Discover Love Without Hurt

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In my early 20s, long before I reconciled with violent, alcoholic parents, I became aware, through several failed attempts at relationships, that it hurt when I tried to love.

In my professional career, specializing in the treatment of emotional abuse, it was no surprise that most victims also felt that it hurt when they tried to love. But it was a revelation to find that perpetrators had the same feeling, hidden beneath entrenched defenses of resentment, anger, and entitlement. The more they abused, the more it hurt when they tried to love. No matter how much their partners loved them, they couldn't feel loved because they couldn't feel worthy of it.

My violent parents loved each other fiercely, yet neither felt loved. They were unable to see beyond their own pain to experience genuine compassion for each other. I don't believe we can feel loved when we wall off the part of our hearts that feels compassion.

Compassion is a gut-level response to a partner's pain, discomfort, hardship, or anxiety. It includes sympathy, protectiveness, and a desire to help but not control. It's not just feeling sorry for someone; it includes an impulse to comfort. At heart, it's a simple appreciation of the basic human frailty we all share. That's why giving compassion makes us feel more humane and less isolated.

When compassionate, we respect that our partners are different from us, with different temperaments, metabolisms, hormonal levels, family histories, life experiences, sensitivities, vulnerabilities, and habits. Love without compassion is intolerant of differences. When partners lack compassion, their arguments have this subtext:

“You have to think like me, feel like me, and behave like me.”

The irony is they wouldn't have been attracted if they were more like each other. In general, we're attracted to differences, though not opposites. There's no me-harmony.

Compassion is necessary for the formation of positive emotional bonds. Think of when you were dating someone you eventually came to love. Suppose you had to call that person and report that your parents had died. If your date responded with, "Well, that's tough, call me when you get over it," would you have fallen in love with that person?

Chances are, you fell in love with someone you believed cared about how you felt, especially when you felt bad. Failure of compassion after relationship commitment feels like a betrayal:

“You got me to fall in love with you by making me believe that you would care how I feel. And now you don’t.”

Most of what people fight about is not money or sex or in-laws or raising the kids. Those are common problems that seem insurmountable only when they're hurt. What causes the hurt, that is, what they really fight about, is the impression that their partners don't care how they feel. When loved ones are not compassionate, it feels like abuse.

The advantages of compassion are just about as good as it gets in human endeavor. When compassionate, you:

• Like yourself better
• Have more options for behavior choice
• Usually get a positive response
• Usually, it improves matters.

Compassionate Assertiveness

Some people fear being more compassionate to loved ones will make them vulnerable to manipulation. That won't happen with compassionate assertiveness, which is standing up for your rights, preferences, desires, and feelings while respecting your partner's equal rights, preferences, desires, and feelings.

Defense against Hurt: Compassion vs. Resentment

When compassion is scarce in relationships, resentment becomes the default defense against hurt and vulnerability. Sadly, resentment is the most rigid and least effective defense against emotional distress. Resentful people get hurt continually.

Compassion is the most flexible and strongest defense. It's not easy to hurt or offend compassionate people because they see that rude, disrespectful, or devaluing behavior is the offender's misguided and self-defeating response to hurt and vulnerability.

If we're to believe statistics, which coincide with my clinical experience, relationships end in a whimper, not a bang. The final rupture is less often caused by abuse or infidelity than a sense of having drifted too far apart. I believe the current that drives partners far apart is the failure of compassion.

The threshold of unacceptable behavior in families is not abuse; it's failure of compassion. Love without compassion is possessive, controlling, and dangerous.

How to Overcome Compassion Blocks

The most common blocks to compassion in close relationships are coping mechanisms of blame, denial, and avoidance, usually in response to the possibility of experiencing guilt, shame, or fear. Guilt, shame, and fear tend to be invisible in close relationships; we see only coping defenses.

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Blame produces anger or resentment. Denial is visible as defensiveness, deflection, or counteraccusation. Avoidance looks like a distraction, disinterest, or emotional shut-down.

When blame, denial, and avoidance habits are entrenched, it's difficult to experience vulnerable emotions, even briefly. Tolerance deteriorates to the point where the specter of vulnerability seems to augur an abyss of suffering.

The disadvantages of blocking compassion are evident. Barriers to compassion:

• Make it hard to like yourself
• Greatly limit behavior choices
• Almost always get a negative response from loved ones
• Always make things worse, at least in the long run.

The Way Out

On a motivational level, the connection of compassion with guilt, shame, fear, and sadness has survival significance. They evolved in the human brain at a time when to leave emotionally bonded relationships would mean almost certain death by starvation or saber-toothed tiger. (That's why it can feel like you might die when dumped by a lover.)

But the connection holds only when the vulnerable emotions are experienced, at least briefly, rather than blamed, denied, or avoided. When briefly experienced, vulnerable emotions evoke compassion.

For example, guilt occurs when we've done something that harmed or threatened attachment bonds. When experienced, guilt motivates recompense and reconnection—shame results from the severance of attachment bonds. When experienced, it motivates reconciliation and reconnection. Fear, when experienced, motivates safety-seeking through reconnection. Sadness (felt loss), when experienced, is ameliorated by gaining reconnection. In each case, compassion is the intermediate feeling between vulnerable emotions of disconnection and the comfort and safety of connection.

Perspective-Taking

Perspective-taking is a deep understanding of what a person is thinking, perceiving, and feeling. It requires determined effort because, on autopilot, the brain projects thoughts and perceptions onto others, particularly in close relationships embedded in routine. Perspective-taking requires that we transcend reactivity to the surface level of another's negative feelings.

Negative feelings are multilayered. The top layer—what we normally react to—is the defensive/symptom level, typically anger, resentment, or presumption of superiority. These are defensive reactions to avoid vulnerability, usually guilt, shame, fear, anxiety, and sadness. While we can't feel compassion for the defenses against vulnerability, we can (and must, in close relationships) have compassion for the vulnerability that gives rise to the defenses.

Feeling Compassion vs. Behaving Compassionately

The experience of compassion is metabolically expensive. It consumes a lot of cognitive and emotional resources, which are not always available on demand. Some people are better at feeling compassion than others. But everyone can behave compassionately (help) without necessarily feeling compassion.

I personally believe that the experience of compassion follows compassionate behavior more often than the other way around. Furthermore, the metabolic cost of compassion is mitigated when we behave routinely with kindness and appreciation in close relationships. This prevents a great deal of the hurt that makes compassion necessary and renders it more accessible when needed. Love bathed in compassion is love without hurt.