Is love a super power?

Is love a super power?

I was recently at a conference in which a group of professionals were talking about therapeutic life story work - especially about how to support children and young people who have experienced trauma. We were asked to consider what our super powers would be if we could have them. I've been a social worker for 15 years. I'm also a mother of three and an adoptee. And to be honest, I have only recently, in my early 40s, really started to feel safe - safe in my experiences, my work, and my capacity to be and to feel loved (despite growing up in my substantive years in a home filled with it).

At the conference, I said I wished my superpower, if I could have one, was love. I described throwing love bombs at people, ones that filled them in clouds of beautiful pink fluffy glittery dust that make them feel truly and deeply loved. ‘Love is not enough,’ my fellow attendees declared, and instead chose ‘teleportation’ as the superpower to put forward from our particular table.

Love is not enough. I have heard this expression a lot in social work. I understand it. I’ve worked with children who have been so deeply hurt that to take love on can feel too scary - they push and push with all their might to reject it before it sweeps them up only to abandon them again, reducing them to retreat into the empty shell of nothingness that follows them around like that of a hermit crab desperately holding on through the stormy seas. But what if we could remove the walls that prevent them from truly trusting it? What if we could create the love bombs that penetrate even the most solid of those defences?

When I had children - my viewpoint changed. I understood love from a different direction. Someone took all that I knew and flipped it on its head. I could love this little person absolutely, fully, and utterly without any limitations. Not only that, but I could feel - really, truly, deeply feel - the love back from them without any judgement. That smile I gave them - and they gave me (once they were able) - healed my heart in more ways than I even knew was possible. I could parent them in the way I wished I could parent myself, and I suddenly fully understood the superpower of love.

As my children have grown - life has chucked things at them - I can see how their deep understanding of love can be shaken. Whether it be through other people at school, watching the atrocities we see on the TV, hearing about world events, or watching me, their mother go through the usual hormonal and stress-filled crashes of madness! I’m so hoping I have built them a foundation of love that they know is unwavering and ever present. I do everything I can to help them understand that life can be tricky - but that we always have each other's back. We can make mistakes, and we can heal from them - they can even make us stronger!

I wish we could do this for the world. On reflection, part of me agrees with my colleagues about teleportation. I'd love to teleport back in time and then use my 'love bomb' superpower on my younger self. It would have saved a lot of time!

But actually, in a way, that's what our children are already doing. They are throwing their love bombs at us every day, healing our inner children so that we can continue to do it for them.

No teleportation needed.