“To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients–care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication. Learning faulty definitions of love when we are quite young makes it difficult to be loving as we grow older. We start out committed to the right path but go in the wrong direction. Most of us learn early on to think of love as a feeling. When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect with them; that is, we invest feelings or emotion in them. That process of investment wherein a loved one becomes important to us is called ‘cathexis.’ In his book Peck rightly emphasizes that most of us ‘confuse cathecting with loving.’ We all know how often individuals feeling connected to someone through the process of cathecting insist that they love the other person even if they are hurting or neglecting them. Since their feeling is that of cathexis, they insist that what they feel is love…
An overwhelming majority of us come from dysfunctional families in which we were taught we were not okay, where we were shamed, verbally and/or physically abused, and emotionally neglected even as were also taught to believe that we were loved. For most folks it is just too threatening to embrace a definition of love that would no longer enable us to see love as present in our families. Too many of us need to cling to a notion of love that either makes abuse acceptable or at least makes it seem that whatever happened was not that bad.”
–bell hooks, All About Love
For Asian Americans and other children of immigrants, we often felt like we weren’t “good enough” in our childhood for various reasons. Underneath those reasons, a common factor for many of our situations was that we were being asked to mature, achieve, and perform at an adult’s pace, not a child’s pace.
In a racialized, capitalist, patriarchal America, our immigrant parents were doing their best to survive. They were doing their best to teach us how to survive. In that kind of environment, it makes sense why many of them might have felt that the ability
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