“Your adult psyches founded upon infant deprivation would crave anything holding out hope, however futile”: Planetmates reveal on real love, “love contract,” adorability in infants, parental “love”

“…the more you re-member yourself, the freer you can be. That is the true “transcendence”: It is one rooted in a re-feeling of and re-membering of the hurts and pains in one’s body that is left over from the past and not a separating away from and a denying of that stored pain … as if one is above body and Nature … and confusing that self-congratulation and ego aggrandizement with enlightenment.

“To reprise then, your differences from other planetmates, stemming from your relation with your mothers and caregivers as infants, have to do largely with survival value being attached to non-expression of needs. For certainly if it was the excessive neediness of your young that disinclined adults to want them, then if a baby had less of those qualities or seemed to have less they would be less likely to be shunned or abandoned, thus more likely to survive. A dependent young one suppressing its needs would manifest in it crying as little as possible, being as “unfussy” as could be.

“But it was not just seeming to be not a burden that was advantageous. For your adults’ psyche being so much founded on not getting early needs met, you would crave anything holding out hope, however futile, of getting anything resembling that kind of satisfaction in the present. So babies who had other qualities appealing to the adult — such as “cuteness,” smiling more, or anything in the category of “adorability” or being “entertaining” or otherwise attractive to an adult or reminiscent of the satisfaction of those early deprivations — would make that young one more likely to thrive. If a baby was more engaging with you (as your own caregiver had not been with you), if it was happier and more noticing of you (as your parent failed to do), and of course to the extent that it would be as little a burden on you, it would increase the overall amount of vital care it would receive from you, from your fully growns, in general. So, any traits in infants that for the adult caregiver held out the prospect, however dimly, of the fulfillment, through the newborn, of their own early deprivations were to increase in humans through the process of natural selection.

“Since many of those early lacks had to do with being cared for, nurtured — what is commonly called “love” — it was any qualities of the newborn that seemed to hold the prospect of easing those cravings that were desired and thus were to be selected for and become more prevalent over time. So if a child displayed behavior that was at all resembling what a truly nurturing parent would be like, he or she would attract more of that kind of attention in return. If fully growns could see a dim hope, from their own newborns, of getting the nurturing that they did not get from their own parents, they would feel more inclined to extend caring to such of their children and increase their survivability over their children who did not hold out such a hope.

“This was the unspoken “love contract” that developed between dependent young ones and fully grown attendants: If a child would act less like it had needs and more like it could satisfy needs it was more likely to actually receive some attention to its needs, however inauthentic and agenda-oriented that attention would be. And what you call love is at its inception simply the desperate hope that your infants will eventually grow up to become the parents that you wished you had had, instead of the ones you had, who did not love you sufficiently when you were small.

“So the origins of what you call your unusually strong parental “love” is in this never-acknowledged “love” exchange. This “care contract” explains how your children managed to survive, with everything going against them. However, on your evolution to a purer love—one of Nature and built once again upon feelings of unity with Other and truly feeling along with another, not just in hopes of receiving in return—you would do well to look deeply into the inauthentic nature of what passes for love for you.

“You are, like all of us, capable of true and unconditional loving. Indeed, you have it in you to have that feeling toward all of Nature, toward all of Reality, even. But you cannot achieve that while caught up in and blind to the hidden agendas and self-seeking desperation which mars your love and while braying to the world about your supposed superior capacity for and the supreme purity of your love. What you need to acknowledge, to start, is how what you place on high, use to boost your estimation of yourself over all other living beings, and attribute to divine origins even … how this supposed “love” … is most often just a swirl of ritualistic craving and trickling satisfaction set in motion by keenly felt but supremely denied hurt….”

— excerpted from *Planetmates: The Great Reveal* by Michael Adzema … now available in print and e-book formats at Amazon

ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Michael Adzema. Video below … interviewed by Michael Harrell

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https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2mm9OBbYjRE