Tell me a story! Part 3 - Healing stories
This post is going to be low on personal opinions; I would rather simply share some of my findings with you.
My first major finding would be that writing facilitates emotional understanding, that by writing about past difficulties, we frame those difficulties in a way that is graspable and comprehensible. Some people mentioned that they felt their physical health had improved as a result of writing.
Overall, those who seemed to get the most benefit from writing, and I’m still open on this particular observation, were those who imposed a fictional narrative of some sort. I’m not quite sure how this works but it probably reflects my own experience of writing too. Maybe it’s about the act of taking a messy, complicated or disturbing experience and turning the experience into a story that makes it more manageable. Perhaps, the dimension of adding fictional narrative somehow placed their personal story at a distance where they could see it more clearly. I’m not entirely sure.
People who wrote about personal difficulties over long periods of time derived less benefit from writing their stories, than those who set themselves short-term limits to write and wrote their feelings in a “splurge” without regard to style, content or grammar.
For people who wrote about their emotional pain over long periods of time, there was a tendency to get locked into a cycle of self-pity and endless introspection. This was most pronounced in those who published extended stories of personal anguish in a web log (blog) My overall impression was that what happened, more often than not, was that it attracted a club that held itself together through the sharing and mutual identification with the emotional difficulty. The odd one or two people reported that they found the identification of others with their personal problems normalised their experiences.
“It made me realise that this problem was not only about me and that it happens to others too.”
People found it generally useful to share and talk about those stories with those close to them or others involved in the life episode, but less beneficial to discuss the issues with the public via a blog.
For bloggers, I noticed a tendency to do transference and identification with others participating on their blog. This was not always helpful to the writer, to the person trying to come to terms with his or her own emotional past. There’s a piece here about five posts down the page on transference and identification if you are interested to know more.
For people who had written about past emotional experiences over an extended period, I asked, “How easy would it be to write a new story going forward in your life, to write the next chapter of your own life?”
This question was frequently expressed along these lines:
“Do you feel able to write stories about how it might feel to be empowered to lead the life you wish to lead? Are you able to pick up your “pen” (metaphorically speaking!) and say “Okay, that was all my story then, but I have my own life and I’m going to move on with the script?” What’s the next chapter?” By the way, if you did that would you feel you were letting yourself or others down, including the readers of your blog? What and how would you like to exist beyond the present?”
This question interests me greatly, but I’m unsure if I have a sufficiently large response to give feedback as yet. I have a notion that those whom I asked the question found it to be interesting “food for thought”.
So in summary, most people who used story-writing to come to terms with emotional difficulties, pain and upheavals, said that story writing improved their emotional wellbeing, and sometimes their physical health.
The greatest benefits were obtained when:
1. They wrote regularly for short periods of time in peace and quiet
2. They limited the time period for which they would write about a certain event, normally to less than two weeks
3. They wrote without attention to style, content, spelling or grammar, letting the story “spill out”
4. They wrote for themselves and not an audience other than those involved or those close to them
5. They wrote only when they felt strong enough and able to face the past difficulty
6. They imposed a fictional narrative on the story
There is little new to add to existing research here, although I did find the responses from bloggers interesting and I am not aware that this has been covered before.
Against psychotherapy...
First, I am not a therapist. It’s not what I do for work nor would I wish it to be. I have worked in mental health and I hold a recognised qualification in analytical psychology. I have in the past spent brief periods doing relationship and marriage counselling. I chose not to work as a therapist.
I have been asked if “I believe” in psychotherapy. My answer is that I don’t, which is not the same as saying that I do not approve of therapists or necessarily, disapprove of their work.
I believe that therapists face terrible and enormous pressures in their work resulting from our social, political and economic failures. Many work hard and receive little or no credit for all that they do. The problems that they face frequently come from areas they cannot possibly address.
What I dislike most about psychotherapy is that it turns all the problems in on the individual. You are the one that is wrong. It can also produce a victim culture, one where if I’m only a result of past causes, then I’m a victim of those causes when my life goes wrong. I believe that we are all more than the products of our past.
I’ve been writing this blog in various forms for many months now. I have joined blog social networks, like blog catalog. I have made a few friends there too! But it gave me the opportunity to see a new world full of different types of therapist.
In correspondence with a friend here, we talked about “quick fix” merchants. Quick fix merchants reflect our culture, where we treat ourselves like we treat our cars. We take our cars to the garage and we want to know ‘what’s wrong with it, how much will it cost and how long will it take?’
On the internet, these people are everywhere. They promise health, seven steps to success, happiness and self-esteem, sometimes for prices as low as $29.99!
They are generally American and perhaps they are part of the cultural tradition of that country, where snake oil salesmen and travelling circus quacks originated.
There are far worse examples on the net, and they are often called “Doctor”. They promote psychological dependency and “appropriate” medication with an enthusiasm that I might reserve for a good night out. I find those the most terrifying of all.
It’s something about our state of mind and our culture. People feel bored, alienated and sick at heart. They feel like life has lost its purpose. So they are fast to jump at all these quick fixes.
Psychology has tried to gain respectability in the medical world by resorting to scientism. I do not believe all aspects of our lives are accessible to science, nor would I trust science to tell me how I should feel, believe or experience the world.
Perhaps I should say more about economics. I have skirted around any direct comment on economics before, but it dominates our thinking and our way of life. Its maxim is ‘More, more, more!” It’s nothing less than a slave driver. No one has free time, no one has leisure, no one has time to feel or think; we don’t have time to live anymore. Our very existence is under pressure and it’s fraught with anxiety.
In my post here, Beyond Psychology, I was grappling with my own uncertainty. I still am. I talked about a new philosophy. Perhaps I might have talked about a therapy of ideas that would have been equally valid. But I’m not sure of either expression. I’m concerned about a world dominated by intellect, where feelings, emotions and creativity are subjugated by thought, especially scientific thought. I question to what extent economic man is also one-dimensional intellectual man.
There’s something else I want to say before concluding about psychotherapy and good psychotherapists. It’s something I struggled with when I thought I might become a therapist. Psychotherapists may fill a gap in our lonely and alienated lives that I feel may be better attended by lovers and close friends with whom we can talk and share intimate understanding. I suspect that the best psychotherapists are little more than paid surrogate friends and lovers. There are profound complications in the psychotherapeutic relationship when the psychotherapist assumes the role of a lover. He or she is treading on very dangerous ground.
In summary, I am against psychotherapy. It is being held accountable for that which it cannot possibly apprehend. Further, it individualises many problems that are the product of our society. It makes every problem, an inner problem and that’s not where problems come from. They come from a world which we have created, and which we can choose to change.
A footnote about suffering
None of what I have written is intended to deny the reality of psychological suffering. It is very real and very painful. Sometimes a therapist or medicine may help in the remediation of this suffering…that I do not deny.
My experience, however, is that ultimately the sufferer who recovers, recovers more as a result of their own courage and determination, than the application of therapy or the use of medication.
The best therapists, in my opinion, are those who enable sufferers to find answers within themselves, which will necessarily entail looking beyond themselves, and beyond their personal histories for the source of their difficulties.
Tell me a story! Part 2 - Love stories
Most recently, I have been talking to other storywriters and to people who have spent much time in writing journals about painful or difficult experiences on-line as blogs to share with others. I have also talked to people who kept journals, or simply used writing as a means to express difficulties or come to terms with trauma.
Before that I had been considering the work of Robert Sternberg, who wrote the book, “Love is a story”.
Sternberg’s work interested me particularly as it was a dramatic departure from normal psychology methods. Traditional psychologists have tended to frame their questions, and establish empirical research that they tested for statistical validity, and used subsequently to formulate the premises of their arguments.
There are all sorts of problems with empirical research, a lot of which have to do with the propensity of the respondents to answer questions in terms of what they feel the right answers to be in accordance with social, cultural, religious, family and other personal norms, pressures and expectations.
I believe that Sternberg used an empirical approach, but it was not his starting point.
We are not born with knowledge of what love is, what it means, how to love and how to sustain love successfully.
We learn about it. At a very early age, we learn about it unconsciously from our experience of our parents, people with whom we come into contact, physical and tactile experience, and basic physical and social interaction with others. A little later we start to absorb other images from books, films, television, kindergarten, school and every other source of emotional and social experience.
Sternberg argues, and I have some affinity with his views, that, based on these early experiences, we assemble our views about love as forms of narrative systems, as stories, which we enact in our later lives. Thus compatibility becomes a matter of finding someone with a story that might live comfortably alongside our own.
In Sternberg’s work, for example, we have “garden” stories, where the emphasis is on planting, nurturing and growing. That’s a tender narrative, although it may be a little low on excitement for some.
We have a travel story where life is a journey, a never-ending movement of discovery. The destination is less important since the person gets their emotional sustenance from the journey itself. In terms of the twenty-five or so stories, that Sternberg cites, I find this one, possibly, one of the more attractive (for me).
There’s the war story where partners remain permanently in conflict, but nevertheless, to the astonishment of observers, stay in the relationship. Perhaps the war relationship is portrayed well in the play, “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
Where I might differ from Sternberg is that he argues the case that only experts like himself might interpret the stories that people have within them of which they are largely unconscious.
I’m not sure whether I believe that these stories are so unconscious, nor if they need the intercession of an expert to understand them.
I had another idea with which I experimented that yielded some interesting results. I wrote about it earlier here:
“It might be an interesting experiment for us all to go off and write our own versions of short love stories that attract or appeal to us in some very deep way. I like this idea. We could all invent our own love fables. We would need to take care to engage with our emotions and write the story we really want, not the story that conforms to all our cultural myths or social norms and ideals, or to the expectations of our partner, but something that would be truly meaningful to us in love.
It would be important for us to connect to the story with our feelings without any inventive embellishments or affectations. Perhaps we might try to write a short love story with a hopeful ending, a story of the positive possibilities of where love might take us.
But we should write a story, a piece of fiction. It might be set in modern or other times, but it would be important to express succinctly the feelings of the protagonists as they move through this story. No tricks only a story; one that takes no more than 20 or 30 minutes to narrate.
Perhaps when we have made our stories. We might sit down somewhere peaceful and calm with a glass of wine and share these stories with our loved ones. We may be amazed about what they might tell us both about each other!”
I did eventually get a few people to join in on that one. I also got a lot of resistance from people who said, “I can’t write stories”.
On the question of “can’t write”, I tried to assure people that it didn’t matter about literacy, grammar, and whether or not they had written before. I asked them to try and a couple more did.
With a select couple, I also asked them to write, a brief account of a past relationship that was most memorable to them in some way either through happiness or hurt.
What I noticed and observed:
1. I knew a couple in big difficulties. They didn’t communicate well. They both wrote love stories, ones that had the outcomes they were seeking, about love as they wanted to experience it. The process of writing a story liberated their communication. They were able to talk about what they liked, what they wanted, and what they hoped for. It was all there in the stories. I got greedy! I suggested that they then wrote another fictional story together. I didn’t care how, but one where they joined their plots together. The result almost brought tears to my eyes.
This was a very special experiment as what this pair had managed to do was, not only understand the stories they carried within them, but they had expressed how they would like to go on writing…living their lives together.
By doing something this simple, I had done more than I had ever managed to do in my brief time in marriage or relationship counselling!
2. People who are able to construct a narrative story over their life experiences seem to get more benefit than those who were only able to write past accounts in literal terms.
3. Almost everyone who wrote stories seemed to discover new aspects of, or re-experience, their emotional selves in some profound way. Their ability to communicate their feelings and understand what they were seeking in love changed in a positive way. Most felt that they were able to go on and “write their next chapter”.
4. The exercise of writing past accounts in literal terms yielded some, but less benefit in this context. (I have more to say about this.)
More soon….
Tell me a story! - Part 1
But this is not about the confessions of a bibliophile, even though I am one. I had this metaphor in my mind tonight of how I would like to take all of my writing here on psychology and put it in a food mixer in the hope that the blending process would turn it into some coherent and cogent whole. Needless to say, I teased myself with thoughts of making a psychology pudding! ‘How many calories would that be?’ I wondered. ‘Too many,' I expect.
For those of you who have not caught the plot so far, I have rejected the duality of objectivity and subjectivity in human understanding in favour of a model of intra-personal and inter-personal (social) constructs that I have described as “consciousness”. This is both an individual and collective consciousness that upholds all of our beliefs in the world including those about science, that change through time in relation to our historical circumstances. I cannot posit any causal or relational ideas about the development of mankind. I also believe that doing so leads one to a form of philosophical circularity where one attempts to make sense of the world through the dominant ideas of the time that tend to be self-proving. If one looks through a green glass, one undoubtedly will see green. Similarly, if one examines social or historical developments through a specific branch of science, it will return a result that conforms to and validates that particular scientific approach within the limits of its understanding.
I have a real difficulty with the subject of history. It’s not so popular in my household as I have a partner who loves it. She can tell me all about the Black Prince, William the Conqueror, Joan of Arc and Elizabeth the First. She can construe the entirety of our human development in terms of “great” men and women. I always have the same nagging question. I think, “Well, that’s interesting about that one individual, I suppose. But what were the millions of other people doing and thinking about at the time?” Our view of history in terms of the acts of “great” people may also be about an ideology that “great” people make history. As such, it is what we have chosen to believe.
It’s a story. It’s no better nor worse than a certain sort of journalism.
There are all sorts of stories: There are science stories that are forever changing, history stories told from the perspective of “great” individuals; there are political, moral, national, economic, war and religious stories too. But they are all stories, bodies of beliefs generally cast in terms of the consciousness of the time.
Understanding the nature of stories, that may underpin our consciousness in the world, has a personal dimension too.
We all have our personal stories, many of us may live them – sometimes over and over as repeated patterns of behaviour, some of us may believe them to be inevitable, others may regard them as pathology or science.
I believe them to be of our making. Also I feel that the only way to move beyond our current struggles in the world is to step back and examine the beliefs that underpin them, to listen to our story and decide if it’s the one we want.
At a personal level, I believe our stories are accessible to our understanding and capable of change too. Whatever others may tell us, we are capable of self-understanding and change.
New Horizons - Beyond Psychology
I wrote about synchronicity here a while ago. I still question synchronicity from time to time. I’m not sure I should since even in this time of change for me, wonderfully synchronous things happen all the time. The right person has that knack of turning up when I need them! Recently I’ve had the gift of another therapist talking to me from way across the pond. We’ve been chatting while I’ve been struggling through my bleaker moments. She has helped me no end in seeing that I struggle with those things that often she struggles with too, that my dilemmas not only relate to me, but that she has faced those same difficulties as well.
Last week we were talking about how we could describe a sense of our underlying connectedness, not only she and I, but all of us. I was grappling with that dimension of our lives in which synchronicity occurs.
I have been struggling with feelings and ideas about a new schematic for understanding how we exist in the world. Psychology spans only one dimension of our lives. It, along with all other single subject disciplines, fail to provide me with a framework through which I can make sense of our existence.
Suddenly I thought, “You’re not writing psychology at all, you’re writing philosophy with psychological overtones!” I love the idea of writing philosophy in a way, although I don’t like all philosophers. But hang on! I might be interested in a new humanistic active living philosophy, one that embraced the psyche too, of living, feeling and doing as well as simply thinking wise thoughts. The word philosophy is derived from the Greek “philo sophos” meaning a love of wisdom. I could buy into that, it might mean a whole body of beliefs that informed the way we are and acted in the world. Yes, I’ll take several large portions of that, please!
Somewhere deep down, I have a natural aversion to philosophy, all that old sterile hogwash about epistemology and ontology, of Popper versus Marx, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Kant. Who cares? But it does more readily lend itself to the overall consideration of the human condition.
So I started to ponder how one might set about approaching how we understand our lives.
I wrote to my friend, “I believe we might exist in three or four dimensions: Intellect or mind, intuition and emotions, a consciousness which is the body of "beliefs" (of which rational science is part) that upholds our way of living in the world that is infinitely changeable, and our universal interaction with nature of which our physical being is part. If I was a quantum physicist I might express all of these phenomena as variables that we might variously create, change or experience as different realities. If I were a quantum physicist and a metaphysicist, I would see all of these aspects of our being as being unified in some structural and spiritual way. I probably believe that too, but, as yet, I cannot explain it.
All that intuition is, is our own personal sense of knowing. I believe that we know or can know far more than we are frequently aware. Also I believe that most of us are more unconscious than conscious, that is to say, we are more influenced by our unconscious minds in seeing our personal reality as something that exists outside ourselves. There are all manner of things that emerge from the unconscious that I simply cannot explain...like those we are attracted to…”
She wrote back to me, “I also believe that there is another realm of awareness...that which I refer to (as many do) as universal consciousness. Is this what you mean by nature and environment? I am asking, because sometimes we connect in same thought-patterns with others that may live across the world...and, it can happen quite unexpectedly, and with very little prelude.”
She and me might be the perfect examples of what she is speaking about!
The “universal consciousness” idea worries me too.
I replied, “I wondered about the notion of our universal connectedness and where it fitted in or even what it was.
I'm not even sure I believe in it outside our physical being... I am a little concerned about creating a new metaphysical reality that may become to be regarded as god. But I do think there may be more...perhaps we need to fully comprehend our own consciousness first.
I'm reluctant to fall into the realms that may be construed as religious or other worldly and I'm very nervous of this whole phenomenon which has been the springboard everywhere for religions, cults and that which cannot be comprehended. Love to know your feelings here.
That was a big "Don’t know”. “
We share our concerns. Her reply was “I don't know either. There is something I cannot explain, but I have no idea. I do understand the concern you state about religion. It concerns me as well.”
I’m stuck at this juncture. I’ll have to ponder more on this point. I keep dipping in and out of the physical sciences to try and formulate an understanding of what this phenomenon might be. But I don’t want to go there, since inevitably that will take me towards the dogma of rational science, systems theory and mathematics. It’s not that I am opposed to rational science, but that it too is simply one part of our predominantly western collective consciousness. It too is a manufactured body of knowledge that changes in accordance with the beliefs within scientific communities, and our experience of being in the world.
Rather than imbue nature with some metaphysical quality. Perhaps I shall locate this phenomenon within consciousness, as a dimension of consciousness we have yet to understand.
I’ll finish with a few words about consciousness that I wrote in my farrago blog (Back to the Future - Part 2, Tag - "Future") last year, when I decided to revisit this subject:
“It is shifts in consciousness, not technology, consumption, money markets or any aspect of our physical environment or social, political and economic systems that causes change. Back in 1962, when Kuhn wrote about "paradigm shifts", he talked about scientific revolutions occurring when a body of beliefs, what we are calling consciousness, could no longer uphold the reality they created.
There are conflicting realities in science too that co-exist, and one may overturn, or embrace one or the other, or synthesise them in a new form of consciousness.
It is consciousness that governs our perceptions of the world that in turn creates our realities. How and what we perceive is our reality, to that extent a philosopher might say that truth is relative. I am not that sure that discussions of absolute or relative truth are that helpful in a world that is governed by consciousness and our perceptions of that world.”
Special acknowledgement
A million thanks to my good friend, Tamera Daun, for her enormous help and wisdom in considering what I have written about here, and for her permission to convey parts of our conversations in this post.
Footnote
Last night, when I sat down to write this I had intended to write a piece about self-esteem! I have been thinking about that too of late. This piece flowed out and was almost written by an accident I can’t explain.
The Emperor's new clothes - On personal development and change
A recent post of hers caused me to reflect on exactly how we exist in this world and about what holds us back in personal development, from realising our life’s potential and desires.
Living in a world dominated by rational science with its tendency to analyse and categorise our being means that we often compartmentalise ourselves into various states of thinking, feeling and being. We have notions of intellect and thought (rational powers of cognition, perception and differentiation), emotions, intuition and other personal traits like will comprised within our personal make-up yet we appear to express them separately. I know I’ve been tussling with this a lot. I have written about it before both here and in my “farrago”. I adopted the term “consciousness”, both individual and collective (social) to try and relate to our state of being in some sort of wholeness embracing all aspects of our existence.
Previously I wrote: “Notions of will, intellect and emotions 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.”
I believe that what makes for an experience of wholeness in our life is a sense of enlightened consciousness – of being conscious of consciousness in a way. It’s an act of profound understanding, an awareness of our being in a world that exists both within and outside ourselves. But it is also a sense that we make our world and take responsibility for it. I believe it is this special understanding that facilitates progress, development, discovery, invention and change. Consciousness brings with it an awareness that our limitations are made by ourselves, either individually or collectively. Knowing and understanding the nature and source of our limitations can bring about the most wonderful possibilities of positive personal and social development, of change in our personal and social worlds.
Perhaps that is a little abstract so I’ll give a couple of examples that come to mind. I write endlessly about the nature of love. We experience love as an emotion within ourselves. What love means and what it stands for is influenced by a whole host of factors beyond ourselves. How we love is an integral part of our belief systems, of our consciousness, and of our culture that forms part of consciousness. Our beliefs about love are upheld by our families, our friends, the media, art and literature, politicians, churches and corporations, as well as our experience. Being conscious means that we have the gift of understanding, our own sense of knowing what love means and where our feelings, thoughts and beliefs about it come from. Being conscious also brings with it a sense of knowing that we may take responsibility and that we can change our lives and how we love. But it’s easy for me to say and much harder to do!
I have a certain understanding, a personal impression and sense of the wholeness that growing consciousness brings with it. What produces that sense of wholeness and often charisma in others, especially in those who become our leaders, is a sense of their own “personal knowing”: Of their consciousness of their own being in the world, and their sense of assurance that comes from taking responsibility not only for themselves in the world, but for their entire world. That’s a big one!
Perhaps the key barriers to consciousness (Others might say this differently: Some might say success or personal fulfilment. They are equally valid as they all go hand-in-hand) are about fear, self-esteem and self-confidence. Being conscious is not always a comfortable place. It can be scary too. Children in their innocence will often exhibit a greater degree of consciousness and fearlessness than us “conditioned” adults. It was a child, after all, that spotted that the “emperor’s new clothes” were nothing more than his “birthday suit”.
Being “unafraid” to express our self-belief is a wonderful release. I believe that the greatest antagonist to love is fear. Hate is not the opposite to love. It is fear. More than anything, I have come to believe that it is fear in whatever form that holds us back in our lives. Some fears are wholly sensible. They guide us in avoiding danger or life-threatening perils. That is the right place for fear. But so many of our fears are not so healthy. They are what hold us back in life, from the realisation of who we are and who we might be. Self-esteem might carry us forward where fear holds us back.
I know I’ve been guilty frequently of being held back by fear or negative self-beliefs too; more frequently than I would readily care to admit.
A little under thirty years ago I read the book “A road less travelled” by American psychotherapist, Morgan Scott Peck. I was riveted. It was sheer inspiration. I have read hundreds of psychology books since but this work still stands out. It’s about the journey of personal fulfilment. At the end of the book, Scott Peck talks about achieving a state of “grace”. (Can’t you just tell what will happen next? It did.) I’d call it something else. But he attributes the phenomena associated with “grace” as that which:
1. nurtures human life (and spiritual growth)
2. are incompletely understood by scientific thinking
3. are commonplace among humanity
4. originate outside conscious human will (the individual)
I believe he was very nearly “right on the button” but instead of developing a notion of consciousness in all its aspects of being in the world, he, in my opinion, goes completely off the rails and gets “God”. So that which he can no longer understand in terms of the world as it exists within the psyche and outside the individual, he attributes to a divine power. In a subsequent work he goes on to judge what is good and what is evil according to his newly found religious beliefs. For me at that point, he lost the plot. What a great pity. He had so much to say.
My point here is that psychology as a mode of personal exploration fails us. The answers are not all within ourselves but in our interaction with the world we make and our beliefs about that world. Only through an understanding of all the dimensions of ourselves within our world can we seek to understand it.
I believe that the biggest barrier to realising that understanding is fear.
Footnote:
Some people in the past have accused me of being naïve and idealistic. I know what they mean but I might express it differently. They claim that my work fails to acknowledge the realities of economics, economic survival and power in our lives. For me, economics and power are important dimensions of consciousness. They exist and are a fact of life. I am not sure that their consideration belongs here.
Much of our reality is informed by economics and power. It is the dominant paradigm (Dare I use that word?!) of our western world. I am sure, however, that its culture does not always serve us well. By necessity, we live with it and it would be “naïve” to believe otherwise. But often I question how well it serves us. I do not believe that focussing one’s life on financial, economic and power outcomes is likely to lead to any form of enduring personal fulfilment. Infinite economic expansion is impossible. Money is a medium of exchange and not an end in itself. We all need it. As the western world slides inexorably towards recession, perhaps a change in economic consciousness might show us the way out. For sure, some change is inevitable, although I am apprehensive about what it might be. So many periods of economic turmoil have found temporary relief in war and conflict.
So, to my critics, I know all about economics and power. We all see its distorted influences in our lives daily. But we accept it as a given fact of life. Only through developing a wider understanding of the world in we wish to dwell in as well as the world that exists, will it change. There is nothing inevitable or god-given in anything made by humankind. We can change. But we can only change by understanding the realities of what exists and that which might serve our future better. That is about consciousness; nothing more, nothing less. We make and we choose the world we live in as it in turn makes who we are. Consciousness, choice, and freedom are about taking responsibility for our world. And taking responsibility is a choice for us too.
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 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."
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?
Thoughts on love and intimacy - Part 1 - Introduction
A time ago I wrote an article for publication entitled "What is intimacy?" Like most of these things, it was borne of what was happening in my life at the time. The other day I dug it out to read. It was not half bad, I thought. Then I found myself thinking about what is and what is not A time ago I wrote an article for publication entitled "What is intimacy?" Like most of these things, it was borne of what was happening in my life at the time. The other day I dug it out to read. It was not half bad, I thought. Then I found myself thinking about what is and what is not possible in love. The question that nagged at me was given that it is not possible for two people to develop, grow and change synchronously in a monogamous relationship then how is it possible not to grow apart, to wake up one day and say I don't really like that person anymore, they are not the same person I thought they were?
Earlier this year I almost bled to death. I shall spare you the gory details but my heart almost gave out when it could not get the oxygen-carrying haemoglobin it needed. I had the most wonderful medical care (Thank you, blood donors!) and now I'm healthier and fitter than I have been for about 15 years or more. That sort of experience does cause a massive "paradigm shift", an entire revolution in one's worldview and personal values. But how do you encompass such a dramatic change in values within an intimate, loving personal relationship?
I was curious what others may have thought about this so I put the words "sustaining intimacy" and "sustaining loving relationships" into 'Google' and it returned so much rubbish that I wanted to reach for the bottle marked "despair".
It caused me to reflect on another random thought that was triggered by an everyday event. I had received a bill for something I had bought at a store. At the bottom of the bill, there were the letters "E&OE" in small print that I learned subsequently meant 'Errors and Omissions Excepted'. What a wonderful idea, I thought! Perhaps I might stamp letters on my forehead to signify how I would wish to feel about loving relationships. Why not 'A w/o E' meaning 'acceptance without exception'? What a great notion!
It was an important clue to me. I suspect finally, at the ripe old age I am now, I may at last be getting close to the answer. Love is certainly not about the narcissistic reflection of some idealised image of the other, or a contra-sexual playback of one's self-image. Perhaps it's not a state of mind at all, but an act, an act or activity of the soul, the psyche.
I found myself earlier trying to remember what C. S. Lewis had written about love, four kinds of love. There was "storge, eros, caritas/ philia, agape, and Love as I remember; Love being spiritual love or, in his case, the love of God. Oops! That's five kinds of love! I must have added one in there somewhere. Who cares anyway? But that's familial, erotic, friendship, altruistic and spiritual love. I'm not really sure that any such academic categorisation of love helps us in understanding what love is or how to do it anyway!
So what of love then? I'll skip around for a while longer but I do believe that love follows a progression like Maslow's hierarchy of needs where human development progresses from its subsistence level and its need for survival at the base of the triangle to self-actualisation at its apex. Similarly, I believe that love progresses through needs, wants and desire where needs correspond with a state of infantile dependency and desire to the self-actualisation of love in emotional maturity. But I'll finish here with a poem, which for me summarises the feelings of the ordinary man in a state of desire. It's called "Feeling Fucked Up" by Etheridge Knight.
Feeling Fucked Up
Lord she's gone done left me done packed / up and split
and I with no way to make her
come back and everywhere the world is bare
bright bone white crystal sand glistens
dope death dead dying and jiving drove
her away made her take her laughter and her smiles
and her softness and her midnight sighs--
Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky
fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds
and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth
fuck marx and mao fuck fidel and nkrumah and
democracy and communism fuck smack and pot
and red ripe tomatoes fuck joseph fuck mary fuck
god jesus and all the disciples fuck fanon nixon
and malcom fuck the revolution fuck freedom fuck
the whole muthafucking thing
all i want now is my woman back
so my soul can sing
Etheridge Knight