offerings of love. If you intentionally did life differently than your parents and find yourself with repetitive life challenges, you may have some healing work to do around rejecting the way your parents offered love and finding compassion for their emotional journey.
Some parents leave their children with loving grandparents a great deal and go off in search of answers to their own unresolved emotional wounds, often finding solace in addictive behaviours. Children frequently don’t recognize the love behind this action, but rather, feel it as desertion or abandonment. They don’t see the parent’s unconscious attempt to provide greater attention and love through the grandparents. The child doesn’t always appreciate the mentorship of the substitute caregiver even when the parent has nothing left to give emotionally. Mothers and fathers learn their style of showing love from their parents and the generations that came before them. Mother and fathers may be energetically entangled with their parents, grandparents, great grandparents, other members of the family system, or collective historical events. The child frequently does not understand the unconscious energetic and emotional dynamics behind the beliefs, thoughts, and actions of the parent. The reason for this is that the parent doesn’t understand the deeper transgenerational familial origins either or chooses not to express their emotional pain. Each generation develops a new way of showing love that integrates or rejects the methods developed by their parents and grandparents.
Perception of Love
The narrow perception we develop in childhood about love impacts our memory and perception of our parents and influences or guides our future relationships with others. So many adults carry the perception that their mother and/or father did not love them because the parents didn’t show love through hugs and kisses and saying “I love you.” Children may have witnessed different love relationships between their friends and their parents, and judge their own love relationship with their parents as lacking. Children may have a fairy tale romantic relationship with love and be shut off to the love given to them in reality. Children may view love relationships on television or on the computer and reject their own parents’ offerings of love. Children judge their parents based on their own perception of love. If the child carries a perception of love as daily hugs, kisses, and “I love you” spoken aloud to them, the child may perceive a lack of love when the parents show love through cooking and pampering. The child may reject the love of the parent who works long hours to provide for the family, perceiving it as a lack of love, when the opposite may be the reality. The child may reject the mother or father who doesn’t give enough materially. In the world of consumerism today, lack of material fulfillment may be perceived as a lack of love.
Judging Love
The child may recognize the failures and perceived flaws of the parent but they may not recognize the emotional woundedness of the parent. The child may judge the parent for being emotionally distant in these circumstances, when the reality is that the child distances him or herself from the parent when he or she rejects the parents’ offering of love. When there are difficulties and challenges between the parent and the child, the love relationship has to be addressed to find wellbeing in adult life. As the child lets go of the unconscious need to reject the parent and the unconscious need to distance themselves from the parent, the child finds their way home. When the child learns to accept the love of the mother and father as it is offered, without expecting anything different, the child can take the love of the parent fully into their own heart. Essentially, if we continue to reject the love of our parent, we may reject that aspect of ourselves. When we reject self, we are unable to find self-love and we may not be in a healthy place for love relationships with others. The body may manifest this rejection of parents and self as immune system issues with the body rejecting aspects of itself.
You know that you cannot change others, you can only change yourselves. When you take responsibility to shift your way of being in the world, you transform your world and have an impact on everyone around you. You shift the inner image of others that you hold unconsciously within you. When you are able to fully take in the love of mother and father as it is offered, you are finally able to take in the life force energy, the breath of life, that is your birthright.
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