Part 1
Love is measurable, like counting the atoms that make up our universe. We have an obligation to keep counting. We paint ideas of being loved in romance, our passions, and heartfelt expressions. That might only be half of its existence. We are deeply capable of resisting care, and the potential feelings of emotional susceptibility. Maybe saying that practicing love has formidable obstacles. Love has proportionate hurtful ways of being avoided, tactics for not being vulnerable. I spent hours with people seeking care for behavioral, lifestyle, and relationship healing. They were looking for answers, as if they didn't have the answers intrinsically or even as if there was an answer. I find counseling, when done well, is addressing the ways we are not lovable. And it might be important to say that mental health has disease and dysfunction that can't be reasoned with using this understanding. I am talking about characteristics found in the heart of the human struggle bell curve. I recognize, in a person’s creative demonstrations of independence, a pattern of resisting or avoiding love. The cliché term is pushing someone away.
I am guilty of the action and prefer to think of it safeguarded sabotage. I might blow up relationships, more like stress the durability, and likely exercise my reactivity with protagonism in order to reveal the depth of love that truly exists within them. And for clarity relationships in this context are not limited to the romantic flavor. I can’t say that it is test. I can’t say there is any type of thoughtfulness in it. I think it is a modality for emotional protection, and when reckless just a coping strategy. I do this because so many relationships in my life have softly pinched me, bitten me, and socked me. I am sure I have done the same.
Because my safety is found in solace, I think the push is to restore some form of stability to organize my emotions. I retreat. My comfortable distance with gregariousness is kept by the angst from not knowing when my protagonism is not seen as agonism. As I become intimate I am lured into vulnerability and this is where my first defense has been to sabotage for safety, like a tunnel rat might scan booby traps. I blow that shit up. Sometimes it is intentional, more often it just feels like I got entangled.
Experiencing this resistance to the vulnerability and safeguard from deep connection might be our love limit. I want to explore this vulnerability as a spectrum for progress. I find popular enjoyment in using the term push-pull. And isn't this nature or expected. Life is polarities dancing, generating a chaos that tends to result in creativity, consumption, or contribution. It isn't dysfunctional and even better recognized as a natural way of being in or struggling for balance. I have practiced curiosity when I grow aware of these tensions, and this has been a helpful tool for adding focus to the push-pull. This helps me to formulate messages to create healing "space" in and through the back and forth. Space here is defined as a platform for confronting the barriers to a harmonious self concept or inertia to disconcerting for togetherness.
In this next little series I hope to describe my struggle to hold the Chicano identity, while framing my struggle in the above described psychology of safeguarded sabotage. I am going to describe the dysfunction I experienced growing to be American while being seen as something embedded. I'll share my reflections on the symptoms of ignorance and neglect that come from the people, the humans, that label themselves Loving.
