✍🏽 “Love Cannot Coexist With Abuse”: Healing the Heartbreak of Childhood Abuse in BIPOC Families with bell hooks
"My parents’ own unhealed traumas and lack of support or resources escalated in abuse and neglect. And denial saved my life, until it didn’t."
I first read bell hooks’ All About Love several years ago, when a friend loaned me a copy of the book, with its distinctive, bright red paperback cover weather-worn and curled, with dog-eared pages and underlined sentences. The book already embodied love.
Like my friend, I read it because I wanted to learn how to better love and be loved in community. hooks taught me, taught all of us, that love is an action and not solely a feeling. That love is a constant practice of freedom. That love is liberation. But what does this mean for those of us who experienced family dysfunction, neglect, and abuse in lieu of love?
hooks courageously wrote about her complex childhood in the very first chapter of the book. In doing so, she demonstrated how love calls upon us to tell the truth. She wrote, “Pressed in therapy to describe my household of origin in terms of whether it was loving or not, I painfully admitted that I did not feel loved in our household, but that I di…