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| | Notices | Welcome to PTSD Forum. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a life threatening, debilitating disorder that can break down a sufferer’s body through anxiety and stress. Further it poses a significant suicide risk resulting from the brains neurological imbalance and chemical depression. Sufferers often live in denial, thus this community is aimed at helping PTSD sufferers help themselves through others experiences, guidance and education. We are here for the sufferer, spouse and families surrounding PTSD. Spouses and family are too often forgotten in this equation, and often they receive all the worst that PTSD has to offer. If you're involved in any way with PTSD, get registered and help yourself now. Non-active members will eventually be deleted. If you are not a sufferer, carer or someone within the mental health industry, and active, then there is little reason for you to be a member of this forum. Non-active members with zero posts are deleted periodically during the year. |  | | 
19-03-2008, 12:50 AM
|  | | | Join Date: Mar 2008 Location: USA
Posts: 222
| |
My definition is not sweet or romantic. Love is a choice. Nobody (including myself) is always gentle, patient and kind. However, if I choose to love that person, then I can endure their bad moments just as they choose to endure mine.
Friends are chosen. If somebody is too negative or too abrasive then I can choose to stay away from them or choose to love them in spite of their faults.
My family is the same. I can choose to over-look faults and extend love, even if the same is not extended to me. Or I can choose to walk away and save my sanity.
It is my choice. |
19-03-2008, 01:45 AM
|  | | | Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: USA
Posts: 1,737
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My personal simplified definition of Love is: Love as a choose and a gift we give others freely without expectation in return.
But here below is a better understanding of exactly what I believe and practice when allowed to remain conscious and not swallowed up in an overload of life's stress and mine and too many others expectations of me.
It was shared with me during past retreats, I easily understand every word of it, bc this too is what love means to me.
Principles of Loving:
More Than Anything Else, We want to Love and be Loved.
Love is a Gift.
Love is Not Time Bound.
Love is Good Will in Action.
Love is a Response to Need.
Skills of Loving:
Seeing: I do not look over or through you. I see you in your uniqueness.
Hearing: I listen to what you are saying.
Honoring of Feelings and Ideas: I recognize your right to feel and think as you do.
Having Good Will. I will you good and not evil.
Responding to Need: If you let me know what you needs are, withing the limits of my value system, I will not run away. I wll be there for you.  |
19-03-2008, 05:47 AM
| | Moderated Member | | Join Date: Nov 2007
Posts: 81
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absence of fear |
19-03-2008, 07:17 AM
|  | | | Join Date: Feb 2008
Posts: 360
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This is my favorite sonnet, and it pretty much sums up what I believe love to be.
-nic :-)
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his ending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
--W. Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI |
19-03-2008, 10:13 AM
|  | | | Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: England
Posts: 245
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I don't know what love is any more.
I know I had it and I lost it.
I know that I wish I had it now. Maybe it's niave, but I think if I had someone to share this PTSD crap with, then it wouldn't be half as bad.
(sorry - just venting - I guess 'love' is a touchy subject for some of us?!) |
19-03-2008, 10:25 AM
| | | | Join Date: Mar 2008
Posts: 46
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love, in my opinion, is selflessness and unconditionality at its best. |
19-03-2008, 12:48 PM
|  | Moderator Chat PTSD Forum | | Join Date: Feb 2008 Location: North Carolina, USA
Posts: 636
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Cherryblossom-
'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. ~Tennyson |
19-03-2008, 04:29 PM
|  | | | Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: Midwest, USA
Posts: 449
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There was a time when I believed that being in love meant caring for someone else more than you care about yourself. Perhaps that is co-dependent thinking though.
"There is no Shangri-La, you know? Every relationship is messed up. What makes it perfect is if you still want to be there when things really suck." ~Carla in Scrubs |
20-03-2008, 12:33 AM
|  | | | Join Date: Sep 2007 Location: Earth (most of the time)
Posts: 729
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Upstream I agree with your definition and if it seems like love is co-dependent to you, then that is what it probably is to you.
But if I can look death in the face and say, "Take me, not my child or husband". That is love, not co-dependent because I wouldn't be here anymore to depend on them.
I can say to the evils of the world, "Hurt me not my child or husband". That is love. I'm certain I could do this for the ones I love because this life (not that I want to leave it any time soon) has been hard one me and I will leave in hopes they survive.
My husband and kids have not suffered in the way I have, and they deserve a chance to live life and be able to find the beauty in it all without all of the ugly, tainted shit.
Peace
Tammy |
20-03-2008, 12:51 AM
|  | | | Join Date: Feb 2008 Location: Canada
Posts: 138
| |
A few folks here have mentioned love as a choice...yes. So many choices embedded in that one choice: to be kind, merciful, present, accountable to and with another. To choose to stand beside another...and remain when all hell breaks loose. To choose a commitment...day after day after day.
I think of marriage vows -- and how they can relate to all our intimate relations. We don't make vows as such with our dear friends, our children, our relatives, our animal companions, our students, etc. ... but it's interesting to imagine what they might be.
I've read (three times!) a marvelous book called A General Theory of Love; it's by Thomas Lewis, MD, and two other physicians. It is a beautiful blend of brain/social science and stories/poetry. It is an urgent call to action --> to love actively. It's a wake-up call, and states in no uncertain terms that we need to love and be loved or we wither and die. Beautiful book.
I also think of love as a call-and-response of hearts... 
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