Live love

Though not as often as in the past, we at work still get into conversations about deeper things in a person's head, and this is some of what came from it yesterday. We were talking about love and unhealed emotional wounds, the down side of love where rejection, loss, hurt and abandonment reside. When we love, and it is a natural thing when we first attach at infancy, we unwittingly set ourselves up to vulnerability, and because it is the ones (beginning with childhood playmates and parental relationships) we love, the ones we are most deeply emotionally invested in, the ones we hope in and hope for, who can cause the most pain. So how do people handle this? Maybe the maladaptive handling of the feelings of lost love is what we see in our depressed hospitalized patients and also in our medical patients. How do people respond to losing - for whatever reason - love? Have they become a rock or an island as described in the old Simon and Garfunkel song? Never to feel or to fully live again? Do they hold on to an anger that causes all kinds of mental and physical problems? Deny their pain or loss? Become reckless, not caring about their own lives? Live out their lives in regret? Let grief rule their lives? Shut down in fear of other relationships? The best thing is to process, let ourselves feel the hurt and pain, let go, adapt to the changes, and get back into life's arena. Love is far above anything else that is important in life but it also has a flip side. Kubler-Ross said she found that loving and being loved is all that matters at the end of one's life. There must be some reason why only one vowel separates love and live. Since we humans live to love and love to live, we must fearlessly keep it up.