Knowing the Narcissist : Love is a Taught Construct
How do you know how to love? Did you sit wide-eyed in front of a large screen as colourful costumed characters hugged one another to a saccharine sound-track so this imbued you with the concept of what love was? Did those cartoon characters explain to you what it is to love? Did their exaggerated voices and crazy antics, followed by the moral of the story teach you what love is?
Perhaps you read about it in love, heard it in songs and studied the many ways in which this ultimate emotion appears and affects people. Chances are that you have been affected by those hugely affecting passages from the great works dedicated to love. Chances are you have been captured by haunting lyrics and catchy jingles which also profess to tell you what love is.
They have all played a part. You may have learned about love from the version churned out by the media, of Hollywood romance, dashing heroes, fair maidens, tarts with golden hearts, the good man who rides to the rescue, the wayward soul saved by love. Love may have been explained to you from the pulpit as a higher love, something which transcends all earthly manifestations, a love so powerful and complete that it sacrificed its only son in order to demonstrate its love for humankind.
This godly love is all around you, it touches each and all and is mighty in its effects. Love may have been learned from furtive fumbles down alleyways, sneaking into bedrooms when so young, the exploration of warm and urgent body parts accompanied by those ever so sincere protestations of love.
A haphazard journey through galloping teen years as nothing and everything makes sense all at once. Then again, love might have appeared to you in the form of something small and furry, an unconditional (so long as it was fed) love which was loyal, giving and ever so cute. So many erudite tutors, learned lecturers and wise proponents of what love is.
Love thy neighbour, love yourself, love is all you need, woman in love, it must have been love, crazy little thing called love, to know him is to love him, we found love, how deep is your love? Love is all around us, in us, between us, lifting us up and letting us down. It is everywhere and you may well have been taught by many of the above and more besides as to what love is.
However, love most likely will have been taught to you by those who created you, those two people who came together and through their own pleasure created you. Two people who decided that they would shoulder the responsibility of creating life, nurturing it and bringing a new person into the world.
Those two people accepted many, many responsibilities from such a decision and act. Chief among them was the responsibility of teaching that person what love is. Through their offices they have furnished each and every one of us with the notion of what love is. A deep-seated and visceral understanding of this is how love feels, this is what it looks like, this is what it sounds like.
This is love. From those two people more than anything else we are first grounded in the concept of what love is. This grounding lasts a considerable time and whilst there are other factors to be considered, as I have mentioned above, it is this lesson which is learnt invariably first and the one lesson which resonates beyond all others. So often we are in their hands when it comes to being taught about love. So, what is this taught love? It has so many, many facets.
Love is being told to never trust anybody.
Love is being made to re-write the entire essay because of one spelling mistake.
Love is being sent to stand outside on a cold winter’s day until all three verses of Ode to Autumn are recited correctly.
Love is knowing nothing is ever good enough.
Love is understanding that someone else knows better than you what is best for you.
Love is turning away from the reality.
Love is standing straight against a wall for several hours for speaking out of turn.
Love is for the weak.
Love is being told that when I am gone nobody else will look out for you.
Love is succeeding.
Love is building a wall as high as possible.
Love is trying until it hurts and gaining that final curt nod of approval.
Love is being seen and not heard.
Love is fulfilling your potential and securing that legacy.
Love is hurting you even though it hurts me, but someone in this household has to do it and it won’t be him will it?
Love is reading to yourself than being read to.
Love is living in the shadows and hoping not to be noticed.
Love is being the best.
Love is the preserve of the powerful.
Love is being denied a birthday party because the other children are too stupid.
Love is being undermined in order to prevent conceit.
Love is a begrudged recognition and the injunction to try harder, go further, climb higher, run faster, study longer.
Love is burning your hand but not crying.
Love is don’t tell anybody about our secret.
Love is a righteous beating.
Love is being distant and pretending things never happened.
Love is being sent away.
Love is not being told.
Love is splendid isolation.
Love was taught this way.
11 thoughts on “Knowing the Narcissist : Love is a Taught Construct”
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Love is — assuming what’s best for the other without actually knowing it.
Child, parent, friend, partner, the world — no one knows it, but everyone assumes, project and direct their idea of love towards the other. It is an almost scripted reality and people believe the lines to be their own. Narc or empath, normal, narcissistic or psychopath – it is akin to a play as the individuals were dressed in a specific costume. It’s not their fault, it’s just what happened and no one was given the manual how to take the costume off. That’s why “love is blind”.
Perhaps not for all, but love is very much a taught construct and even more than people are willing to see. Because if and as soon as the taught construct is gone, you’re on your own and no one can „love“ you anymore in the way which was meaningful to them, as they placed that value above all else.
It doesn’t mean you let them know that their taught construct of love is powerless, no, you go along with it if you must, you don’t hurt people, but you see the costume and the role they cling on to and their assumption of what love is and what those scripted lines or actions mean to them and what kind of effect they expect it will have on you, how it would shape you, shape your character or relationships, your costume, your life and your role in it.
People of all facets manipulate not because they are evil, but because they were taught that it is how life is. People are not flawed, they are simply very good learners. And some lessons they learn are: love „blindly“ so you don’t unlearn.
Jordyguin, I hope that as you are here learning, you are able to come to see this differently.
Hope is a false mistress, dear Vic ;)) This is one of the lessons taught here.
Empathy is NOT Love by the way. Empathy is: I know how being pinched feels – it hurts – I shouldn’t pinch others because it hurts.
Non empathy is: I know how being pinched feels – it hurts – GREAT, I can use it to assert control over others in order to protect myself from being pinched first. Never again shall this happen to me. Pinched i.e. insulted, criticized, invalidated, beaten, oppressed etc. (And it doesn’t even matter if the perceived thread is a little child – I must make it obedient so it never criticizes me, first.)
LOVE is an umbrella term for empathy + reproductive instinct + survival (protection and care for the physical body via intellect and emotions).
AND Love is something else which definition and expression variates depending on the awareness and the creativity of the individual.
Expression of both — awareness and creativity are rare in fact. I see mostly re-copied tactics of validation concepts, manipulation and unresolved daddy/mommy issues masking themselves, or calling it Love…
No, empathy is not love. But emotional empathy is necessary for love to happen.
HG has some amazing definitions of love.
Or perhaps descriptions is a better word.
Even parental narcs all follow the same playbook.
Love is a big smile at the sight of you at the end of a long day. Love is hearing your full story, told incoherently from excitement. Love is letting you go to camp, to the concert, to follow your own path.
I did not know this kind of love, but I try to give it to my children.
ISMW, “Love is hearing your full story, told incoherently from excitement” – recalling the plain as day differences in between my grandmother intently listening and being delighted at my excitement, compared to maternal narcissist who’d be negative, simply because my excitement was not as a result of anything she did to cause that emotional reaction from me. She’d never learned to master the art of being “creative”, or, properly ‘engage’ with me because I was too “difficult” (hahaha).
“Love is reading to yourself than being read to”
I read these words and they caught my eye, or, rather, my mind. Why?
The learned (“taught construct”) from the childhood had to be unlearned, looked at and felt about differently, in order to re-learn by reading through HG’s work, other people’s experiences.
I can recall my grandmother reading to me and my sister, from those books she had, the old cloth like grey material bound ‘Little Ladybird’ books.
Thank you, HG xxx