Love Language - when our role models leave us out of synch

Last week I looked at Gary Chapman’s theory around love languages & the ways that understanding our love language gives us opportunities to understand & enhance the nature of our communication with loved ones. This week I'd like to go a little deeper & consider what lies beneath our personal love languages & what happens if we have not been able to develop a secure relationship with & understanding of our authentic love languages?

Our personal love language has roots within our own individual personality & temperament, but it is also a language that has emerged within the context of the love we experienced growing up.

Our first template for our language of love is the love we witnessed between & experienced from parents or caregivers.

These stories around the love languages we witnessed help us understand who we are & the ways we can & should behave & these scripts around what love is & how it should be shared come to embroider the very fabric of our identity & the love languages we learn to embrace.

The ferment of the stories we’ve absorbed around what love is & what it should or could be can lead us to develop ways of behaving that either repeat the kinds of love & love languages that we witnessed as we grew up or fill us with a longing to fill in gaps or miscommunications that we may have experienced as children.

If, however, we are able to develop confidence in ourselves & feel safe within our relationships we can learn to improvise with partners, holding onto the stories & love languages that made us feel connected whilst also adding details that we felt were missing, drawing on ideas & behaviours that we see in others to create a blend of love language that comfortably meets our needs & allows us to feel ever-deeper connection with partners.

As Chapman observes, we all want to feel that we are heard & valued & to sense that our loves ones are communicating with us in our love language but sometimes we can find ourselves out of synch & unsure of what the truest expression of our authentic love language could be.

We can find ourselves unable to connect with our love languages if

• our love language has been filtered & distorted in the context of challenging childhood experiences.

• we’ve become dislocated from what could be our authentic love language because it’s been overlaid by an overwhelming family language that just didn’t quite fit.

• we’re unconsciously replicating the love languages we experienced because it’s all we know even though we somehow sensed that this language never made us feel loved & valued for who we are,

• we’re consciously trying to reject a love language that we instinctively knew just didn’t meet our needs as a children but we now just feel adrift & confused as to how we can express, to give & receive love in the languages we need.

If we are out of touch with our authentic love language, we may find that even when our loved ones make gestures that feel like they ought to be making us feel loved somehow, they just can’t soothe the wounds that lie beneath.

Let’s take for example the love language around gift giving.

We may feel like gifts should give us the buzz of being loved but if we have grown up witnessing gifts being given

• as a substitute for presence or meaningful communication

• as a reward for compliant behaviour or even

• as a peace offering after unacceptable behaviour

the gifts we receive may stir confusion within us. Gift giving may have been our familial love language – how love was displayed – but if we sensed that gifts were offered to placate or manage behaviour, the confusion of feelings & the aftertaste of toxicity may have overwhelmed us, numbing or even shutting down our ability to reach deeper into self-understanding – the space where we could explore the possibilities of the range of love languages that might in fact have been more meaningful for us.

We may find we unconsciously replicate our family love language around gift-giving but if gifts were generally given as a way of soothing wounds around absence or to mask hollow silence where meaningful communication should have been

• We may have experienced the empty longing of being denied the presence of a loved one & have an unquenched thirst for hearing that we are loved & so our love languages around quality time & words of affirmation will have been marginalised or even repressed leaving us struggling to feel fluent & comfortable with these languages or even to recognise that these may be the love languages that more authentically meet our needs.

• Gifts may offer us feelings of familiarity, but our unconscious unmet emotional needs still feel  unheard & unheld & so the gift giving – even when offered with sincerity - will offer us hollow reassurance because they stir up a cauldron of raw & unprocessed emotional wounds from our childhood.

Even if we knew that we were always uncomfortable & have now made conscious choices to reject what we may have experienced as a family pattern of hollow gift-giving, if we have not had opportunities to address the wounds we felt as a child when we didn’t share quality time of hear reassuring words of love– the love languages we craved & needed to ground our sense of self

• We may have made a conscious decision to choose a partner who gives us the affirmations we feel we need to hear but we may find we struggle to actually accept & believe their words because we just don’t have a template of witnessing & receiving loving affirmations.

• We may find we just don’t know how to ground ourselves in the self-affirmation & self-validation that we needed as children & without this secure capacity to express love to ourselves we may find that we are always looking to our lover to fill the gap & our sense of hollow emptiness where self-love should be & so we may find our need for affirmation is like a bottomless pit that can never be fulfilled.

In these two instances if we can give ourselves opportunities to understand & heal these childhood wounds we can grow in self-understanding & build confidence in communicating both our wounds & our needs. Whether by ourselves or with a supportive partner, if we can find a safe space to open up space & improvise, exploring the love languages that may more authentically meet our needs, we can begin to develop the blend of love languages that will make us feel secure.

If we have grown up in an environment where gift giving was a compensation for or a distraction that masked manipulative or hurtful behaviour, our relationship with gift-giving as a love language may be differently but equally toxic. The wounds we have experienced in childhood may have eroded our very sense of who we are & what love & love languages could & should look & feel like. The gifts we have received may have swamped & invalidated our valid feelings around the behaviours we experienced, confusing us & bringing us feelings of guilt & shame – maybe we misread the behaviour; maybe we were to blame & maybe we are selfish & bad to feel ambivalent about the gift.

This confusion & churn of emotions & difficulty allowing ourselves to experience them keeps us caught in trying to process our distance from our deeper sense of self so we have no space to explore & experience or own authentic love languages & recognise what is right for us.

In this context gift-giving may be laced with the toxic cauldron of emotional confusion from our childhood

• We may have a partner who expresses sincere love through gift-giving but our unheard & unexplored wounds repeatedly stirs up the cauldron of raw wounds each time we receive a gift from them – we want to feel happy & outwardly show gratitude but inside we have pressed an unhealed sore.

• We may unconsciously choose partners who seem to show the same familial language or even seem to show affection through different love languages but underneath lies the same damaging patterns of using love languages to mask wounding behaviours.

• Ultimately because we are dislocated from our sense of our own authentic love language we will always feel & be vulnerable to manipulation.

When we have experienced love languages that were out of synch with our needs & our sense of self as children the wounds that we have experienced may have left us dislocated from being able to understand & explore our own love languages or to feel safe with the love languages of others. Learning to recognise, explore & understand the ways that childhood experiences are showing up in our adult relationships can help us recognise

• When relationship behaviours are toxic in ways that may have felt intangible or even invisible before

• When our childhood wounds are being triggered; what we may need to do to heal ourselves or even keep ourselves safe & how we can communicate our needs with loved ones we trust

• When we are being unconsciously drawn us into unhealthy relationship patterns, a knowledge that empowers us with deeper self-understanding & can inspire us to take the steps to finally break free.

Self-understanding is key.

When we are able to become familiar with the love languages that have formed us we  can still the chatter of family stories that may be overlaying our sense of self & open up space for deeper self-understanding, allowing us to hear the authentic voice within us that lets us know the kinds of love language we may really need to hear.

When we can hear, to accept & validate ourselves, recognising & acknowledging the languages that truly make us feel loves we are in a powerful position to make informed decisions as to who we are & how we want to be loved.

Warm wordy hugs

Laura xx