The Virulent Impact of Not Feeling Loved: A Lesson from the Tin Man
Part one of a four-part series on Big Love
Jennifer Finch, LPC, NCC, SEP
February 1, 2023
When we don’t feel loved, lovable, or worthy of love there is an impingement on our heart. When love is missing, the wound has a very definite feeling. It’s like a landscape of sand with harsh, scorching sunlight, no expected rainfall, cracked land, crumbling rock, no hope for growth and columns of dust devils. When we experience the absence of love, or love delivered to us out of confusion, limitations, and inconsistency, what arises first are the various feelings and reactions to the absence. Anger, frustration, experiences of rejection and abandonment. It can feel desolate. Dry. Empty. Only lizards could survive here.
The lack of love is ultimate loneliness, and it keeps us malnourished and stuck in survival mode. This is never going to be a rich enough environment to thrive in. It’s hard enough just to survive in. The current epidemic of loneliness (equated to smoking 15 cigarettes a day), can be eradicated by adding the juice, the fertilizer, and aliveness that feeling loved can offer. The absence of love, as we know it, squeezes and chokes us, but we can water and enrich the soil of the arid and dry impoverishment by attuning to a different kind and quality of love. One that is more sustainable. Reliable. Consistent. Unchanging. And always, always there to hold us.
The wound of not being loved runs deep and leaves us frantically craving love from the outside environment. We would do anything for just one drop. We get caught and hooked in love addictions ranging from people and sex to booze to maxed out credit cards to divine promise offered by religious zealots. Anything to fill the void.
But what if we could feel a love that doesn’t depend on anything or anyone? What if we could expand the paradigm of what love is and what it feels like? What if love didn’t rely on external sources, like people, parents, caregivers, teachers, spiritual mentors, or materialistic things like boats, clothes, houses, accolades, praise, jobs, careers, fame, recognition, or remodeled kitchens?
In the beginning, we all only recognize love in an animal soul kind of way. This is the first stage of our development as humans because we needed others to survive. We were born co-dependent. Mammalian animals (which includes humans) need connection, caretakers, and basic needs must be met. We received that kind of love to some degree some of the time or we wouldn’t be reading this article.
But what I feel concerned about is that without good motivation, without willingness to traverse the soul’s path, without climbing Maslow’s hierarchy, are we seemingly content to staying here in this horizontal terrain seeking love from external sources? In my experience no one can love us exactly how we need to be loved because our expectations are grandiose. If our partner forgets to fold the laundry, it becomes a personalized attack demonstrating that they just don’t love us enough.
We need to check in and see if we are remaining in our animal souls seeking love from others, or from sources, events, and stuff outside of us.
If we don’t take steps to feeling love of a different sort, we risk that nothing will improve. Culturally we will shrivel up and disintegrate to ash in a ceramic tray from all those loneliness cigarettes that we are metaphorically smoking. I fear we will continue to read outrageous news of massacres, hate crimes, wars, defiance, and arguments of disenfranchisement from those that are not protecting us and “should be” protecting us. If love was felt intrinsically, repair and healing is possible. If we felt loved and lovable, would we feel the need to walk into a crowd, open fire, and harm innocent people? If love of a different sort was felt would a desolate landscape of disease, addictions and hate have a possibility to return to one of compassion, beauty, tenderness, richness, robustness, color and vitality?
This is an important topic that deserves a book but let’s start with the first part in this four-part series on Big Love, and see how it goes.
I believe that the central issue in just about 100% of the people that I see in my private practice comes down to an inability to self-love, or give and receive love openly, freely, without hindrances. This is not their fault. They didn’t receive the love that they needed, or they mirrored love in distorted and confusing ways from their caretakers. If you ask 10 people what kind of love they need, you will get 20+ answers. Some people need the red carpet rolled out for them; narcissists need love too. Some people need Tough Love; it’s a motivator and thrusts them forward in their lives. Some people need gentle, cushy love that is soft and tender. Some people need constant reassurance through touch or a grace of a hand; it helps them pacify and quell internal anxieties. Whatever kind of love you need is OK, but expecting others to give it to you consistently, straight-forwardly, and without distortion is a big ask. Are we setting ourselves up to fail and feel even more unloved?
We all come from our own scripts. We are functioning out of the blueprints of how we saw love being given, how love felt, how Hollywood portrays it, how conditional it was, and how we mirrored it even unconsciously; but all these ways are narrow minded or down-right illusory. And, this is the kind of love that is external and separate from us. Getting love the way we need to will require someone else to widen their repertoire of how they give love. Can we really change someone else? Can we really hold others accountable until they widen their delivery of love to fit our huge and tragic expressions of unmet needs? Couples therapy says, we can at least try and ask. Speak up for what it is we need and want. Entire sections in the bookstore are devoted to this “trying” and “asking.” “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus,” “The 5 Love Languages,” “Hold Me Tight.” I have nothing against these books, in fact I am a big fan of many of them. What I am talking about are the noxious ripple effects that happen when we were unloved, and we are still looking for a kind of satisfying love “out there,” to fulfill an internal need from an external source.
Can we move away from an animalistic model of love to one that grows the human soul? A love that is self-sustaining, unflappable, constant, and reliable like an Olympic flame. Something I call Big Love. A more universal quality of love that can be accessed right on the spot in any moment. The catch is that it can only be accessed somatically by being connected back to ourselves and our internal space of our bodies. It requires us to go in, not reach out to anything or anyone externally, because this Big Love is not something separate from us, it is us. When we can feel this rich texture of love, we become more self-reliant. We can self-soothe. And then when love shows up in those external forms, we can relish in it with even greater joy because it wasn’t expected or being demanded, it's just a bonus!
Big Love is what John Lennon gifted to us. Bob Marley sang it to us, “One love, one heart; Let’s get together and feel all right.” In the Buddhist spiritual literature, it can be referred to as absolute love, the ground of love, presence, true nature, or any number of other colloquial Sanskrit expressions. It is described as feeling vast, spacious, as if we are swaddled within an energetic field of love. In Christian Mysticism God is Love, so there is no duality in that. Rumi, the great spiritual athlete, poet and Sufi, writes, “This is Love: to fly heavenward.” Spiritual work always involves love. In theoretical physics, this ground of love, is being discussed as “unified field consciousness.” It can feel warm, or like a contained and supportive cloak of pink cotton candy. Whatever way it feels to you is exactly how it feels. It cannot be anyone else’s experience; it can only be your experience. It can be spiritual, as we climb Maslow’s hierarchy, or it can be practical, pragmatic, and useful simply meeting an unmet need.
Experiencing Big Love brings me hope that even against all the odds, every single one of us can broaden our definition of what Love actually is, and how it feels. It is waiting there to be felt by us. It has always been there. It is indestructible. And it is not something separate from us. It is all around us, through us and it is us. This is a love that melts duality and allows us to flourish into a human soul. This might be the most essential thing in our lifetime. Because with Big Love comes a natural ability to bring love to others, to our planet, to our children, to everything. And it gets much harder for us to convince ourselves that we are unlovable, when we realize that we are made of love.
This might sound far-fetched or far out. Maybe it is. I am currently following the science of love moving at the speed of light, in neuroscience, psychology, spirituality, and quantum physics. It is all very promising that we can attune to such a vibrational energy field that FEELS like love. And it is incredibly healing. To feel love no longer requires someone else to do, or not do, something for us. This changes everything. The whole paradigm of our suffering shifts to one of self-reliance. Is this easy? No, it is hard and shaky work to open our hearts back up to BIG LOVE. I will be laying out a map of the trail throughout this mini-series of writings on Big Love.
But what I do know with certainty is that it starts with us being willing to open to a right brained, somatic experience and simply feel love. We must move beyond what we think we know about love. We need to get out of our ego-left-brained defiance and constricted definitions and storylines about horizontal animalistic love. This quest discovering Big Love is inward, requires a felt-sense, and it takes an advantageous spirit to look and feel inside. The paradigm of trying to find love Jerry Maguire-style is broken and harming us, because no one can ever complete you when you are already whole.
If you are curious or even a healthy skeptic, I invite you to not take my word on it, but simply be still for a moment and explore how love feels to you? How does it feel in your chest? In your heart? Remember not to define it by externals, definitions, qualitative measurements, or storylines of how love was received or not received by others, in your childhood…especially in your childhood. But rather, in your adult self, right now, in this moment, on the spot, how does Big Love feel to you? Can you feel it? What does the quality of Big Love feel like?
To become a human soul, we, like the Tin Man, need a heart. Our hearts, our love, our empathy, our ability to feel joy and compassion all rest in what makes us human. Angelic even. But as the Tin Man discovered, he had a heart all along. We don’t need to travel all the way to Oz to feel the Big Love I am talking about, it has been there all along. Many have encountered Big Love, going all the way back to the beginning of time. Many great leaders have taught us about it. I have recently re-learned it in my somatic teachings and apprenticeships. This is not a new concept. But, I am dumbstruck as to how we keep forgetting about it. So, I hope to bring Big Love forth, into our modern day, because, in my heart, we cannot keep going in the direction we are going without it.
What if we could train in feeling a love that surpasses our animal instincts? A non-dual love. A human soul-love. Big Love. What if we could shift from a society that feels broken and focused on the surface of survival, based on a duality that we need someone else or something else to feel loved; and instead plumb the internal depths and started to look for inner significance and feel our own love? I am positive together we can find a sustainable love that is innate, inherent, unflappable, indestructible and doesn’t require anything from us except a willingness to open to it. What I am proposing is a Movement of Love.
More on this Big Love topic is coming, this is a four-part series, so stay tuned. And if you are interested, please get on the waitlist to express your interest in my upcoming training certification program: Sitting in Love Together (SILT). You can complete a quick form to get on the VIP list: https://www.beherenowmindfulness.com/silt-training
