Fantasy impromptu #9: Are you lovable?

What does it mean to feel lovable (alternate and equally correct spelling "loveable")? Or even to believe that you are lovable? I do not know. I do not know it at all, because it’s never been a feeling I’ve had or a belief that reaches some "place" inside me (despite the evidence I receive). I’d say that it’s the same feeling, or problem, of “feeling loved.” I don’t know that, either. I question my clients who say “I know that my parents love me. . . .” because they are likely saying they never felt their parents' love. But I am in the same, or similar, boat: I "know" my wife loves me, but I don’t know how to feel it.

 

This is preamble to my asking a client recently: Do you feel lovable? He’s had dreams in which his wife is leaving him. When he wakes up overwhelmed, and through the day, he asks her: “Do you love me?” We pointed out the obvious: If he felt loved, he wouldn’t feel the need to keep asking, irrespective of whether she actually loves him or not (she consistently and probably wearily says she does).

 

Many of us don’t feel good when complimented, when feted, when given love. Now, I have an almost orgasmically wonderful feeling when I know I’ve done something to make my wife feel happy or more secure – such as bringing home a really good paycheck. It’s a fused feeling of “good about myself” and “love for her.” That’s different. To feel lovable and loved requires something in childhood that many of us never received: the specific ingredients of love. Parents' inexplicable feeling of it, which is selfless. Calm and caring touch in babyhood and throughout childhood. Feeding on time, congruent empathic responses on mother’s face, parents’ respect for our self, their interest in us, positive words, absence of malign or benign neglect, and many other factors. Not to receive these gifts is pain, pain that keeps us frozen in need, need that hurts and which we must bury. And when buried, difficult to find, difficult to feel. The only way we could ever have that mysterious feeling of being loved would be to regress so deeply and powerfully back to babyhood – only in therapy – that our therapist would become the healer, the lover, the parent we never had.

 

Easy. Not easy.