News
Love is all you Need
As we head for St. Valentine’s Day, you’re more than likely to hear me humming one of the best known national anthems ever created in the ‘Marseillaise’. As I continue with the words, “love, love, love…….there’s nothing you can do that can’t be done; there’s nothing you can sing that can’t be sung, nothing you can say, but you can learn how to play the game, it’s easy…….all you need is love”, it never ceases to amaze me, the complete and utter genius of The Beatles’ words of wisdom in their realisation and sharing of this absolute truth that love, truly, is all you need!
So, what is love? Neuroscience is, at last, helping us to understand what happens in the brain when we fall in love, and how, in our search for love, we may inadvertently find ourselves in unhealthy relationships – not just with people, but with addictive experiences involving anything from food and alcohol to drugs and gambling.
The early developmental aspects of how we experience love, the need for recognition, appropriate attachment, separation and individuation, all enable us to become healthy adults. In our search for independence as we grow, we hopefully enter healthy, inter-dependent relationships, as opposed to unhealthy, co-dependent ones – so, is this what happens if we don’t manage to have enough of these early developmental experiences? MRI scanning of patients is now helping us to understand the vital need for healthy human contact – the type that generates the ‘love’ chemicals, which subsequently affect the development of the brain – fascinating, as my hero, Spock, would say!!
As a society, we are quite obsessed with this thing called love and the many strange guises it can take – just look at the movie distributors’ choice of timing on the release date for ‘Fifty Shades Darker’, and you tell me if this isn’t creating even more confusion in our being able to differentiate between love and sex! Poor Cupid doesn’t stand a chance, if he’s aiming at loins, instead of hearts, this 14th February!!
Seriously though, the giving and receiving of love makes it all sound like a marketplace commodity, so if you’re still confused, maybe asking yourself the following questions will go some way towards making sense of the relationship you’re in:
- Am I loving this person, or am I playing the role of the provider or the martyr?
- Am I loving this person, or am I playing the role of the parent or the child?
- Am I loving this person, or am I playing the role of the rescuer or the victim?
- Am I loving this person, or am I trying to fix him?
- Am I loving this person, or am I trying to improve her?
- Am I loving this person, or am I trying to save him?
- Am I loving this person, or am I trying to heal her?
The real paradox in all this is that if we really do love them, why are we wanting to change them?!!
When a man and woman marry, they say, two become one…….be mindful of this one, folks, and aim for something that’s much better as a joint goal: you both want to be brilliant in your own right as two separate individuals, and then to be even better and all the more brilliant when you’re together!
Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone, however, and with whomever, you choose to spend it!