The Surprise of Heartfelt Love: Or Similitudes Thereof in Therapeutic Contexts

Abstract

This article is included in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology Special Issue ‘Healing Emotional Suffering through Heartfelt Love’ guest edited by Michael W. Cornwall, PhD. I begin my personal narrative by briefly highlighting literature attesting to the efficacy of love in various therapeutic contexts. I then critique the notion of ‘heartfelt love’ as a healing medium, before relating a profound personal instance whereby I had such an experience. Finally, I proffer the theoretical notion that healing love may manifest, in various degrees of efficacy, along a spectrum of personal-centred therapeutic approaches.

The invitation for me to write a personal narrative for this Special Edition focussed on ‘Healing Emotional Suffering through Heartfelt Love’ comes as a welcome opportunity and challenge. While I value the opportunity to share instances from my personal experiences of giving and receiving healing support in times of suffering, the challenge to my academic self is to first define the notion and experience of ‘heartfelt love’. What, exactly, is heartfelt love?

The efficacy of love in healing practices is evident in a significant body of literature. For example, a Google Scholar search for ‘efficacy of love in healing therapy’ results in about 129,000 hits. These texts are eclectic in their focus and include the healing power of love in context of trauma-specific therapeutic intervention (Bradley et al., 2021; Brees, 2021), nature-based therapeutic practices (Weaver, 2015), Buddhist mindfulness therapy (Rockwell, 2019), Pentecostal Healing (Cartledge, 2013) and African-based Ifunanya (Agape Love) healing (Madubuike, 2023). Clearly, there exists a healing facility in the power of human love. There appears, however, to be no parallel body of research in specific context of ‘heartfelt love’. Indeed, a Google Scholar search for this term shows that different authors have invested it with an array of idiosyncratic or doctrinal meanings, which arguably leaves its definition open to personal interpretation. Accordingly, for the purpose of this article, I adopt Cornwall’s (2019, p. 667) definition of heartfelt love as ‘a human emotion that we feel moving inside ourselves and we must therefore revealingly communicate it outward, when we do offer it to another’. He also refers to such love as ‘merciful heartfelt caring’ (p. 670) and ‘unconditional love’ (p. 667). For me, this infers that heartfelt love is essentially something ‘we feel moving inside ourselves’ as a palpable and driving emotion, located within our heart, when therapeutically aiding other suffering persons.

In adopting this provisional definition of ‘heartfelt love’, my next reflective task is to ask myself the question, ‘Have I ever felt such definitive love in my heart when aiding others’? After some consideration, my initial response to this question is, while there have been many instances where I have had genuine feelings of compassion, concern and empathy for people within caring contexts, I have not experienced ‘heartfelt love’ per se (i.e. whereby my supportive actions were orchestrated via a clear feeling of love in my heart). However, I then recalled a profound incident I had forgotten about, in which a strong and unconditional experience of love spontaneously occurred within my heart when helping a total stranger in a crisis situation. It was genuinely and surprisingly heartfelt. This is my story.

One day, in 1988, I was walking along a roadside on my way to a local cafe in an Australian country town where I then lived, when a woman walking along the other side of the road had a sudden epileptic episode and fell face first into the gravel. I quickly crossed the road to help and saw her eyes were wild with disoriented terror and her face had several bleeding abrasions. She was still in seizure and seemingly oblivious to my presence, but I sat down in the gravel, cradled her head in my lap and talked to her. I had never been in this situation before but intuitively felt that I should maintain a gentle patter of conversation. I told her my name, explained what had happened, informed her about the cuts on her face, assured her that they were relatively minor abrasions that would heal soon and said that another person had called an ambulance, which would arrive soon. I cannot recall what else I said, though I maintained a rhythm of calm talk until the ambulance arrived.

A profound corollary to the above incident is that I experienced a spontaneous and strong sense of heartfelt love for her; a full love glowing in my heart that I had not felt before (or since). It was a feeling that had no egoic strings attached. It was exquisitely unconditional with no hidden motivations, expectations or sexual attractions. In fact, to me, she was quite an unattractive person, about 10 years older than me, with ruddy facial features that looked ravaged by a hard life and alcohol. Yet I felt complete love for her, very different from the usual ‘love’ of physical attraction. I have no idea where this unprecedented heartfelt love came from, or why it happened there and then, though its orbit was not restricted to just her, but to all of humanity, of which she was part. As I later learned, this emergence of ‘heartfelt love’ somehow enabled me to provide support for her which resulted in a healing outcome beyond my knowledge and recognition. When she was released from hospital the next day, we crossed paths on the roadside again, so I introduced myself and asked how she was. She thanked me and said that my gentle presence and calm voice helped her from slipping into a second massive seizure, which had previously always followed the first seizure. Effectively, in following, the flow of my voice rather than the usual pull and pattern of a second seizure, the latter did not manifest. My belief is that, if I had my feeling of heartfelt love and its attendant intuitive guidance not emerged in that situation, then the outcome would likely have been a second seizure.

To this day, I have no inkling as to why and how such a powerful and pure manifestation of heartfelt love spontaneously emerged in that chance situation. Yet, it gave me a welcome and cherished glimpse of the latent healing potentials that exist within myself, within ourselves. Maybe a hint to the mystery of this can be found in Charles’ (2020) analogy on the nature of heartfelt love:

From the ‘heartfelt love’, I see that there are two ways to define love. (One) To fill a void in our lonely lives, we find a kind of love that I refer to as a ‘superficial’ love. To illustrate this I will use a glass of water. Once the water is consumed the glass is empty as is life and the lonely heart returns to find another glass of water. . .(Two). . .The glass is full of water as before; however, when the water is consumed the glass is still full. It does not matter how much water is consumed the glass remains full, there is no way to explain or define the reason why this phenomenon exists. . .You can live this love through the deep feelings from an unknown source within our hearts.

Extending on this analogy, maybe the healing power of love can express itself along a spectrum, ranging from the transiently empty cup of superficial love to the perennially full cup of heartfelt love, with myriad gradations in between. Hence, while person-centred therapies, coupled with human qualities such as compassion, caring concern and empathy, may not have the same degree of healing efficacy as a full cup of ‘heartfelt love’, they may still foster healing outcomes in concordance with the degree of ‘love’ present in their respective cups. In conclusion, it seems that bringing love and the human heart into therapeutic practices and settings has greater healing efficacy than the traditional cold cup of clinical distance and medical objectivity (objectification).