People, groups, and churches proclaim they will love us just as we are, no strings attached. “You don’t have to change to be here. You are accepted,” they say.
Others will say, “Come as you are. But don’t stay that way.”
Which is the more loving thing to say?
Love is hard to pin down.
Does love leave us unchanged?
If love hopes to change us, is it still love?
Does unconditional love mean unconditional acceptance?
Neuroscience says love changes us
More specifically, attachment love builds our brains for an interactive relationship with others and the world.
Infants (0-12 months):
Parental love through eye contact and smiles, through holding, feeding, and changing, is not just physical care. It is relationally transforming for the infant brain. As much as infants need physical care to grow physically, infants need relational care to grow relationally.
And if they don’t get relational care they will die — even if nourished properly.
Parental love at this stage is mostly through up-regulating infants into states of excitement (what Christians would call joy). You know a well loved infant when they seek to make eye contact with all people (even strangers). We call them “bright eyed” babies.
This stage develops the “sympathetic nervous system” which is like the gas pedal of life. This is good when the infant is playing. Not so fun with the infant is full throttle screaming because he is pooping and wants to be changed.
During this time, love trains an infant that life is safe and predictable. The input of love transforms the infant’s brain. And without this transformation life will forever be different for this child.
Toddlers (12-18 months):
With this gas pedal pressed down, and with the development of motion, infants become toddlers crashing around the house.
The mobile child needs a safe base from which to explore the world, learning about all the opportunities and anxieties that this big world provides. The toddler learns that somethings are hot, others are hard, some are cold, and others are sharp. Parental love is there to shape their experience of all these things.
This is called “social referencing”.
Why do kids always want to show you stuff?
Because they are excited. Yes.
But they are also checking to see if you are excited too. If you aren’t as excited, then all of a sudden they aren’t either. By looking at the emotional response of the parent to a situation the child learns the meaning, value, and context of everyday activities and objects. This is the relational and neurological basis for the social construction of reality.
The toddler also learns the they world has limitations.
They learn this through the word NO. Whether it is for physical safety or relational respect, learning “No” is hard, but necessary. Really, the toddler is learning that the world is full of other people — who have their own stuff, need to be places, and have their own needs and wants (later this should be transformed into a “yes brain”—but that is for another post).
This process, of learning about a big world full of other people, develops the “parasympathetic nervous system” — like the brakes for life. When we get too excited, too energetic, too aggressive, too narcissistic really, we need to slow down and process the world with others in mind.
Love, in this stage, trains the toddler that the world has other people in it. And love teach us to down-regulate (what I would call “peace”).
Internal Working Models:
The infant and toddler stages of life (before we develop explicit memories that we remember) create implicit memories.
These implicit memories are connected to what are sometimes called internal working models.
The brain is an anticipation machine, constantly making perditions. And these predictions and responses are based on our internal working models of the world. These mental models take past relational outcomes and predict them into the future.
Whether and how quickly, and in what manner, our needs and desires were met as an infant and toddler become the model for future interactions — even into adulthood.
Whether and how an infant and toddler processes ruptures and repairs in relationships becomes the model for future interactions.
These internal working models are templates of the “self-in-interaction-with-others”, coming primarily from the love (or lack) of parents.
Transformative Love Continues Throughout Life
The process of raising children just continues this cycle at higher and more mature levels, learning one is safe and secure while navigating a life filled with other people.
Love—literally—makes us grow, relationally, physically, and spiritually.
In this way, love is like life. If you aren’t moving forward then you are dying, even if slowly. If you’ve stopped altogether, then you are dead.
Love Grows as a Family
What people really need today is family. And churches that really are families will say, “Come as you are. But don’t stay that way.”
Only when we understand love within a family will we understand what it means to say that “love is unconditional” and only then we will know what “sacrificial love” really is.
We all need to update our “internal working models” according to the Father’s love for the Son in the Spirit. We all need to increase our capacity for joy (up-regulate) and peace (down-regulate). We all need to go into a dangerous world for God’s kingdom. We all need to learn better how to live with others as fellow image bearers of God.
All this will change us.
And I’m so glad that it does.
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Check out TRIVE TODAY for help building these relational skills that might have been neglected in your childhood.
The big books I’m pulling from for this research are The Developing Mind by Daniel Seigel and Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self by Allan Schore.