Is cyber love possible?
PsychologyOnline.
I was very sceptical at first. Cyber psychology? No way, I thought! I warmed to the idea, however, and recommended that the institution involved make their investment.
What changed my mind were discoveries I made in research at the time. One finding I made that caused me to turn the corner was the fact that people were frequently (but not always) inclined to be more open and honest when engaging in anonymous dialogue with their computer screen than they were in a face-to-face encounter with a therapist. This was a salient and important fact in treating some conditions like alcoholism and addictions. “How many drinks have you had today?” asks the therapist. “Oh just the one, doctor,” says the client swaying in his seat breathing fumes that would slay a dragon.
I was reflecting earlier about the nature and type of relationships one makes on the internet. I’ve made some very interesting friendships here, some of which I have confidence, faith and trust in. I even have a couple of friendships that have extended into other dimensions like voice communication, but that’s all for now. I’m sure I will meet one or two of the people I talk to here one day. I’ve been struck by the honesty of most of the people I speak to here on my blog.
I believe that certain forms of cyber attachment are possible. Cyber infatuation is commonplace. So what of cyber love? Is that possible?
Before I attempt to answer that question I’m going to go off on one of those doodling excursions that I’m inclined to do from time to time. Unlike some areas I write about here I don’t profess any real depth of expertise in this subject, so the doodling will take the form of an exploration of ideas.
I’m not wholly convinced that people are more inclined to be honest, or expose their true self (whatever that is) when talking to a computer screen. People in cyberspace say and do things they would not do face-to-face. They lose their inhibitions. This is called the “disinhibition” effect.
Disinhibition can cause people to be more trusting, intimate, share secrets and personal truths far more quickly and readily than they might do in face-to-face encounters in their daily lives. They can also make spontaneous acts of generosity and kindness.
In our consideration of love, therefore, we might say that cyberspace is an accelerant of intimacy.
But disinhibition can run two ways, people can be harsh, critical, rude, aggressive, blaming, angry or even hateful and threatening as easily as they can be trusting and intimate on the net.
I’m something of a cyber-veteran. I’ve had access to the internet since its creation although this is my first personal web-site. In that time, I’ve observed a number of behaviours some of which I can explain in psychoanalytic language and some I can’t.
Cyber relationships can be high on transference. The nature of cyberspace means that in social encounters we can exercise fantasy and our imagination in a way we couldn’t in-person. We can ascribe all sorts of qualities to another that we would wish or hope to exist in a friend or loved one. Transference, however, is about the transfer of a normally powerful emotion from someone in one’s past onto another in the present. It is common for people to transfer feelings from their parents to their partners or to children. For instance, one could mistrust somebody who resembles an ex-spouse in manners, voice, or external appearance; or be overly compliant to someone who resembles a childhood friend or former lover.
Transference, like disinhibition, can be positive or negative.
That’s all conventional stuff.
Also I believe that we all carry some sort of image inside us of the idealised woman or the idealised man to whom we might be attracted.
The sources of this contra-sexual image are complex. They may come from infancy, childhood, our cultures, art and literature, media and the church…from everywhere in fact. Some of these images are archetypal, they’re embedded deep in our culture (and they might differ between cultures). I feel there is no doubt that experiences in infancy and childhood have a differentially powerful influence in how we construct these images. I also believe they are, to some extent, subconscious or perhaps, unconscious. They are what we might experience as the mysteries of interpersonal attraction.
As an aside, I do believe that children who suffer abuse might internalise idealised images of the perpetrators of abuse at an early age that later in life causes them to select abusive partners.
This, in itself, is an interesting subject for me and one about which I’ll write further, but having suffered emotional child abuse I’ve been more than curious to determine what effect infantile and childhood attachments have had on my adult relationships. I subjected myself to a whole battery of psychological tests to determine the extent of their effect. I’m delighted to say that I’ve moved on to an amazing degree, and that my test results indicate a low degree of correspondence between childhood attachments and adult relationships now, although this has not always been the case. I’ve made some very big mistakes in the choice of intimate partners in the past. I’m still learning my lessons.
Coming back to cyberspace relationships, I believe that it offers great scope for something that I’ll call projective idealisation. When we cannot see, hear, touch or smell the object of our attention, we can ascribe whatever qualities we like to them. They can become the man or woman of our dreams. Our computer screen is like a blank canvas on which we can project whatever qualities we seek and desire of another at will.
There is another aspect of cyberspace interaction that I’ve observed and I believe it can be intuitive, conscious or manipulative. I’ll call it “mirroring” here. Idealisation in love generally involves taking the best qualities of ourselves and projecting them on another. Mirroring involves the rapid absorption or assimilation of another’s personality then playing it back to them as one’s own. The mirror plays back a reflection of another’s feelings, interests and values. It can feel seductive and attractive. We might say, “This person and me are so alike,” or “How well this person understands me!” Frequently, it’s the cyber-tactic of the internet Lothario or Casanova. I doubt somehow if it’s a practice that one could get away with so easily in-person. For me, body language, gestures, inflection in speech and eye contact would give the other person away.
No doubt, cyberspace has pushed our social frontiers and changed our working habits, but I don’t feel yet it offers a sensory alternative to love, nor do I believe it will ever. I believe that cyberspace has opened all sorts of wonderful possibilities as a place for making friends and, possibly, even finding lovers, but in order to experience true intimacy with another, one sooner or later has to meet.
If we consider how we bond and interact in human relationships then the limitations of cyber relationships become evident. There’s sight, sound, touch, smell and taste (Yum! Get a grip, Geoffrey!)
None of these are easily possible in the cyber world, although the defenders of internet relationships might point to communication using webcams and the internet’s to transmit and receive voice messages.
These still lack the three-dimensional qualities of human interaction. Audio and video streaming are getting better but they lack all the subtle qualities including those of body language of in-person meetings.
Something that brings this home to me is my life in France. I speak some French but it’s not that fluent nor is it good enough to engage in more complex social relationships. Most of those I know here speak English too or else we manage to communicate more deeply by speaking in Franglish, a clumsy combination of our two languages that often makes me laugh. I find that the French speak very fast too. Often they say I do the same in English. I have sat in the middle of a crowded café surrounded by French people gabbling at enormous speed where I have been unable to understand a word being spoken. Nevertheless, I have understood much of what has been going on between people by their gestures, expressions, intonation and body language. My good French accent will sometimes get me into trouble too. People will talk fast at me and I struggle to understand the odd words. Frequently though I can fill in the gaps of what’s being spoken by their facial expression and tone of voice. The complexity of human communication has so much richness and subtleties beyond language, our main means of communication in cyberspace.
Touch, I believe is a very important human need, and one that we as adults in our often reclusive technological living worlds do not give sufficient attention. Infants deprived of touch can get depressed, ill and die without touch and physical comfort. How adults interact physically with their children becomes a cornerstone in their wellbeing and their development as fully-formed human beings. Being deprived of touch and tactile sensations as an adult can cause insecurity and anxiety. Don’t whatever you do, underestimate the power of touch. A hug, a kiss or simply a pat on the back or a handshake can do so much for another. So get kissing, hugging and touching now! (There I go again!)
Smell and taste are two very powerful, primal and even primitive ways we connect intimately with others. It is through touch, smell and taste that the infant bonds with its mother. They are the stuff of loving intimacy too: The sweet smell of hair, the touch of skin against one’s cheek, the scent of another’s body. Smell and taste draw us very close to another; they stir up strong emotions. They are essential and fundamental in loving intimacy.
So what else happens in potential cyber love relationships? I believe that because of the disinhibition effect that it is possible to attain a level of intimacy and trust very quickly. My question is therefore, then what? How does intimacy grow from there? I do not believe that love can grow from typed words alone.
The danger that lies in the speed of intimacy attainment is that disenchantment can set in equally quickly when intimacy has nowhere to go. You can’t go for a walk, share a meal, or hold another close in cyberspace. I believe that often unless a real life interaction takes place at some time then anxiety and disappointment will come to fill the space in which intimacy once existed. You can take steps and make moves along the way, exchanging photographs, speaking on the phone can help you on your way, but if love is the outcome you are seeking then sooner or later you will have to meet in-person.
Acknowledgements to John Suler PhD, Professor of Psychology at Rider University for his work on "The Psychology of Cyberspace"
Moving on - Part 2 - A matter of trust
I’m always curious about etymology; the word trust probably came from a number of Germanic roots that meant comfort, confidence, consolation, faithful and help. Its origins go back to the twelfth century and before. The word, “trustworthiness” did not appear until well into the industrial revolution in the early nineteenth century.
Trust exists on a number of levels. At its most basic level, it might mean belief in the honesty of another. On the next rung up the trust ladder, it might mean a sense of faith or belief in another’s honesty, reliability, competence and benevolence. This is elementary trust.
Trust is not a virtue, since criminals might trust each other and there may be, “honour among thieves.”
I do not believe that anyone is wholly trustworthy or honest in this way, either to others or themselves. We are all faulted and fallible.
Without the notion of trust, ideas of betrayal and forgiveness could not exist.
Betrayal is also a central motif of Christian religion. God allowed his son, Jesus, to be put to death on the cross, where he uttered the words, “father, father, why hast thou forsaken me?” Is that not the ultimate betrayal? Jesus was betrayed by Judas, by the denials of Peter, and by his sleeping disciples. I’m not a Christian, but I do nevertheless believe that Christianity, like all religions, contains powerful archetypical images that uphold its wide appeal. Is not the story of the crucifixion about the ultimate untrustworthiness of humankind? Perhaps the power of that story is not about the absurdity of the resurrection and the ascension, but in Jesus’s return to those who he loved without rancour or bitterness, that he rose above that unfaithfulness without blame. Perhaps one might extend a notion of the crucifixion to signify not physical death, but the pain of human frailty as manifested in primal betrayal.
I am not sure if there is any greater betrayal than that experienced in child abuse. It is the ultimate crime and the ultimate betrayal. It is an exercise of brutal power by an abuser over an innocent and helpless child. It is corrupt and corrupting. In the last resort, the child may feel that their powerless complicity is an act whereby they betrayed themselves. The weight of guilt and shame carried by the abused victim often causes them to betray themselves over and over again through self-harming behaviours that may include their engagement in other abusive relationships later in their adult life.
I have no difficulties in extending elementary trust to anyone. I am not paranoid and I extend that trust to others freely in the course of my adult life. As one of my friends commented, if I am let down by that trust, it is the failure of the other, not me. Trust of this type is at the centre of all human relationships, including those at work. It is empowering of others too.
What moved me to tears in “Moving on, part 1” was not any issue around elementary trust, but a deeper feeling about something that I might call intimate trust. Intimate trust is the deepest act of human understanding. The work of creating intimate trust is, as I wrote earlier, “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.” Intimate trust is the loving act of entrusting someone else with your feelings, your inner being and your emotional and physical welfare. It is knowing that another will be there for you at a time of your deepest need, that they will not walk away and leave one suffering when their loving care matters most. Intimate trust carries with it no judgments either. It is accepting of mortality. It is the deepest form of trust, I believe.
In some ways, intimate trust has less to do with honesty that is the most common connotation of trust. Perhaps, it has more to do with the etymological root of the word, something that is a faithful, loving and accepting helpfulness. Intimate trust is an act of love, but not all that is taken as love in our world carries with it that sort of trust. A love without intimate trust is one that I would find very difficult to sustain. I have never found this intimate trust in my life so far; I have experienced love of sorts, but I doubt that I have yet known true love. I recognise that there are people who care for me very deeply nevertheless.
I have made great progress in healing. I am, at least, able to extend intimate trust and love to myself. I know I could extend it to others too. That may be the biggest step in my journey. It may be the only one. I don’t know. To develop intimate trust completely means that one experiences it through positive reinforcement in a way where it becomes an experience that overwhelms one’s earlier experience of abuse. I may be crazy but I remain hopeful…I am also cautious and watchful, as I have no desire to experience primal betrayal again.
Moving on - Part 1 - new lessons
Living with a legacy of abuse has so many harmful consequences. One pays scant regard to one’s own welfare. One does not care properly for oneself. One engages in self-destructive habits and abusive personal relationships. One, perhaps, uses work in an unhealthy way. The consequences of all these behaviours take a mass of unravelling. I’ve been doing it for years and years it seems. I still am. I have realisations, even today, that my behaviour now can be based on negative or potentially self-harming or destructive instincts. I’m beginning to see much more clearly now and writing about it here has helped. It’s helped me to put a structure on what was a large amorphous mess.
Today, I’m going to write about another aspect of the journey of recovery and healing. There are many more, but I need to write about this to articulate and understand my feelings about healing better. My voyage of healing beyond the point of confrontation has been an experiential and sometimes, experimental journey. I wished I had had more help and guidance, but there is scant understanding of these issues out there. I have even seen adaptations of the recovery programme from alcoholics anonymous being made for child abuse sufferers. While laudable in some respects, that doesn’t quite cut the mustard for me. There are far too many differences in the nature of the difficulties and the issues one has to face. Child abuse and alcoholism bear no relation one to the other, although one can be consequent upon the other. That’s the only real parallel I see.
I felt having got through remembering, recognition and the first phase of reconciliation that my healing would proceed on its own. How wrong I was! Suddenly, I got a very rude shock. I became very depressed and I did not properly understand why. I don’t mean that I felt routinely fed up either. I felt the black, bleak overwhelming darkness and lethargy of depression.
I couldn’t find myself anymore. It was like I had suffered a profound loss but did not understand what it was. I even took myself off to the doctors and was prescribed anti-depressants. They didn’t help much either, so I stopped taking them.
It was hell. Subsequently I made a discovery. Part of the recovery from abuse is about experiencing a profound loss, loss of part of oneself, loss of the childhood I never had, loss of the parents I may have once falsely idealised. Loss is written everywhere and I did not understand. I simply did not understand, but went coasting along expecting to get better. It didn’t happen.
This loss is like real bereavement. In some ways it can feel worse than that, since one is bereft of parts of oneself, parts of one’s own inner being. Like with any bereavement, one needs to mourn the loss. Mourning this loss requires a great deal of patience and self-compassion. It cannot be rushed either. One may feel better having moved through the first phase of recovery, but there is still the process of healing. I, like many, didn’t understand this stage at the time, and I suppose I believed I could skip over it. By then, I was convinced I was a survivor after all.
What was true was that when I surfaced from depression, I did feel better. That’s for sure. There was another factor in play here that I know did not help me. I’ll talk about that now.
To survive, I had developed an aggressive independence. I stood my own ground absolutely on my own. Others may have experienced me as a caring, loving man. I know that to be true. It’s who I am. But deep down, I allowed no one to get close to me. No one at all; what’s more I distrusted everybody. This is one hell of an admission, I can tell you. I saw any form of dependency as being dangerous and unhealthy. It didn’t matter if it was healthy or not, I regarded dependency as the same irrespective of who else was involved or how trustworthy they were. I doubted my ability to tell the difference as well. Basically, I did not know how or who to trust. I had never learned that lesson. I made my way entirely on my own.
Of course, if one doesn’t trust, one cannot sustain intimate relationships. That is an absolute fact. I’ve written all about the importance of trust here. I know it to be important too. There is a big difference between knowing and knowing how to do it. This is giving me a real shaking up this morning. I’m going to stop writing now for a while as tears are rolling down my face and steaming up my reading glasses. I can’t see what I’m typing anymore.
Back! I wrote somewhere down the page a quote from James Hillman although I believe he was quoting someone else. I don’t have the book to hand. It went, “In all trust are the seeds of betrayal”. I went on to argue that love supplanted and subsumed trust since I believed that if one trusted, one would inevitably be betrayed, but if one loved, one would not. I’ve changed my mind. I believe that love and trust go together, and neither one implies the other. In short, one needs both to sustain an intimate relationship.
There’s something of a catch 22 here. It’s this: If one is unable to trust then inevitably one builds untrustworthy relationships. I should write that out like a schoolboy writing lines.
To really get past and get over the block of mourning, one needs to be able to share the most vulnerable parts of oneself with others. It is only this act of trust that can transform one’s fear of being hurt and betrayed. To get through this stage, means that one has to allow oneself to experience healthy dependency. I’m not sure if I have ever done that in my life. Even when I almost died last year, I resolved to nurse myself back to health independently. I made it too, but at what cost? I wonder now. The word “dependency” still sticks in my throat even now. To heal properly, one needs to feel the care of others. Not only does one need to be able to accept that care, but one needs the caring of others in order to heal.
I hope I can find my way to trust now. I feel an awful empty space inside.
In my next posts I will share more of what I believe the process of healing from child abuse entails. These are my new life’s lessons. My reservations about trust are profound. In doing what I’m doing now, someone close to me will tell me soon that I’m wasting my time here self-indulgently. I doubt that I will trust them, nor will I allow them to care for me. Also, and here's the rub, I doubt if they trust me either.
Thoughts on Love and Intimacy - Part 4 - The Myth of Falling in Love
There is something that makes me feel deeply uncomfortable about the "falling in love" metaphor. It's not the "in love" part since that is wonderful, but the idea that one "fell" into it; that somehow it was like an involuntary act of slipping on a banana skin. It highlights the idea that one did not have a choice in love; it just happened, that somehow one is a victim of one's feelings and that we love whomever our "emotions" want us to love.
I would like to believe that to love is a conscious act of the psyche that involves both freedom and responsibility, where one moves into love through choice. The idea of "falling in love" denies both freedom and choice since people use it to deny that they have choice in who they love. This metaphor might also deny personal responsibility since it allows people to believe that the matter was out of their hands and beyond their control. I may have said in an earlier piece that I felt love was an act of will. Notions of will, intellect and feelings working separately are unattractive (to me) since they suggest that areas of one's being might be compartmentalised and operate separately. I am certain that this is not helpful: It might be like "I work with my intellect", "I love my partner with my feelings" and "my acts of assertion, achievement or success are achieved by my will". How saddening this is, to break up one's self in a way that allows one to express only a part of oneself in given contexts. This compartmentalisation is perhaps the product of post-industrial man, a new machine culture, where work, loving and social being, and success operate in separate personal domains. It is for this reason that I prefer the notion of consciousness where all of our faculties might operate together.
An inversion of the Descartian principle of "Cogito ergo sum" ("Je pense, donc je suis", "I think, therefore I am") that informs all western phenomenological philosophy provides a clue. It follows that if one has no consciousness, then one does not exist. That's blindingly obvious in a way. My wild extrapolation, therefore, might be that if I am not conscious, should I not know, understand or be aware of my feelings, then I cannot love. I believe that idea.
I know I might be theorising here to evade the revelation of what I find most difficult. I shall evade a little longer by doing humour. If one was to land on earth as an alien with a copy of the 'Oxford English Dictionary', then one might believe that love was some savage practice of sadomasochism, in which humans are "set on fire', "burnt", "their hearts scorched", "their souls devoured" and all by love.
It is here that I might embrace the falling metaphor, falling is painful and love is a human risk that carries with it the most awful prospect of pain. I know how much that hurts. There's a thought that keeps moving through me that comes up again and again. I am sure it was a quotation from somewhere, although I would not guarantee that my feelings had not rewritten it. It goes something like "Eros's arrow strikes beyond love's deepest wound". I am also sure that my interpretation might not be the one intended by the writer of this quote. But there is a sense for me that love's arrow in order to find a place in one's heart and one's truth must go beyond all the pain that one has felt before, that one recognizes, knows and embraces that pain, and nurtures one's being beyond it, not denying it, but not ignoring or trampling on it either. That would hurt…but if only it was that.
True love brings with it the most terrifying risks. There's trust…I remember another quote but I cannot attribute it. It is "In all trust lies the seed of betrayal". I tried to find that quote on the internet, I believe it may have come from one of my life's inspirations, James Hillman, but I came up with 'star trek'. This is how the 'star trek' quote went:
Picard, "With all trust comes the possibility of betrayal."
Data, "Then perhaps it is better not to trust."
I have not watched star trek that much, but I believe that 'Data' is a sort of humanised super-android, a computer in human form and that says it all for me.
It's a funny thing about trust but it's something that I have had going on inside me for more than fifteen years now. It is this feeling that love transcends trust, that love is more reliable, more accepting and more generous than trust. Trust is also there in language to mean the relationship that one might have with one's banker or accountant that I do not feel means that much.
But back to those fears, love may also signify so many doubts, so many risks, so much fear and apprehension. There is the fear of betrayal, loss, desertion, distrust and suspicion, rejection and worse. There are also the difficulties in moving towards love; that one might make the journey and find emptiness, that one travels faster than another and they cannot meet and embrace their feelings as they wish to, or that they are scared by the intensity or awareness of the other in fear even though they are reaching out to them. These are not everyday fears; they are the stuff of the death of love. I feel I may have understated them here since they frighten me beyond belief.
There's the journey of low self-esteem that love may heal also. I have been critical of that in the past too in that I believe that someone who does not love himself cannot possibly love another. I believe that to be true, although I have met a number of women whose wonderful flowers and potential have been crushed so badly by insensitive men in unconscious and harmful relationships; such that merely allowing them to be themselves allows them to love again. I have learned much humility of late.
But the fears and apprehensions of love should not be underestimated. In my view, they are the worse fears and apprehensions known to! humankind.
Later I'll go on and write of the joys of mature love and desire. But for now I'll quote from the work of Barbara Kofford, a wonderful and inspirational colleague in psychotherapy who is involved in running the women's center in Jacksonville, Tennessee:
"Love extends ourselves beyond our fear of being vulnerable to seek the good we each desire within ourselves and in the other. To have our love endure, there is a need to develop the strength and resources to survive times of famine. To love another is to relinquish the hope that the other will be our idealized beloved; therefore, mature love rises like a Phoenix from the ashes of lost illusions.
Mature love began for Cupid when he resolved his ambivalence about leaving his childhood home. Legend also tells us that when Venus tired of Cupid's immaturity, released him from his only-child status through the birth of his brother, Anteros, the god of reciprocal love. Therefore, love that lasts requires an acknowledgement that adult relationships are independent of those we have with parents, children, and friends. Mature love does not grow from a posture of dependency and physical appearances; it builds upon the growing autonomy of each so that one will survive the death of the other. To love another is to relinquish the intention to change the beloved. Mature love arises from the death of belief in one's own god-like powers as it flies towards the future on autonomous wings.
What can the story of Cupid and Psyche tell us about how to live "happily ever after"? Their story demonstrates that romantic love begins with idealized passions and physical attraction. And yet, it is only through the commitment of each lover to a process of integrating the internal awareness of love and soul individually that a mature union can emerge between them. It is mature love that provides children with a model by which to develop future relationships. Therefore, it is mature love that lives happily ever after in the generations yet to come."