Love That Keeps You Trapped

Talk of love has a particularly powerful hold on people whose existing internal hypnosis already carries that name.

To see how, return to comfort.

Someone may have anxiety, low mood, broken relationships, difficulty acting, and a fear of change. They change none of it, but say, “At least I'm comfortable.”

In my model, the pathological network supplies that comfort to discourage its own removal. It acts to preserve itself.

Think of an internal protection racket:

“Stay where you are, and I'll give you comfort.”

“Try to change anything, and I'll give you anxiety, fear, pain, sleepless nights, panic—more than you bargained for.”

You answer, “All right. I'll take the comfort.” The condition is that the network gets to stay.

Then you meet a guru who talks endlessly about love, resolves none of the suffering, and invites you to keep returning for a pleasant state.

For the network, it is a safe place: “They won't eliminate me here.” It pulls you toward the group. You think love brought you there. I see the network's self-preservation at work.

Exploiters sense this even when they cannot describe it scientifically. The most effective don't frighten you. They embrace you. They don't bark orders. They agree with everything. They don't say, “Submit to me.”

They say, “Trust love.” “Trust God”—as though they were speaking for God themselves.

And you hand over control willingly.

Love learned as protection

Where might this form of defensive love come from?

Consider a pattern I have encountered in practice. A baby is born with the umbilical cord around its neck and experiences suffocation. Something it cannot understand seems to be killing it.

The child has no concept of an umbilical cord, an obstetrician, or the mechanics of birth. In the model I use to explain the experience, there is only immediate terror: I am being strangled; I am dying.

The mother is the child's central point of connection. Alongside the terror, there is an orientation toward her—a reaching for the mother that I describe as love. Put into adult words: “Mom, I love you.”

The child survives. Otherwise this would not be a story told by a person sitting in front of me.

An erroneous link takes hold:

There was mortal terror. There was love. I survived.

Therefore, love saved me.

Love becomes protection against terror. Later, when the person is afraid, love switches on automatically. They are humiliated, and they love. They are used, and they love harder. They face a threat and start rescuing everyone instead of assessing it clearly.

This is not what I mean by true love. It is love shaped by trauma: it hides fear without removing it.

A person in this pattern can be especially vulnerable to a group built around love. They may give away everything. Their own children go without while they pay for other people's training out of “unconditional love.”

They can harm the people for whom they are actually responsible and still feel saintly—because their internal hypnosis has displaced judgment, proportion, and wisdom.