Unconditional Love

This afternoon, I finished Kathryn Harrison's memoir (The Kiss ), of her incestuous relationship with her father. I share with Kathryn the weighted mantle of incest, the problems of family complicity, and ultimately the quest for the self separate from what ensnares and defines us through sorrow and shame. I intend to speak to the topic of incest in future posts, but now I would rather examine unconditional vs conditional love; sparked by the following quote from The Kiss.

We're taught to expect unconditional love from our parents,
but i think it is more the gift our children give us.
It's they who love us helplessly, no matter what or who we are.

So few children are loved unconditionally. Giving or withholding acceptance based on another person's behavior is the essence of conditional love, and nearly all of us were loved that way as children. Conditional love is "I like how you make me feel." Conditional love is what people give to us when we do what they want, and it's the only kind of love that most of us have ever known. People have liked us more when we made them feel good, or at least when we did nothing to inconvenience them. In other words, we have to buy conditional love from the people around us.

Although it is given unintentionally, conditional acceptance has an unspeakably disastrous effect, because it fails to form the bonds of human connection created by unconditional love. As a result, no matter how much conditional love we receive, we often feel empty, alone, and miserable. And although we like to believe otherwise, because we have received conditional love from others all our lives, that's what we tend to give to those around us. We naturally pass on what we were given.

We like to believe we're unconditionally loving, but in many cases we're not. We prove that each time we're disappointed or irritated with another person. We like to think we unconditionally love our spouse or children, but then we become annoyed when they don't do what we want, or when they're not grateful for the things we do for them.

Kathryn Harrison speaks to the child as being able to love unconditionally. But this may not be the case. I think children are able to love more freely and with fewer contaminates and prohibitions than adults manifest. But by their very nature children are narcissistic and rarely capable of stating "I care how you feel," the hallmark of unconditional love.

Additionally Harrison refers to children as loving their parents helplessly. Though it is possible that children love helplessly, it is unlikely. Perhaps if children knew better they wouldn't love in such an unconditional way.

And it is the right and privilege of the parent to love their child(ren) in the most real way possible and that is with unconditional love. In contrast to Kathryn's experience, I found redemptive relief when Iwas able to love my son unconditionally. I so doing I discovered that that I wasn't crippled by my past and that Iwas capable of giving what hadn't been bestowed on me.......