“Love is an activity, not a passive affect.”
Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Have you ever loved someone with your whole heart… and still found yourself pulling away the moment they got close?
Maybe you went quiet when they reached for you. Maybe you snapped at a perfectly innocent question. Maybe you heard criticism in a tone of voice that, if you’re honest, was only ever tired. And afterwards came the familiar question: what’s wrong with me?
I’d like to offer you a different question, one I’ve been asking in my clinic for many years now. Not “what’s wrong with me?” but “what happened to me?”
Because very often the thing standing between two people isn’t a lack of love at all. It’s a memory. An old one. One you may not even know is there.
Erich Fromm’s Four Elements of Love
In 1956 the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote a small book that has never gone out of print: The Art of Loving. His big idea was simple and, at the time, quite radical. Love isn’t something you fall into. It’s something you practise, like music or painting, and like any art it takes discipline, concentration and patience.
Fromm said that every form of love, between partners, between parent and child, between friends, rests on four basic elements:
- Care: an active concern for the life and growth of the one we love. His test was lovely: if someone tells you they love flowers but forgets to water them, you don’t believe them.
- Responsibility: not duty imposed from outside, but being able to respond to another person’s needs, including the ones they haven’t put into words.
- Respect: from the Latin respicere, “to look at.” Seeing a person as they really are, and letting them grow in their own way rather than in the way that suits us.
- Knowledge: knowing someone beyond the surface, at the core. And Fromm was clear; you can’t truly know another person while you remain hidden from yourself.
Most of us read that list and nod. Of course! That’s what love is. So here’s the question that has fascinated me for years… if we all know what love requires, why do so many of us find it so hard to live?
When Survival Mode Overrides the Capacity for Love
The fact is; your nervous system has one job before all others, and that job is to keep you alive. Not happy. Not fulfilled. Alive.
Think of it like a smoke alarm. A good smoke alarm is a wonderful thing. But imagine one that was wired, long ago, not to smoke but to a photograph of smoke. Every time something in your present life resembles that photograph, a tone of voice, a closed door, a partner who goes quiet, the alarm goes off. Full volume. No fire required.
And when that alarm sounds, the body does what bodies have always done. It fights, it flees, it freezes or it fawns:
- Fight looks like criticism, defensiveness, the argument that comes out of nowhere.
- Flight looks like busyness, distance, the sudden need to be anywhere but here.
- Freeze looks like going blank, numb, “I don’t know what I feel.”
- Fawn looks like people-pleasing, agreeing to everything, losing yourself to keep the peace.
Now hold Fromm’s four elements up against that list. Can you care for someone’s growth while your body is braced for attack? Can you respond to them when you’re busy reacting? Can you see them clearly through the smoke? Can you know them, or yourself, when part of you is still on guard duty in a room you left decades ago?
Of course not. And please hear this: that isn’t a failure of love. It’s a body doing its very best to protect you from something that is no longer happening.
There’s often another fear running underneath, too, the fear that if I let you in all the way, I’ll lose myself. Fromm described mature love as two people becoming one while remaining two. But for someone whose early life taught them that closeness meant being swallowed, controlled or abandoned, “becoming one” doesn’t sound like love. It sounds like danger.
Emotional Memory Images: The Barrier in the Space Between Us
So where does that “photograph of smoke” actually live?
This is where my own work comes in. In my research papers in Frontiers in Psychology (2021 and 2022) I describe what I call the Emotional Memory Image, or EMI. An EMI is an emotional memory that was never fully processed. It sits below conscious awareness, which is why you can’t simply “think of a time” and find it. You don’t remember it. Your body does.
Bruce Lipton famously proposed that the cell membrane, not the nucleus, is where the cell “learns” from its environment. I take that idea a step further, outward into the field around the body, and in particular into the peripersonal space, the space just in front of you, within arm’s reach. That’s where I find EMIs sitting. And I’m not alone in thinking memory may not be confined to the brain; the biologist Donald Forsdyke has argued that memory could be stored extracorporeally, outside the body altogether.
Why does this matter for love? Because of where your partner stands.
When you sit across from the person you love, they’re in your peripersonal space. Right there, in front of you… exactly where the image is. So you’re not just looking at them. You’re looking at them through something. A picture from the past, laid over the face in front of you like a sheet of frosted glass.
How Trauma Blocks Each of Fromm’s Elements
Care: tending the image instead of the person
Care needs attention that is free to rest on someone else. But an EMI pulls attention back towards the threat. If an early experience taught your body that “needing people gets you hurt,” then care either shrinks into guarded detachment or tightens into anxious control. Either way, you’re no longer watering the flowers. You’re watching the sky for storms.
Responsibility: reacting instead of responding
Fromm’s responsibility is the ability to respond. An EMI swaps response for reaction. When your partner’s frown matches the emotional signature of an old memory, your body answers the past, not the person. Responding to someone requires actually seeing them, and the image is in the way.
Respect: casting your partner in an old role
Remember, respect means “to look at.” An EMI is quite literally something in the way of the looking. Without meaning to, we cast our partner in an old role: the critical parent, the one who left, the rescuer who never came. Then we spend our energy trying to make them fit the story… or trying desperately to stop them repeating it. Control, jealousy, people-pleasing, shutting down. None of these leaves the other person room to simply be themselves.
Knowledge: misreading intentions through the past
And this is the heart of it. EMIs are, by their nature, below conscious. They are what we know in the body but not in the mind. So undiagnosed trauma cuts off self-knowledge at the root, and Fromm’s point was that knowing another person depends on knowing yourself.
You can’t see what’s driving your own reactions, so you misread theirs. A late text becomes rejection. A sigh becomes contempt. A request for space becomes abandonment. Before long the relationship is two sets of images talking to each other, while the two actual people never quite meet.
A Story from My Clinic
(Names and details have been changed, as always.)
Rina was 35 when she came to see me, and she knew exactly what she wanted: to settle down and start a family with a man she loved, and who loved her back.
For over two years she’d been on and off with Mo. He was in his mid-forties, married and divorced, no children. And every time they looked like getting closer… he’d blow cold and end it. A couple of months later they’d be back together. And round it would go.
In between, Rina made herself smaller and smaller to fit around him. His needs came first; hers went on hold. There was the occasional night of sex, but zero intimacy. Two bodies in the same bed, and two people who never quite met. His outbursts never happened in public, and somehow they were always her fault. Mo never quite held himself accountable for any of it. He was, as I said to her, a very capable victim, even though he was the older man.
Hold that up against Fromm for a moment. Responsibility, the ability to respond, was missing on his side. And on hers? All her care, respect and attention were pointed at him, with nothing left over for herself.
“I keep thinking if I just get it right this time…” she said.
I didn’t ask her about her past. I didn’t ask her to remember anything. I asked her a different kind of question. “When you feel that pull to please him, if that feeling were out there rather than in here, where would it be?”
She paused. Then her hand came up, slowly, and pointed to a spot just in front of her, low down. “There,” she said. “It’s small. Like it’s trying not to take up any room.”
Her body had answered before her mind had a chance to argue. We didn’t dig for a story. We worked with what was there, the place, the size, the way it shrank away, and I watched her sit up a little straighter in the chair. She took a long breath.
“It’s gone,” she said, a little puzzled. “It’s just… not there.”
A few weeks later she rang me. Mo had gone cold again, right on cue. “And I didn’t chase him,” she said. “I didn’t spend the weekend wondering what I’d done wrong. I just… let him go quiet.”
“I never told you anything,” she added. “Not really.”
“You didn’t have to,” I said. “Your body did the talking.”
Will she stay out of the circle this time? I hope so. What I do know is that the woman on the other end of that phone was taking up a little more room in her own life, and that’s exactly where the love she deserves can finally find her.
The Art of Listening
Towards the end of his life, Fromm turned his attention to the therapeutic relationship itself, in lectures later gathered as The Art of Listening. He believed real listening demanded complete concentration, freedom from anxiety, and a genuine interest in the other person. A listener who is busy defending themselves, he argued, can’t really hear anyone.
This one is personal for me. I’ve been conductively deaf since birth, so “what did you say?” has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. And what I’ve learned, the hard way, is that the deepest kind of listening doesn’t happen through the ears at all. It happens when there’s nothing standing between you and the other person.
That’s what clearing an EMI gives back. Not a technique for being more loving, you already know how to love, but the space to actually do it. When the image is gone, care has somewhere to go. Response replaces reaction. You can look at your partner, really look, and let them be who they are. And you can finally begin to know them, because you’re no longer hidden from yourself.
See how that works? The four elements were never missing. They were just behind the glass.
So Where Do You Start?
Start gently. The next time you feel that familiar pull, the urge to snap, to withdraw, to please, try this. Pause, and ask yourself: if this feeling were out there rather than in here, where would it be? Up? Down? Close? Far away? Don’t do anything with it yet. Just look. Simply noticing that it has a place is the beginning of understanding that it’s a memory, not the person in front of you.
I built the MindReset app, available on Apple and Google Play, to guide people through exactly this kind of work, at their own pace and in their own home. It’s designed to help you find and release those below-conscious images, so that the past stops borrowing your present.
And please, be kind to yourself. If your history includes significant trauma, do this work alongside a trauma-informed practitioner. You deserve support, and you don’t have to do it alone. Undiagnosed trauma affects far more than our relationships, too; I explore how it shapes the body and the very nature of dis-ease in my recent paper.
Love, Fromm reminds us, is an art. And like any art, it flows most freely when nothing is in the way. Your capacity for care, responsibility, respect and knowledge hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s been waiting, patiently, on the other side of an old picture.
Isn’t it time you put the picture down?
Frequently Asked Questions
What are Erich Fromm’s four elements of love?
In The Art of Loving (1956), Fromm named care, responsibility, respect and knowledge as the basic elements common to every form of love.
What is an Emotional Memory Image (EMI)?
An EMI is my term for an unprocessed emotional memory held below conscious awareness, which I propose is located in the field around the body and the peripersonal space in front of us. See Hudson, 2021 and Hudson, 2022.
Can trauma really affect intimacy if I don’t remember it?
Yes. Because EMIs are below conscious, you can be shaped by them without any conscious memory of where they came from. That’s why “what happened to me?” is often a more useful question than “what’s wrong with me?”
Is this a replacement for therapy or medical care?
No. Your feelings and symptoms are real. Keep working with your doctor or therapist, and use this work alongside them.