It's clear that most disease comes from lack of love. And yet, over and over again, we insist that we must first 'love ourselves'.
This makes me want to bang my head against the wall and scream at people. And then I take a deep breath, and try to look past the fact that they're all being complete fucking morons. Ok. So why can they not see it? Why are they blind to this particular truth?
I think we are hard-wired to believe what we experience. It can be no other way. That's why there's no such thing as altruism, or really even empathy. It's all projection, because that's the best we can do. Some people may do pretty damn well at it, to the point that we're actually able to help each other a little. After all, we all have more or less the same basic needs - food, shelter, love, warmth, etc. So it's not that hard to guess what another person might be needing. But the important thing to remember is that it's a guess.
Which is why communication is so confoundedly important! Expressing our emotions is the original way we humans got our needs met. Look at a brand new infant: What are her ways to get her needs met? Crying, screaming, yelling, thrashing with arms and legs when needs are unmet; conversely, giggling, cooing, smiling, wiggling happily when contentment has been achieved.
And you know what? Though we may add many, many layers of confabulation and obfuscatory something-or-other over the top as we 'mature', basically our communication skills really depend on our gut-level connection with these simple, child-like expressions. The further we get from those lizard-brain ways of being and connecting, the further we are from getting our needs met.
Of course 'adults' expect to be able to communicate in less - fraught? demanding? temper-tantrum-ish? ways. But nonetheless, the underlying basic meaning is the same as that of the newborn: I NEED this, and I need it now. As adults we learn to delay gratification, but this is not really healthy beyond a certain point. Yes, it's useful to be able to hold your water when there's no toilet nearby - but this is a socially instilled requirement in a culture that doesn't like its sidewalks to reek of urine. (Though I must say in Paris, it wasn't only the four-legged dogs who routinely made use of the nearest tree. In fact, here in my own mild-mannered burg, I saw a guy just the other day taking a whiz against a tree in the middle of a golf course. Right there before god and everybody, as they say...)
Back to the point: There's that saying about everybody needing eight hugs a day, or some such thing.
You know what? I'm lucky if I get eight hugs a month. I am literally dying here from emotional starvation. And yet this is considered my fault - that I'm just too picky, or what have you.
But consider: What are the means by which a single, adult woman may get her needs for physical affection met? Contrary to the popular idea that women take care of each other, many, if not most of us, don't have the kind of physical relationships with other women that would satisfy this need. Most women turn to men to get our affection needs met.
And along with this comes all the baggage of sex, and the related complications. How many marriages/relationships founder because she wants touch, and he wants sex? In this male-dominated world, guess who wins? Go look at the personals ads sometime and see how many married men are openly advertising to scratch that itch, under the guise of 'feeling unloved'.
Or we can pay somebody to give us a massage. To me this is not worth wasting breath to refute. How can paying to be touched by some random stranger meet the need for close, affectionate touch from a well-know loved one???????? Answer: IT CAN'T.
No wonder we're a nation of addicts - to television, sugar, caffeine, nicotine, alcohol or what-have-you. Our so-called 'gurus' teach us that we are not allowed to ask to have our basic needs met. They repeat, over and over again, the same shit that traumatized us in the first place: Be a big girl. Mommy needs you to be a big girl.
What does this mean? It means, Go away, don't bother me with your childish needs. I'm busy. You're too much trouble. Nobody ever met my needs, why should you have yours met? And on and on ad - how to say 'pain'eum?
Experientially, then, we learn not to have our needs met. We are taught to be self-sufficient at a time when we are developmentally incapable of being so.
No wonder we're all so fucked up. America: Nation of junk food for the soul.
****
Don't give me any more of this bullshit about 'self love'. What the fuck is that anyway? Isn't it just another name for narcissism, which we simultaneously revile and embrace, in that cognitive-dissonant way that most Westerners 'cope' with anything messy or uncomfortable, from sex to death?
****
Unposted comments to '10 Common Reasons to Lie to Your Therapist':
We learn to lie because the people in our lives are untrustworthy. Why should we suddenly trust some random stranger (aka therapist) just because we're paying them a lot of money?
Clue: Most therapists are no more empathetic or caring than your average Joe. Most therapists are out to make an easy buck, and many of them have not done enough of their *own* healing work to be really useful to anybody.
All 10 of these items are about trust. The whole reason most people go to therapists in the first place is to find a SAFE place to talk about things that have always been too scary to share anywhere else, because the people in your life have been untrustworthy with that information.
If the therapist is dismissive, unresponsive, negative, judgmental, invalidating, that re-creates the same scenario most people are trying to escape.
I think most therapists don't really know how to create a 'safe space' because they've never experienced one themselves.
Our culture teaches self-sufficiency, even in relationships. Which is totally ass-backward - by definition, relational needs require a relationship. We CANNOT meet our own relational needs.
***
Just came across excerpts from your book (The Cure Within) via Google, would like to comment.
Quote from Dr. Siegel (p. 196):
I feel that all disease is ultimately related to a lack of love, or to love that is only conditional[...]I also feel that all healing is related to the ability to give and accept unconditional love . . . the truth is: love heals.
In this Western world, we believe that we are personally responsible for everything that happens to us. In the shrink world, this includes the belief that we are responsible for our own emotional nurturance.But we can't provide our own nurturance. It's humanly impossible. Nurturance is a relational need, which by definition requires another human.
It's as if he gets the first half of the equation right: "Disease comes from lack of love".
And yet in the second half, he reverts to the cultural brain-washing that somehow suggests that we are capable of being our own nurturers.
This is WRONG. Nurturing comes from OUTSIDE. Would you blame a plant with brown leaves for its environment, and accuse it of having 'brown leaf disorder'? Would you say that the plant 'stubbornly resists all attempts to water it'?
No. That would be ludicrous. And yet an equally ludicrous rationale is almost universally applied by so-called therapeutic 'thinking': That somehow we are personally, individually responsible for the circumstances and conditions in which we find ourselves. We are basically expected to 'water' ourselves.
Why is this most basic, essential connection not made, over and over in this culture? Why do we repeatedly deny that we need other people? What's with this obsession with autonomy?
The cure is NOT within. The cure is without. The cure is in relationships.
A Parable of Heaven & Hell
A man spoke with an Angel about heaven and hell. The Angel said to the man, "Come, I will show you hell."
They entered a room where a group of people sat around a huge pot of stew. Everyone was famished, desperate and starving. Each held a spoon that reached the pot, but each spoon had a handle so much longer than their own arm that it could not be used to get the stew into their own mouths. The suffering was terrible.
"Come, now, I will show you heaven," the Angel said.
They entered another room, identical to the first. The pot of stew, the group of people, the same long-handled spoons. But there everyone was happy and well- nourished. "I don't understand," said the man. "Why are they happy here when they are miserable in the other room and everything was the same?"
The Angel smiled. "Ah, it is simple," she said. "Here they have learned to feed each other."
No comments:
Post a Comment