Is Everything Based in Love?
I was listening to a podcast today that posed the classic idea that you’re either doing things based in love or not - and perhaps we could start doing more things based in love than in coercion or deceit.
While I admit that when you know you’re lying or trying to force someone to do something it’s not exactly us at our best humanity, I still think it’s all love down at the bottom.
My experiences with Internal Family Systems (IFS) and other modalities showed me that nothing is done without loving intention towards something - no matter how fucked up.
That’s gotta be a hard pill to swallow, but Richard Schwartz, the originator of IFS, did the work to find evidence for the things I only assume. He went into prisons and did all kinds of interviews with people of all kinds of convictions. Every one of them had what IFS terms “Self” (intentionally capitalized) at their core. Beneath all of the awful things they did, they had a calm, courageous, compassionate core. All of the tragedies they’d spawned could be interviewed and explained in a way that would make almost anybody cry.
His very first encounter with what would eventually be his system was with a woman who was trying to stop with self-harm through cutting.
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