Love is an experiental thing

Meaning, it's not a concept; it's a feeling. And I think that when we 'love' somebody, it's because they do something for us that we can't do for ourselves - they like us for some reason that we don't recognize in ourselves; they appreciate something that we do that we may take for granted; they offer us something that we are missing, like a hug. Basically, they feed us something we need.

Which could be anywhere from food to that aforementioned hug, or all kinds of other things: Sitting with us through the death of a friend; calling us when they know we're frightened or worried about something and making sure we're ok, and offering to help in whatever ways they can, or at least reminding us to ask for help if we need it, and not stay stuck in some fugue state of unrequited (?) need. People feed us in all kinds of ways all the time, we just need to learn to

a) accept what's offered when it's offered, and
b) not accept anything that is bad for us.

It's that second one that's tricky for me. I learned long ago to try to overcome my innate tendency to reject compliments - I had a high school drama teacher who said to us (the class) one day: "Rejecting a compliment is like rejecting a gift - you're essentially throwing someone's gift back in their face."

Clarification: That tendency to reject gifts is not innate. It's learned, from a family that taught that me that nothing I did, or had, or was, was good enough. I got to the point where I was afraid to even listen to what another person might say about what I was doing (or how I was being) for fear of being knocked down yet again. I just couldn't take it any more.

What happens is, by our experiences are we hardwired. That is, our experiences literally program our mental/emotional circuitry to process all incoming information a certain way. Our brains/minds/bodies are incredibly sophisticated learning tools, and much of the learning goes on well below our conscious radar, down in that primordial stew of chemical reactions called hormones and whatnot.

The amygdala maps every experience we've ever had in terms of what fear chemicals were released: Was this a 'good' (meaning safe) experience, or a 'bad' (meaning unsafe) one?

The lizard brain is very simplistic, almost binary in nature: On/off, good/bad, black/white. This allowed our ancestors (in my lay understanding) to survive an environment that threw curveballs at them every second of every day - a system that was so fine-tuned, so responsive to its surroundings that most of its responses occurred at nearly a subliminal level, faster than conscious thought.

That's why PTSD is so tricky: We can find ourselves in the throes of a 'reaction' before we've even become consciously aware of a trigger. It then becomes a complicted sleuthing/detective/backtracking/unraveling process to figure out, "Why am I having this reaction right here, right now, at this level of intensity, when nothing in my immediate environment seems to warrant it?"

So when a 'friend' spoke harshly to me this morning, in the midst of what otherwise seemed to be a friendly conversation, it set off all my alarm bells:

"Why did he say that? What does it mean? Did he really mean that??? He can't possibly have meant that. But then why did he say it? Was there something else that he really meant to say that he didn't tell me for some reason? But then that leaves me in the untenable position of trying to guess why he said that, and I don't want to."

So then I draw my boundary (referencing previous post), and say to myself, "This guy is not someone I can trust, because he does not say what he means." And when he does say what he means, he sometimes says it so unkindly that I can't trust him to have my best interests at heart.

So I must move him over on the chessboard of my life, to an area where he can't have much effect on me. In other words, I've moved my internal boundary so that I feel safe.