Love's Passage

Moving to a positive way of life...

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2009-07-03T10:43:27+01:00

For the past three months, I’ve been working for a UK Government department on healthcare reform. It was probably the worst experience of my working life. The management was bullying, repressive, over-bearing and authoritarian. It caused me to consider my resignation from the contract almost weekly. Weekends were sometimes spent healing and recovering from the week before. It was not a good experience at any level although I did learn a lot about workplace bullying, but little more. I took the job mainly for the money and that was a mistake too.

At first, I was assertive and courteous, but then I was told things like, “You’re a highly paid commodity, and you’ll do whatever you’re told to do.” Or “If ...(your boss) has made up his mind he wants something then you’d better do it or else.” I finished a little over a week ago. In my final week I had to report my progress daily. There was no consideration of quality or effectiveness here; one was measured on quantity of output that in my case meant words or sheets of paper. On one day last week I pumped out 15,000 words (That wasn’t a typo. It was fifteen thousand words) that in their view was a reasonable day’s work. (“You should be able to do it in a day. It’s not difficult.” ) I worked like that every day. On Friday, at my final report I was told, “That was a good weeks’ work. Had you done that every week we would have had good value for our money.”

I said good-bye and left. It left me unscathed and I learned some lessons I should have learnt long ago. I believe that it’s true that the universe keeps presenting those lessons to us until we take them to ourselves. There is no one to blame. The responsibility for what happened here is entirely my own. It was my own thinking that influenced this particular outcome.

I’ll tell you more about it. You see a few months ago I found myself stuck in a situation, maybe two or three situations, that I didn’t want to be in. Money was also a concern to me at the time. Those two aspects of my circumstances became my focus. It’s what I thought about. So to reiterate the focus of my thoughts was getting out of a bad situation that I did. What I didn’t think about was where I wanted to go in its place. So what happened was that I got out of one sort of bad situation into another. I had no vision or belief in what my life would look like beyond the problems that beset me at the time.

It’s an important lesson and a very simple one. One’s thoughts condition one’s reality and consciousness. If one thinks something will happen then invariably it will. Moving to the idea of living a positive life, it’s about more than positive thought alone; it’s about positive belief and developing a vision of one’s being. It’s also, and this is important, about behaving and acting in a way that is consistent with these thoughts, visions and beliefs.

Did I say “simple”? There’s more yet. I see so many people almost every day who are weighed down by either the burden or regret of past unhappiness or anxieties about their future. About two years ago I wrote the words, “There is no point in going back to the past or forward in hopeful anticipation. The past provides valuable knowledge but it is an unreliable guide to the present and living in the future is a folly, the fastest track to going off the rails.” There’s wisdom in the Latin phrase, “Carpe diem” - seize the day. The full quotation is “Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero” - Seize the day and place no trust in tomorrow. Life is fleeting and the only place we can find love, joy and happiness is in the here and now. Living joy in the present is the best foundation we can build for our tomorrow. Like positive thoughts draw a positive reality to them; joy and love bring out the best in others and in oneself too.

If you doubt what I’m saying then check this out: The major “therapy of choice” in the UK at present is cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). At its simplest CBT is about monitoring one’s thoughts in the here and now, identifying those that are negative and unhelpful and displacing them with positive thoughts and beliefs. That’s a gross simplification, but it captures the essence of CBT. It’s popular because it works. You don’t need a therapist to work that out either.

Is this all sounding a little like Tinkerbelle, the new age fairy, to you? Is positive thinking really so powerful? Does it actually change what happens to us? While positive thinking cannot be deemed right or wrong since its power is a matter of belief, its benefits and efficacy are, nevertheless, demonstrated beyond doubt in the application of established psychological techniques like CBT. I do believe that the way we think influences our lives and that our minds seek to order our lives in a way that makes them consistent with our thinking. So if we feel and believe something of our selves and act in a way that is consistent with those thoughts, feelings and beliefs and visualise the outcomes we are expecting or seeking, what happens in reality is generally consistent with those behaviours.

Let’s give these thoughts, actions, feelings, beliefs and visions a collective noun and call them our energy. Our energy attaches itself to the object of our attention however it is expressed, be it positive or negative. Energy can work in contradictory ways. We give strength to that to which we attach our energy. I’m reminded of the work of Mother Teresa, who when asked about protesting against war responded, “I was once asked why I don't participate in anti-war demonstrations. I said that I will never do that, but as soon as you have a pro-peace rally, I'll be there.” Acting against an entity or phenomenon gives it more energy in itself. Engaging in conflict as a means of resolving human difference may serve only to energise the conflict and / or the difference. A conflict may be resolved when someone uses their differential power in order to bring about an ending that suits their purpose. The etymology of the word ‘conflict” provides the odd clue. It comes from the vulgar Latin “conflictus”, past participle of the verb, “confligere,” meaning to strike, clash or collide. Don’t get me wrong; I do believe that conflict may have positive and constructive resolutions but only when the people involved choose to end the conflict and find a different way.

I was going to say something about successful people, which invites the question, “What is success?” Before I move on to success, I’d like to take my ideas on a little further then we can see how they all fit together. I’ve written some words over and over. They originated from a teacher of mine who would exhort me to “follow my heart and be true to myself” and to “keep writing my own story”. We each have a life story that is all our very own. In the same way, we each have skills, experience and gifts that are special and unique to us alone. Too often, we turn our backs on our unique gifts for the sake of social conformity and “making a living” - usually from pay cheque to pay cheque, which is no life at all.

Maybe you’ve heard these words before then thought to yourself, “How do I make that step between doing what I do now to what connects with these special gifts of mine? How do I know what these gifts are anyway?” Do you know what those questions are about? They’re about fear. Fear is what stands between what most of us want and what we do now. Occasionally I’ll revert to doing corporate consulting not because I enjoy doing it, which often I don’t, but the fact that it sits deep inside my comfort zones and it’s something I can do easily. Then I find myself working in some heartless autocracy where fear-based direction and bullying is rife and I wonder why. That’s not so easy at all. It’s where I came in!

Let’s break out from the fear for a minute or two and think about this. No one ever got into trouble for thinking so there’s no fear needed here. Think of what you feel passionately about, what you love doing and what you believe in. These are the clues that lead to the discovery of your special gifts. The chances are that when you have really worked out what these gifts are, they’re in areas that are already appreciated and admired by others.

This is all clicking into place. To start we had positive thinking and self-beliefs, we had a vision of how we wish our life to be; we behave and act in ways that are consistent with our thinking, our beliefs and our vision. We focus on the present and in particular of expressing love and joy, recognising that it’s the values of love and joy that draw others to us. Writing my own story means that I am responsible for my own life. If I keep getting writer’s block, it might be time to sit down and write a better plot. Following my heart and being true to myself means that I recognise I have special gifts to bring to the world, gifts of life’s work that I believe in, that I feel passionately about and activities I love. Success is living these positive beliefs, all of them, in the certain knowledge that rewards will follow.

I used to snigger at a good American friend of mine who had this practice of “saying her gratefuls”; of expressing gratitude for the positive things in her life. I thought it a bit ‘cheesy’ and one of those sucrose sweet things borne of crass sentimentality that Americans did. I owe her a number of things: The first is an apology, the second is an acknowledgement of her wisdom and last but not least is my gratitude for teaching me an enormous lesson. What this friend did, as she often does, was to set me off on a journey of thought and discovery. Gratitude, that I had considered to be a simple emotion lacking in any depth or real interest, is a powerful force contributing to human health, happiness and social connection.

Expressing gratitude is something I see now as a cornerstone of a positive way of life. If positive thinking is difficult then expressions of gratitude can take us to the place where it is a consequence of our behaviour. It is, after all, difficult to feel negative and grateful simultaneously!

I’ll write more about gratitude and positive psychology. There’s a whole body of impressive work coming out of UC Berkeley on the subject. Their findings on gratitude demonstrate that it is one of the few attitudes that can measurably change people’s lives. I have come to see it not as an individual act of saying thank you but as a disposition that leads to health, wellbeing, vitality and increased sense of personal value along with a humility that acknowledges the role of others in making our lives possible.

I mentioned a bad work experience at the beginning of this piece that was borne of my own negative thinking. Ending on gratitude reminds me that there is so much to be thankful for and that this work experience gave me the opportunity to do so much I love and enjoy. I’ve had the chance to spend time among friends and experience their care of me, make new friends, enjoy speaking in my native tongue, live in the beautiful city of Cambridge. I’ve loved my time here and it eclipses any workplace difficulties I had. Those too taught me some very big lessons for which I feel deeply indebted, as they’ve prompted me back onto my true track in life. My experiences confirm all that I’ve written here with enormous clarity. They’ve helped me join up the pieces to make a bigger, better whole. Who could not be grateful for that opportunity?

:)

Ten and a half thoughts about love

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2009-04-26T19:48:05+01:00

It’s been a long time. I’m back in England, in Cambridge where I’m living and working currently. So much has happened. One day I might get round to saying more on “Farrago”.

Where this blog started was with me engaging in something of a theoretical excursus around love, intimate love between a woman and a man; what it is, what it might mean, what it could be – all written from a psychologist’s viewpoint. It was nevertheless a very personal account in which I admitted complete subjectivity. I still do. I find it unhelpful, and possibly even unhealthy, to subject one’s emotions to some form of analytical pseudo-science. Enough said.

No matter how I dressed it up, it was a very personal account. Today, I’m going to go the other way. I’m going to write something of what I believe and deeply feel. I’ll probably be quoting myself extensively here. It doesn’t really matter. This was always my own voyage of exploration. I hope it resonates with you.

There are a lot of feelings meshed together when we talk about love. There’s attraction, romantic and erotic passion and love itself, however it may be defined.

Attraction is described as chemistry, a mystical mixture of sub-conscious and unconscious desires often infantile in their origins and pheromones. Some of it may be about biological selection, the identification of a mate for breeding purposes. Attraction is the expression of our biological selves that I feel has little to do with love and more to do with hormones and reproduction. It may also reflect our own early life experiences that may or may not be happy or healthy. It may also trick us into hopelessly unsuitable relationships. A woman’s fecundity, body size and shape may provide a reliable guide to her reproductive ability but it gives no indication as to how we might function as soul mates or long-term partners. Similarly a man’s physical appearance, his stature or sexual potency might not be indicative of his ability to perform as a loving partner or caring father.

Romantic and erotic passion is something else. It’s so potent and so enjoyable that some become addicted to it. It’s like being on the best drugs ever. There’s a rush of endorphins, a longing for the other, an overwhelming desire for them. We crave to be close to them and in their company. Erotic and romantic passion feels out of this world. Adrenaline pumps round our bodies, our heartbeats increase and we see beauty everywhere.

It’s in this state we take the very best parts of ourselves, often of an idealised contra-sexual image that we all hold inside us and project them on to the other person. We see perfection in the other; we see not who they really are, but who we hope they will be. We seek out the good traits of the other. We find what we feel we need in what we see and feel of them.

It's here we do our romantic identification of ourselves with romantic ideals, of our belief that there is something magical in our relationship, in our belief in the omnipotence of love as something that will inexorably produce happiness.

Sadly, neither attraction nor romantic and erotic passion have much to do with love. They may be steps on the way…the start of the journey. That’s all.

The Internet has thrown a spanner in the works. I wrote about cyber love here. It was an interesting treatise where I concluded that it was possible, on the one hand, to develop deep psychic and soul connections, feel sexual and caring attraction to another OR be deceived entirely in a way that wouldn’t be possible given another’s physical presence. My conclusion was that it’s a very legitimate way to meet people if one quickly transforms the interaction into some real life experience. That means speaking on the telephone and going out and buying that air ticket if that’s what it takes. If you value and care about your relationship, you need to do it. This plays havoc with our conventional idea of the development of love relationships. So you’ve met someone here. You both feel deeply attracted to each other, but what if they don’t like the way you look or the “chemistry” doesn’t happen? This produces such deep anguish. If you’ve really taken the time to find out about another, both heard each other and if you both feel you truly care, then take the risk. If the photograph you’ve shared is you and not your grandson / granddaughter and you haven’t lied about your relationship status, what is there to fear really?

The anguish nevertheless is enormous. One might question oneself endlessly about how the other person might react to you in the flesh, so go do it. You’ll know soon enough. Nothing could be worse than getting into deep emotional waters here than to be faced with some profound emotional disappointment in six months or so.

There are a lot of people here seeking dysfunctional relationships in order to recover or heal from past relationships that they have not been able to face or wish to re-enact. There’s only one test. Will they buy that air ticket or would they rather pour out all their anxiety endlessly? You work it out.

Having said that, Internet relationships are high risk. It might not be the first best port of call if you’re sensitive and unable to recover quickly from emotional hurt and disappointment.

Then there’s “falling in love”. So what is that?

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 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 in order to deny that they have choice in whom 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.

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 is a conscious choice.

There’s something about which I’ve never written before and that is listening.

I've been going about buying a computer system in my current work contract for weeks now. I've been sold vapourware, some-ware and no-ware. Finally I thought I found the right system a couple of weeks ago. I called the firm that supplied it, sent them a specification of our needs and had a demonstration last Thursday.

A smart young guy with spiky hair showed up to demonstrate it. It was brilliant. We were able to relate it to everything we did. Why? Because the salesman listened. He used his ears and vocal chords in exactly the right proportions ... about 75% listening and 25% talking. He got our order after about six weeks of diligent research.

I thought 'what a thoroughly nice guy' and clearly he was a brilliant salesman. I liked him instinctively. After our meeting, I walked this young man back to his car as I was concerned about him having been clamped or fined for parking on the grass. We chatted on the way. He had a real interest in our work and what we were doing that was distinguished by his sincerity. Anyway, I guessed he was about 27-28 years of age. We walked to his car. It was a top of the range ... really top of the range, Mercedes Benz coupe. His listening skills had paid off.

That was a trite example but listening, really hearing someone else is so important ... making sure you hear what they have to say, understanding their own meanings on their own terms within their own frame of reference.

It's not so easy. It's an active not a passive act. So few do it; often after one has spoken a few words a person will disconnect and want to tell you what they feel rather than listen and hear you. Listening and hearing brings rewards beyond measure in human relationships. Being heard makes one feel valued and cared for; it's wonderful.

I feel strongly about this one. It's not being persuasive, forceful or right in human relationships that counts, but listening and hearing that is a cornerstone for success.

This next idea will perhaps make some of us feel a little uncomfortable. Is love between adults a human need? I have some real difficulties with the idea of seeing love as a need except in infants who need affection, comfort and physical closeness in order to become secure adults. I believe that most people I meet who admit to having difficulties loving are those deprived of care and unconditional love as children. If love is a need in adults then what is it in ourselves ... what need are we seeking to satisfy? My discomfort with this notion of "need" is that it might come from our trying to satisfy something that we feel to be missing from ourselves. It is this form of "need" that leads one to seek outside oneself to satisfy unmet needs, to avoid fear or emotional pain or solve personal problems. It's a behaviour deeply rooted in infancy I feel; it's how we might have looked to our mother to satisfy our hunger or provide us with warmth.

Looking to others to satisfy our needs is a dangerous business. It produces a paradox of dependency. Seeking to satisfy our need may feel like an attempt to gain control of our lives whereas we lose or go out of control by giving that power to someone else.

There's more about these infantile needs too. I feel that love is not about wanting to receive anything. 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 sound, 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.

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.

Let's talk about sex and money! They seem to cause more problems in relationships than anything else or do they?

I’m not sure they do.They become problems when a relationship is in trouble. There is an economic imbalance in most relationships. One person or the other will own more or earn more. It's inevitable. I don't know what it is but increasingly of late I have seen economic power abused in relationships in order that one person can feel they have control over another. The need for control is as unhealthy as the need for dependency. Those seeking control will often seek to assert the need for dependency in their correspondent in order to diminish them to nurture their own fragile need for self aggrandisement. Economic power games and love are totally incompatible. If you're faced with failing on the weaker end of this type of behaviour, I have only two words of advice. Walk away. If one is serious about making a commitment to someone else, then I believe one throws in one's lot with the other and sticks at it through hell and high water. Economic fortunes can be made and lost in an instant. Love can last till death and beyond. In love, I would wish to give all the help and support to my partner with absolutely no compromise and I would expect the same from them. Commitment takes enormous devotion, nothing less. It's up to partners in love to provide the nurturing environment in which love might flourish. It's up to both of you to establish your own emotional home in which you both might feel safe and secure. If you're worried or anxious that someone wants you for your assets or money then trust is absent. My advice is the same. Walk away.

Let's go to sex since that's much more fun. First, sex is very healthy and it really is a basic human need in the same way as food, drink and sleep are basic human needs. A sexually active and healthy person will be a more balanced, fulfilled and emotionally stable person. Abstinence and sexual repression are similar to sleep deprivation. Ultimately sleep deprivation drives us mad. Sexual deprivation might sublimate in any manner of perversions including abusive and dangerous behaviours.

Sex is not love. People may try and use sex to escape from past emotional pain. It doesn't work. It's simply another form of perversion. Sex can also be a minefield in love relationships. Where there is a fundamental imbalance in sexuality and sexual interest, or to put it more bluntly, when one partner is highly sexed and the other has little interest in sex then there will be a problem in their relationship. It's not an area in which sex therapy can help either. Intensity of sex drive is not something that is susceptible to therapy.

I do believe that sex in true love is like heaven on earth. I'm not prescriptive about when sex happens in a relationship but then I'm not promiscuous either. I know the difference between romantic and erotic passion and love. There is an immense difference. Sex might be an accelerant in intimacy, friendship and caring love for people with emotional maturity, good self-knowledge and understanding. It's very difficult to be naked with another for any real length of time and maintain pretence. Those who simply use others for physical gratification alone are instantly discernible from their post-coital behaviour. The lack of warmth and closeness is obvious. They got what they came for and now they are satisfied. They got what they wanted and in a way, then they left.

There's something that's totally wonderful for me about experiencing open emotional intimacy and the physical act of making uninhibited love. I'm not so young any more and it still feels as beautiful as a new soul's shining diamond. In love, there's a special beauty about lying together afterwards, soaked in perspiration, clinging tightly to each other, feeling bodies wrapped around one another tightly, hearing another's breath, smelling their hair, languishing in the delicious scent of bodies. I'd better stop; it feels like I’m getting carried away with that beautiful imagery. The spontaneity of loving, caring sex feels wonderful to me too.

So I feel the compatibility of sex drives in a loving partnership is important and as I've written before so is the compatibility of core beliefs, not only beliefs but also shared or complementary morals, values and deeply held feelings about the world.

For example, I have an absolutely passionate interest in personal development and growth, and also in learning. It says all sorts of things about me, how I might be in the world, and what matters to me most. I'm very open and enjoy communicating my feelings and emotions that I do with ease. Many people find these qualities attractive, even though some are very different in their outlook. To be happy in life, I need to be with someone who shares these same values and attitudes. It's not enough for another to be awed by them, then later, find that they require far more effort than they are prepared to invest. Awe is no substitute for intimate mutual respect and caring admiration for another. Awe can easily switch to fear and contempt.

The sharing of passions and interests is, I believe, a real bedrock of loving personal relationships but they do not have to be the same. I love human difference and difference may be an important point of growth. I'll go one step further; I love to celebrate human difference. If someone else was the facsimile copy of me, there would be no development, no life and no growth. I'd atrophy and die of boredom. The point is still the same in a way, since difference in order to be tolerable needs to fall within the ambit of my personal values. My values underpin who I am, and yours do too.

The two paragraphs above came from another piece here. I concluded with some other words and want to share those again.

Love for me is about the active interest and positive participation in the life of another, cherishing who they are for what they are, accepting their being without exception, valuing their well-being, wanting and enjoying them, sharing everything including their fear, shame, guilt, anger and sadness.

That was well worth the repetition.

There's something about pain I want to say. It's more than using some semblance of love to try and escape from past pain. I've written about that before. I've said enough already.

The journey itself into love may be painful. There's some phrase that I always reinterpret here to suit my own purpose. It goes something like "Eros's arrow strikes beyond love's deepest wound". This to me has a special meaning, it means that in moving to love one travels psychically past the deepest hurt one has ever felt, that one is able to know and feel that past pain and be at one with it. It's an act of personal resolution without which love is not possible. Moving to love requires a special understanding too because, since none of us are perfect, love has an uncanny knack of being able to find those unresolved hurting bits. The deeper the love, the bigger the pieces of clutter love may unearth, so listen to your heart and hear its lessons with compassion and tenderness.

There's the "T" word. It's trust. It's one word I write about all the time as being a natural constituent of love. I'm going to throw the cat among the pigeons here and say that I do not entirely trust the "trust" word. There's another phrase and again I know not where it comes from, only that it ingrained itself in my heart. It goes, ""In all trust is the seed of betrayal." Trust is something without which betrayal would not be possible. Trust and betrayal are in a way natural opposites. The definition of trust is something like 'a belief in the honest competence of another’. In that way, it's a quality one might ascribe to one's accountant. I've always felt that love subsumes the trust word, that love brings with it qualities of forbearance, acceptance and forgiveness that have no basis in trust alone. Also I value loyalty, fidelity and faithfulness that are old-fashioned concepts with little relation to trust. I value openness, directness and honesty too. Of those qualities, only honesty is implied by trust.

The trust police are out there I know. I've met one or two of them. I let my instincts guide who I trust but if they let me down, I do not see it as my problem but theirs. Trusting another is empowering and affirming of them too. It brings out the best in people. I don’t much care for the trust police. Suspicion is their middle name. To them an act of oversight or omission is a distrustful act. Their distrust is a way of indulging their judgemental and controlling natures. Their existence forces me to choose love over trust every time. This extends to all my day-to-day dealings in the world.

I'm almost done. I'm going to slip an extra thought in before I go. The renowned psychologist, Eric Berne, and others talk about self- actualisation as being a state in which one's "inner child" is allowed to be expressive and free. One's childlike self, the part of you which can see any number of things eclipsed by the conditioning of adulthood, is a real source of joy. It has a true appreciation of nature. It can see the beauty of a storm or a flower petal. My inner child seems to be alive, well and running free - pranking, joking, playing and smiling on the world. My hope for true love in others is that it is able to liberate the inner child, to set us free from the shackles of materialism and cynicism to which we are conditioned in adult life.

Finally I wanted to say I still believe all of this can be achieved within a monogamous loving relationship. I've said what I feel to be the desirable qualities of those elsewhere. I still live in hope.

So what's mental illness?

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2009-03-03T19:55:38+00:00

I wrote a comment on a good friend’s blog this morning about which I felt deeply uncomfortable at the time. I described heroin addiction as a mental illness. It’s very unlike me to apply that label to anyone, and having left the comment it made me feel very uncomfortable that I’d done so.

My uneasiness with the “mentally ill” label comes from a host of factors, from work and life experience too.

First, the diagnosis of mental illness is made from a consideration of symptoms rather than its underlying physiological cause. It’s a medical oxymoron. Physicians may surmise the reasons for its biological cause or for those biochemical reactions that underlie the condition, and seek to make pharmaceutical interventions that are by and large designed to alleviate the symptoms of the illness rather than address its cause or provide a cure. Hence the administration of drugs will be seen as an effective way of “managing the condition”.

My qualms about the diagnosis of mental illness go much further than the aetiological inexactitude in discerning its cause. I spent some time working in mental health and have, like most of us, encountered the experience of so-called “mental illness” in close friends and family.

Still I don’t know what mental illness is, that is not to deny the reality of the condition. I’m not sure if there is any benefit in debating whether its cause is nature, nurture, biochemical or neurological predisposition, genes, DNA, the world we inhabit or something else. Perhaps it might be all of those. I simply don’t know, and I find it a form of naïve arrogance when someone claims the ascendancy of one cause over others.

There’s a whole new craze on the block too, and this is diagnosing people as suffering from “personality disorders”. Personality disorders to me from reading the psychiatrist’s diagnostic criteria listed in the DSM handbook seem to be like the infinite rearrangement, combination and permutation of all other forms of disorder as defined by their symptoms, then calling the disorder something else. It might be safe to say, they are a compound disorder. Depression is often an underlying (and very real) condition too. More than anything I’m left wondering, since more often than not these disorders are susceptible to being treated successfully by cognitive behavioural therapy (or variants thereof) if they aren’t frequently a psychic internalisation of the crazy world we live in.

I’m going to simplify this account somewhat to make it accessible to the reader. One of my teachers, R. D. Laing, Ronnie to me, argued “those labelled as schizophrenics, suffered from ontological insecurity, a lack of faith in their own and others' reality which led them to create false self systems to fend off psychological and emotional catastrophe”.

Ronnie had conducted an experiment at a Glasgow psychiatric hospital back in the nineteen fifties. He put aside a room that I believe he called the “rumpus room” and there he engaged with patients diagnosed as schizophrenic as if they were whole, reasonable and reasoning, feeling people with their own story to tell. Many people labelled as schizophrenics appeared to recover, and were subsequently discharged. The experiment was far from a success, since those people who had appeared to recover were subsequently readmitted, their “schizophrenic” condition having recurred. But Laing worked on and posited a theory of mental illness that was derived from the living interactions of the sufferer with their families which, although misinterpreted by the media, was not saying that families cause madness! Ronnie’s principal thesis was that madness is not necessarily a breakdown, but may represent, potentially, a breakthrough into a more authentic way of being (i.e. that it is a natural healing process with a beginning, middle, and end) versus the normal state of alienation to which the majority of us have succumbed.

It was no coincidence that when I first met Ronnie I was chairman of a mental health project that was about rehabilitating those diagnosed as schizophrenic back into the community following periods of incarceration in mental institutions of up to 25 years. I was a “hands-on” sort of chairman and I met and talked with these people, and became their advocate too. Many were brilliant albeit in strange ways. One man I met was able to navigate from any named street in London to any other by bus and on foot. One day, we took our little band of crazy folk onto one of those outdoor management challenge days, the sort where you have to cross a river with very limited means. There they decided to vie against the top management team from Marks and Spencer who were also doing it as a teambuilding and creative thinking exercise. No contest! Even though they came up with the most bizarre solutions, our crazy team won hands down. I was so proud of them! The saddest part of that time was that many of our residents, although they got better, suffered from Tardive Dyskinesia, a fatal degeneration of the central nervous system caused by psychotropic drugs like chlorpromazine.

I could write a book on what I feel about this, but I’ll cut my story short with one more account of a very close personal friend of mine who had been diagnosed as suffering from bipolar disorder. Like me, he had been an abused child. He had also chosen to study psychotherapy. A short while into his studies, he realised suddenly he had suppressed all of himself, denied his abilities, and he was brilliant, in order to fit in with what had been a high-achieving life.

His life fell a long way short of what he was able to be or able to do. The pain of his abuse to which he hadn’t come to terms was massive. His close personal relationships were a mess. I liked this man a lot. I lived in London when I met him and often we would sit up to the middle of the night discussing everything…quantum mechanics, religion, psychology, creation theories…just everything. We’d met oddly in the university café, where he was exclaiming to a friend, “Who said ‘All property is theft?’ ”. “Proudhon,” I replied. Most people would have said Marx. But it’s the French anarchist, Proudhon.

What happened to my friend is that when psychotherapy let off the brakes on his brilliance, he went into hyper-drive. Suddenly he wanted to feel, express, think and engage with all those parts of himself he'd denied. He read books by the busload staying up often till late at night. He would go and buy a peach or an apple at the fruit stand in the morning, and come back and describe it as the most beautiful thing he had ever eaten. He had shut down all of his senses in order to conform with the world in which he found himself. His great big, loving, creative, bright personality had closed itself down in order to navigate the tram tracks of what others said was right and legitimate to experience.

He was often a bit bonkers and spoke in odd ways, but I felt no ill of him as so often his thoughts were brilliantly inspired and creative. He spoke in metaphors that I was able to understand.

He tried so many ways to escape or take a rest from his big corporate job, but those who wouldn’t take responsibility put up a fight. To cut a long story short, an employee and a shrink had him detained compulsorily in a mental hospital under the UK mental health act.

He was diagnosed as bipolar with manic psychosis. His world caved in. I stuck by him. I didn’t believe the diagnosis. But he had four episodes of whatever it was over four years. The whole mental health squad bore down on him, telling him he was mentally ill. Depressed? He felt very depressed about what was happening to him.

Over and over again, people from the mental health establishment reinforced his so-called illness. Every action or every feeling he described to them was interpreted in terms of mental illness culture. He was told to expect to be hospitalised every six months for the rest of his life. He sank into deep depression at the thought, which was taken to validate his illness.

So what happened to him? He lived on. But one day he decided to reject the diagnosis and become “normal” again. He never had a recurrence of his so-called illness, but he did lose his amazing creativity, spark and his flair for life. His being threatened others in ways they could not bear, so he decided to “fit in”. He’s never been “mentally ill” since. He does the odd piece of big commercial work these days. His life now is one of perpetual self-denial and pleasing others.

I’m not sure I can put that down to anything. I simply don’t know about mental illness. One day I may say more of what I believe, but that in itself might be considered mad.

Making Love Relationships - Part 2 - Other types of love

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-05-06T18:04:00+01:00

My motivation for going on this exploration of love was about discovering how to do a better sort of love. When I began this journey it was mainly for my own benefit.

I may have been partly successful in identifying some of the prototypical characteristics that may be found in loving, healthy, enduring and satisfying relationships and some of the pitfalls as well.

Academic psychologists have identified several common groupings of love types and styles. I suspect that in truth there is infinite variation, but there seem to be a number that are recurrent and common-place, that constitute most of the prototypical types of love or love styles in western society.

For the sake of completeness, I am summarising some of the other more common variant love types and styles described by psychologists, here:

Storge

The constructed type of storgic love is characterised by rapport, self-revelation, interdependency, and mutual need fulfilment.

Storgic lovers are essentially good friends who have grown in intimacy through close association, with an unquestioned assumption that their relationship will be permanent and that they will find a way to deal with their problems that causes them minimum pain. A storgic lover does not fantasise finding some other, perhaps unknown but ideal, lover in the future and abandoning the storgic partner. It never occurs to extreme storgic types that a romantic 'knight on a white horse" or "femme fatale" will appear at some future time to solve their problems. It is more likely that even if this should occur to the storgic lover, he/she would need the storgic partner around to discuss the romantic lover, to give advice, and to share the joys of discovery.

The storgic lover is not a person bored by routine home activity, but is more likely to find it comfortable and relaxing. Storgic lovers are not constantly on the search for new love experiences; rather they enjoy the security of being able to predict each other's responses to their behaviours.

If storgic lovers should break up, they would probably remain close and caring friends, perhaps continue corresponding with one another and actively caring about one another.

Physical intimacy, coitus, and the appreciation of their partners as sexual persons usually come relatively late in a storgic relationship, are accepted comfortably and joyously when they do appear on the scene, and are thus satisfying. Pure storgic types are extremely unlikely to "keep an eye out" for new or more romantic partners.

Temporary separations are not great problems to storgic lovers. Their mutual trust is such that separations are viewed as necessary inconveniences, needed diversions or opportunities for personal growth that will either improve or at least not damage their relationship.

The storgic lover does not "fall in love" in the way that other types of lovers do. The storgic type is more likely to recognise that he/she has been in love for some time without realising it earlier. As a result, anniversaries, birthdays, Valentine's day and the like occasions are not important to them and may even be forgotten or overshadowed by other matters.

In many ways storgic lovers resemble siblings in their understanding of the love relationship. If they fight and argue, it is not an indication that they do no love each other. They are likely to feel that when their love has matured it will be permanent and that they cannot replace their relationship with each other any more than they can replace those that they have with siblings or with parents.

Agape

An agapic lover is forgiving. This kind of love typically assumes that when the loved one causes pain to himself or herself or to someone else, that he or she is acting in ignorance, innocent error, or is the victim of forces not originating in the love -object's personality.

A male agapic lover might, for example, help his female love object arrange an abortion if she became pregnant by someone else during their love affair. Or he might easily love and accept a child conceived by some other man with deep concern for the anguish caused to his loved one and with tender affection for the child. An agapic lover would be more likely to help his or her love object to get medical attention for a venereal disease contracted from someone else during their love affair than to be angry or punitive towards the love object for having a sexual relationship with another.

Agapic persons never "fall in love." Their love for others is always available and they are simply given the opportunity by some of their love objects to show their love to a greater extent than they are by others. An agapic lover cares enough about his/her love object's happiness to understand and give up the loved one if that would seem to give him or her a greater chance for happiness elsewhere.

An agapic lover is patient with the behaviours of his or her love object to an extent that seems to border on masochism. The ideal agapic lover would wait indefinitely for a love object to be released from prison or from a mental hospital, would tolerate the behaviours of an alcoholic or drug-addicted spouse, and would be willing to live with a partner who was engaging in illegal or immoral activities, even though he/she personally disapproved of such behaviours. The agapic lover is always supportive of his/her partner.

Agapic love may be most stable when both partners are agapic. The problems that may arise might involve the obvious drawbacks of self-sacrifice and self-denial. It has the benefits of altruism and giving. A major issue for agapic lovers may also arise if the giving and receiving goes strongly out of balance that seems to be a strong possibility.

Mania

This type of love is obsessed, uncontrolled, dependent and intense in every respect.

The constructed ideal of this type of lover is obsessed with his or her love object. A manic lover may be unable to sleep, eat, or even think logically around the loved one. The manic lover has peaks of excitement, but also depths of depression, with very few periods without a high or low.

This type of lover is jealous to an extent that might be described as irrational. A manic lover cannot tolerate loss of contact with a love object, even for short periods of time, and is distressed by a lack of the lover's presence or anticipated interaction. A manic lover is typically crushed by real or fancied rejection, possibly to the point of suicidal ideation.

The manic lover often try to manipulate the behaviours or feelings of the loved one, but because he or she seems to be bereft of logic, often succeeds only in looking foolish in his or her own eyes. For example, a manic lover may tell their loved one that they should spend a few days apart to think objectively about their relationship, and then go into a state of panic because the partner cannot be located during that period. Manic lovers tend not to tolerate separation well. During periods of separation, the manic lover may experience high levels of anxiety that they may project back onto their loved one holding them responsible or to blame for the anxious discomfort they are feeling. Frequently this will push the relationship into crisis that in the manic lover's view will have been caused by the behaviour of the other rather than by their own anxiety.

The manic lover has a tendency to review his or her abortive love affairs and speculate about what when wrong that terminated them. They will commonly extend this practice to reviewing the past love affairs of their partners in the same way.

Manic lovers frequently have sexual problems as well as problems in handling other forms of intimate interaction. Because of their high level or anxiety, manic lovers might be expected to have problems related to anxiety, such as vaginismus, difficulties in attaining orgasm or premature ejaculation.

Mania is probably associated with low self-esteem and a poor self-concept. Because of this, manic persons are typically not attractive to persons who have good self-concepts and high self-esteem. They become burdensome to more self-sufficient others. If they are rejected by them, their anxieties intensify, making them even less attractive.

It is possible to confuse a manic lover with an erotic lover in the early stages of a relationship since the manic lover will be intensely sexual and romantic. What distinguishes the manic lover is one's experience of them; relationships are like a roller-coaster. They soar up then crash down again frequently within very short time cycles.

Mania is intense, frequently alternating between ecstasy and agony or joy and tragedy. Manic love, when strongly felt, invariably does not end well and is not likely to support the development or maintenance of any long-term stable relationship.

Pragma

The ideal constructed type identified as pragma is that of a person who is unable to invest love in "unworthy" love objects.

With this style, love is a shopping list of attributes. Pragma lovers are often more concerned with structural issues such as wealth, home and lifestyles rather than giving full consideration to their partner as a loving, feeling person.

The pragmatic lover is keenly aware of the comparison level for alternatives that he or she has. Pragmatic lovers are inclined to look realistically a their own assets, decide on their "market value" and set off to get the best possible "deal" in their partners. Once the "deal" is made, the pragmatic lover remains loyal and faithful and defines his or her status as "in love" because the loved one is a "good bargain." Should the assets of either partner change, the pragmatic lover may feel her or his contract has been violated, and may begin to search for another partner.

A pragmatic lover typically assists the loved one to fulfil his or her potentials; for example, such a lover might make sure the love object finishes school, asks for deserved promotions, gets the attention or that he or she "deserves" from physicians, stockbrokers, or employers.

Typically, a pragmatic lover maximises his or her own assets before "putting them on the market." A male pragma may decide not to become involved with any females until he has £500,000 in the bank, or has gone through psychoanalysis, or has a secure job, or has assured himself by reading enough or consulting experts to be sure he is sexually skilful, or the like. A sterile or impotent pragmatic lover may deliberately seek out a widow or widower with children if he or she wants a family.

Once a prospect is in sight, the prototypical pragmatic lover might check out future in-laws and friends systematically, find out if the couple's rhesus blood factors are compatible, and obtain assurance that there is a minimal probability of hereditary defects showing up in their mutual children and so forth.

Pragmatic persons break up or divorce or stay married for practical reasons. Divorce may actually be planned for some future date. For example, pragmatic partners may decide to finish school, to get a different job at another location, to put their youngest child through high school, or to reach some other such goal or state before they get divorced.

Pragma always looks at things in context and know his or her basic values, scaling everything by them. (e.g. if sex life is mediocre, pragma may consult a sex counsellor, but is more likely to assign sexual activity a low value in his or her value system and simply accept its mediocrity. "After all, he is a good provider, and being orgasmic isn't all that important." "She is a good mother, and I can get by on coitus once a week without getting too tense.")

While other types may have spontaneous orgasms or masturbate just from thoughts of the beloved, pragma probably learns to recognise sexual tension and relieve it when necessary for sleep or comfort (if sex is not devalued).

Pragma thinks ahead about family size (an probably even about what sex the children will be). If pragma is a schoolteacher, he or she may plan an October/November conception so the baby will arrive during vacation.

Ludus

The ideal constructed type of a ludic lover is that of a person who 'plays' love affairs as he or she plays games or puzzles — to win, to get the greatest rewards for the least cost.

A ludic lover hates dependency, either in himself/herself or in others. This type shies away from commitment of any sort (does not like lovers to take him or her for granted). The ludic lover enjoys strategies, and may keep two or three or even four lovers "on the string" at one time. A ludic lover may even create a fictional lover to discourage a real one's hopes for a permanent relationship. He or she avoids long range plans, is careful not to date the same person often enough to create the illusion of a stable relationship. A ludic lover would rather find a new sex partner than to work out sexual problems with an old one. And yet, he or she may suddenly show up for a replay, even years later, with birthday flowers, a bottle of a favourite wine, a sentimental Valentine, or a record of a favourite song, and vanish just as suddenly. A ludic lover usually enjoys love affairs, and hence rarely regrets them unless the threat of commitment or dependency becomes too great.

Dates with a ludic person are never dull, even though they may not happen with great regularity. He or she is never possessive or jealous. The ludic lover usually has good self-esteem and usually is assured of current success in love as well as most other areas. Unlike a pragmatic lover, a ludic lover never reveals all of himself or herself nor demands such revelation by partners.

Ludic lovers are not likely to be very sophisticated sexually. As a rule, they have only one sexual routine; if the sex partner is not pleased by the ludic lover's sexual pattern, then the ludic one simply finds another partner rather than attempting to improve an unsatisfying relationship. If she does not like his sexual behaviour, the ludic man moves on to someone who does; if he does not get an erection or bring her to orgasm on his own (with no help for her) the ludic woman looks for a man who will.

Sex is self-centred and may be exploitative rather than symbolic of a relationship. A ludic lover does not listen to (or take time for) "feedback" that suggests commitment, which is "scary." A ludic lover may not even want to be his or her partner's best sex partner because that might necessitate commitment or dependency that would be "awful." Physical appearance of the partner is less important than other qualities, such as self-sufficiency and lack of demanding behaviour, to ludic persons.

Ludic lovers within relationships may be intensely competitive. Everything is a game and winning the game is very important to them. Game-playing might extend to normal domestic activities such as competing over who takes the "best" telephone messages. With every winner there must be a loser and being a loser all the time is not sustaining emotionally. For this and other reasons, relationships with ludic persons, whilst they might be enjoyable and fun in the short term are unlikely to be enduring.

Acknowledgements

Universities of Yale, Illinois, Chicago and the College of Liberal Arts, CA, and Sternberg, Weis et al (2006) and Sternberg, Barnes et al (1988).

September 2007

Making Love Relationships - Part 1

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-05-06T17:56:00+01:00

When I first started writing my thoughts on love, I was reflecting on some emotions, on the things that might happen to us when we move towards love, and on a better type of loving too.

But I had some underlying concerns about what really happens when we do loving relationships. I was very happy with my feelings about real or true love being unconditional giving, I still am. Then I have some concerns about it still, although these are more about the world in which we live rather than those feelings themselves.

I was not really sure how to start talking about loving relationships, about the vocabulary to use so I've synthesised and combined bits from here, there and everywhere to give the words a broader and better fit to my own feelings, thoughts and beliefs.

I have drawn on a lot of material that can be demonstrated to be generalisable by and large, although there are many exceptions, but there are some patterns too that are helpful to understand.

One word of warning, if you are expecting a cookbook of "how to" ideas, better to buy a recipe book then read this as I don't believe such books work.

I believe there may be a set of characteristics, of “love components", that are perhaps common to most relationships.

I'll talk about those here, as well as some of the phases of early development stages in love relationships and the events that might be expected to take place within them.

I want to break away from most of what has been written before in that I’d like to allow for unending growth possibilities in love. Most empiricists and other psychologists would simply ascribe a sort of structural determinism that seeks to impose a form of limiting rationality on what is, in my view, entirely subjective, intuitive and unbounded in its reality and possibilities.

To join things up with other aspects of our social world, I’m moving to a world where I see intuition, emotions, feelings, consciousness and unconsciousness as being those phenomena that influence our worlds of love relationships, rather than some pseudo-scientific rationality that might be imposed on it by experts.

This is very much a work-in-progress. In part, it draws on published material by Robert Sternberg (et al), at least for its outline framework. I do have a sense that Sternberg may be moving away from being the hero of empiricists to someone who might take a similar position to me. I don’t know. I sense that where we might differ is that he still tends to see love as stories that inhabit our unconscious minds which only he and experts like him might interpret (A latent determinist who acknowledges that love is ultimately a subjective construct) whereas I believe that the way to achieve an enduring love is to move to a place where love is synonymous with conscious emotions, accessible intuition, personal responsibility and freedom.

In his book "Love is a story" (OUP 1998), Sternberg breaks away from the traditionalists. He acknowledges that love functions at the intuitive rather than rational levels and that our experience plays a part in how we love too. He recognises that psychotherapists have failed to understand the underlying realities of our relationships. Psychotherapists have tended to focus mainly on the manifestation of difficulties (symptoms) in relationships, rather than the underlying reality of our relationships that may give rise to those difficulties.

The problem that I have with Sternberg's work thereafter is that he attempts to break down love into a set of narrative systems containing a series of presuppositions that people bring to relationships of which they are (largely) unconscious. After this he sets out his expert analysis of twenty-five different types of narrative with his view on their interpretation and their capability of adaptation.

I’m not totally sure about how unconscious these stories are or for that matter, whether his work is a novel thought that has been enlarged to the proportions of a theory. I do agree with his thoughts about subjectivity and intuition, however, and that’s a very important leap forward.

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 hearts 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 hearts 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 simply write a story, just 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; a story 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 might be amazed about what they might tell us both about each other!

The components of loving relationships

These are the conventional groupings of love components originally proposed by Robert Sternberg:

Erotic Passion

This is the stuff of physical attraction. It's the racing heartbeat, sexual desire, erotic excitation and a physiological activation that feels great. It's like being on drugs. The best sort of drugs as masses of endorphins course around our bodies and make us feel high!

Romantic Passion

This is a dimension that differs between cultures but for us it is a process of what I might call positive idealised projection. Here we take the very best parts of ourselves, often of the idealised contrasexual image that we all hold inside us and project them on to the other person. We see perfection in the other; we see not who they really are, but who we hope they will be. We seek out the good traits of the other. We find what we feel we need in what we see and feel of them.

It's here we do our romantic identification of ourselves with romantic ideals (cultural myths), of our belief that there is something magical in our relationship, in our belief in the omnipotence of love as something that will inexorably produce happiness.

Intimacy

Intimacy is truly wonderful. (See, I'm a love enthusiast really!) This is the place of our special bond in an affective love union: It's where affective support, understanding, communication, trust, self-revelations, security, comfort and ease with one's partner lives.

My next “component” is where I see the possibility of deep and lasting love residing (or not, as it's simply a conscious choice and may be thought too difficult by many):

Companionate Consummate Giving Love

In part, this is the place of the unconditional love that I wrote about in the "love and sex" blog. There I focused on one dimension only (Unconditional giving love) to distinguish love from sex. Here I would like to expand our possibilities of love to include all four dimensions of deep friendship, its passionate components (including the expression and satisfaction of sexual desire), unconditional giving love, intimacy, as well as the possibility of making a commitment to maintain this love.

This almost looks like a place of emotional utopia to me, but who would not wish for it? Perhaps by understanding our stories and allowing their past pain and despair to heal, of exposing our consciousness, and knowing what it is for which we strive, we might write this new love story for ourselves. I believe this is a conscious choice. There is nothing intrinsic, mystical, innate or god-given here; it's simply a choice. But don't get me wrong, it’s not easy!

Love is not necessarily something that happens exclusively inside of us as individuals. It is that too, but our ideas about love come from our belief systems, our religions, our cultural myths and social norms, from politicians, corporations, from the media, from literature and from Hollywood. In fact, our notions about love come from all those beliefs and ideas that uphold our social world. They come from what I have collectively called our consciousness. It is consciousness that embraces and informs all of our ideas about love and that lives both within us and outside us too.

In a television interview after his engagement to Princess Diana was announced, Prince Charles was asked if the couple was in love. Diana responded for him quickly and enthusiastically. "Of course," she said with a warm smile. Charles added, under his breath, "Whatever 'in love' means". Charles's uncertainty is not that surprising since love means many different things to different people. Ultimately love is whatever we choose it to be. We do have that freedom. But make no mistake, it takes real courage to stand up for the love we want, for the love that is most satisfying, healthy and enduring, since it may mean flying in the face of all that our culture holds to be valuable.

Otherwise there are no given truths about love, no deeper meaning that’s accessible only to psychologists or anyone else. There is biology. There are the biological drives to mate, reproduce and parent but what I am looking for here is an emotional state that might promote our health and wellbeing that includes our loved ones and our families; A healthy loving positive environment is also conducive to the development and growth of secure, confident people.

My own interest is in exploring and discovering the emotions and behaviours that might produce the healthiest, enduring and most satisfying ways of being. There is no deep truth to uncover; our truth is what we make it. We have freedom of choice and the ability to take responsibility for ourselves (albeit that many find that difficult), to determine our own lives in ways that they may serve us and others around us best.

Going back to the piece on love and sex, here’s what I wrote about real / true love there:

"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’s 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."

That was part of the story, but I do wish to allow for the expression and satisfaction of sexual desire, of growing our affectionate bonds of understanding and intimacy and building deep friendship here too. My main aim of the love and sex piece was to show that love and sex are different and to talk about how we might build a solid emotional foundation where real love might develop.

All relationships need some aspect of friendship to survive, although some unhealthy relationships may exhibit marginal friendship only (or none at all). But this is a new place of deep friendship and deep possibilities for me, for the most wondrous possibilities.

Sternberg talks about "commitment" being a phase of a relationship. I want to stay away from phases that prescribe determined courses of relationships in all but one and that is the first phase, the romantic phase. I'll re-define commitment as an event or activity that takes place somewhere past the end of the romantic phase but I’m not going to set out anything beyond that.

The romantic phase

This might be called the fireworks phase! It's a really wonderful phase. There's a massive growth in Erotic Passion, which according to empiricists, plateaus at the end of this phase although it usually continues for a number of years at the plateau level then diminishes. Its continuance at a level that is satisfying to the people in a relationship may continue if the relationship is to survive the longer term.

Also Romantic Passion soars up like a rocket. Everything is good, positive even euphoric during this phase. We see a lot of perfection around that is often just a romantic illusion.

One should not pour scorn upon this phase, it’s a wonderful, exciting (and for some, an addictive) experience and I believe that it helps us build up the endurance for the life challenges that follow, and they always do.

There are many variant or deviant endings (the sexual conquest, romance addiction or serial repetition are examples.) that can occur either within or after this phase. Nothing here is cast in stone.

Interestingly enough and based on considerable empirical evidence, the typical duration of the romantic phase is about six months.

I believe we might make another inference here though: Where there has been strong development of Intimacy, the relationship may move towards commitment, but the point of outward commitment is certainly not always at six months or thereabouts, but some commitment, even if it is just purely an emotional commitment, is needed to carry the relationship forward at the point where the romantic phase ends.

Two events will normally occur after the romantic phase although it is very possible that they may happen during this phase in part, but not completely.

The first event is relationship "testing". This is the part where the partners ask, "Is this person really the one for me?" "Do we want the same things of our lives?" "Will being with this person be someone that I can endure and who contributes to the life I want, as well as my everyday life now?" "Could I really live with this person?" "Do we understand each other well enough to make a commitment?" "Can I tolerate this person's impulsive / overly measured behaviour?" "Can I trust this person with the knowledge of my true situation?" "Will this person support me in my goals and desires for my life?"

Testing generally happens after the romantic phase has ended. It's the bump back down to reality. It's here that we start to see the person as the human being they really are. Our bubble of euphoric bliss bursts and gets deflated. In the normal course of relationship development, it's the first event to be a make-or-break point and it's one of the most important decision points in a relationship.

One thing I would say though is that studies show that Romantic Passion continues to grow through this phase and beyond for some years so testing is not inconsistent with maintaining our romantic ideals in the relationship.

Commitment

The next event is about "commitment".

Commitment is a real place of struggle. It's often talked about as the "power struggle phase" or the "growth phase". I prefer the latter term but there is a real power struggle here too.

It's where partners negotiate the balance of power within a relationship, the style of that power whether it's democratic, consensual or autocratic.

It has to happen so better do it consciously rather than fight!

It's also here that personal boundaries are set down and negotiated as well as our need for personal space and all our other emotional and personal needs. Forget the marriage contract, as it is here where the emotional agreement will be reached that will form the basis of any companionate or conjugal bond.

The commitment process need not be hostile. For example, one might decide to adopt a gentler consensual decision-making style but inevitably there will be some tension as each partner sets out his or her needs and wants. Personally I don't enjoy hostility, antagonisms and antipathy and I'm sure that there are constructive ways of agreeing personal needs in the form of making and discussing personal requests of each other without trampling on each other's feelings. Ultimately each partner will need to feel comfortable with the agreement, if an agreement is to be reached and growth or security in love is to follow. Where power plays or games strategies are adopted to gain biased benefit for one partner or the other, resentment may follow close thereafter.

One last and very powerful thought: there is no doubt that the passions of romance and eroticism may diminish over time, but it is my belief that they should be enjoyed to the full for as long as they endure (and as long as possible!) A loving sexuality is very healthy. In fact, I believe it is a prerequisite of developing and maintaining emotional and mental health. It is not, however, a substitute for love. There is something more that may reward all our pain, struggles, hurt and the apparent transience of these passions. I believe that deep friendship, intimate and unconditional giving love, has an amazing power to grow and develop indefinitely and infinitely during our lifetimes. For me, that is what makes love worthwhile. I know of nothing else in life that is more desirable, worthwhile or beautiful.

September 2007

Love - Why bother?

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-05-07T00:00:00+01:00

I shall probably talk about love, love relationships and some sort of commitment or conjugal bond (like marriage or loving intimate committed cohabitation) as if they were synonymous here. I am doing this as I believe that some committed relationship is a natural progression of love between two people. I am not sure that I can take a clear value position on what is possible and I can only express my feelings and beliefs about what I personally find desirable and attractive.

So are love and love relationships, the new blue light case of the age? There is a welter of statistical data that suggests that love and commitment are in a state of terminal decline if one looks at love through a lens of marital outcomes. Divorce rates have soared. In the USA, more than 50% of marriages end in divorce. In the UK, the numbers are very similar. A Rutgers University survey reported that a mere 38 per cent of Americans who are married describe themselves as actually being happy in that state. If one includes married and unmarried people in relationships, the numbers do not improve by the inclusion of committed cohabiters, they get worse.

I read a book recently by a woman called Laura Kipnis called "Against Love: A Polemic". Ms. Kipnis is a professor in media studies at an American university. She systematically destroyed any notion of love and marriage in that book although I did not feel it was so revealing, nor so clever. A real concern I had was that she did not even see the pressures on love: the idea that it may be blown up as the universal answer for everything, that people entering marriage may believe that love is all and the cure to all ills, that our problems about love and marriage might be the result of all the romantic images our culture pushes at us minute-by-minute, day-after-day. She also moots that adulterers are quasi-utopian rebels who might liberate us all! Really?

Kipnis offers nothing in place of love other than debasement. One comes away with a feeling that all she feels about is sex and that the world might be free and happy as a copulating tribe of monkeys. I would hate to point out to Ms Kipnis that Gibbon monkeys are monogamous.

In all of the anti-love and marriage material I read before writing this, Kipnis's book was the worst. It looks and sounds radical and even alludes to Karl Marx. I have some respect for Marx whose work is often trotted out like some simplistic utopian nonsense but I do believe he was a very great philosopher too. There is something in the core of Marx like a belief that the value of people means little or nothing without the respect of other human beings and that this is needed in order for people to attain their full expression. In many ways, I have much time for Marx, but then, unusually, my education required that I read his books also. Very few people have.

To use the words of Betty Friedan, Kipnis makes marriage look like a concentration camp. But I don't just want to shoot her down in flames either as she makes some very valid points.

She does describe a notion of people living together in marriage becoming rule-bound, of becoming drowned in a sea of petty dictatorship and household tyranny. I have seen it. I suspect we all have. There are rules for loading the dishwasher, not dropping socks on the floor, leaving the bathroom door open; the meaningless domestic drudgery and dross of day-to-day existence becomes everything. We enter marriage feeling love, passion and "till death us do part". So why the problems and what changes?

Ms Kipnis should have an inkling; after all she is a widely published author and a professor of media studies. Love is not merely an emotion that exists inside us. 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 are upheld by our families, our friends, the media, art and literature, politicians, churches and corporations as well as our experience. Some of these institutions may be failing us.

There are strong vested business interests in love, marital and sexual difficulties too, like the pornography trade, Viagra, therapy, alcohol and drugs industries. The pornography trade worldwide is massive! It is said to generate revenues of more than US $60 billion annually and makes up 12% of all internet content. How sad is that?

In the UK, the Office of National Statistics cites couples' high expectations as the reason for an upswing in divorce. But are high expectations really such a bad thing? Personally I would encourage them. I believe that we ought to expect more and better from many areas of our lives. In some ways, marriage might be used as a vehicle, a power-based strategy for enforcing compliance within a society riddled with infinite petty rules, meaningless and violent politics and the seemingly hateful piety of many religions. It might be these social and political dimensions of marriage that are stultifying, emotionally deadening and harmful.

I do believe there is hope for deep loving monogamous relationships. I have thought a lot about whether I really believe lasting, enduring, satisfying love relationships are possible. I have thought deeply about people I have known whom I know have emotionally successful relationships. I have read some academic research too about what factors tend to be present in relationships that endure and succeed. I have some of my own feelings and beliefs too that come mainly from experiencing past pain, difficulties and reflecting on my past relationships. I know I now have the capacity for what I believe to be a better sort of love. But I am flawed and fallible and very far from perfect but I have learned many lessons too.

Here I will talk about consciousness to mean the individual psyche. I do believe there is another dimension of consciousness of which we are all a part, a kind of collective psyche or social consciousness. I have touched on the notion of collective consciousness before and I believe it to be the ultimate expression of the connectedness of humankind and its relation to its world. In common with Marx, I believe that people both make, form part of and are influenced and made by this social dimension of consciousness.

Also I believe that individual consciousness is accessible to us all and that by bringing our individual consciousness into focus we might choose to change or enhance our lives. This self-understanding is not something that many practice; many people I meet are almost totally unconscious. Their world is one where things happen to them, they are not responsible, and life is "just like that". They have no control over their existence since they have done little or nothing to understand anything of what they feel, how they behave or how they perceive or understand.

But my real point here is that for us to feel satisfied in love we first have to understand the view of love we carry around in ourselves. We all have views, feelings and our own set of metaphors (implicit subjective stories) about love. Until we understand what they are, we are unable to be satisfied with love as we need to understand what we are seeking and what will make us happy. It's an obvious truism, but the surprise for me is always the number of people who are simply unable to articulate their beliefs about love.

To be aware and be able to be a fully functioning loving person requires that we face up to past pain. I have written about this elsewhere in a blog post entitled "love and sex" but it's so important I am going to repeat it here:

"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... 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…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."

Going on to another of the points I seem to have made inadvertently already by the inclusion of this quote: To have enduring, satisfying love, means one takes responsibility for oneself, for your loved one and in every other aspect of your life. Doing blame, passing the buck or evading the issue won't cut it. If you don't do responsibility, you can't do love. It's as simple as that.

I want to re-emphasise a point here too. It's the one about listening to your past pain with tenderness and compassion. This is so important. I've seen many people fail to face past difficulty and pain simply because their approach was to engage in emotional self-flagellation. If you beat yourself up, it hurts and sooner or later you'll give up on looking at the truth of your pain, because it simply hurts too much.

I wanted to mention doing love relationship endings too. Hopefully most people know about the importance of doing loving endings. There is something about a loss in love that feels the same as any bereavement. As with any bereavement, it's important to do mourning. Mourning a loss is our way of coming to terms with it. It's fine to weep and cry. If one avoids that mourning it just adds to the baggage of past pain and that means that one will need to come back to that sadness later in order to love another. If one doesn't do the mourning, it will come back to bite us in our next relationship as unresolved feelings belonging to the past move from our unconscious into the present and cloud our feelings and affect our behaviour towards our new loved one. Anyone who has been on the end of the totally inexplicable behaviour of someone else in a close relationship will know what this feels like. Do not take it personally; it's probably not about you at all. Talk gently to your partner about it, then maybe he or she will be able to bring it back into consciousness and deal with their feelings about their past difficulty. Do not give up either, no matter how irrational the other person becomes (and people operating from unresolved feelings in the unconscious can be very irrational); be loving and support them in understanding their feelings.

One more thing, it is likely and possible that the person operating with unconscious unresolved difficulty will project those feelings on you and say that you are the cause of the difficulty. It may be hurtful too but if you have a good self-concept and good self-esteem you will recognise this projection when it happens. You will perceive easily that the problem does not belong to you but to someone else in your lover's past. It can be anyone, even a parent and need not be threatening if it is handled well. If the person has a lot of unresolved past difficulties and little consciousness of their feelings it may not bode well for the future of your relationship.

Another factor which I am sure affects the survival of love relationships is the longevity of physical and sexual relations. Touch and tactile senses are very important. I believe that hugs and cuddles are an essential part of healthy living too! It saddens me that we recognise a child's needs for physical affection, for hugs and cuddles then "grow up" and do not recognise that these needs remain in us as adults. So many people feel that hugging and cuddling belongs to the world of the child. It's not true, everyone loves a hug and a cuddle so get hugging and cuddling right now!

On sex, there are so many ways to keep its excitement alive. Sexual desire will wane if sex with another becomes the same old boring routine time after time. The passion of romance will not support sexual relations forever. So be inventive about times, places and methods…different ways of doing sexual arousal too, different types of foreplay.

Some lovely late friends of mine, two German Jewish people had the most amazing sex life for the whole of their lives as far as I knew. Certainly they were still going strong well into their seventies and they had first met in WW II. They were so funny; they had so many special qualities including a completely unabashed openness so I would often get to hear about their latest (sexual) adventures! They were both very successful in the media business, in film and television, and used often to fly across the Atlantic to the USA. Apparently if it was a night flight and the cabin lights were dimmed, they would cover themselves with the blankets and touch each other's intimate parts. I don't think that's all they did as they loved the expenses paid trips in business class where they were be able to "be naughty, quietly and slowly, of course." I was feeling a little sad earlier today at my own lost love and these lovely people came to mind. They taught me so many lessons, many of which I write about here. They knew something about facing past pain too. They had tons of past pain. The Nazis had slaughtered many of their family and they both had fled to the UK before the outbreak of WW II. The dreadful irony was that they were both imprisoned as Germans in a British concentration camp on the Isle of Man. It was where they met. They felt no bitterness, no hate at all, but I do remember drinking champagne with them on more than one occasion to celebrate the odd accomplishment of Simon Wiesenthal in bringing Nazis to account.

This is getting very long again so I'm going to string a whole lot of qualities together that I believe are essential to have in a lasting loving relationship: Trust, caring, intimacy, companionate love, respect, humour and some healthy excitement from time-to-time!

I've never been sure about the trust word and have always felt that love assumes its meaning and much more, but trust is essential. Distrust is damaging and corrosive of love.

On caring, intimacy and companionate love, I've talked about all those before. Caring carries with it the more profound emotions of forbearance, forgiveness and understanding. They are wonderful to experience and all may grow in time unlike the shallowness of romantic illusions that fall away over time. Companionate love is the endearing quality of deep friendship that I find both attractive and desirable in my own love relationships.

Excitement is new and I've added humour to my list that I believe to be more important. Research has shown that excitement experienced jointly with one's loved one can enhance intimacy. I believe we all need some, fun, excitement and humour to keep our relationships alive. There is nothing as refreshing as the ability to laugh and in particular, laugh at oneself. I do it all the time!

There's another new word here and that is respect. Respect is one of the most necessary components in any healthy relationship, whether it is a friendship, love or marriage. Respect is not given; it's earned as is trust. To respect also means that we have to behave in a manner that is respectful. To do trust also means that we have to be trustworthy.

There is one very last point I want to make and that is crucial to be able to learn to resolve relationship conflicts constructively, Many people, especially men, do walking away from conflict and that doesn't work either. We need to learn about how not to escalate conflict and keep right away from hurling insults at partners too. Both are damaging and harmful. It's naïve to believe that crises, conflicts, differences and anger will not arise in love relationships from time-to-time. The important thing is to create a safe haven for the expression of those feelings and work quickly and constructively…lovingly to resolve differences and difficulties.

That's the end of what I see and believe to be important in love. Notice that physical or sexual attraction does not appear anywhere here. Obviously those forms of attraction might play a part in our choice of mate but it's not something I see as being of prototypical importance in love.

I'm going to finish now, but first I want to say that these are my own criteria for what I need in a loving, enduring, satisfying relationship. I also believe they may be generalisable and healthy. I do recognise it may present others with something of a problem. It makes mate selection very difficult but at least I have said explicitly what my beliefs and wants in love are. I understand my own feelings in love completely. I wish my mate to feel that what is most important to me in love is also important to her.

December 2007

The dangers of impersonal analysis

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-12-16T20:29:57+00:00

This post has been up and down like the proverbial “whore’s drawers!”

I’m putting it back now as I was having a conversation today with someone close to me about the damaging effects of impersonal analysis and theorising about another’s personal disposition. When I studied psychotherapy, the practice of impersonal analysis was deemed to be about as constructive as gossip and here’s why:

Feelings can only be understood within their own personal frame of reference, by the person feeling them. That sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? It is not simple at all.

We all have meanings that we attach to our feelings. They are our very own.

In the past, I have talked about consciousness and the difference between mind and emotions.

I have even used words like “I know what I feel” that means for me “I understand and am aware of my feelings and the meanings I attach to my feelings for most of the time.” Sometimes a negative feeling may arise in me that I don’t properly understand. They always take me a little by surprise but (some of) my good friends and I are sufficiently conscious to (usually) be able to see when this happens. Sometimes my friends will help me discover the meanings (usually negative and apparently irrational) that I attach to these worrying feelings. More often, I will see them for what they are and seek to understand them for myself.

But only I can be aware or what I feel and only I can know.

It is easier for me since I am probably more conscious than many others I know. I do not say that boastfully as all it means is that I have done much more on my inner resolution of pain and difficulties and understanding what arises from my unconscious than most. I have done it because I had to in order to survive, to set myself free of past pain, some of which was massive and traumatic. I can still get it all badly wrong. I can make attribution errors, for example, when unconscious feelings come up in me. I might feel, for example that my unconscious is throwing this feeling up because of something happening in a present relationship. It does not necessarily mean that my feeling belongs to my present relationship, but perhaps something in that relationship has triggered a feeling in my unconscious from my past.

What is important to me is that I do not take that feeling (usually negative) and project it on my present relationship. That can be very damaging. So in becoming conscious I will try and look at this feeling and work out what it is saying, where it comes from and where it belongs.

This is not that easy at all, as these feelings might exist in multiple dimensions, and have relevance to both my past and present. They might, for example, be an old ghost feeling, a negative feeling that has arisen because of other stimuli or my re-experiencing an emotion to which I had formerly attached some negative meaning when I had felt hurt or upset. The act of understanding even my own feelings is so complex, how on earth might someone else “think” they can do it?

I am going to try and summarise what I believe the practice of decent psychotherapy to be about as it’s relevant.

Again I am going to over-simplify and focus on one element of what I believe psychotherapy is:

Psychotherapy is about the empathic (loving?) facilitation of helping another to become conscious of (seemingly irrational) negative meanings that they attach to distressing, persistent, troubling emotions and behaviours, such as anxiety, depression, insecurity, irrational fears and obsessions. By helping the other discover the meanings they attach to their feelings, they might be able to understand their feelings better and see what is real for them and what is not. The goal of this process of self-determination is to assist the other in enhancing their understanding of feelings and the meanings they attach to them in order that they might see whether they are appropriate or not to the real situation in which they find themselves.

The process of facilitating discovery is what is difficult. There are many ways of doing that through talk, dreams, story writing and other means. That is where the real skill of the therapist lies. Why this is important in this context is that the therapist does not understand the feelings of the client by going along and imposing some set of rational analysis and abstract theories on another, their role is to help the other discover their feelings and the meanings they attach to them for themselves.

The role of the psychotherapist is not to tell or advise someone what they feel but to enable them to discover those feelings for themselves. They will never say “I know what you feel” or “I thought what you felt”.

They might help by pointing out and helping the client to discover and understand contradictory feelings that they might be bringing to the same situation but they will never use the words I “thought what you felt” in the absence of hearing those feelings from the client.

Also it is important for a psychotherapist to be able to understand any transference or projection of their own feelings onto the client (and vice versa). It does happen. Transference often happens in love too. We all do it.

I have talked about psychotherapy because it is a metaphor for how we might love and the importance of relating feelings as they are; seeking to understand them for what they are, listening, hearing them properly and truly knowing another person.

To know another, one must always hear their feelings exactly as they are; making assumptions about them, thinking what another feels, or making abstract rational analyses of another’s feelings are downright harmful. It can also be the thing to send a relationship off the rails and quickly into the graveyard.

If you do not or cannot hear the feelings of a loved one you will end up in deep trouble. Likewise if you assume that you know what another feels you will end up in deep shit too. If you take your meanings to another’s feelings, chances are you will end up in conflict. If you are so committed to projecting your meanings or your feelings onto theirs and refuse to do anything other than hold onto an anxiety that is supported by your false assumptions of the other’s feelings, you will threaten the relationship itself.

This is not uncommon. I have seen it many times. I have seen it happen in my own intimate relationships too.

I am really labouring this point. But in love it is so important to listen, hear, and understand your own and another’s feelings for what they truly are. It is so important to be conscious of fears and anxieties, to accept that they do not need to be threatening, to see them for what they are and seek to understand what they are telling you.

If you play the game of “I know what you feel” or “I thought you felt”, you will end up in trouble time and time again.

Footnote

There is a very important distinction to be made here between the type of therapy I am describing and the classic psychoanalytic mode of therapy. In common, with cognitive behavioural therapists, I may believe that the meanings that one attaches to one’s emotions, no matter how incongruous they might be, are within common sense and are accessible to one’s own cognition and understanding.

The psychoanalyst, however, believes that they might put some special interpretation on feelings in given contexts. Psychoanalysis has explained, for example, a woman’s feeling faint when away from home in terms of unconscious meaning: Being out of doors stirs up a repressed desire such as a wish for seduction or rape. (Fernichel 1945) The wish arouses anxiety because of its taboo nature.

I do not relate to this stuff at all.

For a behaviourist eliciting a person’s cognitions (meanings) becomes important when we attempt to understand their relationship with incongruous emotional reactions. It is about discovering an individual’s emotions based on that person’s peculiar appraisal of an event or experience. (Beck 1976)

So what is healthy self-esteem?

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-11-30T16:57:40+00:00

There feels to be a whole new wave of American pop psychology proselytising the power of self-esteem and self-love.

To me, it often feels like the new Christian evangelist exclaiming how their life changed when they “got Jesus”. Instead these self-love advocates seem to feel a need to remind us continually that it was the power of coming to love themselves that let true love (of others) into their lives.

Such exhortations make me suspicious since the qualities of self-love, self-worth and self-belief seem to negate a need to recount to others these qualities as life-transforming forces, since they necessarily entail a self-acceptance and self-assurance that appears to make their proclamation unnecessary.

I believe in the power of self-esteem, but I’m becoming a little jaundiced with its declaration with the same underwhelming sincerity that frequently accompanies the assertion that I should, “Have a nice day!”

I do believe that self-esteem is fundamental to our capacity to love others.

The message of the power of self-esteem has been with us for thousands of years. It’s in the New Testament, where we are told, “Love your neighbour as you love yourself’, (Mark 12: 31; Luke 10: 27). This assertion of loving another is necessarily predicated on the act of loving oneself.

There are two aspects of our current preoccupation with self-esteem that trouble me.

The first is the rising pressure on individuals to perceive of it as being socially desirable and necessary without any reliable guide as to what it is, where it comes from or how they might learn it.

Part of this first concern is that I believe self-esteem exists in three (or more) dimensions and is not simply something one feels (or discovers wondrously and suddenly) within oneself. I believe that self-esteem does in part exist within oneself; it also exists in relations to others in the same way that we know or experience all our feelings in social connection with another. There is also an experiential component of self-esteem whereby our experience of the outside world is internalised as part of our personality make-up. It is this experiential dimension that, for example, might cause low esteem in an adult who has suffered abuse as a child.

Notions of self-esteem also feature implicitly or explicitly in the work of humanistic psychologists.

For example, Abraham Maslow, represented human needs as a hierarchy arranged in the form of a pyramid, where self-actualisation follows on from the achievement of self-esteem following various survival, natural and subsistence needs being met.

Here’s a graphic representation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

This brings me to the second difficulty that self-esteem presents. Does self-esteem exist independently of poverty and socio-economic status?

With Maslow, I fear I have to achieve far too much in my life, possibly more than is readily accessible to me at present, before I can feel self-esteem, yet I do feel self-esteem. Nevertheless, I can envisage situations of hardship and poverty in which it must be very difficult, if not impossible, to feel or maintain healthy self-esteem.

So what is self-esteem?

There are two series of posts here that are as yet unfinished, one on recovering and healing from child abuse and another on doing living love. This piece seems to fit where I am with writing both.

In healing from child abuse, one of the first steps in the final lap of healing is the development of the belief that one is entitled to share in life’s riches, and by life’s riches, I mean far more than material success. It means that we address the feeling that we are not deserving of the good things in life: success, financial rewards, achievement, even luck. It means that we make prosperity part of our lives and accept it and acknowledge it when it appears. Prosperity is not all about financial rewards or material possessions. Prosperity is a state of mind that encompasses our needs, wants, desires and dreams for a life that bestows emotional and spiritual riches on us as well as material well-being.

This healing step requires major changes in our thoughts, feelings and behaviours concerning what constitutes success and achievement and our worthiness to partake in them.

Knowing intellectually that we deserve our "fair share" and feeling it emotionally are very different, to say nothing of the experience of enjoying and celebrating our gains, which is the best feeling of all.

In healing from child-abuse, this is a late and important step. It’s part of the journey to gaining self-esteem, which is vital to our psychological health.

For me (and others), genuine self-esteem has two dimensions of self-evaluation:

1. An evaluation that one is competent to deal with life's basic challenges (self-efficacy)

2. An evaluation that one is worthy of happiness (self-worth). Self-worth encompasses the conviction that one is deserving of success, love, and friendships, and the acceptance of positive feelings, such as pride and joy, as "natural" and proper to one's existence.

Adult self-esteem includes self-reflective and independent thought; taking responsibility for and authentically asserting one's thoughts, beliefs, values, and actions; pursuing meaningful life goals; and adhering to moral values that are based on meaning.

The psychologist and psychotherapist, Nathaniel Branden calls these standards of self-esteem "pillars," meaning that they are foundational to self-esteem. If we act in ways that meet these standards, our self-esteem will necessarily rise; if we fail to act in these ways, or betray these standards, our self-esteem will drop. In summary, these sources of self-esteem are internal to the person; they depend on self-directed psychological resources that are under each person's control.

Two other clinical psychology theorists, Richard Bednar and Scott Peterson, have proposed a similar model in their book entitled, “Self-Esteem”. For a person's self-esteem to improve, they say, he must confront anxiety with acceptance and realism.

This requires coping directly with the unwanted thoughts and feelings that precipitate anxiety, such as pain, embarrassment, shame, and fear. But such realism is possible only if:

1. A person perceives himself as responsible for his thoughts,
feelings, and behaviour

2. He is able to accept the beliefs and feelings motivating the anxiety

3. He is able to disclose his authentic thoughts and feelings to others in an appropriate context.

These three self-directed processes correspond to Branden's pillars of self-responsibility, self-acceptance, and self-assertiveness.

Branden makes a helpful distinction between genuine self-esteem and pseudo self-esteem.

Pseudo self-esteem relies on "external" sources, such as being admired or approved by others, social status, or physical appearance.

People may tend to put their reliance on external sources to the extent that they are lacking in the self-directed psychological processes that constitute internal sources of self-esteem. Because external sources are not under our direct control, they cannot realistically enhance our feelings of competence. Self-esteem that depends on them is therefore insecure and under constant threat.

One last point here: For me, having healthy self-esteem means that I have the means within me to recover from difficulty and hardship. Facing up to challenges, accepting reality and responsibility are fundamental to my self-esteem. Since I do believe in myself and do have a healthy (but not inflated) sense of faith and belief in myself, I also believe in the prevalence of my human spirit over adversity.

Perhaps I believe in very little, but I do believe in love, hope, self-esteem and the prevalence of the human spirit over adversity.

There can be little more malignant and destroying of the human soul than the low esteem belief that one is worthless. I believe that healthy self-esteem can be learned, and can be attained by everyone.

It’s why I’m writing this today.

Also I believe that like low self-esteem, overly high self-esteem is as damaging to our lives and humanity. High self-esteem might also represent egotism, narcissism, arrogance and emotional insensitivity. High self esteem may be presented as overblown self-love; whatever it is, it is just as ugly.

This subject interests me deeply. I’d very much welcome and respect the views of others, please do let me know what you feel too.

Doing living love - Part 2

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-11-28T14:32:01+00:00

Falling in love feels amazing. It’s like being on the best drugs ever. There’s a rush of endorphins, a longing for the other, an overwhelming desire for them. We crave to be close to them and in their company. There is a strength of erotic and romantic passion that feels out of this world. Adrenaline pumps round our bodies, our heartbeats increase and we see beauty everywhere.

Someone wrote to me: “People crave for love. They die for it; they even kill for it. They steal for it, they lie for it, they long for it, they ache with passion; they can even cheat and betray for it.”

No, they don’t.

What my writer was talking about was not doing love, but falling into madness. Mad, obsessive love makes for good stories (my writer was an author) but it does not lead to a sustaining, living love.

There are similarities between falling into this kind of love and the psychological illness, mania. Mania can heighten feelings of connections to others and may make the person suffering from it feel a sense of the interconnectivity of the universe. Someone who is manic may feel a sense of euphoria; they may be hypersexual. All of these elements of mania are at least vaguely related to what is generally associated with the behaviour of people who are “in love”.

Then there’s infatuation: “Infatuation is the state of being completely carried away by unreasoned passion or love; addictive love. Usually one is inspired with an intense but short-lived passion or admiration for someone.” (Wikipedia)

Infatuation is an exaggerated view of a person and the adoration of that person as a result of this idealised view.

Infatuation does not provide any safe basis for a close living love either.

Personal attraction can be very powerful; it’s also something of a mystery. No one properly understands how and why we are attracted to another. Sadly, I’m not sure if attraction is such a reliable guide to the possibilities of love either. I believe that emotional decisions made on the basis of attraction can be as dangerous as those based on romantic passion and infatuation. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be negative or a killjoy but I speak as someone who in my life has been attracted to those with whom I haven’t had any chance of finding happiness many times over.

I have a whole compendium of my own relationship mistakes. I have made many mistakes in my life that it would be far too easy to attribute to misjudgements about attraction to someone else. I’ve needed to look at those and understand them too. These misjudgements are my very own. I take complete responsibility for them.

I’m going to give these more thought. Some early mistakes were doubtless attributable to a loveless, abusive childhood. I know I sought out the love and approval of others to make up for the love I never had. In making mistakes, I have made them both ways. I have been as blind to those relationships that offer the potential of strong love, as those that might be destructive and harmful.

It’s been love by trial and error for me, and there have been a lot of errors. To have no childhood frame of reference for experiencing love, is sometimes as daunting as finding one’s way across the Sahara without a map and compass.

This has been a two-edged sword too, since I’m not stupid, and often I’ve been aware of the mistakes I was making. In knowing that I made mistakes, I sometimes withdrew from intimate relationships altogether. I decided I couldn’t take another risk. I couldn’t bear the thought or prospect of another relationship failure. The fear of failure has sometimes meant I stayed in unhealthy relationships for to long since I could not bear the prospect of failing again. Generally I withdrew from these relationships with a bruised soul and a bleeding heart. I felt terrible guilt in failure as well as the pain of loss.

This can become something of a cycle. The cycle can run over years. It may look like I’ve recovered from a relationship, and I’ve probably more than recovered. Fear has kept me away from the prospect of seeking a love relationship again, until loneliness and desperation has propelled me back into one again.

Loneliness and desperation is the worst possible basis of entering a love relationship.

Finally, at my relative mature age, I believe that at last I’ve found a solution. It’s like drawing my own map and building my own compass. It’s the only way I know. It’s very simple too but it takes a lot of effort. Maybe everyone knows this truth already. Fine, but why didn’t anyone tell me? I’m sure others must be in this same boat as me, so I’ll talk about it here.

In order to move to a safe, secure loving relationship with someone else, I need to build a state of deep loving intimacy with another prior to our making a commitment to stay with each other. That might sound too daunting to some, I know. It’s not really, since one can make commitment an explicit intention of intimacy. It’s good to know the journey one wishes to embark upon before you buy the tickets!

“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…Intimacy is the deep honest personal sharing between people.”

Intimacy for me is also a place of personal responsibility, being valued and valuing the reality of another for who they really are. It’s a place of personal affirmation and acceptance. It’s a place without judgements and without blame. In intimacy, I can show my vulnerability openly and without fear.

So that’s the story for me. I feel it’s safe and okay, since intimacy for me goes hand-in-hand with the other sustaining feelings in love; those around trust, respect and caring. I don’t feel there’s any way of being dishonest, duplicitous or avoidant in intimacy, since those acts in themselves will undermine intimacy as much as they undermine trust and respect.

This is not necessarily the stereotypical development pattern of a love relationship as psychologists set it out, but it’s the one that’s right for me. Most see commitment as being the stage in love following erotic and romantic passion. I love a bit of passion too, but as part of that I will wish to gain deep intimacy, if that’s not possible I’ll abandon ship. Love without intimacy is no love at all. Better to feel a short pang of hurt in a state of passion than a wrecked life and marriage a few years down the tracks.

The section that appears in italics is from an article entitled “What is intimacy” that I first wrote for publication in March 2002. It’s taken me this long to learn its lessons!

Doing living love - Part 1

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-11-27T17:39:37+00:00

Last year and early in this one, I wrote a lot, tens of thousands of words, about what I believed love was and what it might be. It was a very personal account to which I should have appended the words “for me” at the end of every sentence!

I read the works of tens of other psychologists who had studied and written about love too. My big question was about what emotions needed to be present in order to sustain a loving relationship beyond that first rush of romantic and erotic passion, which wonderful though it is, may diminish and fail to support a long-term love relationship.

It made me chuckle earlier today as I had cause to read my very first, short post on love, where I was not asking what love was, which is the question that has preoccupied me and I feel I have answered as best as I am able, but how do we sustain loving relationships? I failed to answer that question in all those thousands of words. I am nothing else if not fallible.

I may have been guilty of creating an impression, that misled others too, for it’s tempting to believe that if one shares a set of beliefs about what love is with another, it may be possible to find love with that person. So it would be like, we both value the same things in love; I want “trust, caring, intimacy, companionate (committed and deep supportive friendship) love, respect, humour and some healthy excitement from time-to-time” and so do you. We both value the same beliefs about love and we can share those; therefore we can find love together.

I’m simplifying what I wrote to a great extent. I could have made that an eight-word list, right? I wrote thousands of words. It wasn’t that simple.

Sharing beliefs about what love is and what it might be with another is very different from being able to make a sustaining and loving relationship. Understanding what love is and might be is very helpful, but it ain’t the same as getting down and doing it!

I’m going to talk about some of my basic beliefs about doing love now as there’s a big distance between thinking about what it is and doing it!

I like to start with a big bang! In talking about love, especially in talking about ‘unconditional giving love’ that I also believe in, I deliberately played down the importance of sex. So do you believe that sexual incompatibilities can be fixed? Do you believe that sexual disappointment isn’t such a bad problem when there is so much good about the rest of your relationship? You do? I’m sorry. You’re probably wrong.

About fifteen years ago, I did some marriage and relationship counselling for a while. Two big problems came up over and over. They were sex and money. With money, it was usually a matter of inducing some consensus about how a couple operated with money. The difficulties around money were often more about relationship power and communication than anything else. I could work with that usually unless someone was bent on using money like some emotional heavy artillery. It did strike me that difficulties about sex and money often went hand-in-hand.

Some sexual difficulties were about innocence and ignorance and those were soluble in most cases. But the toughest difficulty was where there was an imbalance of sexuality and sexual interest between one person and another. One can learn sexual technique and improve one’s skill as a lover. Sex therapy, however, does not create or increase sexual interest or desire. The key word is imbalance. There may be no difficulty if one partner has no interest in sex and neither does the other. But if one person has a very strong interest in sex, and the other doesn’t, then the partner with the strong interest will rarely be able to forget it.

I’ve concluded I might be a big baby! I really love physical intimacy. I love touches, caresses, hugs, cuddles and kisses…and sex too. Also, in case you’re wondering, I have, as I’ve written before, a monogamous disposition to my intimate personal relationships. It’s the way I am and it’s non-negotiable. It’s an important compatibility indicator for me.

Young children get depressed, and may get sick or even die without physical intimacy. So how and why do we as adults ever get to believe we’re so different and leave such a fundamental part of ourselves behind so often in order to be “grown up?”

Next there’s something I’ve never seen written about much before. I don’t truly understand why. Maybe it has been written about before and people say what I feel in different ways.

I’ve really messed up here in the past, so it’s a lesson that’s cost me an awful lot of pain. It’s about knowing, understanding and feeling at ease with another’s core life values, attitudes and beliefs. Like all acts of intimate understanding it takes much time and effort to comprehend these in another.

It may not be at the top of your agenda when you’re in some hormone-driven erotic, manic romantic state either.

We all have beliefs and values about the world. They run very deep. For example, I have an absolutely passionate interest in personal development and growth, and also in learning. It says all sorts of things about me, how I might be in the world, and what matters to me most. I’m very open and enjoy communicating my feelings and emotions that I do with ease. Many people find these qualities attractive, even though some are very different in their outlook. To be happy in life, I need to be with someone who shares these same values and attitudes. It’s not enough for another to be awed by them, then later, find that they require far more effort than they are prepared to invest. Awe is no substitute for intimate mutual respect and caring admiration for another. Awe can easily switch to fear and contempt.

I’ll say a little more, since this point is so important (to me, and perhaps to others too).

The sharing of passions and interests is I believe a real bedrock of loving personal relationships, but they do not have to be the same. I love human difference, and difference may be an important point of growth. I’ll go one step further; I love to celebrate human difference. If someone else was the facsimile copy of me, there would be no development, no life and no growth. I’d atrophy and die of boredom. The point is still the same in a way, since difference in order to be tolerable needs to fall within the ambit of my personal values. My values underpin who I am, and yours do too.

There are some words I can’t quite grasp here. It’s the most important point and I can’t find the words. I’ll try. Love for me is a lot about the active interest and positive participation in the life of another, cherishing who they are for what they are, accepting their being without exception, valuing their wellbeing, wanting and enjoying them, sharing everything including their fear, shame, guilt, anger and sadness.

The psychologist, Scott Peck talked about discipline and had none, many of us (especially Americans) talk about “work” but it’s not that either. Love really doesn’t come easy, and in my next posts I’ll include more cautionary lessons I’ve learned. Living love is not easy. It’s not fate, romance or hormones. It’s not self-sacrifice either. It is a conscious caring act of will.

But there’s much more, later…

Is cyber love possible?

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-11-17T09:49:28+00:00

A few years ago, I did a very unusual work project. I was engaged by a UK government investment agency to appraise and evaluate a business run by a group of psychotherapists aiming to provide online therapy services. It was called
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"

Emotional rescue

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-11-15T12:05:39+00:00

In my life and in my friends and loved ones, I know some very warm, loving and caring people. They have so much to give to someone else and to the world in general. They are giving of themselves by nature. But they keep doing something that makes me cringe every time I see it. They are rescuers.

I have a male friend who is habituated with MySpace, the free cyber-dating agency posing as a social network.
;)
Every so often I look at the friend’s profiles listed on his home page there. My friend subsists in an unhappy marriage. Looking at his MySpace friends, there is a whole coterie of extraordinarily beautiful women. I read their profiles. Almost every one of them is a damaged suffering child crying out for help. Don’t get me wrong. Some of these women are immensely successful; some are stars of stage and screen or media entrepreneurs. But every one is troubled and hurting in some profound way.

My good friend is a wonderfully caring, loving and tender man. He is also a fairly clever man. He remains unhappy. In his own way, I believe that he feels he will find his own happiness by rescuing others and by giving.

It’s not working. He’s a rescuer.

The psychologist, Abraham Maslow, spoke of ‘deficiency love’. The goal of deficiency love is that somehow, some other person will compensate for something one is unable to find in oneself.

In the case of the rescuer and person in recovery, frequently the person in recovery will feel hope that the rescuer will bring about the recovery that they are unable to bring about for themselves. This is often the basis on which the rescuer and the sufferer will first engage in a relationship. It is a deeply flawed rationale since it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for someone to give you that which you cannot find in yourself.

I am sure that there may be many and complex reasons why the rescuer enters a relationship with a sufferer.

There is altruism, of course; simply the belief that they might make a positive difference to the life of another. I wonder though if the pathological need to rescue others might be based on another personal need, a need to bolster one’s sense of self-worth by feeling that one is motivated to do good to another.

In a way, perhaps, entering a relationship as a rescuer might be less demanding than entering a relationship on normal terms with another.

Another difficult aspect of the rescuer / sufferer interaction is that there is a sense that the rescuer enjoys some level of emotional or other superiority in their relationship with the sufferer. It is an unbalanced and unequal partnership. What at first might appear as a loving act of giving and kindness might be a narcissistic act of self-endorsement for a frail ego gained at another’s expense.

If one asks anyone who has successfully undergone recovery from say, an addiction or alcoholism, from an unhappy relationship, or from trauma or victimisation, I suspect they will all tell the same story. They will tell you, almost without exception, how ultimately their recovery came from within themselves, from their own commitment and determination to recover. They were motivated strongly to recover and they did. Others, generally those who are skilled, trained or experienced in helping others in recovery may have assisted or even facilitated the recovery, but ultimately that recovery came from themselves.

Last year, I suffered a serious and potentially fatal illness. I had some wonderful medical treatment. I’m not sure if I was cured exactly. My recovery came from a moment of realisation that in order to get better I needed to add my own strong will and determination to whatever treatment was provided to me. I needed to take responsibility for my own care. Thank goodness, I did, since I had been misdiagnosed as suffering from two conditions, both of which were potentially terminal. In the end, it was found that I had contracted a bacterial infection, that whilst it was life threatening, was curable with antibiotics. The turning point in recovery for me was the moment I decided that I was going to get better and the point when I found the self-belief in me to do so. That's my own story of recovery.

The rescuer and sufferer relationship is an entirely risky business.

Without an act of will, even courage or determination from the sufferer, the rescuer may be drawn into an unending process of failure. Worse still they might project an imagined state of recovery upon the sufferer in order to justify or support the idea of the relationship or their actions within it.

There is another shortcoming where the sufferer fails in recovery, and it’s one that I believe that Eric Berne identifies in his book, “Games people play”. The rescuer in engaging with the sufferer who fails to recover may take on a multiplicity of roles. They may even engage in collusion with the sufferer acting in a way that sustains the sufferer’s difficulties or problems (The rescuer buys the drugs or the drink. Berne calls this role “the dummy” or “the Patsy” )

What is more usual is that the rescuer may take on the role of critic or judge. By judging or criticising the sufferer, they free themselves from the idea of failure borne of a false premise that the rescue was in fact possible. This is a damaging place to be as the judge or the critic is one step away from being a persecutor.

So the first and most likely outcome between the rescuer and the sufferer is one of failure. The most damaging consequence for the sufferer is that the rescuer adopts an attitude towards them that reinforces or holds them in the difficulty. Criticisms and judgements do not facilitate recovery.

A second risk for the rescuer and the sufferer is that recovery may be so painful for both parties and tear the relationship apart. People coming out of difficult relationships, addiction or damaging life experiences are not at their best. A relationship that might work at another time may not work when someone is going through recovery.

A third risk is that the sufferer does actually recover and when they do the role of the rescuer no longer makes any sense and has no purpose. The people involved in the relationship may not easily be able to shift roles. The sufferer having recovered may also come to see the rescuer as simply a reminder of a painful and difficult past.

Probably, the greatest risk of all is that the relationship is built on a foundation of difficulty or illness rather than health or wellbeing.

Where recovery becomes the central focus of a relationship, the difficulty or illness itself may represent the foundation of the relationship, rather than an unpleasant time that the sufferer needs to leave behind in their life.

Ultimately, while others can play a role in assisting in recovery, the decision to recover and the pain that it often entails must be borne by the sufferer. Therefore, emotional rescue as the basis of a relationship will, I believe, fail more often than it will succeed. Personally I have never witnessed a relationship based on emotional rescue that has been successful in its outcome, or nurturing of its participants.

Acknowledgements:

Abraham H Maslow, Motivation and personality, 1954
Eric Berne, Games people play, 1964
Robert J Sternberg, Love is a story 1998

If music be the food of love...

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-10-21T17:16:02+01:00

During my never-ending adult education, I once had the gift of an amazing teacher. The name in which he published was R. D Laing. He was a clever, insightful, perceptive, wonderful, loving, radical and often unruly man. He was a psychiatrist of the best sort. Like many who are sensitive, perceptive and gifted, he may have drowned his emotions in excess and drink from time-to-time. A search on “Google” will tell you more about him. I knew him as Ronnie. For a year, he was my psychotherapy tutor. Sadly he died from a heart attack a couple of years later. I missed him.

I struggled with all this "talk" psychotherapy stuff. So I asked Ronnie one day, how one might tell what someone else was truly feeling. They may not say after all. They might not know the truth of how they felt themselves. He replied, “That’s simple, laddie.” He made me laugh. He always called me “laddie”. “Find out what music they’re listening to. That will tell you how they feel soon enough.”

He went on to tell me that if the music didn’t help me, then I should get them to write stories. If that failed, I should ask them to paint pictures, but never to rely on talk, if I wanted to discover their true emotions.

This post is inspired by and dedicated to a friend, a fellow abuse recoverer. She lives over 5,000 miles away. Last night, I was deeply concerned for her. Today, having heard what music she listened to last night, I feel so much better, if not envious. I would have enjoyed that same music too.

Ronnie’s wisdom about music, though simple, is profoundly true. Music is a powerful connection in our lives. It says deep things about us as people. It crosses nations, politics and social divides. I feel true to Ronnie’s view to this day. Music also tells me about another person and how I might feel about them, even whether we’d get on. Think about it. So you love Mozart, Bach and Joni Mitchell, whom she hates. She loves Whitney Houston, Metallica and Westlife. Better think again. What more can I say?
;)

Moving on - Part 3 - My greatest lessons

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-10-21T11:12:07+01:00

This will be my twelfth post on coming to terms with, recovery and healing from child abuse. I feel I have only a little more to say. That may change; often the interaction with others causes me to remember feelings and issues that have been important to me.

This has been a very personal account. In some ways, I was fortunate, in other ways, less so. Everyone is different.

By the time I was at the healing stage I had to take a good long look at my behaviour. I’ll say more, but I should have done things that I didn’t properly understand or know about at the time. I was in and out of therapy. Since I had an involvement in mental health through my work I also had ready access to others working in mental health, both therapists and psychiatrists. This was a mixed blessing. On reflection, my own knowledge of issues around child abuse now far exceeds that of most professionals I knew then.

On the face of it, at the time, I had many positive behaviours that had value in my life. I had excellent social skills. Similarly, through my work, I had competences in assertiveness, listening, communication, decision-making, negotiation, conflict resolution and leadership skills. Those things came with the territory that was my work. I was chief executive of one organisation and chairman of the board of another. I was used to functioning in public. I gave media interviews, appeared on radio and television, I could get on my feet and engage and hold the attention of over a hundred people in a talk or presentation.

If only life was that simple.

A lot of my behaviour, although it appeared charismatic sometimes, was flawed and had its roots in dysfunction and coping mechanisms that I had learned in early life.

I had good social skills but I was frequently a “pleaser”. I would behave unconsciously in a way so as to strike agreement and accord with others, despite my own feelings, beliefs and values. I wanted to be liked, to be popular, but my inner self still held the memories of abuse that I was a freak, unlikeable and even repulsive. I looked like a competent leader, but I was solitary and heroic. I was forever struggling with feelings of deep inadequacy I had within myself. I was a perfectionist. I was wresting with words from my father that went, “Not good enough! Not good enough! Not good enough!” over and over.

Heroism and perfectionism combined meant that I would make hoops to jump through, ever higher and higher, until such time as I fell flat on my face. Then there was no one there to catch or support me and I would start over again.

I had big problems in setting boundaries and limits in personal relationships. I entered abusive relationships by the score.

There are many more examples I could cite, but those are sufficient to make the point. Many of the personal traits that others may have regarded as positive in me were not. They had their roots in my early life experience of abuse.

This gave me a truly massive problem. My life was a nexus of hundreds of relationships both through my work and personally. Being bad at setting limits, I had no privacy. Whenever I wanted to retreat and have quiet time to myself, others would come clamouring to my door or call me incessantly on the phone. Through my coping mechanism of taking responsibility to free me from the dependence on others so that they could not harm me, I had created no end of unhealthy dependencies on me, mainly from those unable or unwilling to take responsibility for their own life. I cannot begin to describe how horrific this was. I had a married female colleague who had accidents every time I withdrew from her dependency on me. At first, I thought it was accidental and unfortunate. Then I noticed the same behaviour over and over. If I moved away then she would break her leg or crash her car. Her accidents were always succeeded by cries for help. I tried to help, but I needed her to try to help herself too. She never did, nor did her husband. She had married a much older man who treated her as a child. She was an abused child and had married a new daddy. She wanted me to be her daddy too.

This was a nightmare. People at my main place of work would rail at me for what they feared would be my imminent desertion of them. Predators who were jealous of me saw my withdrawal as an opportunity to take things from me. So-called friends would call me up and scream hysterically down the phone. One particularly nasty piece of work, a psychiatrist, saw his opportunity to use some of the most manipulative behaviour I have ever witnessed, in order to sleep with my girlfriend at the time. He tried to convince her and others that I was going mad and should be certified for my own protection. He failed. I had stronger allies than he could handle. Subsequently, he was struck off and I celebrated. His little plot was seized upon by another senior colleague and a professional adviser of mine, who speculated that they might be able to take control of my personal assets that included a controlling interest in a profitable business. They failed too. I fired them both. These are a few examples to make a point. There were many, many more.

Not all therapists and psychiatrists are good people. I knew two who drew much of their own sense of self-worth from the power their profession gave them over others. Needless to say, they fought my recovery too. They told me I had a fragmented personality, that I was disordered and split. I let this have a profound effect on me. What they were suggesting were symptoms I associated with a schizoid disorder. This was a complete nonsense but it influenced me to behave in a way that I now know to have been very misguided.

Now here’s the point: What I should have done is taken stock and made an inventory of all the problem areas in my life. It would have been a big list. So many areas of my life were causing me to feel downright miserable and unhappy. There were a few glimpses of light here and there, but my work, social and personal relationships were in the main unhealthy and founded on a legacy of problems from my early life.

Looking back, as frightening as it may have seemed at the time, I should have taken the sheet of paper that was my life, screwed it up, chucked it in the bin and started again. I should have refocused on pursuits and friendships that would have brought me happiness. Instead, I sought to maintain some level of continuity in answer to those critics who had called my life and me fragmented.

I got it badly wrong.

Instead I struggled on through. I tried to hold it all together as untenable as it was. Slowly, all the parts of my life I had tried to hold onto crumbled and fell away. Far from a celebration of self-determination, I spent my time clasping at straws and emptiness, trying to piece back together that which I should have let go.

This is my biggest mistake and my biggest lesson. I wasted years of my life, more than twelve years, dealing with its consequences. I continued to work in an area I disliked, when I could have given others and myself so much more by being true to myself. I could have had better and more positive close relationships. The only consolation I have is that I know that now, and I work to change. It is as if the burden of some ten-ton load has been lifted from me.

Finally, I want to say something more about healing. I wrote earlier:

“True healing involves seeing and knowing what is wrong and having the compassion to call it into change.

…It…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.”

I have talked to a couple of readers here about this already. It’s so very important. I know both these readers extend tenderness, love and compassion to others, but rarely to themselves. They also beat themselves up mercilessly for the suffering of their past. They indulge in self-blame that is so characteristic of abuse. I understand and I have done that too. Beating yourself up will never work. Healing need not be so painful. It is a release too. If you beat yourself up over what has been done to you by others, then sooner or later, you will give up. You cannot change what they did. The suffering will go on. Giving up is not an answer.

My training therapist was a wonderful man. At one time, he was beaten out of my life by the bad guys. In parting I’d like to share some of his words with you. They were in response to my endless questions about what I should do with my life:

“Listen to your heart and hear its message, only then will you discover your own truth…Be true to your heart and to yourself. Keep writing your story, the story of your own life. It may be time for the next chapter…”

I finished writing my first novel in the summer. It’s overlong and needs a lot of editing, but it occurs to me that so many things I say here first emerged in the process of writing that story. It was liberating. The theme of listening and being true to one’s heart recurs over and over in that story. I have heard my own heart’s message. Finally, a few weeks back, I decided on a title for my book. It’s called, “Love’s Passage.”

I’m working on a second book too. This one is a children’s story. It’s a celebration of playfulness written by the now happy small boy who lives inside me. It’s not based on the deep philosophy and psychology of “Love’s Passage”. It’s called, “The Dustbin King”. It’s very funny. It could even be a story for a film, an animated cartoon most probably. More about my books on Farrago later.

Moving on - Part 2 - A matter of trust

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-10-20T13:53:38+01:00

In my last blog, “Moving on - Part 1”, I talked about trust in perhaps what was a rather ingenuous way. I’d like to explore trust a little more, and hope you might join with me in doing that! Writing for me is often about exploration of thoughts and feelings rather than the presentation of firm ideas. It’s a journey with lots of diversions en route!

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

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-10-17T13:20:53+01:00

It’s time to move on. I came to terms with child abuse. I made it past the painful recollections, and re-experiencing past pain and anger. I made some sort of forgiving peace with myself. I had good support, help and guidance to do that. I had not prepared myself properly for what followed, nor did I know how to do that. I was in uncharted territory and knew not where to go from here.

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.

Coming to terms - Part 9 - the confrontation

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-09-25T21:09:02+01:00

I had steeled and becalmed myself for days or weeks before that night. I was as calm as I could be. My pulse raced and I could feel it beating in my temples. I had worked out the words to say to my father. At first, the words were a little cold and abstract like enquiring about the weather on a wet afternoon. I would simply ask him calm direct questions and let him know my feelings. I knew I had to remain calm. One sign of fear or anxiety and he would jump through that chink in my armour faster than I could deflect him.

It was early autumn. I remember behaving in a way that was out of character. I raided my parent’s drink cabinet and poured myself a glass of scotch strong enough to anaesthetise a skunk. I drew deep breaths.

My mother already knew that something was wrong but she had never imagined hearing what followed. My father talked on and on about himself as he always did. I drew a deep breath and told them both that there was something very important I needed to talk to them about. Silence in the room. Eyes focused on me. Their interpretation was probably that I was about to confess a terrible misdemeanour or say something like I had been diagnosed with a terminal illness.

I stayed calm to the last. I spoke softly in silence. I talked about what had happened to me at the hands of my father. Something that had really stuck in my gullet was his allegation of how I had committed a sexual assault on my brother, transferring the blame for what he had done to me. I talked of the miserable consequences the abuse had on my personal relationships, a whole series of broken intimate relationships.

He replied, “I thought all I did was to bring you up to be the very successful person you are now.”

I almost bit a chunk out of the whisky tumbler. I still felt anger and I could feel it rising inside me.

“So is that your formula for bringing up children?” I responded. “Beating me senseless until I was unable to function, let alone feel or think. Locking me in rooms, sticking your penis in my face then telling me I had venereal disease. I WAS TEN YEARS OLD! Connecting me to the electricity…I thought I would die. Telling me I was unfit to mix with other children, that I was scum…on and on and on…then going to the doctor and telling him what you did to me, I did to my brother. I was thirty-two when I found out about that. How do you think that felt? So are you going to sit there and lie to me now?”

Those are not the exact words, but a loose paraphrase, but by god was I angry.

He denied it all again. I stayed silent. I remained silent for minutes, seething.

He denied it all again.

I calmed myself and slumped back in the chair.

My mother spoke, “You know Geoffrey is speaking the truth Joe, so do I.”

‘Shit mum!’ I thought. This was support from unexpected quarters.

I watched him carefully, studied his body language, anticipating a violent outburst. I had no need to be afraid. I was very much stronger than him and could restrain him easily.

Begrudgingly and sullenly, he acknowledged that I was telling “my version of the truth” pointing out that he believed that all he had done was for my benefit. After all, “look at him now.”

Once more I went through the consequences of his violence and harming behaviour. This time I didn’t stop there. I talked about what he was doing to my mother. I demanded that he stopped.

“Or else, what will you do?” he replied aggressively.

I didn’t go there that night to engage in some sparring contest or threatening exchange, but I knew I had to turn up the heat. There was no regret, no remorse, no contrition in him.

“Or else, I’ll go to social services, your doctor and the police,” I replied, “and if I have to challenge you physically, I’ll do that too. You don’t frighten me now. You have no hold over me or my mother. It’s the end. It’s over. Now you choose.”

Epilogue

I left soon after that. I’m certain that my mother was never beaten by him again. Sadly she died five years ago from Alzheimer’s. I wondered about the connection of being beaten round the head with heavy objects and that illness. I do believe that in his own way, my father got better too. I talk to him two or three times a year. We salvaged a relationship of sorts. It’s not that friendly but in some ways I care for him. Don’t ask me how. I simply don’t know.

After that night, although I checked on my mother from time to time, my parents didn’t speak to me that much for a couple of years. I feel that in their own way, they too were coming to terms with guilt and shame.

Some time after this event, I made it to the point of acceptance and forgiveness.

Coming to terms - Part 8 - blame, acceptance and forgiveness

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-09-25T17:47:15+01:00

I want to say something about blame. I have used the word here in different contexts. I have never said, “I blamed my father”.

Blame is one of the most unhelpful phenomena I know.

I have written about it before:

“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 anything about me or the other?' 'Where has blame helped you to achieve the outcome you wanted?”

I realised having worked through all the emotions associated with abuse and having emerged from the dark shadow it cast over my life, I needed to do more.

I had a very wise older friend, someone who had acted as a parent figure in my life since before university. She had been one of the co-founders of “the Samaritans” in the UK along with another remarkable man called Chad Varah. The Samaritans is a nationwide organisation set up to provide a lifeline for the suicidal and despairing. She was also a teacher and training therapist. I owe a lot of my recovery and healing to her. She was also the one to whom I turned every time I got into a problem with personal relationships. There were a lot of those. She was always there for me. I talked to her about the confrontation. She had said, “the only way you will truly get through this is to be able forgive him what he did to you.” She never used the “blame” word either.

I’m not totally sure about all aspects of forgiveness, even now. Nor am I sure it is right for everyone. Accepting that the abuse occurred and putting it all behind you once and for all may be the only resolution that makes sense and feels right. Deciding whether to forgive or accept is one’s own choice and no one else's.

I got through on a compromise. I was able to forgive my father as a perpetrator of child abuse, as a man suffering from a particular kind of sickness. I had to accept some of his particularly sadistic acts of violence.

But whether its forgiveness or acceptance, the point is that it is a transformational experience of one’s self. It’s not about condoning or rejoining a family in which one suffered. It’s a compassionate acknowledgement of what happened. For me it was an empathic step in recognising the sickness of my father, and a desire to leave bitterness, resentment, hurt and pain behind. The true compassion is that which extends to oneself. It is through finding that compassion that one is able to move towards a place of healing. The inner-work of forgiveness is, I believe, finding a place of true self-reconciliation.

I did go on to confront my father since I wanted an acknowledgement of the truth from him. I wanted him to see the truth of the pain he had caused me, but more importantly to see that he was still inflicting that pain on my mother.

Forgiveness and acceptance went on for a time well beyond the confrontation. It took months. Sometimes I can still become angry and frustrated when I realise that this age-old wound is affecting the way I behave now. The anger never lasts now. I always move on to a better place.

Coming to terms - Part 7 - dealing with toxic emotions

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-09-25T09:22:03+01:00

I’m going to say only a little about the toxic emotions that are a legacy of child abuse here. I have no need or wish to revisit, remember or re-experience them now. I have moved beyond that a while ago, thankfully.

There was another step that for me, and I suspect for others too, that was critical in the process of recovery. I have alluded to it briefly here in passing but that’s all. I never recovered fully as a result of the process of recalling and allowing myself to feel the toxic emotions I had inside me. I needed to feel these emotions in order to understand and release them. There was another step for me beyond confrontation too, that as I will explain later was right for me, but it is not right for everybody since sometimes confrontation can present appalling and unacceptable personal risks. The final step was to forgive my father the abuse he committed against me. Only after I had moved through forgiveness was I finally free. It was forgiveness that finally relieved the burden of suffering I carried within me.

It wasn’t such a very neat parcel. I must say that too. Some of the legacy of abuse persisted in how I lived my daily life. There was a part of me, which wanted to see continuity in my life, which chose to build upon an existence founded in dysfunction. I should have made greater and more fundamental changes especially in my working life. I know that now. I made a mistake at the time.

Anger: I had a real difficulty in expressing anger. First, I had associated it with my father’s aggressive abuse, and second as an abused child it was never safe to express anger. Anger was connected to the things that hurt me too.

Suppressed anger is dangerous. Many survivors turn their anger inwards. Introjected anger may become depression, anxiety and self-loathing. Others may express it in inappropriate aggressive behaviour or withdrawal from social or personal relationships.

One of the great lessons in recovery is the release of anger, to do it safely and to direct it at where it belongs, to the perpetrators of abuse. Anger can be expressed safely and need not be overwhelming. We can turn it on and turn it off. We can also learn to control anger and express it appropriately.

All adults have feelings that are rooted in childhood development. Those left over from abuse may be very powerful, and sometimes destructive.

Fear and anger are both very natural responses to the threat or act of violence. Anxiety is related to fear and comes from not knowing what to expect within the family.

Shame and guilt are terrible demons and coming to terms with these may present the adult survivor with real problems, however, their presence should tell you that you still hold yourself responsible for the abuse in some way. You are not responsible, and you were a powerless, innocent child. Put these feelings back where they belong and that is with the abuser and not with you.

Adult survivors internalise shame when they identify with or idealise parents who abuse them, abandon them and fail to confirm or value them as people. Shame becomes part of a package of self-blame, self-destructive thoughts and self-sabotaging behaviours. During the childhood years this bundle of negative feelings evolves into a major part of the survivor's sense of self.

There may be other feelings of alienation and hopelessness that may result from too many disappointments or a sense that you are resigned to life and have lost any belief in its ability to be better. These feelings will always tell you something about yourself, do not try and ignore them; only when you have heard their message will they go away.

I don’t believe there are any shortcuts here. If you don’t reconnect with these feelings and see them for what they are, they will continue to haunt your adult life.

Whatever anyone says, I don’t believe you can skip this step either. I, and others survivors I have known, have used a number of harmful mechanisms to “numb out” these feelings when they get too strong. Some adopt a workaholic lifestyle in order to block out the feelings. Others try to “self-medicate” and anaesthetise their pain and strong emotions by using drink and drugs. Stifling anger and rage may simply mean that the victim expresses it as aggressive, anti-social and abusive behaviour.

I’m going to make a recommendation here. I don’t often do that. It’s about therapy. There are therapies and therapists I have known where they encourage their clients to engage in endless reflection. They don’t work! You get mired up in all that pain and it’s the therapist’s job to facilitate your finding a way out. But I’ll make one positive recommendation and that is that an appropriately qualified therapist can be of immense help. Dealing with all these feelings can be very confusing. Often they arise in an untidy and messy way. Often it is difficult to work out where they come from, what they mean and what belongs to where.

So here it is, I would recommend cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) provided by an appropriately qualified therapist who has an understanding and knowledge of child abuse. I like CBT and find it immensely helpful. CBT maintains that the meanings that one attaches to one’s emotions, no matter how incongruous they might be, are within common sense and are accessible to one’s own cognition and understanding. I agree.

Very simply described, CBT is about discovering emotions, understanding them, their meanings and their context, and discovering where or to what they belong. It acknowledges that emotions and the meanings we attach to them may be sensible or not. It is also non-judgemental.

As the man who developed CBT, Aaron Beck, wrote, “(For the cognitive behavioural therapist)… eliciting a person’s cognitions (meanings) becomes important when we attempt to understand their relationship with incongruous emotional reactions. It is about discovering an individual’s emotions based on that person’s peculiar appraisal of an event or experience.”

What is great about CBT, in my view, is that it is entirely focused on healthy and constructive outcomes, on recovery, and that its administration usually covers relatively short treatment courses and time-scales.

Please note: Psychotherapy and psychotherapists are a matter of personal choice and selection. Should you be in or be considering psychotherapy it is best that you find the therapy most appropriate to your needs and personal situation. The views here represent only the opinions of the author.

Coming to terms - Part 6 - a personal episode

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-09-23T16:54:59+01:00

I was a bright child. I loved books.

My first memory of paternal difficulty was about books.

I loved those young boy’s classics from way before I was born, Just William and Jennings and Darbyshire, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn too. I was younger than eight years old, perhaps five or six when I started reading those. We lived in a two-up, two-down house in a run-down “slum-clearance” area of London. Often I found my emotional life in books. My home life had never been rich in affection, although my Gran lived downstairs and she may have been one of the first adults to give me the love and affection I never knew at home…upstairs, as was.

One night I had been reading happily. I read fast. That particular night, I had been reading one of those “William” books borrowed from the library to which a kind-hearted neighbour took me. I was devouring this book. Maybe I’d read eighty or a hundred pages that night. My father came to turn off the light. He quizzed me about what I had been reading. Proudly I told him. He questioned what I had read in disbelief. It’s when the trouble started. He snatched the book from me and whipped through pages asking me questions. I answered each one. I had read the book after all and I was enjoying it. He refused to believe my reading speed. I was puzzled. "I was only reading, Dad." As I answered more and more of his questions, he became more and more angry. He threw down the book on my bed and struck me hard across the head before casting the room into darkness.

My father felt ambivalence about my brightness. It was his trophy but he was also jealous. I didn’t understand his jealousy then, not till much later. By the time, I was eight, I was like a performing seal jumping ever and ever higher into the air to catch the fish that would win his love and praise. Some said I was a “gifted child”. All I knew was that I got stuffed in rooms doing numerous things like IQ tests and calculus when I would have rather been climbing trees and playing football. I longed to be a “normal boy” from a “normal home” with a “normal family”.

The hoops of achievement were set higher and higher. I managed to jump through most of them. When I didn’t, I was beaten, humiliated and tortured. My father was tough. He was a real man! He had been a member of the royal marines. He knew about killing. He had fought at the siege of Crete, fought against Hitler’s crack parachute squadrons. He had sat in a hole for days shooting men coming from the sky. Some time during my recovery when I was talking to my mother, she had said, “It was there he killed his first man…many men. From then on, I knew he was marked as a man forever.” He escaped from Crete. Many British soldiers died there. I have sat alone in their graveyard at Souda Bay reflecting on his life.

I got royal marine training too, aged four. My father held me below water until I inhaled it, choking, suffocating, wanting to vomit and feeling terrified. At age 13, before I was “rescued” from home, I lost my best school friend in a drowning accident at a school swimming class. I blamed myself for that too. Is it any wonder that to this day I am hydrophobic? I still am and I would love to swim. Maybe one day…

Sometimes doing something exceptional at school won his praise. I won a national essay-writing prize for a story about the feelings of a boy stranded in a cave cut off by the rising tide of the sea. The adult judges didn’t realise I was writing about me.

My childhood experience equated achievement with love but also with pain. In adulthood I continued the same habit, all on my own. But I never did it for myself. In my heart, I did it for him in a strange sort of way. I set the hoops of achievement ever higher, never taking any credit or reward for what I did. After all I didn’t feel I deserved anything, only shame and guilt. By the end of my twenties, I was doing pioneering in computing. I even sat in the think tank where the first PC was conceived.

In my quest for love, I did the “first of that” and the “biggest of this” in world technology terms. I always pulled it off at great personal cost. My insides were empty. They were so full of pain and grief. I never took proper rewards either. I never felt I deserved them. I was an empty hollow shell. It hurt like hell. It never got any better. I was left with nothing. I told myself it was my fault.

Coming to terms - Part 5 - recognition and remembering

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-09-23T09:42:04+01:00

I talked about remembering abuse; the word "remembering" may be misleading. I had never forgotten what had happened to me but I had made my memories safe. They were like a set of dissociated, abstract events that I had disconnected from my feeling self.

Psychology textbooks often write about “remembering” and “re-experiencing” abuse. I am not sure about the “re-experiencing” word either. What I did was to allow my past emotions to gain their expression in my conscious self and re-connect with my sensory (how my body felt) and behavioural reactions (how I responded to abuse) at the time. It was painful and often confusing. Both the pain and the confusion passed. I did not wish to get mired down in it. In hindsight, I have seen others who use partial recollection as a form of self-destructive behaviour. What looks like an effort to come to terms with abuse has become a masochistic, self-punishing engagement with it. I suspect, and this is very hard for me to say, that they feel their engagement with abuse or emotional neglect gives their life meaning without which they might feel lost. These poor souls may be so mired down in the pain that they are unable to see beyond it. Perhaps because they have become so accustomed to living the pain in their daily lives, they fear what they might feel is an emotional void beyond it.

I have touched on aspects of pain here in earlier posts. I have no need or desire to go back and recount the circumstances in which that pain arose. Pain hurts and I needed to move beyond it. This first part of recovery, the re-engagement with the emotional and physical suffering of abuse carried with it so much pain, but there was not a void beyond it. What I felt was a personal liberation; a liberation into conscious realisation, emotional potential and a reconnection to my own humanity as an entire person.

An abuser will generally try and attach blame to the victim in the abuse. They will say they are inflicting pain because you are bad, unworthy of their love, abnormal, stupid, corrupted by the devil, a freak, a pervert, someone who should not mix with others. The intensity of these assertions increases as the abuse increases. The abuser frequently maintains that his or her acts of violence are a punishment for the manifestation of the child’s behaviour or even its existence (“My life was a whole lot better until you came along. You have taken everything from me. You don’t deserve a life!” ) These abusive behaviours are cruel and insistent. The abuser may demand that the child sanctions their being deserving of punishment. Like in sexual abuse, he may say, “You’re a filthy, disgusting little pervert. You don’t deserve my love. What are you?” I heard that one often enough in bouts of ritual humiliation.

All of these assertions and justifications of the cruelty of abuse erode the child’s identity and its positive sense of self. They undermine its ability to grow into a whole, integrated, loving adult. Worse still is the inversion of the abuser’s destructive assertions into the victim’s self-beliefs. The victim, who is dependent on the parent for its survival, comes to believe that is they who are responsible for the abuse that has been inflicted upon them. The child will frequently believe that what they have experienced is simply a normal part of growing up. They will believe that whatever happened to them, they deserved.

Recognising abuse for the child is impossible. Children (generally) do not have the emotional and intellectual capacity to understand what is happening to them. For the abused child this inability to understand is further compounded since the abuse itself will frequently arrest, disrupt or disturb their normal emotional development.

I lived with high degrees of fear in my childhood. I can remember the dread I felt about going on a family holiday when I was eight or nine years old. My fear was such that I could barely eat and frequently I shit my pants. This was no holiday. It was one or two weeks open exposure to terror and humiliation. My incontinence stopped as soon as the holiday ended. My father’s working days were the best for me. Spending two weeks with him was a horror.

Why I mention fear is that is that fear is more often than not the block to remembering. My first attempts at remembering came with massive rushes of fear, fortunately with remembering came recognition and realisation too. Three thoughts carried me through the fear. They were about recognition. They almost became a sort of mantra to me. They went:

1. I understand and believe that I had no power over my father’s abuse of me. I recognise and hold him completely responsible for that abuse.

2. My abuse belongs to my past and I fear it no longer. My memories of abuse while painful can do me no harm. Memories have no power over me.

3. I wish to claim myself back as a whole person. I no longer fear my father, as I know he is powerless to hurt me now.

Remembering, recognition and re-experiencing are only the first steps in coming to terms with child abuse. They are also the most important and difficult stages of recovery.

Next: Dealing with the aftermath of abuse…understanding toxic emotions.

Coming to terms - Part 4 - making it safe

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-09-22T12:59:06+01:00

Recovery, why bother? Isn’t it simply too frightening? After all one is moving to an “unknown”, might that not be worse than living in one’s present state? What’s to be gained by dredging up the past again? You should pull yourself together, buckle down and get on with life! How could you show such disrespect for the people who brought you into the world? Isn’t recovery simply a choice?

I could make a list of at least a hundred remarks and questions like the ones above. I’ve heard all those and more, those and others which have been said to me, some very recently.

I suppose recovery may be a choice, but it’s not much of one. It’s a little like saying “sickness is a choice”.

I’ve touched on a few of the problems and difficulties arising from a legacy of child abuse. Here’s a longer list: Anxiety; depression; self-sabotage, self-destructive behaviours that may include addictions, compulsions, and suicidal ideation; relationship problems; sexual difficulties; social alienation; low self esteem and numerous physical ailments.

There is some pain in recovery. Perhaps what is important to remember is that having survived abuse, one has already dealt with the worst aspects of that pain. There can be no pain greater than the experience of abuse itself.

Remembering the abuse and re-experiencing all the feelings that went with it are only the first two steps in a very long process of recovery and healing. Recovery may feel like a risk too. Everything is a risk and the balance to be made is one between healthy and harmful risk.

When I started writing about child abuse, I hadn’t intended to talk about this at any length, only to reflect on my own experience. My messages and e-mails have caused me to reconsider and say a little more.

To approach recovery, it’s important to feel safe in doing so. Child abuse is about being and feeling unsafe. If you don’t feel safe then you won’t progress in your recovery.

Recovery might mean facing painful memories, powerful negative feelings, and possibly self-destructive behaviours. To withstand those reactions, you need to feel as safe and strong as possible. It is essential to have supporters and allies who will give freely of their time to you, and that they understand what it is you are doing. I had a therapist too. I was, after all, undergoing training in psychotherapy, and training therapy was a mandatory requirement of my educational course. Dealing with this issue in the middle of my course may have added a year or so onto the time it took me to qualify. But it really was worth it.

My therapist helped me only a little. The fact that he was non-judgemental when I experienced some very difficult feelings was the greatest help he gave me. The real help came from elsewhere. Sometimes the sources of that help and support were a surprise to me. I even made new and lasting friendships as a result of the experience. I made a plan. I alerted my doctor too. She was very positive and supportive.

I chose a time when I could absent myself from work if I didn’t feel up to it. I suppose in total I needed to take somewhere between four and six weeks off work in a period that ran over about a year that covered the initial phases of recovery, mainly the remembering and re-experiencing phases.

On the odd few occasions, when my feelings seemed overwhelming and out of control I made a point of making no decisions. I tried to take myself off to somewhere quiet and safe at such times. The comfort of knowing that someone else was around if I needed them helped me a lot.

Timing is important, as is setting the pace and structure for recovery. I felt strong enough when I approached recovery although at times going through recovery, I did experience doubts as to whether I’d actually make it.

Although I got through the process, I didn’t do well at every stage. One area where I did very badly was in resolving potentially abusive relationships first. I had a very public life. Directly or indirectly I was responsible for several hundred people in my working life.

One coping mechanism that I had developed was that I took responsibility for many people close to me. It wasn’t healthy. It was avoidant behaviour too. It was a survival mechanism that I learned somewhere along the way. Its rationale went that if I took responsibility for someone else then they couldn’t harm me as they might if allowed to act of their own volition or if I depended on them. So I had a hyper-responsible, independence that was impossible to sustain. Only in the aftermath of recovery did I realise that this is what I did.

Of course, (and what I hadn’t seen at the time as I could not see it), this drew damaged and abused children to me like a magnet. So when they picked up that I was attempting to recover, I didn’t tell them but they sensed it, they flew at me from everywhere with infantile rage and destructiveness as their weapons. There is nothing as terrifying as infantile omnipotence since it knows no mercy or compassion. It's simply terrifying!

A short while into recovery, I had to change all my personal telephone numbers to make a distance between these damaged people and me. Sorting out this mess alone took me about four years following my first round of recovery. It was a living nightmare that cost me dearly in so many ways.

This issue can be so very complicated. It is also very important. The experience of abuse in childhood can determine not only how we shape our adult relationships, but also our perceptions of how we might be treated by others. Our perceptions may become self-fulfilling prophecies or they might influence our ability to distinguish between what is happening to us now and what happened to us in childhood.

If one has never resolved one’s childhood abuse, research has determined that one stands a very high chance of repeating it with a spouse, colleague, partner of friend.

Resolving abusive relationships as part of recovery from abuse is, in my view, one of the most critical and important steps in achieving a successful outcome.

What else? It’s a good idea to look at one’s life and get help in areas where one is exposed to crises. Many child abuse survivors live lives that are characterised by constant crises in all areas. These can relate to money, work, jobs, accommodation as well as personal relationships.

I’m still dealing with the aftermath of the messes I made. My life used to go from soaring highs to crashing lows. I have known what it is like to be an entrepreneurial multi-millionaire to someone struggling to keep out of the bum’s night shelter. All of my feelings about myself have changed, as have my values and beliefs. Having had an experience last year, perhaps it was a wake-up call, where I almost died from a bacterial infection, my values, beliefs and how I want to spend time in this world came into sharp focus. There may be a little disjoint in my life now as I work on it. I realised not that long ago that I should have made some big changes rather than what I did which was to try and salvage, build on a life that had its roots in dysfunction.

Some lessons take longer to learn and I’m still working on them.

Okay, last point. In recovery, be good and kind to yourself. Find ways of gaining sensory, emotional and intellectual nourishment. I have a whole host of these. I love art and music and make my own version of both badly! I love cooking, writing, the countryside, walking and cycling too. I love my friends most of all as my real friends allow me to be me and like me for who I am…what’s more I even love writing in this blog. Even writing here I make self-discoveries all the time that are enriching and satisfying. Anyone for a cuddle? (I love those too!) :)

Coming to terms - Part 3 - meeting the truth

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-09-19T10:18:38+01:00

Before I go on to talk more about confronting my father, I’ve a little more to say about the process of coming to terms up to now.

The recognition of abuse is no easy matter. The abuser will generally always act in a way that makes one feel that the pain of abuse is deserved. To get through abuse frequently one accepts the abuser’s condemnation of oneself. I know I came to believe that I truly was bad, sick, unworthy, undesirable and less than human. I really felt that I was this ugly stinking maggot I was told I was. This is made worse, since abuse generally begins at an age where one’s affective feelings for the abuser are often already developed. Put simply, I loved my father before he started abusing me. I continued to love him through the period of abuse too.

I’m sure as a young child I misbehaved. Often I misbehaved because I craved the loving attention of my father. What I got was something entirely different. Sometimes as a child I transferred my affection to things. I stole too. I stole other children’s toys and pretended they were my own, that my father had given them to me as a gift of his love. The toy object I had stolen took on the guise of an expression of love from my father that I never received. All I ever felt were his fists colliding with my head or stomach or some other part of my body where he felt I was less likely to bruise…but that was only some of the time.

I got out of my parental home by writing a diary about the abuse. I was a very literate child. Books were another place I found to hide. One day at age thirteen I took my diary to my family doctor and gave it to him. I was taken from home immediately.

This rescue, and I was transferred to a “special” school, made life no better. My crushed self-belief caused me to feel that this was now the end of my life; that I was doomed a life of misery and failure from here on. I cried in bed for days. A doctor was called who prescribed anti-depressants. I felt awash in the world. Where was I to go now? I felt cast into a social dustbin of hopelessness. The act of transferring me to this strange environment brought no love or succour, only safety from a different sort of pain.

I had a younger brother. Social workers were alerted and crawled everywhere over our home, my diary in their possession. My father asserted to them and my doctor that I was mentally sick, that I had lied, and had made the contents of my diary up. I am not sure how well he convinced them. They maintained vigilance over my younger brother’s welfare for a long time thereafter. I am mentioning this point, since this is the abuser’s common tactic on discovery. It was also linked to an incident, another discovery I made in my thirties:

I had been working overseas in the United States, and on my return to England I felt very unwell. I did not feel anything terribly bad was wrong with me, but I felt ill enough to consult a doctor. I returned to our family doctor, the one to whom I had given the diary. He was an Austrian Jew, a wonderful man in his own way, who had also taken a psychiatry qualification in Austria. I told him of my illness and got the usual prescription for antibiotics. He started to question me about my sex life. His questions seemed bizarre and oddly out of context. They were touching on the nature of my sexuality too. I was puzzled and very bemused. My sexuality was straightforwardly heterosexual. There was nothing very unusual there. So I asked my doctor to say what was on his mind, to pay little regard to my sensibilities, but tell me why he was asking these questions, since I didn’t understand what was behind them.

He told me and I recoiled in horror. My father had come under a lot of pressure following my removal from home. He was challenged about abusing me in a very serious way. What he had told my doctor was that I had perpetrated homosexual assaults on my brother. He had made up worse lies than this, but this one really struck me to the core. I’m not sure what exactly went on between my brother and my father. I knew my mother had acted in silent collusion and had said she had no knowledge of the abuse.

The acts that that my father had committed against me, he had claimed I committed against my brother. There were lies, lies then more lies. I must have sat in that doctor’s office for an hour talking about it.

I felt shaken, sick to the stomach and for the first time, I felt the most enormous repulsion towards my father. Not that long afterwards, I took myself off into therapy, my first bout of many therapies.

What was worse still, I questioned myself as to whether my father’s allegations were true. I knew in my heart they were false, but the legacy of child abuse had cast its black magic of selective forgetfulness. The damage of child abuse lurked in me, and the demons that told me that I got what I deserved were the ones that held my conscious attention.

It’s far more difficult than one at first realises to recognise the truth of an abuser’s behaviour, to accept that this person who inflicted a mass of abuse was the person who one held in love and esteem, to recognise the profound sickness of the abuser.

Life’s events brought me to a reality check suddenly. My first realisation was that my father had never stopped his violence to others but he had transferred it to another more compliant and dependent subject, that he was beating my mother. This was two or three years on from my meeting the doctor. Accidentally during a visit to home, I had wandered into the bathroom, not realising that my mother was in there bathing. Her body was covered with bruises.

I made time to catch my mother outside home. I asked her about what had been happening. She complained of dizziness and feeling unwell. I had to press her hard to tell me what was happening. Eventually, she did. My father was beating her mercilessly, often striking her around the head with heavy objects. I knew this had to stop, and I resolved to confront the brute of my father there and then. My mother’s admission had brought about the conscious recognition that my father was a pathological abuser. I decided to put an end to it, and subsequently I did. I had reached the next stage. I had recognised my father for the very sick man he was.

Before I go on and talk about that confrontation itself, I want to say a few more things about the process of coming to terms with abuse.

If you are reading this as someone who has been abused, my heart goes out to you.

Dealing with the aftermath of abuse is excruciatingly painful, shockingly disturbing and difficult.

For that reason, many abused people do not do it. It is simply too frightening.

There’s a post down the page here, it was based on an article I wrote originally for publication in 2002. It’s called “What is intimacy?” I’ll quote from it later because I cannot emphasise the points it makes enough.

Coming to terms with abuse is very tough. Failure to come to terms with abuse may frequently mean that the abused child in later life goes on to become an abuser. It is for this reason, that the perpetuation of child abuse is often inter-generational. There is a comment on my first post in this series pointing to me to a link to the story of another. I clicked on that link last night. The first words I read were something like, “Child abuse is hereditary, I’m convinced of it.” I had to stop reading at this point although I will go back and read what that person has to say. Hopefully she will join in reading this too. Her statement is I believe both true and false. I will say more too after this quote from an earlier post of mine:

“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.”

QUOTE ENDS

During the big wave of realisation of abuse in training therapy, one of the greatest fears I experienced was that having been abused, meant that I was tainted by the devil and I would go on to be a child abuser too.

No, I don’t believe child abuse is hereditary, although it may often appear to be that way in people who have failed to “come to terms’” with their damaging early life experience. There is a personal price in coming to terms with abuse, but it’s a small price to pay for not becoming an abuser. In my recovery, I broke free of this cycle of abuse. This is so important to me.

If you have been abused then I want you to know that it is possible to recover yourself as a loving whole person and a wonderful caring parent too. Moreover, your realisation and coming to terms with abuse may, I believe, make you into a better parent. There’s nothing inevitable about the victim going on to be the perpetrator…nothing at all!

I’m going to write a little more about abuse and some popular prejudices in my next post. I have heard and experienced a lot of prejudice.

I have recovered, and recovered fully, although I am often haunted by demons of self-doubt and sometimes, negative self-beliefs, that come from my childhood. Most times I recognise and see them for what they are. Sometimes I make mistakes too, that much is human.

I should end this post here. It’s already too long. I want to share some more experiences here before getting to the point of talking about the confrontation with my father. I need to talk about dealing with anger, guilt and shame too. Also I want to talk about blame and forgiveness.

More soon…

Coming to terms - Part 2 - the realisation

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-09-18T17:43:50+01:00

One of the painful things about growing up without a real family is that one has so many bits missing. I’m not sure how many social skills I lacked, only that there were lots of them. One of the few benefits of growing up in a place where personal survival is paramount is that one learns very quickly.

I had an awkwardness about me on every social occasion. I hated large social groups. I learned how to cope. I learned social skills of sorts. All aspects of my life were difficult in those early days, all except my career. But even my career was erratic. I could experience great success followed by terrible slumps of fortune. I had no love inside me. I felt no love for myself either.

I was fortunate at first. After university, I met a lovely young woman, an art student. I fell into my own incomplete version of love with her. Her parents were big small-town people who were against me from the outset. I endured so much talk from them about being worthless, useless and a failure. I was well used to that by then. It was life as usual, until my lover overdrew her bank account and her parents held me responsible. They turned up one day at our flat and demanded we put an end to our relationship there and then; all for the sake of a £60 ($108) overdraft. By this time I was working. I had bought her dresses, clothes, food and even paid for her accommodation with me. We were in our early twenties. Her parents tore us apart. She left college and went to work as a primary school teacher. I remember to this day how wonderful it was to watch her work with small children. She had a natural gift for her work. I saw in her a sort of uncorrupted womanly beauty. I felt sullied to the core.

Intimate personal relationships were a big problem to me. Child abuse does that. I made a mess of every one. I didn’t know how to love or be loved, so I made error after error. At first, I hid from my pain in sex.

Later in my twenties, I married another very lovely woman with whom I am friends to this day. Sadly and perhaps inevitably, she had a lot of personal problems too, problems that had prevented her from discovering the true nature of her sexuality. Eighteen months into our marriage, she was liberated into the realisation that she was attracted to women more than men. She was a lesbian. We separated and eventually divorced. She has been living happily with the same woman partner for more than twenty years. Now I love her as a very close friend. In times of difficulty we have often helped each other.

After these two women, my personal relationships got worse. In some ways, I was fortunate in that my early life had given me some acute sensitivities that provided a strong desire to understand my own and other’s feelings and emotions. What I didn’t understand was that subconsciously or even unconsciously I may have had this emotional beacon flashing inside me shouting out, “Come and get me! I’m an abused child!”

In my damage, I attracted some very damaged and dangerous people to me.

I’ll skip some time since this was not meant to be a chunk of autobiography. By the time I was in my thirties, I was a total mess. My relationships always went awry. I ran a company that employed damaged children from everywhere…they were drawn to the business like a magnet, and we were sixty strong. I knew something was very wrong in me. Frequently I would work flat out in the day then escape into drink by night. The bottle had become my best friend. Fortunately I may have been spared an addictive gene. I never made it to alcoholism, but on many of my bleak, dark, lonely nights, I numbed my emotional pain by drinking to excess.

I was a workaholic too. My workaholic life took a useful turn and by happenstance I ended up running a mental health project in addition to my day job. I could work all the hours god sent if I wished and never have to face myself, or so I supposed. I knew I had profound problems. Often in the murky drinking hours, suicidal thoughts would come to haunt me. I had planned my own death so many times, more than I would ever care to admit.

There was worse too, the feelings of unworthiness lurked inside me all the time. I even developed my own personal relationship complex that I nicknamed the “Cinderella Complex.” It was only some other self-destructive way of doing relationships. If I found “Cinderella” the woman who I really wanted, I would do everything in my power to put her off me. I felt I was only deserving of the ugliest of ugly sisters, even if ugly meant destructive of me. I never deserved Cinderella.

I decided to study psychology (analytical neo-Jungian psychotherapy). My “social” rationale was that it would enable me to support the staff of the mental health project better. My personal agenda was to try and cast out those demons of child abuse.

I did it. But I almost went mad in the process, literally insane. In my training therapy all my energies were directed at coming to terms with child abuse, and how I might live as a functioning loving adult.

When the child abuse dam burst inside me. I experienced all the emotions that I had denied and repressed. I use a "dam" analogy, which is an interesting choice of words. I had a sense of having built all these coping structures on top of my memories of abuse. The child in me had done it to protect a young child. My child was sometimes my caring parent too. I had piled layer on layer on layer of emotions without foundation above the pain and hurt. In doing realisation and recognition of child abuse, these protective layers crumbled. At first, there were small cracks, through which my child's feelings escaped. Then they rushed fast through the cracks bursting the dam, the blocks that I had put there to cope. The strength and intensity of those childhood feelings were alarming, absolutely terrifying.

I can’t say how many nights I begged people to be on call, be close, and be with me while I coped with the most frightening feelings. My whole head felt as though it might implode in a rush of emotions. I felt unimaginable rage, I felt murderous hate, I felt utter fury…and I felt the most desperate grief. At one point, when I really felt I was going crazy, I rushed off to the local Catholic Monastery and asked if they could lock me up there for a couple of nights. They were kind and benevolent, but not that understanding. The feelings were so intense that I went into manic rushes. I wasn’t manic, but I felt like I was. I would often walk for miles and miles with these terrible emotions pounding and rushing inside me. I would walk until the skin on my feet was raw and bleeding. On one occasion, I can even remember blood seeping through my shoes. That’s how powerful my feelings were.

During all of that I couldn’t function; I could barely work. I held my life together in public. Abuse had taught me how to put on a brave face when I was falling apart inside.

I had accomplished the first stages of coming to terms with abuse. I had started to recognise the abuse for what it was, I had allowed myself to feel the massive anger and grief that the abused child feels. I’m not entirely sure if recovery from abuse comes in neatly packaged or progressive stages. Mine didn’t. My father’s judgment and condemnation of me had lost its power. He could harm me no longer. Eventually most of these strong emotions played themselves out, and then I found myself struggling with what to do next. I simply did not know how to cope. Psychotherapy training did not help me that much.

Coming to terms...the beginning

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-09-18T11:52:11+01:00

These next posts are about exorcising a ghost from my past. They are talking about something which I have never talked publicly before.

They are about child abuse, my own experience of abuse.

Up till now, I have only talked about this in private. Even then, it has frequently had emotional consequences that I found difficult to handle. I can remember recounting the nature of my abuse to two close, sensitive and highly educated friends. They both recoiled in disgust and horror. Neither was able to deal with what I had told them. One was unable to speak with me for days afterwards. I felt simply terrible, as though I had confessed to suffering from some terrible contagion, like leprosy.

I’m not going to talk about the nature of my abuse here other than to say it was extreme, severe and encompassed every form of abuse imaginable, including massive violence, sexual and emotional abuse. It started at around age eight and had left me emotionally crippled by the time I was thirteen.

I survived.

Human beings are remarkable and resilient organisms sometimes.

My own survival was, perhaps, based on two factors initially, then more later.

The first of these was like the operation of a pair of weigh scales.

Sometimes when you suppress the development and existence of one side of a person, another aspect comes into play to compensate.

For me, this meant that my emotions shut down completely, the pain was too great for any child to bear. It was even too great for my loving adult friends to bear. I believe that what happened to me in the short term is that I became completely focused on survival; I developed a kind of formidable “black” intelligence. I was thought to be “gifted”. Some gift that was! My second survival mechanism was that I was able to identify and latch onto good non-abusing adults who helped me. These were so important as I didn’t have a family to help from a very young age. I got pocket money from my parents sometimes, that was all, and often, that was more about public display than any real concern for my welfare.

I was mainly lucky or perceptive in my choice of adult helpers. Predominantly they were good people.

My intelligence was formidable. It was also a very dark force. I was like a jungle animal sometimes. I did not bully, I was never violent and after my early life experience, I was not that physically strong either. The abuse had taken its toll on my body. If threatened, I could outrun almost anyone I met intellectually. I had no compassion either. My black intelligence was ruthless. It’s how I survived.

But my intelligence was something about which I felt totally equivocal. Every time I exercised it, I felt emotional ruin and desolation inside. I craved love and affection. Generally I found neither. I craved it so badly that my sex life started at a very precocious age, at 13. I wanted to experience the human physical warmth that had been denied to me in childhood. I felt those infantile cravings for love, physical warmth and attachment that I had never felt. I wanted to find out about touching and being held.

Having been removed from home aged 13, my life went up and down like the Himalayas. I flunked all my early education then in a bout of fury, I gained university entrance qualifications that would take me to anywhere I chose in 5 weeks. The course was 2 years long. I completed it in 5 weeks.

I worked for a while then took myself off to a very good university where the pattern started repeating. By the end of my first year, I had been offered a research fellowship. I hit the doldrums in my second year because my achievement was so caught up with feeling so bad in my heart. It was a habit. To “achieve”, I closed myself up emotionally. In the void of achievement, all I felt was emotional pain and emptiness. I felt totally empty and desolate inside. No achievement could ever make up for that.

This account is all in hindsight. I can make some sense of it now.

But the legacy of child abuse haunted me for a very long time.

There was much more…all manner of strange, unpleasant, unhealthy, hostile and painful experiences.

Perhaps, the worst of these was being very bright and working class.

Social workers had thought it a good idea for me to take a scholarship to attend an English, upper class, public (elite private) school. I passed the scholarship entrance exams. I lasted only about four years at that school. I was bullied because of my working class accent at the time (I now speak impeccable “BBC” English). I was beaten, bullied and called a “wog” and a “nigger”. I was neither. I am white. But I learned what it was like to feel like an outcast there, like an untouchable.

Ironically, I was expelled from that place for persistent “delinquent” behaviour, mainly for answering back and defending myself. The reason given for my expulsion was “academic under-achievement”.

To complete my pre-university entrance studies, I went to a state (sixth-form) college. It was like heaven by comparison. Study with sex, drink and cigarettes.

I had not recovered.

It was only the beginning of the next chapter.

Tell me a story! Part 3 - Healing stories

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-07-29T12:01:55+01:00

For a while now, I’ve been talking to people about whether writing about past and present emotional difficulties helps in transcending those difficulties…whether writing is a means of coming to terms with emotional upheavals and healing from them.

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...

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-07-29T13:01:00+01:00

I wanted to say a few words about questions that I am asked all the time about 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

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-07-28T14:01:43+01:00

Moving away from grand theory and back to psychology, I have been interested in the power of stories for a long time.

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

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-07-27T23:36:00+01:00

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with stories for as long as I can remember. As soon as I was old enough to read books, I devoured them. I had my first library ticket when I was about six years old.

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. I know people who love history. They 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

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-07-27T08:26:10+01:00

I’ve been delving into my psyche a little recently. It’s been a time of major adjustment for me of late. I’ve had the odd moments of uncertainty and doubt, but they have never persisted for that long. More often than not, those moments have been triggered by my past rather than my present. That happens too.

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

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-05-30T11:26:45+01:00

This post should be credited at its outset. It was inspired by the writing of another, an exceptional, talented and compassionate holistic counsellor, therapist and coach, called Tamera. You can find her blog here

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?

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-05-16T11:37:01+01:00

I use the words transference and projection a lot in trying to explain interpersonal dynamics in relationships. It has become clear to me of late that they evoke a lot of confusion so I am going to try and explain them here in simple terms. They are not, however, that simple and whole books have been written about them, so if you are an informed reader, do please excuse my crude explanations here.

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.

What is intimacy?

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-05-06T22:25:00+01:00

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’s not although sex may be a fundamental (and wonderful) part of intimacy.

The work of creating intimacy is realizing, expressing and affirming 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 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. It is not inevitable that an abused child will go on to be an abuser. Such a statement would be as absurd as it is damaging. I do believe, however, that all abusers are likely to have suffered abuse themselves.

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 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?

March 2002

The Rebound Relationship

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-05-06T22:26:07+01:00

After a divorce or separation from a long-term relationship many individuals try to make up for their emotional losses by rushing straight into another relationship. This is because divorce or separation sometimes 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 another to the extent that you become "blind" to your true feelings.

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 six stages of grief: shock, denial, anger, sadness, acceptance and healing. The enormous impact of these reactions should not be underestimated.

Rebound relationships, which never last long, seem to occur as the result of two people projecting an idealistic notion onto each other. Difficulties may occur as one person creates an understanding of the future of the relationship that differs from the new partner’s view of that relationship. Often these issues are about commitment. Both parties, however, 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.

Often, 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 the idea that, "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" with 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 with the former partner.

Emotional issues and needs that were not brought out during the divorce or separation will often 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 suffering 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 career or creativity.

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 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 in its own right. 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 feel this because your 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 feelings of self-worth.

Rather than look at a separation or divorce as a loss, perhaps one might look at life’s lessons that so frequently come back to us through another person. Most of us keep meeting partners who show us exactly where we need to work on ourselves in order to become who we truly are. These wounds are often the openings into our missing life.

October 2007 (revised February 2009)

Synchronicity - Part 1

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-05-06T22:05:00+01:00

For a very long time I have struggled with Jung's notion of synchronicity. Simply put synchronicity is the concept of meaningful coincidence, of the acausal connection - a connectedness between apparently disparate phenomena and events.

For me, the problem of synchronicity is that it is riddled with so much mystical jiggery-pokery on the one hand and ideas about fatalism and divinity on the other. There are so many esoteric deterministic elements that might be thrown into the synchronicity melting pot including ideas about pre-destination and pre-ordination. Who establishes that these coincidences have meaning or significance? Are events and phenomena not open to subjective re-interpretation in order to show their coincidental significance? Is the construction of the meaning and relatedness of phenomena and events simply an act of creating their subjective correspondence?

I shall suspend my scepticism and go off here on a short excursus, a voyage of discovery in words to see if I can articulate what I feel about synchronicity.

In case I am being too abstract, perhaps I should attempt to give one or two examples of synchronous events: A woman orders a red dress for a party but a black dress is delivered to her in error. As she is about to phone the shop where she bought it to advise them of the mistake, the phone rings. It is her sister, "Mother has died. You need to come for the funeral." The woman thought she was in control of her life; she believed she knew what would happen next. The synchronous event told her otherwise and outfitted her for what was actually coming next, something much deeper had occurred.

That is a powerful example. I know in my own life, there feels to be other purposeful connections that have been made that may not happened had my life followed its planned course.

We seek to understand our world in terms of cause and effect. I do not believe that everything can be understood in those scientific and rational terms. Cause and effect are the rationale of industrial man. It is a form of cultural and intellectual arrogance of the worst kind that maintains that the scientific mode of understanding is the only valid way of knowing and understanding our world. The obsession with rationality pre-dates industrialisation, but perhaps rational consciousness was a social pre-condition or a cultural pre-requisite of the change to be brought about by the industrial revolution. What is interesting is that it was the Catholic Church who seized upon rationality as the only way of knowing. During the inquisition and beyond, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of women were put to death by the Catholic Church for so-called witchcraft. To be a witch was to have a "heretical" belief either good or bad that could not be substantiated by rational proof. Of course, the only heretical beliefs one was allowed to hold were those religious beliefs proselytized by the Catholic Church itself. Inquisitions happened everywhere throughout the Middle Ages. To have non-rational beliefs was to risk being put to death; it is no small wonder that rationality has a stranglehold on our consciousness. But I digress.

Back to synchronicity: I am going to try and drop rationality for a while too and simply share the sense I have of synchronicity.

Synchronicities appear to cluster around significant events. Many meaningful coincidences occurred, for instance, when the Titanic sank and when Kennedy was assassinated. Also personal disasters or crises in our personal lives seem to invite synchronicity.

Perhaps synchronicity is the surprise that something suddenly fits! Synchronous events are meaningful coincidences or correspondences that guide us, warn us, or confirm us on our path in life. Coincidence happens at a specific moment. In this sense it is existential, tied to the here and now. Correspondences may continue. This is how synchronicity is essential, always present, in our human experience. Synchronicity may also be found in a series of similar events or experiences. It can appear as one striking event that sets off a chain reaction. It is always unexpected and somehow uncanny, almost eerie in its accuracy of connection or revelation. This is what makes it impossible for me to dismiss synchronicity as mere coincidence.

There may be synchronicity in the fact that our knowledge of our real issues, of ourselves and of our relationships, comes simultaneously with the strength to face them. We are usually in denial for a long time before we finally recognise and acknowledge our own truth. Synchronicity is in the fact that we often only let ourselves know when we can deal with what we know.

Synchronicity also occurs in looking back at one's life and seeing how it all prepared or instructed you for the realisation of one's full potential. A hidden feeling or truth may have waited to be awakened by the right person or circumstance, sometimes painfully. My destiny, perhaps, was to have had such a beginning. My neglectful and abusive father helped me practice for the independent and loving life I lead now. James Hillman writes: "This way of seeing removes the burden from the early years as having been a mistake and yourself a victim of handicaps and cruelties; instead it is the acorn in the mirror...." This may be light years ahead of what I wrote earlier.

Everyone and every event in life's drama is part of the metaphor of our personal development. The issue from an old relationship may not be: "how bad she was" but "how much I needed to learn." Most of us keep meeting partners who show us exactly where our we need to work on ourselves in order to become ourselves, e.g., men who abuse, women who are unfaithful. The wounds are openings into our missing life. Often, the only way in which a lost piece of ourselves or of our history comes back to us is through another person. The unknown is scary so people and events come along that help us go there. This is synchronicity. The only mistake we make is hanging on to some people too long or too briefly. We ask, “How, why and with whom did I do that?” We fall into the trap of taking them as literally themselves instead of metaphorical forces that have come to boost, chide or light our way in life. “Who finally pointed the way beyond my limitations?”

My personal jury has been out on synchronicity for about 15 years now. It looks like it just walked back in and voted in its favour. “Now who or what took me there?” I wonder. Time will tell me all I need to know so long as I listen carefully and pay attention.

My acknowledgements to Dr David Richo whose book, "Unexpected Miracles: The Gift of Synchronicity & How to Open it" inspired this piece and also to the work of Carl Gustav Jung on which my thinking about synchronicity is based.

Synchronicity - Part 2 - Fate, Destiny and Jonah and the Whale

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-05-06T22:06:58+01:00

There is a difference between fate and destiny. The words fatal and fatality come from the same root as fate. Fate implies no choice and ends with death. Destiny requires our wilful participation in achieving an outcome that is desirable for ourselves and for others. In normal usage the words may be used interchangeably but they do have distinct and different meanings. In the Old Testament, destiny is linked to good fortune.

Jung wrote, "We are dragged along by fate to that which we refuse to walk upright…"

The culmination of synchronicity is the revelation of one's destiny, of the path through life that gives meaning to our existence, of our essential selves. That which we refuse to bring into consciousness or deny comes back to us as fate. Fate strikes us from without when we fail to heed its summons from within. Attention to synchronicity, to the meaningful details of our being, no matter if they appear chaotic or disorganised, helps us join and make sense of the unfolding processes of our lives consciously.

Destiny is frequently connected to our career. Our work in the world is often our means of actualising our potential.

Frequently I go through streams of thought and talk about them with my friends, and with one of my male friends in particular. We were chatting about this blog and I mentioned that my next short piece would be about destiny, fate, synchronicity and Jonah and the whale. Perhaps my friends think me a little eccentric but they do seem to have unending patience with my unravelling this story. But I suspect I may have seen my friends eyes raised heavenwards as I told him about what I intended to write here.

Many biblical stories are interesting to me in their portrayal of cultural archetypes and their value as fables or parables: Stories that exist to teach lessons and contain within them ancient mythological images that inform our culture and our consciousness, as well as our moral conscience. Why I like the story of Jonah is that it seems to be the biblical archetype of the refusal of one's destiny where fate and the reversal of fate occur through acceptance of destiny.

I shall retell that story without any religious embellishments as a secular myth. Jonah is called to be a prophet and refuses his calling. He runs from destiny, hopping off on a boat headed for Tarshish (thought by some to be Minoan Crete). But he is simply running from himself from which there is no escape. While at sea a huge storm brews up and tosses the boat wildly. The sailors pray to their gods, to several gods to be saved from calamity and death.

Jonah sleeps through the storm below deck until he is dragged from his bed by the boat's captain. The sailors decide to draw lots to divine who might be the cause of their problem and the lot falls on Jonah.

The sailors question Jonah who confesses that he is running from destiny, from his own special calling. Jonah in a moment of self-destructive guilt tells the sailors to throw him overboard, telling them that if they get rid of him then their lives will be spared. Perhaps this is an acknowledgement of the psychological death that occurs when we fail to be true to ourselves. The sailors cast Jonah into the sea.

As Jonah is about to sink, to drown and die, a whale swallows him. He remains in the dark place of the whale's belly for three days and three nights. It could be any dark place and most of us have known those places of being in darkness and struggling over our future lives in one way or another. But he remains in that dark place meditating his destiny; of his purpose in life, Jonah eventually accepts his purpose with truth and sincerity and the whale spits him out onto the shore.

What a wonderful allegory about fate and destiny. Of course, there are one or two further twists in this particular tale since Jonah accepts his purpose then feels resentment about doing so. For a second time he is beset by misery and grief together with the desire to die yet again. Perhaps this is the reinforcement of the consequences, of the feelings of inner deadness that we feel at times when we are not true to our feelings and to ourselves.

It is a very good story!

There is something about synchronicity that I feel helps us to forge a lasting relationship with the universe and with life all around us - not just other people but a relationship with nature, the environment and the physical world around us. It is a peculiar aspect of our culture that encourages us to see ourselves as individuals serving self-interest but without any connection to the universe we inhabit. Many writers use the word "spiritual" here. Sadly, even though I have enquired of many people, I do not know what the word "spiritual" means! I did have one friend, now dead, who helped Chad Varah establish the Samaritans, a national charity in the UK that provides help and support to those who are despairing and suicidal. She was a committed Christian. I asked her what "spiritual" meant. She replied, "Don't you know? You are one of the most spiritual people I know." But I'm none the wiser. Still I don't have a clue. I do have a sense though of our existence being inextricably connected to and part of the cosmos we inhabit. I have a deep fascination with quantum physics that shows the infinite inter-relationships of the atomic structures that constitute our universe. It would be foolish to suppose that the world we inhabit in ourselves does not form part of that same universe.

Jung said, "We find our destiny on the path we take to avoid it." The greatest of human tragedies is to lose our power and potential of actualisation because of addictions or our involvement in relationships that are abusive, untenable or depleting. Great potential in us can simply fade away and no one will do anything to halt its waste or dissolution. The world will stand by as we throw away or reject our life's good fortunes. There is no guarantee that the whale may intervene for us as it did for Jonah. To take up Jung's words, they mean that we should look for our destiny in those parts of our lives in which we are refusing to engage. That is no easy task. I am not even sure, even at my age, where to start. Perhaps we should stop and look while we are running in the opposite direction! "Is my destiny scribbled on parchment, twirled in a bottle and hurled into the sea, to be stumbled upon only long after I am gone?"

Chance, chaos and randomness may all play a part in showing us our destiny. As chaos theorists have shown even its apparent disorder may be susceptible to a form of implicit organisation. Perhaps it is synchronicity that integrates the irrational, that which lies beyond our understanding, with the essence of our universal selves. Perhaps the trick is to perceive the sense in events despite their apparently random display.

Mahatma Gandhi may have expressed this tension between our existential reality and our universal truth most accurately. Humankind does after all appear on the one hand to have been ignorant and destructive, yet on the other, wonderfully responsive and restorative: "I see that mankind still survives after all its attempts to destroy itself and so I surmise that it is the law of love that rules mankind."

My acknowledgements to Dr David Richo whose book, "Unexpected Miracles: The Gift of Synchronicity & How to Open it" inspired this piece and also to the work of Carl Gustav Jung on which my thinking about synchronicity is based.

Love and sex

geoffrey@geoffreysplace.net — 2008-05-06T22:40:00+01:00

These thoughts on love and intimacy are strange things. As I looked back I realised that they charted my own recent feelings life reflecting my concerns at the time of writing. This piece has taken longer, much longer to write than any before.

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.