This is from Gretchen Schmelzer’s blog:
For those of you who have been hurt or who grew up with trauma you may know the word love, but you may not understand what it means. Or maybe you understand what it means in fiction, or movies, or other people, but you don’t know what it feels like. When people say they love you—you can think about the word love, you have an idea of what they are trying to say, you know they are trying to be nice, but your body feels numb, or you feel like you are watching the whole conversation from the outside. Love is something other people understand. Love is an abstraction.
Survival mode makes it hard to experience and understand love. Where survival is an experience of tension or tightness, love is an experience of openness and expansiveness. Where survival is an experience of longing, grasping, clinging, or vigilance—love is an experience of patience, of being able to breathe and look around. There is a brittleness and stiffness with survival. There is an elasticity to love.
I found this quite extraordinary and helpful. I remember when my ex-husband threw his arms around me and said “I love you so much” and I felt like I had come into a warm room for the first time after an eternity out in the cold. Unfortunately, the feeling didn’t last, although I could remind myself of it. Finally, my difficulty with being sexual due to early trauma ended up in divorce.
Despite that experience, I continue to be uncertain of what love is, unable to feel my love for others, or to feel their love for me. I always blamed myself for being unloving. So it’s possible that I’m not unloving, and people do love me, it’s just that it’s hard for me to feel it.