The Love That Nourishes

The concept of love is widely used and exploited in all areas of life: romantic love, passionate love, blind love, motherly love, etc.

Love is a complex and subjective relational phenomenon, which entails Cognitive, Emotional and Behavioral elements. Therefore, loving involves Thinking, Feeling and Doing. Furthermore, it assumes that as a relational phenomenon directed at a person who is the object of love, it must be perceived by them as such; if not, it matters little that one claims to love with all his or her strength. To add more complexity, it is necessary that it manifest itself in all its components, since a partial interference in any of them nullifies the effectiveness of the whole.

The awareness of being complexly loved is called Relational Nutrition.

This process is the basis for the construction of personality and contributes to the maturation processes of the psyche throughout life. Different partial blocks in any of its three components (cognitive, emotional and pragmatic) can lead to personality alterations and various psychopathological disorders.

Two of the cognitive components of love, essential in successful nutrition, are recognition and appreciation.

Recognizing the other means seeing them, perceiving their needs, and accepting their existence. At first glance it seems obvious, but it is not, since when we accept the existence of the other, we limit our own in a certain way.

When there is a lack of recognition as a continuous relational pattern, disconfirmation occurs, which involves the perception of the non-existence of the other.

Valuing others means appreciating their qualities, even if they are different from your own. As with recognition, accepting the value of others also puts one’s own value at risk, so these phenomena are not without difficulties. The lack of evaluation leads to disqualification: yes I recognize you but I reject you.