HOW DO WE KNOW, WHAT WE FEEL FOR ANOTHER IS ACTUALLY "LOVE?"
Feelings of longing and yearning are aligned with craving something. If you have a strong craving for chocolate for instance, and you have none around your house, you feel a deep need for it inside, do you not? It's practically all you can think about, until you run out to the store and buy yourself some chocolate to ease and satisfy this craving~ isn't that true?
Well, it's the same with love. Painful sensations of longing in relationship to another, means they're not available to us emotionally (and sometimes physically). We're seeking comfort and nourishment from that attachment, but it's either out of our reach, or it's withheld or denied to us. This LACK sets us up for sensations that are akin to a powerful craving.
Many of us grew up associating these painful cravings with our love for Mother. We didn't have to LEARN to love her after we were born, we'd already bonded to her during our fetal development period in her womb.
When we didn't experience getting our adoration RETURNED to us once we were outside of her body, it set us up for a deep and unsatisfied hunger or craving for her love in equal measure to what we felt for Her.
Because this was painful to us as newborns, we sensed that because we couldn't feel our love being reciprocated, it meant that WE were flawed, not good enough, not touchable or lovable, and defective. This is the heart of core shame (the video I posted awhile back, on YouTube).
When our earliest bonding experiences (after birth) are filled with hungry craving, we grow to accept that the act of loving produces pain. Painful yearning for love, becomes our (distorted) perception of the emotion itself. The upshot is, if someone we meet doesn't invoke these same painful cravings in us, we can't possibly interpret that attachment as being "true love."
This is the Borderline's crucible. It also holds true for the Codependent Narcissist, for they are core damaged in precisely the same way, due to inadequate emotional supplies from Mother during the earliest stages of their life. Both Codependency and Borderline Personality result from post-natal deficits with Mother, which in my view, makes them personality disorders whose symptoms merely manifest differently.
The Codependent compensates for his/her sense of defectiveness or inadequacy by 'buying' people's approval, affection, love, respect, etc. with over-giving gestures. He/she equates being "needed" with being "loved." The Borderline compensates for his/her sense of lack or sense of unlovability by honing their emotional and sexual seduction skills, as being desired or "wanted" equates with being "loved."
Each of these personality types lacks the ability to feel intrinsically lovable simply for BEING. Each is addicted to performing, in order to try and get what they've painfully craved since infancy~ which is acceptance, approval, adoration and affection from their maternal object.
For these people, there's hard-wiring on a cellular level in the body, that accepts and understands that love equals pain, and vice-versa. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Father. We derive our sense of Self from our maternal object, in the earliest stages of our life. The sense of inadequacy and core shame inside us that drives all acting-out behaviors and addictions, is deeply rooted in us by Mother’s inability to give us the love and attention we needed, from infancy onward.