Love is rarely included in the dialogue about trauma.

There’s pathology, lists of symptoms, pearls of wisdom that need to be excavated for it to mean anything, and tons of coping resources.

Tools without love become weapons against the psyche, often against the very trauma within our being that we are seeking relief from.

Soul-loss, a distinct aspect of trauma, is a disconnection from love; it’s no longer feeling connected to a loving, nourishing, compassionate, and understanding life source.

This can be from major events but is also a symptom of emotional and spiritual trauma—when we grow up never talking about how we feel, never having our experience held or acknowledged, being punished and shamed for expressing feelings or needs, or being gaslit and manipulated via our emotions. 

Unfortunately, we live in a culture that is so ingrained in the ways of life of trauma that we see codependency as “love” and become addicted to these ways of being. Our culture does not see the value of emotional healing because it does not benefit from emotionally healthy people. Thus, we are taught not to value this deeply human and sacred part of ourselves.

We buy into living on the hamster wheel of constant shadow transformation that we hope will lead us to some light-filled place where we can finally be free and happy.

We can’t outsmart trauma.

In our heart-of-hearts, we all long for love.

We want to love and to belong—a kind of happiness that doesn’t rely on authority or things going well. We want a deep contentedness with life, purpose, and a harmonious connection with grace and sustainable rootedness in the erotic mother’s benevolence.

Yet, we do not talk about love unless it is romantic love. This type of love is greatly misconstrued if we do not also acknowledge that most trauma comes from a lack of that same love. Most of us don’t trust that we would be loved if we were truly ourselves.

How are we supposed to know how to love ourselves if we never learned how?

We aren’t allowed to talk about how we weren’t loved well—that our hearts were not seen and how that impacted us. And, because we cannot talk about it, our systems develop believing that this is love. We continue to carry the ancestral burden of loyalty to suffering for love.

This must be grieved.

We are led to believe that the only place love exists is in a trauma-free, shadow-free zone, which is a massive motivation for our ego and consciousness to suppress, repress, and deny deeper truth. We want the things we feel so separated and disconnected from.

Our egos construct idealistic versions of our True Self that can look a lot like love, but if they are not connected to our hearts, rooted in the base of our bodies, it’s just an image we built to defend ourselves from our pain—something that we do not know how to love.

It may sound bleak. It’s easier to be sold five steps to freedom or the tools to act like a loving person if you hate yourself. Those tools give us hope because we feel productive.

Love is productive, but not in the way we think. Love is healing.

When we are healing our hearts, recovering from a life that lacked love, we enter into the caverns of our hearts, and we grieve. This is what heals us. It sweeps out the carnage of the past and makes room for us to love.

Not having been loved for our true selves is a loss.

Love comes naturally to us when there is space within our living vessel, the loving Mother’s embodiment, for love.

The things we think are the problem are not the problem.

There isn’t really a “problem” that needs to be solved. It’s, instead, noticing where we experience a lack of love. We have difficulty embracing our shadow as a part of the totality of who we are. We should be making friends with it rather than seeing it as the enemy.

What does your heart need today to feel more loved and nourished, relaxed, and safe in your human form?

This question may bring grief, unknowing, and other sensations and memories.

This is the body’s intelligence and the gateway to integrating the divine’s love back into your human form.

This is what heals trauma—what awakens the loving Mother within.

Love heals. Grief is love.

Let the spaces, the ones you do not yet know how to love, be your prayers. Offer it up to the Earth herself, and listen; she will help you learn how to love again.

Be gentle. Be gentle with yourself, my friend.