Self-awareness: Book Review Women Who Love Too Much by Robin Norwood (1985)

"Because for women who have grown up in deeply unhappy homes, where the emotional burdens were too heavy and the responsibilities too great, for these women what feels good and what feels bad have become confused and entangled and finally one and the same. " Robin Norwood is a therapist who identifies a certain pattern of thoughts and behaviour that some women develop as a response to problematic conditions in childhood -- “loving too much”. The author traces the characteristics of this type of women, along with the role of men in this dysfunctional dynamic (usually addicts, alcoholics and damaged ), the conditions of childhood that carve the psyche of these women and the culture (media, norms, values etc. ) that strengthens and reinforces this view of intense, unhealthy, obsessive love. Norwood uses cass studies of women in real-life to examine the boundaries between healthy and unhealthy ways of relating, and the antecedents in childhood for these problematic conceptions of love.

She outlines a self-help style 10-point recovery plan for women who are addicted to "toxic love", i. e. those who measure the degree of their love by the depth of their torment. She advocates for a focus on recovery, healing and self-love to free oneself from destructive loving behaviours to build healthy, meaningful relationships. Norwood makes a case for the Freudian underpinnings of childhood trauma (emotional abandonment, neglect, deprivation etc. ) to explain this maladaptive view of love (often manifesting as a "crushing obsession" in adulthood), as having roots in the love that was denied by parents or primary caregivers in conditions of lack or abuse. The severe emotional starvation and hunger that results from the loneliness of the inner child manifests as a desire to repeat and recreate the trauma in order to master it - thereby seeking romantic partners who mirror their parents’ worst sides.

To elaborate, if a young child has experienced a trauma of some kind, it will “appear and reappear as a theme in his or her play activities until there is some sense of having finally mastered the experience”. A child who undergoes surgery, for example, may “reenact the trip to the hospital using dolls or other toy figures, may make himself the doctor in one such drama and the patient in another, until the fear attached to the event is sufficiently diminished”. Women who love too much do the same thing: reenacting and reexperiencing painful relationships to master them in a desperate attempt to master our wounds. However, the book also stresses on the importance of shifting the focus from loving others (to the point of pain), to loving oneself so there is no toxicity attached to the concept of love.

By courageously accepting, grieving and forgiving the past, these women can move on to forge enduring relationships were their needs for nurturing are met in healthy ways, not through pain or abuse. Becoming more than what the circumstances have made us - “Victor, not victim”, should be the nugget of wisdom that we need to extract from our childhood burdens. I could especially connect to the case of Trudi, 23, who was married to an emotionally distant alcoholic man. Trudi, coming from a dysfunctional childhood where she had to take on immense emotional responsibility and had to be the adult for the entire family, experienced lack of warmth and emotional distance from her parents and therefore suffered with self-worth. These were issues that resonated with me, and called to attention many of the defense mechanisms I picked up along the way in order to get through my perceived ordeals. Certain patterns of denial that were operating under the surface that masked pain and anger also became evident to me after putting myself in the third person perspective and evaluating my actions and past as though it were a case study in a book. I also struggled with looking at love in a healthy way, and often mistook obsession as love ("Nice men are boring").

Deeper still was the wounds I discovered I had that were rooted in emotional starvation and the primal need for nurturing. In terms of contributing to my self-understanding, this book helped me realize that I need to move on from the people that have denied me the love I needed when I needed it, and removing the anger associated with my parents for the things I think they didn’t do rightly. Grieving for the damaged child within all of us, and the importance of forgiving those who have wronged us when we were vulnerable and defenseless as children, is another insight that I had while reading the recovery section. I also need to work on healing myself before trying to heal everyone else around me, and courageously understand my shortcomings and learn to overcome them. It's not the end of the world, so I don’t need to feel everything intensely to truly live. It’s in the subtle moments that life reveals its beauty to us, and I need to recognize more readily those moments when they occur. Believing that I'm worthy of the right kind of love, and love that causes pain isn't love at all, is the ultimate truth that I took away from the experiences of all these women.

Just as it has benefited me immensely, this book can also be incredibly healing to just about anyone who has struggles with relationships, but especially those who: are women, since our maladaptive behaviours can slip under the radar (we are expected to put up with trashy men). There is a thin line between being selfless and tolerating abuse from a partner; also, those who are struggling to overcome childhood abuse, neglect or abandonment (physical or emotional) by parents/caregivers and those struggling with issues of self-worth, a tendency to "give too much" too quickly, or needing a crisis to function normally; those with issues of control and powerlessness in their relationships, often playing the victim/feeling victimized by others, and finally, those who have been in abusive relationships or who are attracted to "bad guys" or damaged men (addicts, narcs, abusers). Phrases that were deeply impactful to me, and those that I would use in the future:

1. "To be alone means to feel the stirrings of the great pain from the past combined with that of the present. "
2. "We listened because we were afraid of the consequences to the suffering parent if we didn’t, and afraid of the loss of love if we failed to fill the role proscribed for us. And so we didn’t protect ourselves, and our parents didn’t protect us either, because they needed to see us as stronger than we were. "
3. "We often do not really know who we are, and being embroiled in dramatic problems keeps us from having to hold still and find out. "
4. "We use our obsession with the men we love to avoid our pain, emptiness, fear, and anger. We use our relationships as drugs, to avoid experiencing what we would feel if we held still with ourselves. A truly awful relationship simply serves the same function for us as a very strong drug. "
5. "An addict who is practicing his disease isn’t looking for someone to help him get well, he’s looking for someone with whom he can stay sick, safely. "