Love is supporting the people you care about in the most sincere and positive way you can.
A few thoughts:
In answer to this graphic, and for those in the family who want to love everyone including the perps:
There are people who only want to love everyone and when they do, they sometimes deny someone that they love their truth. Trauma happens and denying it doesn’t show love at all. If anything it makes the person whose trauma is being denied feel unloved. In fact, it makes them feel like they are being treated like liars sometimes. Inevitably the denier will ask why this or that happened or didn’t, and it sounds like they are supposing that the traumatized person has never been traumatized. In fact, they are expecting a traumatized person to act normal and to not show any kind of defensive behavior at all. This is not realistic on the deniers part.
To ask the deniers we will find that the traumatized actions are not understandable in the least. Yet if you bother to look at their history there is usually a reason for everything that happens. Doesn’t really matter if fear is behind whatever it is, or anger, or whatever. The mixed signals are painful, over the long haul the negative messages of the denial are what seems to come through the strongest in the mind of a traumatized person. Because love that doesn’t support the loved one, is not love at all. It can make a person want to run away from that person who wants to love and never look back.
When I speak of support, I am not talking financial. Only being there” for someone who needs you. On that note. If you tell a traumatized person you are there for them and that you love them, and then you deny their experiences by claiming you want to love everyone including their (family) perpetrators –that is simply adding trauma onto the trauma and that is why the traumatized want to run and never look back. In the process of trying to get healthy and outgrow the trauma it becomes necessary to create a healthy world (as is possible) that includes making new friends and family. That includes not looking back no matter how hard it is, and no matter how many tears result from the decision. There are a TON of very strong people out there!!
Having said this… life is sad sometimes. Going through experiences like this, where you hear someone like, say a sibling, say, that she/he just wants to love everyone, in answer to you trying to explain something that explains a behavior. That loved one is simply shutting you down. You the traumatized, the victim, are to shut up, sit down, and behave yourself. No wonder we want to cry, and believe me we do. Yet, we are expected to shut up, and go to our place and never speak that way again.
When I finally move away from where I am now, far away, and never look back. Don’t bother to ask me why. By that time, it will be way to late. I’d rather be completely alone (which by the way, I’ll never be completely alone) I’d still be happier than giving a piece of myself away to people who only pretend to care.
(p.s. when that time comes, don’t look for me either, believe me, I won’t want to be found.)
