When I first read Bell Hooks All About Love I was in my early 20’s and thought I’d been in love a few times.
I wish I still had that copy of About Love, so I could reread what I scribbled in the columns, notes to self, and revelations. I carried it around like a bible, proselytizing to all who’d listen about the difference between cathexis, love, and care.
In short, the definition of Love, borrowed from Scott Peck, is the will to nurture oneself or another’s spiritual growth, love as a verb and decision.
Care is meeting the needs of another person and what you think they need. It isn’t a curiosity of what that person needs to grow into the most evolved version of themselves. Care can coexist with abuse and neglect, but love cannot.
While Cathexis- is based on romantic comedy notions of love. It is more about the person experiencing the feeling of intense feelings of attraction and emotional investment and doesn’t actually benefit the person on the other end. It’s more about, “I enjoy the feeling I get when I am with you and want to keep feeling it.”
While I cultivated enduring and intimate friendships, I had a very conflicted relationship with romantic love. I still feel friendship is undervalued when left in the shadow of romantic partnership.
During the time I started Dr. joe’s meditations, I was working on a memoir, reremembering and reexperiencing being a teenager, oppressed by domestic terrorism and violence at home.
“When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect them; that is, we invest feelings or emotion in them. That process of investment wherein a loved one becomes important to us is called “cathexis”.
In his book Peck rightly emphasizes that most of us “confuse cathecting with loving.” We all know how often individuals of cathecting insist that they love the other person even if they are hurting or neglecting them. Since their feeling is that of cathexis, they insist that what they feel is love.
When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions
Growing up in a household where family members sexually, emotionally, and physically abused and didn’t protect me, left me confused by the concept of love. Hooks’s distinctions in About Love between love, care and cathexis validated my reluctance and liberated me to receive love from a lover.
My heart felt like a net as a I read About Love, quick to catch feelings of adoration, care, and compassion for strangers in newspapers I’d never met, in countries I’d never been to. I could feel deeply for friends and humanity as a whole, but romantic relationships were unsafe.
Being in my body was unsettling. I felt allergic to my own sensations, eye contact with someone I had a crush on made it hard to breathe, and someone saying “you are beautiful” ignited a panic attack. A tornado of chemicals, pins and needles, internal high wind alert, unable to think clearly, spinning critical thoughts, a feral need to retreat and escape.
I couldn’t relate to romantic comedies, because that giddy butterflies sensation was absent. Instead, most romantic or flirtatious encounters left me feeling like the slow-motion frozen woman in the basement horror film scene. My nervous system couldn’t tell the difference between someone wanting to chainsaw me or kiss me.
I still have such visceral memories of what it was like to live above my body, with a nervous system that responded to life as if I was being called on in class and hadn’t done the reading.
There are multiple paths to finding your way back to yourself. I offer one approach to rewiring your brain through your body in the courses I’ve been creating.
I recently posted a blog you can read here, about my concept of Asshole Angels. Asshole angels show us our growing edge. In life there are often people, Asshole Angels, we feel victimized by and it can time and perspective to regain ground and feel empowered.
These bullies and abusers can be external, but they can also be internal. We all have a part of us that functions as an Asshole Angel, a part that may sabotage or paralyze and discourages us with its critical voice. It’s useful to consider: Where do we need to have a boundary with ourselves? How do we get in our own way?
What do we tell ourselves we can’t do? How do we talk ourselves out of what is possible? What does your habitual negative self-talk say? What does it encourage you to do? Stay up too late, do that thing that depletes your energy, over giving or even overworking? One person may sabotage their relationship while someone else is sabotaging their career.
Whether those Asshole Angels are external or internal they show us our vulnerability, and insecurity and provide the opportunity to develop our self-respect. What do you want to turn away from and what do you want to turn towards? And also be sure to support Bell Hooks and purchase a copy of About Love.
