Why love and abuse cannot co-exist

Why deception and love do not work together

I am a huge fan of bell hooks work. I have been for years.

I had the privilege of seeing her in 2008, and I am so grateful that I had that opportunity since she passed in December of 2021, at the age of 69.

Last night I attended a symposium honoring her at Austin Peay. Two of her sisters and a long term friend of hers spoke.

They talked extensively about her book on love, All About Love.

If you are familiar with hooks, you know she has many good books, like 40 of them, but this one apparently made the NY Times Best Seller in 2020, 13 years after its publication.

As her sisters pointed out, we all needed to hold on some love during the time of the pandemic. Perhaps that is why.

hooks had so much wisdom. But a few things that her sisters said, quotes from her book, last night spoke to me and felt like they were being spoken directly to me.

The quote that I was asked to read aloud was the following:

“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving.”

This was a lesson that I had to learn in my solitude, after having a co-dependent relationship with my ex husband and seen modeled with my mother growing up.

I had to learn how to be alone.

Some part of me even knew that I needed to move across the country to Minnesota even though I was scared and anxious about leaving my former partner, but I just knew that I had to do it.

I knew that I needed more experience in living and thriving alone. I think there was also a part of me that—as my friend Allison has said—my body chose physically to be away from him before my mind and emotions would even allow myself to understand/process why.

But I also reflected on hooks’ ideas that love cannot be present when there is an absence of social justice.

Ie—Abuse and love cannot co-exist.

Ie—And deception and love cannot truly co-exist either.

Lies and abuse do not honor the other, the beloved.

They destroy love. They damage it. The two are incompatible.

I also reflect on the ways that I felt abandoned and betrayed from my former relationship, but my friend, Allison had to remind me that he had abandoned me from this betrayal and abuse. He ‘divorced’ me. He dropped the ball. It was not my fault and I did nothing wrong to deserve that, deception and cheating. He broke us.

I also reflect on hooks’ words when I consider my father, emotionally and verbally abusive.

I remember even as a small child, very thoughtful, wondering how someone could so easily profess ‘love’ to me and yet how much it didn’t seem to matter or mean as much to me, when he said he ‘loved’ me, since I still didn’t feel ‘safe’ with him as I did with my mother.

Certainly because love means that [you hope that you] feel safe. Of course we don’t feel safe in the face of constant and repetitive abuse.

It sounds so simple. Indeed.

And yet, if you grew up in a dysfunctional family, you know that it is not. Especially if this is your parent and you grew up in that environment. Your norm. The complex trauma of being in a cycle of abuse, not an isolated incident.

Now, I do believe my father loved me, at least as much as he was able.

He was also limited. Traumatized. He had a disease.

And it wasn’t enough for me, for what I needed, as a child.

And his professed love was also contradictory and ran counter to the safety and security that love suggests a parent provide for a child.

That is why there is this disconnect.

My story is a common one, all too common.

And the point is not to rehash old wounds. I have long since forgiven my father, for how I grew up and also for his manner of exit from this life.

But, as I do the work, to understand the trauma, to better tend to my wounded inner child, these are the things I face.

This is why I turn my head and marvel at attentive and physically affectionate and present, loving fathers.

That is why though I certainly want them for all children, ones I know and do not, there is still the twinge of….envy? Sadness? Sorrow? Regret? When I see it taking place and realizing that I did not have that.

I feel a combination of all of those things.

The wounded inner child surfaces at these moments.

I need to help her reconcile what happened to her.

And I have to love her for the both of us, compensating for the love that I did not receive as a small child.