What's L O V E Got to Do With It?
What's love got to do, got to do with it
What's love but a second hand emotion
What's love got to do, got to do with it
Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken
What’s love got to do with it is an American biographical film based on the life of the great Tina Turner. Growing up, I loved watching this movie. Actually, I was obsessed. Not sure why, because the movie is bruised with abuse. The movie depicts Tina Turner raised as the outcast of her family. At a young age she is sent off to live with her grandmother, until she passes away. She returns to her mother, who treats Tina more like her maid than her daughter. Because of this, Tina grows up having a skewed reality of who she is inside. One day she meets this man in the music industry, Ike, who discovers Tina’s gift of singing and entertaining. Are you aware of what happens when someone shows you light when all you’re used to is darkness? You grab a hold to them. You cling, even if that light is simply a reflection of you shining through that person. Ike discovers that Tina can sing and together, their career’s blossom. They are traveling from city to city, embracing a life of sex and drugs, living in luxury. Eventually, Ike cannot contain his abusive nature. What he’s done to other women, begins to pour onto Tina. Abuse, physically and emotionally. Tina thought she had finally found light, love…but again, it was all an illusion. It was a shadow.
What’s your Attachment?
It was John Bowlby who discovered, from an evolutionary perspective, childhood attachment theory. He noted that as infants we seek physical proximity with and socio-emotional support from our parents or caregivers (especially our mother). As we develop, we begin to internalize our caregiver’s response to our needs. These responses turn into our beliefs about the responsiveness and reliability of others and our own worthiness. Explanation extended—we use the relationship model gathered from our caregivers to guide other relationships later in life. This framework becomes our perspective and orientation for all relationships…and again, for how we see ourselves.
Reflecting on Love
Awe is also love. As noted in a Huffington Post blog, if parents can learn to “stand, reflecting awe, embracing mystery, curious, openhearted, immersed in the now and loving the opportunity to be in love with this very life,” our children will learn to do the same. This alone could turn our culture from fear to greater love (Rockwell, 2015). Imagine a world where from the moment we are born, we are taught to love…to be love.
Now, back to Tina…
What I know for sure is this: we must ALL come to find and know love for ourselves. I’m talking deep within us. We must come to know it in a way that it’s no longer a selective bargaining process: present on Monday and gone on Tuesday. It no longer chooses to be present on days when the sun is shining and gone when the forecast calls for rain. It’s around both in success and failure. It must remain, like a tree planted deeply in the ground. Like a lioness who is willing to die in the protection of her cub. It must remain, come hell or high water. When we are able to know and keep that kind of love and light within us, we won’t put up with abuse. We will learn to recognize darkness, repel it, and move forward with our own light. Tina Turner was brought to the lowest point of her life. So low that she had two options: to remain in defeat or fight for love. She fought. She fought so hard until the love and light in her rose to overcome everything not in alignment with who she was inside. No, Tina did not know love from her mother, and because of that she suffered. But, at some point we all must decide to move from victim to victor. When Tina found love for herself, darkness had to back away. When she found love, she found the real Tina Turner.
So, what’s love go to do with it? Everything.