Without Love

"Without love, there is no reason to know anyone, for love will in the end connect us to our neighbours, our children and our hearts." Martin Luther King

This is the quote I chose for the main landing page of our website. I was so intrigued by Martin Luther King in my 20s. The change he inspired and lead was prolific. He challenged the status quo and was driven in wanting to see injustice broken and positive change to impact oppression, and long standing oppression. But he did not seem to be motivated by anger but by something even more powerful, love.

To be motivated to address head on the injustice and oppression he could have very easily met anger with anger and fuelled the anger. But his emotional petrol was different.

What is love? Why is it so powerful? To love and choose to continue to love, even within our own families is an active choice. At Christmas time as families gather tensions and triggers can run high. I've seen so many counsellors and therapists over the years on various platforms promoting boundaries and severing ties with narcissistic parents to empower and maintain personal well being and mental health. That seems like a helpful idea until you read comments at Christmas time about missing family and loneliness and how they wish things were different. And boundaries motivated by separation seem to need some kind of maintenance of hardness of heart and blame of not being seen, misunderstood or blame of manipulation. There can still be triggers despite the separation.

But what if instead those difficult parents or partners were seen through the lenses of undiagnosed neurodivergence and as people who really struggled with all the aspects of life and parenting without access to the tools and openness to mental health support we have now as parents? And what does acceptance of the lack of desire of someone to want to change based on fear, or hopelessness or lack of self awareness look like? When do we as adults no longer think of ourselves and focus on how parents make us feel about ourselves and we look to them as individuals with their own struggles? Maybe it doesn't happen until they age to a point where they need to be taken care of by their adult children as diseases associated with age kick in? Or is there just more resentment piled on top of hurt as the aging parent has their care organised for them and the visit to the expensive care home to spend half an hour with someone who is not entirely sure who they are? Then as they pass the strange mix of relief and disappointment of what was needed from them as a parent is kind of left hanging and the triggers of pain remain although more hidden.

So what can actually counter this pain, love and what does that mean to love the unlovely? To make a choice to actively love someone who has maybe missed who you are as a person, the person who raised you and was meant to some how really get you but didn't?

I think part of loving someone daily is choosing to forgive them daily. And that my dear reader is really hard thing to do. As a Brit in a culture that has plastered around the places from t-shirts to Facebook wisdom type of posts "Be Kind" I sort of think means lets love each other. The beautiful book, and the animation of the book which I missed watching, The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse, kind of touches on those painful parts of our souls that most if not all of us carry. There is something very beautiful and accepting and hopeful about that book.

The idea of loving ourselves is often associated with emotional and physical selfcare. I want to challenge you as part of that self care to consider what part forgiveness of others looks like in that. Of not holding little or big resentments that causes those triggers of deeply felt emotions and raising levels of anxieties. Understanding and acceptance is part of that and I also don't think you ever arrive. But what I do think is that it helps to heal important relationships and helps your own healing. It isn't easy to do but it is a precious thing to do. Precious things cost a lot and our families are precious because they rarely stop growing, and healing between you and your parents will impact not only you but your children and your grandchildren. Children are always watching you, even when they are grown and flown.

When you choose love in this way, you choose to do something very brave as it costs you a lot emotionally to choose change. But the fruit of that is a positive legacy you can't even imagine.

In closing I can't really think of an appropriate call to action to connect with me, instead I would encourage you to connect with someone in your family, who you love but have fallen out with and would have liked things to look different. But do scaffold yourself as something needs to be different in you first or old behaviours and ways of coping will kick in. Explore what it is to love someone, really love someone, there are so many self help books, blogs, programs to tool you up. Perhaps an update to this post will be a tool list.

But for now maybe be inspired by the lovely story which "has been translated into over 40 different languages and dialects. Charlie's words and illustrations have brought comfort to many and have been shared online around the world as well as on t-shirts for Comic Relief, magazine covers, street lamp posts, school classrooms, cafés, women's safe houses, prisons, hospital wards and as NHS hospital computer screensavers."