Part I of this post I described how survival and well-being converge in our ability to love, and in Part II we looked at why practicing love in today’s world is not always easy. In this third and final part, I will share how we might enlist our amazing neurological capacities to maximize our ability to love and feel loved. We need to (literally) let love conquer fear.
Here is how it works.
Our human bodies function like emotional sponges, we literally “vibrate” with each other’s emotions. When we empathize, our body feels what the other feels. In that process, we also automatically want to do something about it, because it turns out that
empathy and compassionate action are neurologically tied responses (how convenient!).
Empathizing, then, requires that we tolerate (or increase our ability of) “feeling with” the other.
So to love is to feel without shutting down; the ability to love is squarely planted in our emotion regulation skills. If we are overwhelmed by feeling another’s emotion, our fear response takes over and we can no longer empathize, connect, or think well. On the other hand, if we are able to sustain the emotion, both parties experience a deeply soothing, meaningful connection.
This means that our difficulty to welcome and tolerate our own internal sensations is the single most central obstacle to experiencing love. Why do we find tolerating our inner sensations so difficult?
First, much of what we are taught and exposed to (not necessarily much of what actually exists) leads us to fear each other. Second, we live in a culture that has perfected vilifying negative emotions and has created technologies to constantly distract us away from them. (And all that even before we consider direct contact with traumatic experiences).
Both problems have the same solution: “practice makes perfect”, as they say, where practice is more powerful than intellectual learning. What does that mean?
If we feel love for each other, what we think has little impact on our actions and decisions. We don’t want to hurt those we love and empathize with, even when we might not like them. We only want the best for them, because, remember, to love is to feel “with”, in our own bodies. While deconstructing misconceptions and biases is always a welcome addition to learning to love one another, without the experience of loving/resonating with one another, intellectual understanding has no hope of making an impact.
In a recent interview, social activist Rev. Jennifer Bailey said that while
“relationships move at the speed of trust, social change moves at the speed of relationships”.
It couldn’t be more biologically true!
So the most important thing we have to learn is attuning ourselves to others and sustaining the activation that that attunment creates in us. How do we do that? Social psychologist Dr. Barbara Frederickson has wonderful resources for the former, and mindfulness practices are an effective option for the latter.
The operative word in both cases being “practice”. Just like the best work out, the best practice is the one you do! Consistency and repetition are the key.
Now, the love and empathy I’m writing about are not dangerous: they don’t imply agreement, or lack of boundaries, or indiscriminate submission to others’ will.
In fact, none of those create physiologically helpful loving moments. While love conquers fear, it doesn’t make us stupid! In fact, it makes us smarter. It allows us to detect more accurately who deserves trust, where to build connections, and where to establish boundaries. Fear, on the other hand, only separates. It compromises our perspective taking, it doesn’t allow us to see context, have nuanced understanding, learn, or act wisely.
Love is not an intellectual experience (of agreement, political alignment, cultural understanding). It’s the momentary, genuine realization by the parties involved of our shared humanity, it’s an experience of interconnectedness. In those moments, no one is better or worse, right or wrong, we simply (and physiologically) “are” together. When that happens, our entire being feels well, good, right. And the added bonus is that we are much wiser as we take action from there.
Love, then, by definition, is a tender spot to be. You have to train for it.
We have to practice fully welcoming what arises within us so that we can be fierce in our capacity to come together and thrive,
both individually and as a species. And learning to love we must: our very survival depends on it!