Healing Is Having Somewhere for Your Love to Go

Part of healing is having somewhere for your love to go.

We talk a lot about feeling loved - and for someone in crisis, in pain, or isolated, how much they need to feel loved. We talk less about what happens when their love has nowhere to land.

When a teenager is struggling, everyone around her is asking the same question: how do we help her feel loved? That's the right question. But there's another important one that often goes unasked: does she have anywhere to put her love? Is there something that needs what she has to offer?

A mother told me about picking up her daughter from a volunteer shift at an after-school program. She waited as her daughter said goodbye to the kids - hugs, high fives, the whole heartfelt send-off. Her mother said she hardly recognized her - or rather, recognized her completely. Her daughter's face was lit. She seemed back, the girl who had seemed disappeared and hidden for so long. She was like the sun, her mother said. So full of love. So herself.

Healing isn't only about receiving care. It's also about being the one doing the caring. There's a difference between giving to earn love and giving because love is what you're made of. This is the second kind - not self-abandoning, not giving at the expense of yourself, but giving because that is you being yourself.

Teenagers have enormous capacity for love. Fierce, loyal, strong love - for friends, for animals, for causes, for ideas. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, prolific writer, poet, and depth psychoanalyst, writes that the creative life is born from having so much love for something - "whether a person, a word, an image, an idea, the land or humanity - that all that can be done with the overflow is to create." That overflow has to go somewhere. It is part of our nature.

For parents, this reframe can be useful. When your daughter is struggling, the instinct is to pour love in. And yes, keep doing that! And also ask: where does her love go? Where can she offer her gifts? If the answer is unclear, that's worth paying attention to.

Because when love has nowhere to go, it doesn't disappear. It ferments. Into longing, or worthlessness, or the feeling that you don't quite matter. And no amount of being loved by others will quite quench the need to offer our own gifts - to enact the full circuitry of being human: to love, and to be loved.

It's not for any of us to decide where her love goes. But we can reflect back all the places we already see it - because it's already there. It doesn't have to be earned or invented. It just has to have somewhere to land. As Estés writes: "Anything you do from the soulful self will help lighten the burdens of the world. Anything. You have no idea what the smallest word, the tiniest generosity, can cause to be set in motion." It can be small. It can be quiet. It can be a hug goodbye to a group of kids at an after-school program. It is beautiful and it matters.

Part of healing is embodying our design - the blueprint of who we are. And the blueprint has always included this: somewhere for our love to go.

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If you found this helpful, please share it with someone who might appreciate it too! 💛 And if you're navigating this with your daughter and are curious about support, you can reach out here.