The Blues

Tuffing it Out

On September 14, 2011, in Life, by Rosie

Love, like ice-cream, comes in many forms.

There’s the chocolate-covered, nutty topped cone of unconditional love. There’s the frozen ice-cream cake of unrequited love where one can be treated coldly, left to melt in a hot puddle of unrequited goo, or rendered stiff as a board and cast aside for the trendy cuppy cake arrangement.

Then there’s the Paddle Pop of platonic love and the drizzly, liquified centre of rich, dark, oozing luxury ice-cream that encompasses sexual love. What of true love, everlasting love, obsessive love? They could all have their ice confectionary analogies too.

But this post is about tough love.

Over the past few months, I’ve heard of several instances of tough love being administered and (sometimes begrudgingly) heeded. Is there anything more difficult to confront or accept? I’m sure there is, but at the time of being dealt the ‘tough love’ hand of ultimatum, the recipient probably believes there is not.

According to Wiki, Tough love is the:

expression used when someone treats another person harshly or sternly with the intent to help them in the long run. The phrase was evidently coined by Bill Milliken when he wrote the book Tough Love in 1968 and has been used by numerous authors since then.

Using the analogy from earlier in this entry, tough love could be considered the ice-cream that gets forgotten at the bottom of the container. It’s icy, hardened, left to lie about on its own. The tough love giver wants to help it out, finish things up and make things right in the container at the bottom of the freezer, but the ice-cream remnants need to work it out on their own.

It’s time for that.

Dishing out tough love implies that there is love in the relationship, despite the problems or issues of the tough love recipient. The giver wants a lesson learnt, a change of behaviour, something positive to result from a (possibly) negative experience.

Whatever way it’s given or received, it can be pretty heartbreaking. The non-enabling of a dependent who might have an addiction, the eviction of a child that can’t adhere to the values of family life, the break-up of a relationship where one member can’t manage her demons despite the continual support and love of a partner.

Tough love, like the no-mates ice-cream at the bottom of the freezer, sucks.

Whether it’s successful or not is another matter, but even that outcome can be quite long term. It doesn’t help heal the hurt in the here and now.

When it comes to situations of administering tough love to family members or friends suffering from addiction and/or mental illness, the implementation is excruciating for the giver/s. There’s a sense of abandoning those in need. There’s a feeling that we (as the administrator of the tough love ultimatum) are letting our loved one down, are being unsupportive, selfish, even disloyal.

One of my favourite ‘sayings’ from mental wellness literature is that the caregiver or the tough love administrator must always ‘put his/her oxygen mask on first.’ If we’re always riding the turbulent aeroplane with our loved one, strapped in beside them and their issues, we’re going to crash sooner or later too. If we were in a first aid situation and this loved one was trapped in a house fire, we’d die if we rushed in to save them.

We want to, but we can’t.

The same ‘check for dangers to self‘ attitude needs to be applied when dealing with sufferers of mental illness, addiction or even behavioural issues. This seems to be where tough love comes into play — when we’re struggling to breathe for ourselves, can’t take it anymore, and something has to give — then there’s the tough ultimatum.

Sadly, it’s as tough for giver as the receiver. Perhaps it’s even tougher.