A story which i heard somewhere...

The summer my daughter was eight we took a family trip. One day we were gathered on the shore of a large lake, taking turns water skiing. When i was skiing away and out of vision, my daughter, an adorable innocent little girl with sweet pigtails, turned to my husband and said, "I wish Mommy would fall down and the sharks would come and eat her and i would see the bone." Then she continued to watch me, smiling playing in the sand and saying, "Look at Mommy."

My husband, who was holding her hand at the time, was rather taken aback. He turned to her and said something like, "That might hurt Mommy." My daughter seemed relatively unaffected by this thought and continued playing.

There are a couple of forces at work here-- at least. One is the natural expression of hate toward the person you love and depend upon the most. The other is the child's wish to get rid of the same sex parent so that she will have the opposite sex parent to herself. Both of thses are natural feelings on the part of the child. Accepting them helps the child to be less fearful of her own feelings. Then she can move beyond them and becomefree of their unconscious grip, so that they do not contaminate relationships later in life.

All children harbor destructive wishes towards their parents. Both love and hate are a part of the child's feeling world. When she can discover that she does not have the power to destroy her parents' love or presence in her life, even though at times she may wish to, she can intergrate both of these feelings within herself as being a natural part of any deep intimate relationship. When she cannot, when she is forced by circumstance to relegate negative feelings to her unconscious, those feelings may find expression in passive-aggressive or otherwise destructive ways. They may even be turned against the self, where they will confuse the child and make her guilty over what she carries in the silence of her mind. She will be forced to split off from a part of herself.

Unintegrated feelings from the childhood carry over into intimate relationships throughout life. We all know people who can acknowledge only one aspect of self, who are unable to see, for example, negative qualities and feel the feelings, they will destroy the relationship, keeps them in denial. The problem may be that they were never really allowed to see these aspects of their own parents, to learn in childhood that these feelings are natural. Eventually, for any deep intimate relationship to survive, it will need to accommodate the good and the bad, the liked with the disliked. This is how deep relationships can remain alive and people can continue to grow within them. Otherwise the relationship tends to become role-typed and stratified. People who are happy together have genrally learned to accomodate the whole of the person to whom they are related, which allows the soul of the relationship to flow more freely.

Love does not cause suffering,
what causes it is the sense of ownership,
which is love's opposite.

Find someone you love,
And someone who loves you
to complete love