Being touched and caressed, being massaged, is food for the infant; food as necessary as minerals, vitamins, and proteins. Deprived of this food, the name of which is love, Babies would rather die. And often they do.
Marriage has become a battlefield where two persons are fighting for supremacy. Of course, the man has his own way: rough and more primitive. The woman has her own way: feminine, softer, a little more civilized, more subdued. But the situation is the same. Now psychologists are talking about marriage as an intimate enmity. And that's what it has proved to be. Two enemies are living together pretending to be in love, expecting the other to give love; and the same is being expected by the other. Nobody is ready to give - nobody has it. How can you give love if you don't have it?
Sometimes, when you are not getting the love you want, giving makes you think you will.
I was not allowed a physical lover. Falling in love with Love was the best I could get.
Everyone needs acknowledgement. When we're kids, we need it from our parents. If you don't get love from your family, you're destroyed inside.
Those who deserve love the least need it the most.
But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.
Most Christian leadership is exercised by people who do not know how to develop healthy, intimate relationships and have opted for power and control instead. Many Christian empire-builders have been people unable to give and receive love.
I learned to make things not matter, to put a seal on my hopes and place them on a high shelf, out of reach. And by telling myself that there was nothing inside those hopes anyway, I avoided the wounds of deep disappointment. The pain was no worse than the quick sting of a booster shot. And yet thinking about this makes me ache again. How is it that as a child I knew I should have been loved more? Is everyone born with a bottomless emotional resevoir?
Your parents don't give you much love, do they?' 'I don't need that stuff,' I told her. 'Henry, everybody needs love.' 'I don't need anything.' 'You poor boy.
It makes my life easier that I don't have to take my daughter or son to school, that I've not got to look after them because they are ill. But then, I'm not nurtured and cherished, so I will seek external love from other close relationships.
But hurting ourselves to inflict pain on others is just another cry to be loved.
I am most anxious to give my own children enough love and understanding so that they won't grow up with an aching void in them--like you and I and Harold and Martha. That can never be filled, and one goes around all one's life trying, trying to make up for what one didn't get that was one's birthright, asking the wrong people for it.
To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.
We're not raising children with the love that we need to.
Parents are your teachers until a certain point, and if they don't give you love, you'll go somewhere else to find it.
But if you don't have that memory of being loved, you are condemned to search the world for something to fill you up. But no matter how much money you make or how famous you become, you will still feel empty. What you are really searching for is unconditional love, unqualified acceptance. And that was the one thing that was denied to you at birth.
No one had ever told her this basic fact: not everyone got to be loved.
What the ego doesn't want us to see is that our pain doesn't come from the love we weren't given in the past, but from the love we ourselves aren't giving in the present.
If you don't have that memory of being loved, you are condemned to search the world for something to fill you up.
What love is depends on where you are in relation to it. Secure in it, it can feel as mundane and necessary as air - you exist within it, almost unnoticing. Deprived of it, it can feel like an obsession; all consuming - a physical pain.
I believe we live in a love-starved society. Everywhere you go there are probably people who haven't had the right kind of love in their lives.
Masculine anger is always because you are feeling constrained, trapped by life. Feminine anger is always because you are feeling unloved.
I realize that the love I never got from my family, I've looked for in the most wrong places my entire life.
I guess living without love, without experiencing it or being able to give it is pretty strong punishment.
