Hi : )

Hopefully I can be forgiven for interjecting myself here, I know none of you know of me personally because I have not posted in this forum before, but I found this topic to be of particular interest.

I am not certain in your case (to the OP) what type of loving your therapist was referring to in his/her email to you, but, I do feel, from my own experience, that loving is very much a big part of therapy, and, speaking only for myself, perhaps it has been the most important concept for me to understand.

From the beginning I think it's critical to understand specifically what kind of love is being mentioned.

As I see it, it has been not the presence, but the absence, of love in my life which has caused me the greatest degree of confusion. Thinking back to the time I was a child and my parents divorced, it was the absence of love between them which made a pathway to seperation possible. Following that came doubt and distrust about love.

A few years later, I felt it was an absence of love from my step-parent which made it easier for her to give me abuse, instead of the love I needed.

Entering my young adult years, my understanding of love was compromised. I confused it with lust and companionship. I had difficulty creating and maintaining friendships. I made several attempts at establishing one on one romantic connections but there was a persistent distrust that ulitmately led to breakups and sadness. I blamed the other person for their inability to love me as I believed I should be loved.

Looking back, I can now see, my shared contribution to all that heartache. I, as much as anyone, had failed to love.

Love for me now has a different kind of meaning that it has in my past. It is something that is not only romantic, but has a much broader meaning. When I read the news about domestic violence, terrorism, hate crimes, bullying, or just about anything involving the harming of others, what stands out to me is not that someone might be an addict, have the wrong religion, or some type of mental illness. What stands out to me is the absence of love, because, if a person understands love and truly loves those that surround him, it would be an impossibility for that person to harm another.

I would say now that learning this understanding about love has been the single most important step I have taken in my personal therapy process. Through this I have learned to maintain my own level of anger about all the chaos, confusion, and misunderstanding I see happening in the world today. It is not that people are weak or selfish or egotistical or greedy. It is, the way I see it, simply that they have, thus far, failed to learn about love.

It has been a challenge to me to seperate myself away from the fray, to not buy into the wave of angry, bitter, cycle of harm, but, having made those first steps, nothing in my therapy has been more rewarding.