Emotional rescue
I have a male friend who is habituated with MySpace, the free cyber-dating agency posing as a social network.
Every so often I look at the friend’s profiles listed on his home page there. My friend subsists in an unhappy marriage. Looking at his MySpace friends, there is a whole coterie of extraordinarily beautiful women. I read their profiles. Almost every one of them is a damaged suffering child crying out for help. Don’t get me wrong. Some of these women are immensely successful; some are stars of stage and screen or media entrepreneurs. But every one is troubled and hurting in some profound way.
My good friend is a wonderfully caring, loving and tender man. He is also a fairly clever man. He remains unhappy. In his own way, I believe that he feels he will find his own happiness by rescuing others and by giving.
It’s not working. He’s a rescuer.
The psychologist, Abraham Maslow, spoke of ‘deficiency love’. The goal of deficiency love is that somehow, some other person will compensate for something one is unable to find in oneself.
In the case of the rescuer and person in recovery, frequently the person in recovery will feel hope that the rescuer will bring about the recovery that they are unable to bring about for themselves. This is often the basis on which the rescuer and the sufferer will first engage in a relationship. It is a deeply flawed rationale since it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for someone to give you that which you cannot find in yourself.
I am sure that there may be many and complex reasons why the rescuer enters a relationship with a sufferer.
There is altruism, of course; simply the belief that they might make a positive difference to the life of another. I wonder though if the pathological need to rescue others might be based on another personal need, a need to bolster one’s sense of self-worth by feeling that one is motivated to do good to another.
In a way, perhaps, entering a relationship as a rescuer might be less demanding than entering a relationship on normal terms with another.
Another difficult aspect of the rescuer / sufferer interaction is that there is a sense that the rescuer enjoys some level of emotional or other superiority in their relationship with the sufferer. It is an unbalanced and unequal partnership. What at first might appear as a loving act of giving and kindness might be a narcissistic act of self-endorsement for a frail ego gained at another’s expense.
If one asks anyone who has successfully undergone recovery from say, an addiction or alcoholism, from an unhappy relationship, or from trauma or victimisation, I suspect they will all tell the same story. They will tell you, almost without exception, how ultimately their recovery came from within themselves, from their own commitment and determination to recover. They were motivated strongly to recover and they did. Others, generally those who are skilled, trained or experienced in helping others in recovery may have assisted or even facilitated the recovery, but ultimately that recovery came from themselves.
Last year, I suffered a serious and potentially fatal illness. I had some wonderful medical treatment. I’m not sure if I was cured exactly. My recovery came from a moment of realisation that in order to get better I needed to add my own strong will and determination to whatever treatment was provided to me. I needed to take responsibility for my own care. Thank goodness, I did, since I had been misdiagnosed as suffering from two conditions, both of which were potentially terminal. In the end, it was found that I had contracted a bacterial infection, that whilst it was life threatening, was curable with antibiotics. The turning point in recovery for me was the moment I decided that I was going to get better and the point when I found the self-belief in me to do so.
The rescuer and sufferer relationship is an entirely risky business.
Without an act of will, even courage or determination from the sufferer, the rescuer may be drawn into an unending process of failure. Worse still they might project an imagined state of recovery upon the sufferer in order to justify or support the idea of the relationship or their actions within it.
There is another shortcoming where the sufferer fails in recovery, and it’s one that I believe that Eric Berne identifies in his book, “Games people play”. The rescuer in engaging with the sufferer who fails to recover may take on a multiplicity of roles. They may even engage in collusion with the sufferer acting in a way that sustains the sufferer’s difficulties or problems (The rescuer buys the drugs or the drink. Berne calls this role “the dummy” or “the Patsy” )
What is more usual is that the rescuer may take on the role of critic or judge. By judging or criticising the sufferer, they free themselves from the idea of failure borne of a false premise that the rescue was in fact possible. This is a damaging place to be as the judge or the critic is one step away from being a persecutor.
So the first and most likely outcome between the rescuer and the sufferer is one of failure. The most damaging consequence for the sufferer is that the rescuer adopts an attitude towards them that reinforces or holds them in the difficulty. Criticisms and judgements do not facilitate recovery.
A second risk for the rescuer and the sufferer is that recovery may be so painful for both parties and tear the relationship apart. People coming out of difficult relationships, addiction or damaging life experiences are not at their best. A relationship that might work at another time may not work when someone is going through recovery.
A third risk is that the sufferer does actually recover and when they do the role of the rescuer no longer makes any sense and has no purpose. The people involved in the relationship may not easily be able to shift roles. The sufferer having recovered may also come to see the rescuer as simply a reminder of a painful and difficult past.
Probably, the greatest risk of all is that the relationship is built on a foundation of difficulty or illness rather than health or wellbeing.
Where recovery becomes the central focus of a relationship, the difficulty or illness itself may represent the foundation of the relationship, rather than an unpleasant time that the sufferer needs to leave behind in their life.
Ultimately, while others can play a role in assisting in recovery, the decision to recover and the pain that it often entails must be borne by the sufferer. Therefore, emotional rescue as the basis of a relationship will, I believe, fail more often than it will succeed. Personally I have never witnessed a relationship based on emotional rescue that has been successful in its outcome, or nurturing of its participants.
Acknowledgements:
Abraham H Maslow, Motivation and personality, 1954
Eric Berne, Games people play, 1964
Robert J Sternberg, Love is a story 1998
Transference and Projection - What are they?
Transference is the unconscious redirection of one’s feelings from one person onto another. For example, we might redirect feelings for say, a past spouse or past lover, onto a person in one’s life because of something they say, a mannerism, tone of voice or aspect of their appearance. In therapy, transference may occur when the client redirects a feeling from a significant person in their life onto the therapist.
Transference is very common. We all do it.
Projection is different. It’s where we attribute (project) our own unwanted, difficult, shameful or unacceptable thoughts and/or emotions unconsciously onto another person.
For example, Doris does not like Jack. Doris for whatever reason is unable to face that she does not like Jack. Her unconscious mind prevents her from admitting her feelings towards him. Her conscious thought is not “I don’t like Jack” but “Jack doesn’t like me”. In a way this projection is similar to denial.
The reasons and motivations for projection can be complex and specific (to individuals) so I cannot cover them here.
Ahah! That was easy, wasn’t it? Next there’s projective identification. I know I’ve confused some friends with this one! I have felt this one happen to me too in personal relationships.
This is a really tricky one! It’s where a person engages with another and projects a false belief onto another in such a way that the other person alters their behaviour to make the belief true. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Clear as mud? I’ll try one or two examples:
Doris and Jack are lovers. Doris has become disappointed with Jack whom she unconsciously feels is not the man she wants. Her desire for Jack is waning fast. Unable to face how she feels for Jack, she projects on Jack that he has no desire for her anymore. Night after night, she flounces into bed and says to Jack, “You do not desire me anymore” or “I know you no longer want me.” What she feels about Jack, she attributes to Jack through projection. Jack has always wanted and loved Doris and he does not understand her behaviour. Doris makes these assertions repeatedly in bed at night, then turns her back on Jack, pulls away from him then goes to sleep. Jack, however, experiences Doris’s behaviour as an outright (sexual and emotional) rejection of him and starts to pull back from Doris to avoid being hurt. Doris now has proof positive. Jack is moving away from her. She can now say, “I told you so!”
Was that complicated? Another example might be a paranoid man who develops a delusion that he is being persecuted by the police. Fearing the police, he starts to behave in a way that is uneasy, anxious and furtive when he is around police officers. The police officers observing what they construe as “suspicious” behaviour perceive that he might be involved in some criminal activity and start to look for reasons to arrest him, thus reinforcing his paranoid notion that he is being persecuted.
One more: Identification. This one is simple. It’s also a normal stage in human and emotional development but it’s here for another reason. Identification is the state or process of merging with another through imitation. Why I mention this is that occurred to me in talking with another blogging friend earlier that identification and transference happens frequently in cyber relationships. For example, I have known people who, when engaging in internet relationships, shroud their identity and instead present in a process of “mirroring” (imitating) the other person. This distorts the relationship since the other person starts to believe that the “mirror” that is reflecting back at them is, not surprisingly, very similar in personality and interests to themselves. They are not. It’s a psychological device of which the “mirror” may be conscious or not. We all do identification to adapt to different social circumstances. But in the context of this virtual world I find it scary sometimes. It can be a form of dangerous manipulative behaviour too.
Thoughts on Love and Intimacy - Part 5 - Love and sex
Sex and emotional health
I have talked a lot about healthy loving in adults where love is based on wants and desires rather than the dependency needs of childhood. I believe that sex is different in a way in that is far more of a basic human need, something we need to maintain our mental and emotional health.
Earlier this year, I wrote erotic fiction, not because of any voyeuristic tendencies but because my own sexuality had been shut down tight in a hurtful and destructive marriage. I pushed it down in a place so deep so that I could not be hurt or damaged further, so deep in fact, that it was hard for me to recover it. So writing this fiction was my own story-telling emotional and sexual therapy. I knew how to do that even if I was not fully conscious of what I was doing at the time. It was my way of recovering myself as a fully functioning being with all my bits working. I am glad to say that all those parts of me are back and alive and well. I published the work on an amateur writers’ website. Its popularity astonished me. To-date, the first five chapters of this long, sometimes humorous, tale have had more than 130,000 reads according to my web statistics and that is impressive, almost in the class of a best selling novel these days. But looking at what I wrote now, I am deeply dissatisfied with it. I feel it is shallow and lacks the loving sensitivity and passion that I am able to feel now. More of that later.
I’ll change the tone from my usual pedantry here and just let the two protagonists of my erotic story do the talking. They are new lovers, John and Rosie; ironically they are both qualified psychotherapists! The “I” in the tale is John speaking. Here is their discussion on sex and emotional health:
“Isn’t it amazing?” she said. “How healthy good sex makes us feel.
“I feel like I’m glowing with wellbeing this morning. I feel happy, healthy and complete. I haven’t had sex for years and last night I had the best sex of my entire life. It made me feel so good…like a whole person again.”
She paused for thought.
“You know, I’m sorry to sound like the shrink-wrap I am, but Freud had it absolutely right. Living in some void of sexual repression does us no good at all. It makes us sick. If it doesn’t drive us to do crazy things then it just makes us sick at heart. So what goes wrong?” she said.
“Rosie, I’m with you on that one. It’s what I believe too but all sorts of things go wrong,” I said.
“Either we live in aloneness like you, or else we get caught up in emotional double binds and twists and turns with our loved ones that just do us harm. We lose the plot, I suppose,” I added.
“Have you lost the plot?” she asked.
“Yes, me too,” I replied. “I’ve got caught up in that world where money and material stuff controls what I do both in and out of my marriage.
“And by the way, you weren’t the only one to have the best sex of their lives last night. I did too.”
I caught Rosie’s eye and returned her smile.
“Sex is a basic human need, as basic as food, drink and sleep,” I said. “Denying it makes people crazy. It not only causes social disease, but makes for a lot of perverted and crazy people out there too. Freud was right on the mark in my view.
“So you see we’re both a pair of shrink-wraps leading lives that are opposed to what we believe, and there lies the rub!” I added.
ENDS
That was a very light-hearted way of making the point, but denying and repressing our sexuality makes us sick, it makes for a sick world too. I have a lot of issues with Freud and Wilhelm Reich, his student, but I’m with them all the way here and a healthy loving sexuality makes for a healthy person and a healthy world. We do some repression necessarily to make civilisation possible, but we have taken it far too far in my view. Repression is a dangerous and damaging thing, it makes for perverts, rapists and murderers.
But I have something very much more important to say here now.
Sex and love
So that was all very sweet, or was it really? It’s mine, and I’ll own up to it here. My erotic fiction was pathetic. It had nothing or little to do with love. It had everything to do with a man (me) finding and facing his brokenness, of looking his big life’s mistakes, errors, pain and despair square in the face.
What the story is about is two people who try and use sex to mend that brokenness, to ease their pain. It does not work! After 140 pages of this stuff and about 55,000 words I stopped writing the story since I knew it had to end in tears and that my masturbating readers were just looking for more and more sexual titillation that I had given them in large measure already.
As the pain in the story increased chapter by chapter, so the readership decreased generally by decrements of fifty per cent. Had I gone on to tell the whole truth I may not have had a readership at all.
The love that Hollywood and our consumption-based society tries to sell us has little to do with love at all and everything to do with profit. Sorry, but this time I’m going to tell it how it really is, no holds barred, so if you’re looking for fantasy here, stop reading now. Some of you who carry on may find what I have written to be very difficult and painful. It is, I know, I have felt that pain too. If you feel that “Pretty Woman” is a great love story, then you had probably better stop here to avoid disillusionment, since as an account of love I find it about as satisfying as a gastronomic feast of warm blancmange and overcooked cabbage. It appeals to me that much!
Let’s look at sex and love then. First they are not synonymous. They are not one and the same thing and may have little to do with each other. I have every belief that sex within real love may be like heaven on earth. I do not know as I have not found it yet.
A friend once said to me recently and I’ll paraphrase her words, that sex only provides temporary relief from emotional pain, that people use it to escape their feelings and that sooner or later they would find emptiness.
I need to use another word here and that is perversion. The word pervert is not too popular in our culture today but it does mean “to misdirect” or “to lead astray”. Perversion in this context means an act of that leads a person away from a psychological goal or the pursuit of true fulfilment. To quote another eminent psychologist “we can say that a perversion leads you away from the true depths of your emotional pain - and from the psychological healing that could happen if you were to work therapeutically with that pain - by distracting you with something apparently pleasurable.”
As my friend perhaps knows, the connection between sex and perversions is often found in idealised romantic or erotic love. So I’ll talk more about love here to be clear about what I’m saying.
But let’s hear this lesson again:
- As long as you pursue sexuality out of a need to be loved – as a form of something you need or want – you will be disappointed. You will be led right behind illusions straight into perversion. You will find nothing but emptiness.
- I’ll say that again a different way. As long as you try to fill your inner, psychological and spiritual emptiness with another person through romantic, erotic love or sex – you will remain unconsciously broken and empty.
Back to the pain for a moment: Without facing and healing our past pain we cannot truly love. We may need and want to do all sorts of other stuff to avoid doing this and I’ll say more about that too. But to move towards love is to perhaps to treat yourself as one might need to treat others. True healing involves seeing and knowing what is wrong and having the compassion to call it into change.
This means that you need to take responsibility for yourself and the world around you. It also means that you don’t beat yourself up mercilessly for your past mistakes. Love also means finding responsibility and compassion.
To heal means that you have to see your life for what it truly is. It is being honest about your emotional pain and all the dreadful mistakes and errors that you have made in trying to hide from your despair. Then you have to listen to that despair with compassion and tenderness and let it tell you its own whole story. Only then will your heart be transformed. Only then can you move freely towards love. My friend already knows this wisdom, running from your despair into some dark corner of your unconscious to be seduced by sex and perversion will only result in even more emptiness, despair and pain.
I know someone is going to ask me sooner or later where my earlier piece on intimacy fits into all this. Perhaps it should have been a later piece as it talks about intimate behaviour within love but not love itself.
Now this gets worse, first I want to talk about what love is not, then I’ll go on to say what I feel it is.
I’ve already said that love is not an escape route from past pain, mistakes and despair. I cannot say that enough times so here it is again. It’s the stuff of the rebound and transitional relationship where people bounce from one person to the next acting out their fantasies and their toxic emotions. Sooner or later, this person will face drown in a sea of complete desperation and lifelessness when the burden of the past becomes too much to bear.
It’s not about finding some comforting sense of absolute belonging and acceptance; that’s what we give to babies. We all have to face feelings of mortality and human isolation sooner or later and there is no escape from them. As unpleasant as it may seem eroticism is based on infantile needs to be received, accepted and satisfied. When a person feels all of these needs have been met then he or she may feel that she is “in love”. But sooner or later this intensity will be broken when the need to deal with real world pressures and difficulties breaks into a relationship.
It’s not about material wealth and the sharing of objects. Material goods and structures have nothing to do with love.
It’s not about moulding yourself, your body, your dress or appearance to meet the expectations of another’s desire.
And it’s not about receiving anything, nothing at all.
Real love is an act of giving unconditionally. To offer true love, to will the good of another, is to accept one’s own vulnerability, weakness, insignificance and humility. Love is a responsible act of will and of choice. As I wrote in “the myth of falling in love” it is not something that one falls into! You might fall into the swimming pool, but not into love. You can fall into fatal attraction, and you can fall into desperate desire but you cannot fall into love. Love requires courage as in a way it’s a sacrifice of what our modern culture believes to be valuable. It means standing up for love, leaving the pack, not as a terrorist or subversive, but with something better than what others may see in their blindness.
Love is the expression of profound emotional qualities such as patience, forbearance, belief in the other, compassion, understanding and forgiveness.
The difference between romantic or erotic love and true love is the difference between receiving and giving. A lot of us do not give generously of our hearts at all nor do we give that selflessly either. Instead we are addressing a covert desire to avoid being abandoned. This apparent generosity is not love at all; it is emotional bribery.
The hardest part is about giving. True love is about giving and nothing less. It is about giving love rather than desperately searching to be loved. It’s the only attitude that can begin to carry you through the agony of human limitation and mortality. Love that is based on giving, not receiving, is true and lasting. It is never fleeting and can never fly off into despair and hate.
It is a pity that true love is feared by most of us, and is hardly ever taught to anyone, children or adults.
Acknowledgements: My grateful acknowledgements to the late French psychologist, Jacques Lacan, whose work and ideas inspired this piece.
Thoughts on Love and intimacy - Part 3 - The Rebound Relationship
After a divorce or separation from a long-term relationship many individuals try to make up for their emotional losses by rushing right into another relationship. This is because divorce feels like such a personal failure.
Although you may have had no control over the situation, you might still blame yourself for the course of the events and long to prove to yourself that you will not repeat this pattern. If your partner left you for someone else, or if they were demeaning or critical you might also desire the approval of the opposite sex to the extent that you become "blind" to logic.
Rebound relationships can also be the result of trying to make up for "lost time" spent mourning the previous relationship or an attempt to compete with the ex- by finding a new partner before he or she does.
No matter what, when a marriage or long-term relationship ends, you are likely to go through the five stages of grief: shock, denial, anger, sadness, and acceptance. There is no underestimating the enormous impact of these reactions.
Rebound relationships, which never last long, seem to occur as the result of two people projecting an idealistic notion onto each other. A delusion occurs as one person creates an understanding of the future of the relationship that differs from the new partner. Usually these issues are about commitment. However, both parties feel a great sense of temporary relief from being with each other. They may also be getting companionship, emotional support and attention that they feel that they can't get elsewhere.
Usually, both participants in a rebound relationship are completely blind to obvious evidence that the two of them are actually incompatible. The glue that holds the two of them together is along the lines of the phrase "Anything is better than being alone."
Some people embark on rebound relationships, as they can't release the past until they are put through the process of trying to build a new intimacy with someone else. Blocked or repressed emotions that were not expressed towards the ex partner may now be "acted out" on the new partner.
The new partner offers them a comfort and an emotional security that makes it easy to act out anger and other toxic emotions that could not, for reasons of emotional inaccessibility, be acted out on the former partner.
Emotional issues and needs that were not brought out during the divorce or separation will often rise to the surface and affect the new rebound relationship. As one or the other or both partners in the rebound relationship work out these issues, usually a process of emotional transformation occurs that frees the grief-stricken individual from the past.
As the person is healed, they have no more need for their rebound relationship. The partner in the rebound relationship can't grow, as it was only there to provide temporary emotional support and allay grief and pain. Rebound relationships don't have long term potential simply because the needy person will have embarked on a process of emotional recovery.
Relationship counselors recommend that a widowed or divorced individual should wait about a year before they begin looking for another committed relationship. This gives you the time to work through the shock, anger and despair that probably accompanied your loss.
Before embarking on another relationship, it is important for you to do some soul-searching and make sure that you are actually ready for another commitment. If you were the perpetrator in the separation, some serious self-examination might reveal that your real goal is to work on some other area of your life such as your creative side or career.
It can also prevent you from initiating a long-term pattern of going from one chaotic emotional situation to another in the future. Many people have a series of bad relationships, not because they are a perpetual victim or have bad luck, but because they have not taken the time out that they need to heal. In some cases, an individual can rebound several times on ONE relationship simply because they are looking for a substitute for their previous partner as opposed to a relationship that will work. One sure sign that you are about to enter a rebound relationship is if the new partner seems somehow "familiar" to you.
Another indicator that the relationship is rebound in its nature is if you see your new partner as somehow rescuing you from the last situation. You might think this because the new partner might be encouraging you to see him or her in this light so that they can feel powerful. Helping others or being an emotional "rescuer" is one way that emotionally injured individuals can boost their self-esteem.
Rather than look at a separation or divorce as a loss, you are well advised to look at the glass as half-full. This is the time to take stock of your life as well as an honest accounting for your responsibility in the debacle (no matter how much you think your partner is to blame). This will help free you from the kind of desperation that leads so many into a rebound relationship that also ends in disaster.
Thoughts on Love and Intimacy - Part 2 - What is intimacy?
Intimacy is many things and can exist on many levels: thoughts, knowledge, physical, emotional and sexual dimensions exist in intimacy. But here I am only concerned with close loving relationships between men and women.
In searching the internet, one might be tempted to believe that intimacy was exclusively about sexual intercourse. It is not although sex may be a fundamental (and wonderful) part of intimacy.
The work of creating intimacy is realising and expressing our inmost self in relationship with others, and supporting them in expressing their inmost self with us. Expressing our inmost self can mean revealing our feelings and needs, our dreams and hopes, our fears and joys and worries, our creative insights, our secrets and our pain . . . all the inner, personal aspects of ourselves. It does not matter at all, for the purpose of intimacy, whether we express "positive" aspects of ourselves such as joy, love, attraction and excitement, or "negative" experiences like fear, sadness, shame or anger. They all count. The important thing is that what we are expressing be personal and real. Dishonesty kills intimacy. Abstract, impersonal intellectual analysis (no matter how brilliant) kills intimacy, as does evasion, seeking to control another, judging and placating. Intimacy is the deep honest personal sharing between people.
Intimacy and honesty
I don't want to go overboard on honesty. There are forms of honesty that often simply reflect a personal preference like "I hate that sweater" or I don't like that dress" that are often best left unspoken. Opinions have little to do with the truth. There are types of honesty for some that are harsh, brutal, hurtful and inconsiderate. To be intimate requires a communicative sensitivity - a deep empathy with how the other feels and a desire to know and experience their world lovingly through their own frame of reference. It is to relish and cherish difference. It is not to enforce conformity to one's own tastes.
No judgments
Intimacy is a place without judgments. It is truly that place where acceptance without exception lives. It is a place of unconditional love. It is also a place where we have to know and love ourselves. Intimacy is not yielding ourselves up as a sacrifice, to engage the psychopath in acceptance, to cherish the abuser or wife-beater. There are other places where these people can get help. To love ourselves is a fundamental prerequisite to loving someone else. It is not about offering oneself up to another as a sacrifice or being a willing victim. There can be no judgments in intimacy as there are no right or wrong feelings.
Rejection, fear of desertion and the presentation of a false self
There are people, and I know I have been one of them, who resist intimacy for fear of being rejected or deserted. Many of us have been betrayed by someone we love or trust. Physical, mental, sexual and emotional abuse teaches us to build huge insurmountable walls of defence around ourselves. Sometimes the loss of another has simply been too painful to risk repeating the experience, to be that deeply hurt again. These are all hard lessons but, and it's a hell of a 'but', if we allow these experiences and feelings to block our capacity for intimacy, we exclude all of life's deep possibilities. We become isolated, non-functioning walled off and unfulfilled as people. We live in some stagnant backwater where it may be 'safe' (although I would question that as I believe we are more likely to signal our hurt and damage in some unconscious way and attract those people whom we wish to avoid.) but it is in a way a living death.
When we close out the pains of the past from our conscious minds, they inhabit our unconscious and influence our actions without our understanding why. Unlocking the unconscious to know and understand the cause of the difficulty is problematic. Perhaps therapy is the answer, perhaps it is not. I am inclined to believe that a lover or loving, understanding and patient friend or partner is more likely to provide the safe haven for the discovery and healing of past pain rather than the infrequent attentions of a therapist.
Fear of rejection and desertion are most often the bogeymen left behind from a difficult and painful childhood. More frequently than not the child will be conditioned to believe that their badness, abnormality or simply their individuality is the reason for their rejection. Only when the child has yielded or conformed for the sake of survival to the adult's view of them will they suffer the pain of rejection. Alice Miller, the renowned Swiss psychoanalyst, wrote 'The child is always innocent'. But society invariably takes the side of the adult and blames the child for what has been done to him or her. In turn the child betrayed by society has no choice but to repress the trauma and idealise the perpetrator. This repression leads to neurosis, psychosis and delinquency. The perpetuation of new crimes can only be prevented by the victims, seeing and being aware of what was done to them. A welter of discomforting feelings of rage, anger and unbearable pain often accompanies the discovery of childhood trauma. It is not a comfortable place to be.
It is no surprise that the abused will often go on to be an abuser.
Confronting this trauma feels to me (having done it) to be the easy part. The question is 'what then?' Only time, love and self-understanding holds the key. The adult will often feel powerless but these are the feelings of the damaged child. The adult is not powerless and only they hold the key to change through awareness and building love for themselves in themselves. Believe me, this is easier said than done. The abused child will often have been told that the reason for their abuse is that they are not worthy of love or are bad, abnormal or evil. This is the abuser's excuse. But I know the key for transformation lies in self-awareness and love.
Is this a diversion? A small diversion perhaps since I believe that in this dark place, the discovery of love and intimacy is true liberation. Intimacy and acceptance can provide the life-force of love - its re-generation and rebirth and an escape from the trauma of abuse.
Intimacy also requires individuality. There is another misconception about intimate relationships that says that intimacy means doing everything together, never arguing or disagreeing, always saying yes to each other. This belief leads to a suffocating, false "closeness" that is not intimacy at all but rather an unhealthy mess where nobody has any freedom or personal identity, where we present a false self. We are each unique, different, unlike anybody else. Intimacy - which is expressing our true self in relationship with others -requires that we honour and respect our differences. Being true to ourselves includes saying no to things we do not like, getting angry at those we love, expressing opinions or ideas that others may disagree with, and living our lives differently from the way other people choose to live theirs.
What makes this hard is that many of us have been brainwashed to believe that it's "unpleasant" or "impolite" to disagree, to say no, to get angry, or to do things our own way instead of the way somebody else expects us to. For many people, it' is frightening to stand alone and be a separate person. Conformity is more comfortable. But burying feelings of hurt, anger or dissatisfaction, and avoiding disagreements makes relationships dead and boring. Conformity does not bring people closer together. Without individuality, real contact and intimacy are impossible.
It follows that to be intimate with others we have to be intimate with ourselves. This means learning to be aware of our deepest feelings and needs, knowing and accepting ourselves as we really are, not as we wish we were or think we are supposed to be. It means knowing and acknowledging the truth about us. It means accepting and becoming comfortable with our separateness and individuality, choosing to be different and unique.
Being ourselves, and not a member of the pack, may seem a lonely place, and it is alone but rarely is it lonely. One aspect of intimacy is being unafraid to be with just oneself…. to know oneself. It's a prerequisite to being intimate with someone. It is only through being ourselves that we can experience the other and find the starting point of growth in love.
I always have an uncomfortable feeling when writing about individualism. In the 1980's and beyond, the individual became a political doctrine. One that was more often associated with selfishness, greed, social isolation, wealth and power. This has nothing to do with an individualism that calls for self-knowledge and self-determination in a social and personal context of intimacy, nothing at all.
Intimacy and vulnerability
How many times have you heard or thought 'I would like to be intimate but I feel so vulnerable'?
There is a feeling that if I reveal my feelings or myself to another they may be critical and derogatory and I will be hurt since I care for them and wish them to care for me. People in close relationships invariably hurt each other in the process of becoming intimate but if they are seeking intimacy then the hurt will rarely go untended. Intimacy and vulnerability do go hand in hand but if a person feels threatened by the criticism of another, they can quickly shift back to their own frame of reference and self-belief for support. This is why self-knowledge, self-belief and self-love (that is different to onanism) are cornerstones of intimacy; the stuff that enables one to reach out fearlessly to another, knowing one can always let go. Intimacy is the affirmation of another. Intimacy is not derogatory.
Guilt and blame
The guilt and blame games are played on such a wide scale that it is hard not to be drawn into them. The notion of 'He did it me' is everywhere. We all know the feelings. They go 'we are in this bad place because of all these bad things you did to me. I hold you to blame for my difficulty.' Maybe this is defensiveness, maybe it is fear. But it is fear of responsibility that causes blame and true growth in intimacy can only thrive where there is an acceptance of responsibility for love's growth without blame.
Blame and assertiveness do not co-exist. Blame distorts, harms and even destroys. It is self-destructive as well as destructive of others.
So I hear the cynics say 'Blame is a natural human response to threat or injustice, to wrongdoing or loss.' I am sure that is true too. It is all too easy. But what I would ask the proponents of blame is 'When did you last solve a personal problem with blame?' 'When did blame last improve your life?' 'When I blamed what did it help me to understand about me or the other?' 'Where has blame helped you to achieve the outcome you wanted?