I do wonder what it is about the word ‘love’ that terrifies so many of us. We’re scared to say it, we’re even more scared of hearing it. It comes loaded with baggage that it really doesn’t deserve.
I think I frightened someone recently by using it. I love you to bits, you know that, but… the ‘but’ that followed isn’t relevant, the but that matters here is that clearly they didn’t know, and now that I’d told them in such a flippant way – to me just a simple natural stating the obvious no big deal way – you could almost hear the hooves screeching on cobbles as the horses were reined in. Woah!
As it turned out, I got lucky. The person concerned decided to talk about where they were in their own life, and what they did and didn’t want. It was a brave step into vulnerability for them, and for me it was a relief, because we got to re-set. I hadn’t meant what they thought I might have meant. There was no big scary monster lurking behind the kind words.
I love them to bits – as I do a fair few other people in my life. The important thing to know about my loving someone (and probably also your loving someone and everyone’s loving someone) is that it is not remotely related to ‘being in love’ with them, it is not remotely related to romantic love, it is not remotely sexual. Any and/or all of those things might play into how and why you love a particular person and/or how you express that love, but none of them are key ingredients. All of those things are reactions and responses. They are about how you feel. Love isn’t something you feel, it is something you do.
Importantly it is something you choose to do.
Love is holding space, supporting, respecting, encouraging, challenging, freeing, affirming, valuing, accepting – especially accepting the aspects of a person we find discomforting or at odds with our own world view.
The recent experience got me thinking in particular about this concept of holding space for someone, and what that means.
HOLDING SPACE
For me, it means holding a soul space open for them to be who they are. It means giving them time. Listening to them – really listening, paying attention to all the nuances and contradictions in what they say, without judgement, without interjection, without wanting to try to help or fix or solve, equally without wanting to flatter or validate or direct. The space that we hold is just that: space. It is a void into which they can step and be seen and be heard. Importantly, it is the space in which they can see and hear themselves. It is a “safe space” – the place where they can put all the stuff they’re scared of letting out into the world in case it goes rogue on them.
This isn’t therapy. You are not coaching. You are not encouraging them to speak. Maybe you will ask questions because you are genuinely interested and want to understand fully what it is they are trying to share – not because it is them that is sharing, but because it is a view or an experience that per se intrigues you, and you are a curious person.
Holding space requires a conversation to take place, a gentle conversation in which you simply seek to understand and to let them know that they can keep talking or not talking or stop talking however it is they choose to use the space you are giving them.
In order to hold space for someone you have to learn to be both within it and outside of it at the same time.
One of my challenges in holding space for someone, is that point when they decide Phew, enough, I don’t want to say any more, when effectively the space is full and they need to let it settle, dissipate, disperse…they need to wait and watch and be sure that they have not misjudged the trust they have placed in you. My challenge isn’t in meeting the trust – that is a given –my challenge is in letting them walk out of the space I am holding open. My challenge is in accepting that there will always be something unsaid, that I can hear pawing at the door wanting to be let in. My challenge is in continuing to hold the space until the time is right for the unsaid to be said…and in having to accept that such a time may never come.
I say ‘my challenge’ as if that is the only one. It is not. The equally challenging flip-side is when someone does not recognise that the held space is full, overflowing, drooping under the weight, ready to split and leak and bleed. We all need our safe spaces, the people we can off-load onto, vent into… but we owe it to them to wake up ourselves occasionally and just check that we’re not overburdening, swamping them with our rubbish to the extent that it overflows the space they’re holding for us, into their own space.
Holding space for someone can never be to detriment of the space we hold for ourselves. If we are not centred and strong and resilient, holding space for others can be very damaging. We can still do it, and the simple fact is that we will still do it; it is in our nature to be caring and compassionate and want to help, to be there for the people we care about. The problem is that if we do not, at the same time, create the space for ourselves, we will be overwhelmed, we will lose ourselves. The aeroplane oxygen mask analogy has become a cliché but that doesn’t make it any less apt. We have to help ourselves before we can help anyone else.
CREATING SPACE
In an ideal world there will be as many people holding space for us, as we are holding for others. Some of them will be the same people; some will not. There will be mutuality and diversity. It is too easy to say that there must be equal give and take between individuals. I think our interactions are more complex than that.
I will give to the people in my life and I will take from them. I might hope that over time the giving and the taking evens out, but suspect that often it won’t. At the extremes there may be folk to whom I only give and folk from whom I only take with no reciprocation. That sounds harsh and unfair on a one-to-one level, but we don’t live one-to-one, we live many-to-many. Just as I give without receiving, so I receive without giving; just as I give and receive in equal measures, I also receive and give in unequal measures. What matters is that as a society, as a community, as a universal ‘system’ we equalise the giving and the taking across the whole.
In order for this to happen, the global, universal equalisation, we absolutely HAVE TO give unconditionally at times, and we have to receive unconditionally at times. Both of these are hard concepts to come to terms with. We don’t want to be selfish. We don’t want to be doormats. We have to learn to be both. At times. And to be sure it is only “at times”. Selfishness and selflessness are as necessary as the equal-giving-and-taking. They are the only way the system can balance over time and space.
We can only give what we have. We can only receive what we need. Those things won’t always be in balance. We have to think wider, longer-term. We need to recognise that balance and stasis are not the same thing.
So what do we do when, in the moment, the balance is off-kilter? We have to make sure that where we need space that doesn’t, right then, appear to be being held for us, or if we can’t find it, we have to make sure that we create it for ourselves.
In fact, I would argue that even if there are myriad people holding space for us and we know who and where they are, and what kind of space is open, and how safe it is, we do well to skill ourselves in creating our own space. Just in case.
Creating space for ourselves serves exactly the same purpose as holding it for someone else. First and foremost, it is also soul space. It is sacred. It involves trust and openness. It is whatever it takes for us to be open and honest with ourselves. For me it involves journalling primarily, but it also involves long walks in lonely places, and camera-play, and writing poems, and eating ice-cream, and throwing ingredients in a pan with the hope that a scrumptious meal will come out of it. It also involves turning the music up loud enough to annoy the neighbours, pushing the furniture back and making-believe I’m living a different life. It involves colouring-in and doing crossword puzzles. It involves writing stuff like this. These are just some of the ways in which I talk honestly to myself and listen to what it is I have to say.
You may do some of these things. You may do completely different things. You may kick a ball around, or go fishing, or play saxophone out on the streets. You might knit, or paint, or surf, or sky-dive. It doesn’t matter what it is: whatever it is that you do purely for the doing of it, is you creating space for yourself, it is your soul being open and honest, and I invite you to listen to what it is telling you.
