the language of love
May 12th, 2009Many couples come to my office because they think that the issue that is causing problems in their relationship is communication. While this definitely causes problems, I explain to couples that they have to dig deeper than just looking at their words. Words are preceded by feelings. Feelings are preceded by thoughts. And then you need to know where the thoughts originate from.Where did they learn how to be loving or be in a loving relationship. Most people learn about love from their first love relationship which is, you guessed it, with the person who raised you.
It is just like that old expression-the language of love. I believe that just the same way we absorb our first language that we speak, we also absorb lessons about love from our mother or our father or whoever it was that raised us.
Let’s take an example of S. who came into my office not understanding why she was always mad at her husband. She felt like she could feel so disappointed in him over the silliest little things, then yell at him and then they would both feel bad. When we looked back at her childhood, she told me that her mother had several boyfriends while she was growing up. One had cheated on her mother, and another had been mean, almost abusive. S understood that her mother felt disappointed by her relationships with men and conveyed that message to her daughter. Not on purpose, not to be malicious, without thought. S. picked up the ideas of disappointment that her mother had the same way she picked up the concepts of speaking english. No one sat her down to teach her all the words. As a child, she listened, she absorbed the language, made it her own.
So once S. began to understand that sometimes the way she reacted to her husband was not really about the way he was acting but because she had this idea in her head that he would always disappoint her, she was able to distinguish between what was really happening and what was just inside her head. Then she was able to work on changing those ideas and have a much more loving relationship with her husband.