How we learn love as children forever colors how we love as adults
What beliefs did your childhood leave you with?
There’s an episode in Anna Kendrick’s HBO show “Love Life” in which her character Darby, a 20-something trying to find love in the Big Apple, is visited by her narcissistic mom. The narrator concludes the episode with the following prose:
“Love is alchemy. (…) The way a daughter experiences the love of her mother will forever color the lens through which she gives and receives love of all kinds.”
Just two days earlier I’d had an insightful conversation with my therapist about exactly this topic. My beliefs around love.
It hit hard.
I became to realize how deeply impacted I’d been by the notions I’d adopted surrounding love growing up. Until then, they’d been mostly subconscious.
How We Experience Love As A Child Forms Our Core Beliefs Around How We Love As Adults
When this topic initially came up, I was working through my struggles to let myself be angry for the lack of attunement I experienced as a child. I was raised with such an abundance of love, it felt wrong to be angry for what I didn’t get. After all, I’d gotten so much.
But love and attunement are not the same.
One can feel neglected and loved at the same time. My mother was a stay-at-home mom who dedicated her entire life to raising her children, yet I never felt seen as a child. I identified the underlying belief that was driving my struggles to allow my “inner child” to be angry: I felt that if I couldn’t forgive, I’d be selfish. I wasn’t leading with love.
What would that mean?
It would mean that I was not capable of love.
Because my parent craved a very specific type of love that I wasn’t able to give, I adopted this belief some time in childhood. There was a mismatch between our love languages and a lack of awareness on both sides.
But of course, the child doesn’t dare to blame their primary caretaker.
The child, primed to seek safety in their caretaker above all, will assume that something about themselves must be wrong.
It’s an act of self-protection.
Core Beliefs Can Be Helpful or Harmful — Here’s How to Identify What’s Going On For You
Developing core beliefs in itself is neither good nor bad. It’s a normal part of growing up. It only becomes problematic when core beliefs are actually limiting beliefs.
Limiting beliefs are beliefs that are not true. They are often beliefs that we adopted as children because they were helpful at the time. For example, in order to protect the image of my primary caretaker, I chose to believe that something was wrong with the way I gave love rather than with how my caretaker received it.
Core beliefs are often carefully buried in our psyche and with that, not easily accessible to us. Some of them we’re aware of, for others we have no clue that they are in fact guiding our behavior.
As Carl G. Jung famously said:
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
There’s a reason we always seek out the same type of partners, whether harmful or hurtful. We seek out the love that feels familiar.
Core beliefs may be deeply buried, but there are ways to get to them.
What’s been most helpful for me has been working with psychedelic plants accompanied by integration therapy.
Talk therapy is helpful when memories are subconscious but not completely repressed
In most people, core beliefs are subconscious, but that doesn’t mean there’s no way to get to them. You might be able to identify them through talk therapy.
There’s one specific technique that I’d like to share with you, and it’s super simple. It’s called the “Downward Arrow Technique”. You can do it by yourself. It’s a series of questions that will help you get to the core of a belief.
These are the steps:
Choose any automatic appraisal you believe to be true, ideally, one that incorporates some type of judgment (“I should …”)
Ask yourself: If this were true, what would that mean about me? Why does it matter to me? What would happen if this were true?
Continue asking yourself the questions in (2) until you get to some form of an “I am” statement. This is your core belief. To get there, you need to make sure you move “downward” rather than horizontal.
When core beliefs are unconscious or repressed, we can psychedelics can help bring them back into our awareness
I don’t remember my childhood.
It’s always been this way, at least before I started working with psychedelics.
As a result, it’s been hard for me to get to the bottom of things with just talk therapy. If we can’t remember what happened, we can’t explore how it affected us.
I recall once experimenting with Gestalt therapy. I was instructed to place two pillows in front of me, one for my mom, one for my dad. Next, I was told to connect with my inner child and share anything she may want to say to my parents.
She didn’t have much to say.
Nada, actually.
Because I wasn’t able to connect with her.
She was buried.
It wasn’t until I leveraged intentional psychedelic journeys to connect with the little girl inside me that I began uncovering some of these core beliefs.
In My Own Healing Journey, Psychedelics Have Been Immensely Helpful In Uncovering Core Beliefs
A few weeks ago, I was on a plant medicine retreat.
In an intimate setting of four participants and two practitioners, we participated in a series of ceremonies over the course of a weekend: Ayahuasca in the evenings (DMT-containing ancient Amazonian brew), and San Pedro during the days (mescaline-containing cactus, natively called “Wachuma”). I’ve written previously about why exactly it’s impactful to work with the combination of these two plants in this way.
During the last day of our retreat weekend, in the middle of our Wachuma ceremony, I quite suddenly started feeling invisible.
It was so uncomfortable.
I curled up on my mattress. I checked out of all conversations. I didn’t want to be there anymore. I didn’t know what was going on, but thankfully, I knew the medicine was doing its work.
Wachuma is a heart-opener, and with that, it will bring to your awareness to all the barriers between you and love. It will often bring up emotions that keep your heart “protected” or inaccessible.
At some point, our guide came and laid down next to me. We began talking, I began crying, he held me. Together we processed a reality that I hadn’t realized was such a big part of my childhood: the belief that it wasn’t safe for me to feel.
Before this experience, I had absolutely no clue what was going on. While I continued to struggle with addiction and wasn’t able to feel my emotions.
But that day a window opened.
A window into my soul.
This was the insight that set of many of those that would follow, including my lack of capacity to love.
When I returned to plant medicine in an effort to heal those beliefs, a new world opened up to me. I learned that I was not only capable of love but had an abundance of love to give.
I learned that my love language was quality time and physical touch.
And, I learned that my love was never too much, and never not enough.
Finally, I feel able to step into the next season of my life.
The season in which I reclaim what love means. For my inner child, and for the adult in me.
Yes, how we experience love as a child will forever impact how we perceive love as adults. But the last word’s never spoken. By bringing awareness to our core beliefs, and identifying and correcting those that are limiting, we get to recreate ourselves.
We get to redefine how we as adults, as mothers, as partners, and as friends want to give and receive love.
We get to go on the journey of finding or remembering our love language.
And we get to cultivate and practice it.
And we do that by starting with ourselves.
Because how we give love to ourselves will determine how we give love to and receive love from others.