Dependent Love, Self-Love and Consciousness
Preliminary Remarks
At first: There is only one love. You will find this one love inside every single event of your life if you dare to have a closer look. At second: Love in itself seems to be a polarity. Love covers a tense, the tense between surviving and growing, between orientation towards outside and inside, between matter and spirit. If we are going to have a closer look at the way children love, besides, we may see how love and consciousness create each other and how we ourselves move along with the polarities of love, or more precisely spoken: how the polarities of the one love move us, sometimes by nearly tearing us apart, sometimes by making us whole.
I noticed the polarity of love by working with the life-integration-process and with Wilfried Nelles’ model of the evolution of consciousness. One pole of love finds itself in an unescapable dependency of its own environment, perhaps the people it depends on. Therefore, this way of love dedicates itself totally to these people. It re-acts in every single moment. The other pole of love has never reacted. It seems to be an agency or energy itself. Every single moment something goes out of it. It continuously creates vitality in its own individual shape.
The first one I call „dependent love“, the other one „self-love“. Dependent love is personal, it always wants something. It is a whole big longing. Self-love is not personal, it does not want anything, it is a whole big surrender, simply to what is. Together, these two poles of love create our consciousness while shaping the relations to our environment and to ourselves. They do it in certain stages, like Wilfried Nelles has shown. Both poles of love get in resonance from the moment of procreation on. Obviously we need both of them for surviving and growing, for healing every time anew and for becoming ourselves every day.
Dependent Love
The first stage of dependent love we unfold as an unborn child inside the womb of our mother while physically resonating with her body. Vice versa, the dependent love unfolds the unborn child. In exchange of nutrients and metabolic waste the fetus takes all he needs to grow from the female body, to build bones and skin, to find in his specific form.
While growing inside our hostess we act very carefully not to overstrain or jeopardize her. Because we simply can’t escape. If she dies, we will die together with her. If our nourishing environment gets in danger, so we do, as long as we live inside her. This fundamental dependency leads into adaptive responses like these: the body of an unborn child takes less nutriments if the mother is starving. The unborn child will slow down his growth in order to save the environment, the mother. The same pattern works if the mother experiences violence or panic: the unborn child will slow down his movements in order to stabilize his hostess.
The body of an unborn child is eager to get in touch with the surrounding mother both physically and energetically, in order to establish a strong and stable resonance with her. The unborn child meets his mother exactly at her inward whereabouts, and only there. If she, for instance, is unconsciously busy with previous events like escape and expulsion after WWII, the unborn child inside her will take part of her traumatic experience and become a refugee himself. If she feels relaxed and safe, the child will relax too. If she is scared of her father/husband, the unborn child will take over her fear in order to relieve her, true to the purpose of dependent love: „The more secure of my surroundings, the more secure I am.“
Dependent love in itself is a movement of survival. It is the shape our survival instinct has taken on. Dependent love tells the environment: „For you I shall do everything, no matter, what it will cost me, because if you are fine, I am safe.“ Generally speaking, dependent love is concerned with form as such. The inescapable dependency of being physically embedded in another body determines how an unborn child gets in touch with this environment and with himself, what kind of relationship he develops and experiences both to the hostess and himself. This kind of total dependency creates which way of resonance fits best.
The best fitting way of resonance for embedded beings seems to be the immediate physical sensing. An unborn child is pure sensing, both physical and energetical, he is pure resonance. This way to be a resonance provides the basis for all further stages of resonance, like feeling, thinking, perceiving, knowing and seeing. We are resonance-beings as a whole, and as a whole we are able to resonate. The foundations for all that will come later were laid in the womb. The representative perception in constellations roots there, for instance. Once our birth separates us from the womb, we are all we had experienced while resonating with our mother for nine months, because we incarnated this resonance while we grew from a fertilized egg into a baby ready for birth. We are incarnated metabolism, incarnated adaptation performances to our maternal environment, incarnated stories of our parents and ancestors. We are dependent love in the form of a little human of flesh and blood. But not only.
Self-Love
Self-love plays a critical part, too, but in a different way. While our survival instinct acts in the form of dependent love, our growth drive arises in the form of self-love. Self-love always feels safe. It is never concerned with survival, it never adapts itself to any environment, neither people nor the circumstances. Self-love simply is. It is there as a never ending impulse to fulfill itself and to perceive itself while being. Due this fulfilling impulse self-love in our case seems to prefer the form of human beings, made of flesh and blood. But: self-love does nothing for its environment, it never does anything, it has no purpose. It is, while it exudes life, it is pure joy and vitality. Actually, there is no word to describe it properly, it seems to blow up the realm of language. Self-love may come out of life itself, may be it is life itself. It seeks no meaning, it doesn’t need to, it is being. It covers no form, but it creates form and changes it merciless, untouched by the destructions accompanying every transformation.
By going through the life-integration-process often we can see the self-love revealing itself on 1st stage, once the heritage of our independent love from inside of our mother has shown up there, has been seen, felt and appreciated as our own achievement. The self-love of every fetus, child or teenager will be threatened, limited and polished by the necessities of dependent love. This unavoidable process creates a deep sadness, like always when life itself gets suppressed. The LIP as a powerful tool to establish contact to this sadness and the self-love within reveals: no power of the universe is able to finish self-love.
The representatives on 1st stage show, how unique our self-love appears. We name this uniqueness „the inner vision“, „the calling“ or „the melody of life“, depending on what linguistic pointer we prefer. Self-love seems to be the nucleus around which the stories of our father and our mother arrange themselves during nine months of our growing inside the womb. The biochemical codes of these stories live as our genes in each cell of us. Cell after cell we build up our shape, from the fertilized egg to the birth-ready child, continuously resonating between self-love and dependent love, agreeing and disagreeing, harmony and opposition. While dependent love seems to be concerned with our form, self-love is our essence. We are the resonance of dependent love and self-love, of essence and form.
“Mother-Consciousness”, Stage One (Paradise)
Now we can see more clearly: this resonance creates our first stage of consciousness, the symbiotic unity-consciousness in the shape of physical sensing. The relation to ourselves and to our environment – the consciousness – takes place in the realm of our unborn body. It remains limited to the body. Nevertheless the body-consciousness of a fetus is able to contact all the experiences, internal states and memories of the mother surrounding him and of all people who belong to her – the father of this child, the grandparents and so on. The first stage of consciousness is totally related to the body of the mother. Therefore, we could call it „mother-consciousness“.
„Mother-consciousness“ is not able to distinguish between inside and outside, between „me“ and „you“. To be inside and to be totally connected is all there is. To be outside would be deadly. If you live in symbiotic „mother-consciousness“, you have to avoid getting outside, at all costs. The symbiotic unity-consciousness is not aware of its own adaptive performances. It lives in physical and energetical adoption and through this, because all things the unborn child does to ensure the motherly environment, he does for himself in order to survive. The unborn child experiences all the goods or bads the motherly environment offers as if it were outcoming from himself respectively happening to him at once. He is able to feel pain, but is not able to know if it is his own pain or his mothers. „It hurts“, that’s all. Therefore later in our adult life we often take certain adaptive achievements of the unborn child as character attributes, but they are not. They are „only“ the embodied movements of our earliest dependent love.
Well, after birth, we continue all we have learned about dependent love inside the womb. We simply don’t stop, because our survival is at stake. There is only one difference: our birth is done, we are parted, we are outside. Resonance and contact with simple physical sensing has become obsolete. We must learn to cover a distance. Our former hostess disappeared. She transformed into a „you“, face to face. She became our mother. Our physical sensing is now about to cover this fundamental distance in order to stay alive, because all food and all security is there, is there in the shape of this new „you“. So our body develops the „physically sensing over distance“. We learn compassion, we learn to feel. Compassion becomes the realm of the next stage of our consciousness, the group- or we-consciousness. It is the empire of childhood. Here the dependent love becomes an emotion, a feeling.
How The Child Loves
A child does not know that it feels. A child is his feeling. The only state he was familiar with was at first to be surrounded by the „all-inclusive-service“ inside the mother, before being expelled by birth. The newborn baby carries the remembrance of this „all-inclusive-service“ as the only experience of being alive in the outer world. By the first scream of this former unborn child, we witness a mysterious transformation: the experience of the reality inside the womb turns itself immediately into an ideal, into an unconscious imagination about the reality of life and how it should be. Our birth comes to an end by turning the remembrance of being inside (the womb) into an expectation, an ideal picture of the new outside (the mother). This ideal will serve as a measure for all our further life-experiences. It is bound to get disappointed, and so we are.
If the mother disappears, the newborn child feels threatened by death. It makes no difference for the child if the mother had to take care of a serious illness in a hospital or if he had to stay separate from the mother for health issues. If the father disappears, the child experiences the whole world getting unsafe. For this experience it doesn’t matter if the mother divorced him or if he couldn’t find work in the nearby areas. If the mother appears unhappy, the child tries to make her happy. If the father carries a burden inside himself, the child tries to take over. If the mother goes down, physically or psychically, the child takes over her functional role in order to stay safe. The same procedure if the father gets weak. If the father is dead or otherwise not at the hands, the child seeks him everywhere. The child will become his own father, that is functionally the husband of his mother, and vice versa. And the child does very well with all of these movements because it is all about his own survival. With the whole of his existence a child says to the parents: „For you I will do everything, no matter how much it will cost me. Because if you are well, I am safe.“ The currency of dependent love is cooperation against safety, in urgent cases sacrifice against saving.
If a mother or father or both of them cross the psychical or physical boundaries of their child, he does not flee. The child will let them abuse himself. No child is able to go away freely from the parents, the dependent love does not allow it. The child exposes himself to nearly all his parents do to him or do not. Threatening events the child covers deep inside and blames himself for these events in order to be able to stay. If the boundary-crossing of the parents turns into sexual or otherwise violence, the child will stay even in this case. In addition, he will cover the perpetrators because he is attached to them in dependent love. To be part of the family for sure is more important for the child as to be healthy and well. It is ready to die instead of not belonging to this primary group. The dependent love of a child is an all-out affair because it is driven by his survival instinct. Sometimes yet this dynamic gets fatal if it hives off, maybe by deadly sickness or by committing suicide in subjectively hopeless hardship. For me this belongs to the way of dependent love, too. But it remains a mystery.
Dependent love literally does it all for those it dependents on, without taking care of itself. This way dependent love creates the consciousness of the child, the we-consciousness. As resonance-medium at this stage of dependent love serves the emotion, the movement-out-of, the physical sensing over distance, first of all to cover the distance between mother and child. Deep down the we-consciousness is a „mother-consciousness“, too, because the family serves like an emotional womb for the child. So the dependent love builds up our inner emotional landscape during childhood.
“Mother-Consciousness”, Stage Two (Magic World)
If today we get in touch with this child, we once were, from an adult, present perspective, may be while going through a LIP, there is one principle: the subjective experience of the child is always right. At the same time there is a second principle: we have to sense, to feel and to see that we are no more there where the child has been. Our childhood is over, once and for ever. This experience of the adult is right, too. Then, and only then, we can stand the echo, the reverb from our past. Only then we can touch all the things children do and suffer in dependent love without tumbling into these long gone experiences anew – all the pain, disappointment, the not-be-seen, trait, defenselessness, border crossing until sexual abuse, powerlessness, aggression, muddle, despair, darkness, illness, self-control, madness, hostility against the uncontrollable vitality of our own self-love, which is simply not interested in dependent relations, which remains at least uncontrollable.
The tenses between this origin and unique vitality, the self-love, and the necessities of the dependent love, sometimes for a child get unbearable. This tenses have to relax somewhere, they must find a place. This tenses take place in his symptoms or adaptive performances, may be striking behaviors, illness or incidents. They relieve a child from the tension between his own vitality and his environment by giving this tense a form. His symptoms enable the child to hold exactly the balance that is needed to stay in the environment he depends on.
One thing you will find in common all over the world: no child has a choice how to face the parents/the environment and himself. But the child unconsciously believes to have one. This particular believe is, in my view, the crucial signature of the group-consciousness.
Inside the group- or us-consciousness, we emotionally confuse our environment with ourselves, always trying to fit into this environment. A child relates all that happens in his family immediately to himself. If the parents appear to be unhappy, the child experiences himself to be the cause of their unhappiness. This ingenious trick enables the child to avert his own powerlessness, to stabilize the environment (may be the parents) further on and to grow up more safely this way. So this trick of the dependent love creates the magic world view of childhood. It may feel like: „I am holding and saving my mama/my papa (=the world).“ If I don’t succeed: „I am guilty.“ Our self-view, our parents-view and our world-view is determined by magical childish presumptions until our adolescence comes to an end.
In contrast to dependent children and adolescents physically adult people always have a choice how to face their environment and themselves. But unconsciously they believe not to have one. This belief is, in my view, the crucial signature of the I-consciousness.
Inside the I-consciousness, we confuse ourselves with our own concepts of ourselves and our environment. We try again and again, with all the (survival-) the power of our consciousness so called free will, to turn and to fit the reality into our inner picture of it, into our ideal. At the same time there works an unconscious (!) belief of adults, there is no other way of dealing with reality. This particular believe I call neurosis. „Neurosis“ is the most advanced and turned upside down variation of the magical world-view of childhood. It is made by puberty. Neurosis is the particular form dependent love takes on at the 3rd stage of consciousness.
Childhood itself is free of neurosis. Childhood only knows very precise adaptive performances of dependent love. Even if they appear neurotic – may be school anxiety, enuresis, concentration difficulties, violence against others or themselves, somatic symptoms, illness a.s.o. – There is no neurosis. Children still have no use for it, they simply adept. In urgent cases they adept by developing symptoms. No child is able to develop a neurosis.
“Mother-Consciousness”, Stage Three (Neurosis)
To create a neurosis you need a tool powerful enough to separate you from your current reality. This tool is the thinking. Thinking arises out of the tension between the picture of yourself you were familiar with in your childhood, and the new reality breaking into this picture by being flooded with sexual hormones at the beginning of your adolescence. Your self-portrait suffers a breakdown. You sense a drag out of your family, your body does things, like bleeding monthly or growing a beard, you never experienced before and you never would have chosen freely: „Help, I am forced to become a man / a woman!“ The child was bound to feel safe in order to survive. Neurosis now uses the thinking to cover the dependent and powerless child. Vice versa the thinking itself creates neurosis. Neurosis understands everything and sees nothing but itself. By rational understanding neurosis builds up the strongest possible wall against the reality of life. The urge for understanding as such is the life-assurance of neurosis, as long as it stays in the realm of thinking.
In this particular sense nearly all physically outgrown people behave neurotically against some parts of reality. That means they see an ideal respectively an illusion instead of reality, and they prefer to respond to this ideal/illusion, not to reality. Most of all adolescents have to spend much energy by creating neuroses in order to turn their self-ideal, their parents-ideal and their world-ideal into a bullet-proof cover against their actually present reality of life. This way they protect their threatened inner child and build up an autonomous „Me“ above this inner child, literally like a bunker.
The autonomous „me“ is identical with neurosis. By building an autonomous „me“ the dependent love accomplishes its mission. At the same time the dependent love gets jobless because all dependencies vanish at the end of puberty. The only dependency that stays with us for our whole lifetime is the decency of life itself. This brings us back to the self-love. Self-love represents life itself, nothing else. To be more precisely: self-love and the „I are“, that is the inner place where we experience our life, are the same. Self-love is the natural opponent of the autonomous „me“ respectively the neurosis, which is only rooted in long gone models of life, in ideals. In a strict psychological sense neurosis is the form of I-consciousness.
Interesting consequence: neurosis is not an illness, but an unavoidable task of evolving. Without neurosis none of us really could leave the family we were born into. Without neurosis we could not successfully say goodbye to our childhood and to our parents. Without neurosis it seems almost impossible to realize: „I am out and alive.“ Neurosis serves us in concluding the outer birth-process by making the inner birth unavoidable. Though it turns into illness if we take it out of our evolving process. That means if we avoid, not only temporarily, but basically, to grow beneath the rational-abstract thinking and the clinging to ideas and ideals.
The neurosis of outgrown adults is propelled by the survival impulses of the dependent child, that is the past perfect stage of life. It was directly created in the past stage of life by the thinking of the puberty. I don’t say anything against thinking in the sense of reflection or contemplation. That is a wonderful and creative process if you let it think inside you. But if you face reality in the way of thinking in the sense of your rational models, concepts and ideals, your thinking will involuntarily become a manufactory of neurosis. Thinking in the encounter of actual present reality will cheat on you: it will let you experience only your thoughts, subconscious concepts and ideals instead of your current life. You experience your past instead of your present, you are tricked by a long gone drama, staged by thoughts. That’s why thinking is the favorite hiding of all of your problems and simultaneously the form of the I-consciousness. Thinking creates the I-consciousness as well as it gets created by the I-consciousness, as always in the evolution of consciousness: the respective form of resonance and the corresponding stage of consciousness create each other. The I-consciousness lives in the physical sensing by rational model, in the abstract thinking. Its empire is made by thoughts.
Conclusion
We see: increasing wideness of consciousness leads into more abstraction, too. From the embedded physical sensing in symbiotic unity-consciousness to physical sensing over distance, the feeling in us-consciousness, to physical sensing per abstraction, called thinking. The main purpose of thinking seems to be the reversal of the dependent love of the child in order to create autonomy. While the unborn child has been completely embedded inside the mother, the thinking is busy to take hold, to seize, to usurp the mother (psychologically = the world) by getting a grip on it, by surrounding it, by penetrating and understanding it, by comprehending and including it. In this (reversed) sense the I-consciousness is a mother-consciousness, too.
Autonomy, the „beeing me according to my own law“ needs an ideal, an inner picture how this „me“ should be, and vice versa, how my environment should be in a difference to the „me“ and the environment I remember from childhood. How the ideal arises we saw in the context of birth: it is nothing but the expectation (attached to my survival), the basic experience in the past stage of life, the all-inclusive-service inside the motherly womb, would continue in the present reality. Ideals as such are always related to the past. They always get disappointed, they always are nothing but thin air. Though: as long as you need to cling to your ideals in order to survive, no ideal is allowed to die. It remains the highest value as you can notice in our western society, which is overcrowded with ideals. In I-consciousness the ideal remains as critical as the belonging in us-consciousness and the unity in symbiotic unity-consciousness.
Well, in contrast to the ideals, reality has the property to act and to win through. Reality is not an illusion, it does not disappear if I refuse to look at it. Reality always provides me with challenging adaptation patterns of my own past dependent love. They are still at work despite the fact that I am out and alive. Those situations invite me, by sometimes harassing me badly, to perceive them from the inner place of self-love and to take them not personally.
This way I learn to see what I really had done in dependent love and what my self-love now requires from me. So I learn to love, the love I am. Reality always supports me, if I let it happen. Reality drags me to be born into myself as a whole. I may be linger this or hinder it for a while, but I can’t speed it up or design it, not even with constellations. I only can give space to it inside of me, nothing more. In other words: I can open my heart for the stunning realization, that deep down I never did anything else but love.
