Blog Post 5: The Power of Three Words

Language heals. Rendered with affection, it soothes the spirit. Loving words are often balm on psychic wounds.

Language, of course, can do tremendous harm as well. It’s easy to weaponize words.

Today I wish to speak about the power of the words, “I love you.” Recitations of even such simple phrases as “ “How are you really doing?” and “I miss you,” can wash ease strain and stress and spread a ray of light into the most dismal gloom.

But what surpasses the words, “I love you” for their power? In a blog about the many ways that language and love can promote healing after trauma, it’s fitting to devote a post to these three words. They happen to be especially euphonious in English. These words trickle on the tongue.

And they are richest in the power of their impact. Let me tell you three “I love you” stories as an illustration. 

Here is the first story. I once knew a man of sixty-two, a retired consultant who’d gone through major trauma and a terrible divorce. He was still somewhat bitter after his unhappy marriage of three decades but now happily engaged to a kind and generous woman he dearly loved.

One day as he and I walked outside a café after a pleasant chat, he told me that saying the words “I love you,” was something he didn’t do. Even to his grown children, his lovely fiancé and other loved ones.

“They’re just words,” he told me brusquely. “They mean nothing.”

I was shocked. To me, these are the three most precious words in any language. Indeed, the ones that most need to be said. How, I thought, could he argue otherwise?

My friend wouldn’t back down. “They’re just an incantation,” he said gruffly.

“No,” I said. “Love’s like a river that needs rain. And those words are rain.” In fact, his fiancée struck me as a woman who needed and deserved those words. I added, in one of the more intense conversations I can recall, “Just ask any marriage counselor what a woman needs to hear!”

He grimaced. “I never saw the words as necessary.”

Necessary! I smiled. “Fiddlesticks,” I said. “They're the loveliest words in any language, and in English they’re exquisite. Listen. I love you. Trickling and mellifluous, like water on the tongue. Why don’t you say it? Every day I say ‘I love you’ to my kids, my husband. Even our cat. And often to my dad, my brothers, friends, and anyone else I’m close to. Do we cheapen the words by sharing them? No, they’re enriched by use. More vibrant for being shared. Nothing’s lost. You should say, “I love you,’ every day, as reticence therapy!”

My friend paused. An odd frown wrinkled his brow. “Perhaps I will,” he said at last. He added, to my shock, “I love you.”

I laughed in delight. “There, that wasn’t so bad. No bones broken!”

He smiled. The ice had melted.

But though my friend capitulated, I found my victory a bit hollow. It felt too sudden, and a bit grudging on his part.

I was wrong. Months later—by then happily remarried—he admitted I was right. He was now regularly telling people he was close to that he loved them. “I say it all the time,” he reported with a sheepish smile. “Every morning I say it to the walls and doors and windows, just to keep in practice.”

This, from a man long set in his ways. A huge surprise to me, and one of my personal victories. (It’s also a testament to the fact that occasionally you can use language to change people’s minds.)

Most important, I saw in real time how giving those words—not only receiving them—can help a trauma survivor heal.

Now I’ll tell a sadder story. I grew up with a mother who never said, “I love you.” She didn’t hug or kiss her three children, or display affection or tenderness. She wasn’t cold. She was distant: the product of an abusive mother, a horrific childhood and personal tragedy. (She was also, I suspect, on the spectrum.)

Children like me who are sexually abused but have poor attachments to their mothers are at higher risk of dissociative disorders. This was my case.

My father, at least, loved me, and showed it. After I was grownup—it’s never too late—he began telling me, “I love you,” several times a year. For me, those words held treasures.

But my poor mother graduated into old age and illness without saying them to me. I wasn’t angry with her, but I can’t say that didn’t hurt. Over time, I became my mother’s primary caretaker long distance. She lived on Canada’s west coast. Her three children were scattered across North America, and she refused to move in with any of us. Though I visited and wrote letters (remember those?), phone calls were the primary way I kept in touch.

During my mother’s late seventies, because of her ill health I began telling her, “I love you,” as I closed each call, knowing the beneficial impact of those words. I didn’t anticipate the result. Being a polite little old lady, my mother started saying the words back to me": “I love you too, dear.”

This hurt.

Hurt terribly. 

Hurt to my soul-bones.

I know I’ve just told you it’s never too late to say, “I love you.” But please understand. From my mother, the words felt like an exercise in etiquette. She’d never said them to me before (that I can recall). I emphatically, with almost brutal force, did not want to hear them now. Not from my mother. Ever. At all.

At least, not as an act of politesse. I wanted my mother to love me, of course, both in words and acts, but I knew she never could. Knew it from the age of five, which affected my life. Knew it in the cells and pores of me.

But in her old age, what could I do? Order her not to say she loved me? Obviously I said nothing. I never told her how painful it was to hear her say those words.

Over the years, another strange thing happened. My elderly mother began saying “I love you” first herself, every second call. So Iwould close one call by telling her, “I love you” and she’d answer me, “I love you too, dear”. But then on the next call, she would close first by saying, “I love you” before I could say it.

This dynamic bewildered me. I never told her how much I hated it. Over time I grew accustomed to the ritual—I had no choice—but I never liked it.

Now this story takes a different turn. My mother had a weekly cleaning woman who became her caretaker, doing things for modest pay that a spouse, grown child or close friend would do. My mother left her housekeeper a decent sum in her will and told me so.

After my mother’s death at 84, her attorney—also my brother’s attorney and friend—read the will to us in his office. To my shock, he’d cut that kind, sweet lady out of my mother’s will! When I confronted him about it, the attorney mumbled something incomprehensible. And I knew , though I can’t prove it, that he’d engineered the change to help my brother, his friend, get a bit more money.

On the sidewalk outside the attorney’s office, I told my brothers what Mom had wanted. My brothers, being the fine men that they are, made a decision on the spot. To hell with the money.

We immediately made a pact to give this woman the cash, and as soon as the funds came in, we did.

I wrote my mother’s housekeeper a letter to explain the bequest and thank her warmly for everything she’d done. She was both shocked and thrilled by my mother’s generosity. She wrote me a long, handwritten letter and mentioned something that bored through me.

She said—I can’t recall the exact words, but it came down to this—that my mother loved her children, and that she’d often mentioned the importance of telling them, “I love you.” In fact, my mom admonished her housekeeper to tell her own children every day she loved them. 

To read these words from my mother’s caretaker was a strange and powerfully healing moment. I’m still in shock, partly because I know this change in my mother came about precisely because she herself felt the healthy, healing power of the words, “I love you.”

The words I’d chosen to say to her myself, with great pain, to ease her final years.

So there is another testament to the power of those words. And yes, this experience brought me to a kind of resolution, as a trauma survivor, about my mother’s failure to protect me and love me.

But now here’s a third and much happier story. As you know if you’ve read this blog, or viewed The Interpreter of Love Project website, I’ve had a deeply traumatic life. In a previous marriage decades ago, my husband at the time—in many ways a kind and gentle man—simply didn’t love me. We lived together for seven years. I believe he tried to love me, but the three “magic” words from him rang hollow.

When I first fell in love with my beloved husband of nearly forty years, the father of our two children, he said “I love you” with such force and conviction that I melted at once into puddles of gratefulness and love. He’s been saying the words ever since, with the same conviction and depth of feeling. Including, thank God, during my horrific years of PTSD about my years of serial sexual trauma from the ages of 11 to 30.

I cannot describe the healing impact of hearing my husband say how much he loves me, often, despite knowing my horrific history. But I will be grateful to him all my life.

It was, in fact, my husband who taught me how to say, “I love you.” Say it with power! Give the words generously and often, with warmth and fondness. Bestow on them their full magical power by giving yourself with the words.

The words I love you are good for us all. But for trauma survivors especially, they can be healing.

Language alone is not enough to heal us from trauma, of course. Not even the words, “I love you.” But if you can utter them from the heart, with authentic love, they may hold more healing power than any other words in any language, whether you give them or receive them.

The power to restore and comfort us. To bring more affection into the world.

Be generous with these words. They’re enriched with use. You are enriched by using them.

So are we all.

I love you.