The Power of No
Senin, 20 Januari 2014
The Power of No
fall in love
Clingy Love
Clingy Love – A Correspondence
Many of us know what it's like to fall in love. The rush of feeling, that sense of vitality, and that gaze you can’t get enough of…it goes on and on.
Yet love often falls flat. It burns out or gets TOO intense. You find yourself needing space, or demanding ALL his time. You worry when you don’t hear from her, or you begin to feel anxious when you do. Does she really love me? Is he losing interest?
When Love Triggers Problems:
Love can be hazardous, yet it opens the door to our greatest dreams. It can lead to connection and bliss. It can also lead to hurt and rejection.And, often both with the same person!! In past posts I proposed the idea of a Field of Intimacy, where so much psychological baggage gets opened. If you handle it, you’ve got a love to last. If you don’t, watch out.
Here’s a touching comment from an intelligent reader. She is responding to a piece called, Field of Intimacy. Does her story remind you of someone you know?
A Reader's Question:
Thank you for writing an article that was neither silly nor pretentious. This article speaks to so many issues I have dealt with all of my adult life. Myromantic relationships are riddled with rage, worry, and fear of abandonment. Waves of happiness and moments of deep intimacy make my sinew physically recoil. Irrational fears, controlling behavior, and emotional neediness have destroyed potentially healthy relationships all of my life. Even potential to friendships, or just to happiness in general, I viscerally react. Eye contact, even. Mine is scattered and sporadic and uncomfortable.
But here is the kicker: My mother and father created and raised me in a beautiful, stable home filled with unconditional love and proactiveparenting. My mother breastfed me until I was maybe one. She read to me. She drove me to school. Her life revolved around our family, and not in an unhealthy way. My father went to work every morning at 7, came home every night at 6, we ate dinner as a family, and he happily washed the dishes to give my mom a break. In short, I believe that she was an excellent mother and wife, and he was an excellent father and husband. They are still married after 46 years.
So what gives? My brother and sister are both married, happy, and have beautiful children. Me, I am perpetually falling for yet another guy, spending the first third of the relationship in a romantic frenzy and the second two thirds on an emotional free fall of ALL or NOTHING. "I love you/this is never going to work/I love you/You're going to leave me/I love you/Please please don't leave." And I eventually wear them out, and their love for me no longer outweighs the exhaustion of trying to calm me down and comfort my worry. They fell in love with a cool, kind, fun-loving woman and wind up with an anxiety-ridden child.
If my first experience with love was beautiful and warm and caring, why am I so spiky and fiery and hostile, thirty years later?
The Road to Neediness:
There is a lot of pain here and I am sorry.
The fact is that we don't completely understand how people end up needy. There are many roads to Rome, and sometimes it is a combination of many factors. Here are some thoughts. Perhaps something will ring true for you.
Clinginess poisons love.
And therapy can detoxify clinginess.
The mind can act habitually, with love and fear of rejection near the top of the list. By objectifying your experience, therapy offers an opportunity to try something new. Habits, no matter how ingrained, can only be managed if you know when they're activated.
Don’t lose hope. The sweet thing about being an adult is that the future is not set in stone.
You have some choice.
Hope this helps.
MB
Here three pieces that may be of use.
https://my.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-intelligent-divorce/201302/bad-memories-8-ways-detox-yourself
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-intelligent-divorce/201208/are-y...
https://my.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-intelligent-divorce/201208/why-n...
____________
Love can be hazardous, yet it opens the door to our greatest dreams. It can lead to connection and bliss. It can also lead to hurt and rejection.And, often both with the same person!! In past posts I proposed the idea of a Field of Intimacy, where so much psychological baggage gets opened. If you handle it, you’ve got a love to last. If you don’t, watch out.
Here’s a touching comment from an intelligent reader. She is responding to a piece called, Field of Intimacy. Does her story remind you of someone you know?
A Reader's Question:
Thank you for writing an article that was neither silly nor pretentious. This article speaks to so many issues I have dealt with all of my adult life. Myromantic relationships are riddled with rage, worry, and fear of abandonment. Waves of happiness and moments of deep intimacy make my sinew physically recoil. Irrational fears, controlling behavior, and emotional neediness have destroyed potentially healthy relationships all of my life. Even potential to friendships, or just to happiness in general, I viscerally react. Eye contact, even. Mine is scattered and sporadic and uncomfortable.
But here is the kicker: My mother and father created and raised me in a beautiful, stable home filled with unconditional love and proactiveparenting. My mother breastfed me until I was maybe one. She read to me. She drove me to school. Her life revolved around our family, and not in an unhealthy way. My father went to work every morning at 7, came home every night at 6, we ate dinner as a family, and he happily washed the dishes to give my mom a break. In short, I believe that she was an excellent mother and wife, and he was an excellent father and husband. They are still married after 46 years.
So what gives? My brother and sister are both married, happy, and have beautiful children. Me, I am perpetually falling for yet another guy, spending the first third of the relationship in a romantic frenzy and the second two thirds on an emotional free fall of ALL or NOTHING. "I love you/this is never going to work/I love you/You're going to leave me/I love you/Please please don't leave." And I eventually wear them out, and their love for me no longer outweighs the exhaustion of trying to calm me down and comfort my worry. They fell in love with a cool, kind, fun-loving woman and wind up with an anxiety-ridden child.
If my first experience with love was beautiful and warm and caring, why am I so spiky and fiery and hostile, thirty years later?
The Road to Neediness:
There is a lot of pain here and I am sorry.
The fact is that we don't completely understand how people end up needy. There are many roads to Rome, and sometimes it is a combination of many factors. Here are some thoughts. Perhaps something will ring true for you.
- The Role of Abandonment: Clinginess may have its origins in abandonment, trauma or unavailable parents. This is a common explanation. You get close and then dormant wounds become alive again. You are a competent woman, who finds herself impossibly demanding. The source lies in a painful past.
- The Role of Temperament: Or, it may develop more benignly, because some kids are constitutionally demanding. As infants they take longer to warm up AND settle down. Such kids may internalize parents differently than those who settle with ease. The good enough parent can never be truly enough. The problem may lie in a person’s temperament.
- The Role of Development: Or, some people get stuck in the idealizing part of development which gets activated during romance. Intimacy is a field which digs deeply into the psychology of early life. We all idealize our folks as young kids and this idealization can get reactivated as adult romance. But, love is not simply romance. It is making life work with a person that we love. Romance transitions into love. If you have a developmental immaturity then this transition may be difficult.
- The Role of the Oedipus Complex: Or, some people recreate the childhood experience of being unable to get what they really want. Freud labeled this phenomenon the unresolved Oedipus Complex. It goes like this: We adore our mother or father. We are unable to have them for ourselves. We recreate this drama in adult life by choosing partners that will never really choose us, or by pushing them away in our anxiety to hold onto something that weunconsciously believe that we can't have. Some psychologists believe that this formulation is farfetched. I don’t.
- The Role of Experience: Finally, we are all moved by experience. Just as we learn from childhood, we also learn from adult life. Many of us don’t learn from experience, but rather repeat the same mistakes over and over again. You are hurt by someone, and you are injured. You look for others like her, with the hope of overcoming it this next time. You regress and get needy. She rejects you. And, the cycle repeats. The mind can be quite rigid. And, attraction to someone we can’t have can become habit.
Clinginess poisons love.
And therapy can detoxify clinginess.
The mind can act habitually, with love and fear of rejection near the top of the list. By objectifying your experience, therapy offers an opportunity to try something new. Habits, no matter how ingrained, can only be managed if you know when they're activated.
Don’t lose hope. The sweet thing about being an adult is that the future is not set in stone.
You have some choice.
Hope this helps.
MB
Here three pieces that may be of use.
https://my.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-intelligent-divorce/201302/bad-memories-8-ways-detox-yourself
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-intelligent-divorce/201208/are-y...
https://my.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-intelligent-divorce/201208/why-n...
____________
How We Learn to Lie
The Intelligent Divorce
And further unorthodox advice on relationships, marriage and parenting
How We Learn to Lie
Liar, liar—breaking the habit
Bionic man
‘Bionic man’ makes debut at Washington’s Air and Space Museum
By Lacey Johnson WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A first-ever walking, talking “bionic man” built entirely out of synthetic body parts made his Washington debut on Thursday.
The robot with a human face unveiled at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum was built by London’s Shadow Robot Co to showcase medical breakthroughs in bionic body parts and artificial organs.
“This is not a gimmick. This is a real science development,” museum director John Dailey said.
The 6-foot-tall (1.83 meter), 170-pound (77-kg) robot is the subject of a one-hour Smithsonian Channel documentary, “The Incredible Bionic Man,” airing on Sunday.
A “bionic man” was the material of science fiction in the 1970s when the television show “The Six Million Dollar Man” showed the adventures of a character named Steve Austin, a former astronaut whose body was rebuilt using synthetic parts after he nearly died.
The robot on display at the museum cost $1 million and was made from 28 artificial body parts on loan from biomedical innovators. They include a pancreas, lungs, spleen and circulatory system, with most of the parts early prototypes.
“The whole idea of the project is to get together all of the spare parts that already exist for the human body today – one piece. If you did that, what would it look like?” said Bertolt Meyer, a social psychologist from the University of Zurich in Switzerland and host of the documentary.
The robot was modeled after Meyer, who was born without a hand and relies on an artificial limb. He showed off the bionic man by having it take a few clumsy steps and by running artificial blood through its see-through circulatory system.
“It, kind of, looks lifelike. Kind of creepy,” said Paul Arcand, a tourist who was visiting from Boston with his wife.
The robot has a motionless face and virtually no skin. It was controlled remotely from a computer, and Bluetooth wireless connections were used to operate its limbs.
The bionic creation’s artificial intelligence is limited to a chatbot computer program, similar to the Siri application on the Apple iPhone, said Robert Warburton, a design engineer for Shadow Robot.
“The people who made it decided to program it with the personality of a 13-year-old boy from the Ukraine,” he said. “So, he’s not really the most polite of people to have a conversation with.”
Assembly began in August 2012 and took three months to finish.
The robot made its U.S. debut last week at New York’s Comic Con convention. It will be on display at the museum throughout the fall.
(This story has been corrected to fix spelling of documentary host’s first name to Bertolt, not Bertold, paragraph 7)
(Additional reporting by Ian Simpson; editing by Barbara Goldberg and Leslie Adler)
Sexting
Sexting Is The New Normal
Instagram, ‘selfies’, sexting, dating websites — we can’t decide whether technology has complicated our love lives or made them more convenient (or both?). But one thing’s for sure, we could talk about the topic for days — make that two weeks, to be exact!
Asian Giant Hornet
The World’s Most Deadliest Animals You Don’t Know About
March 19, 2013
Some animals continuously steal the top spots on various lists of the world’s dangerous and deadliest animals. While great white sharks, cobras, and ferocious African felines may be experienced predators, there are just as many little-known yet equally threatening animals lurking in the wild:
Once you notice the size of the Asian giant hornet—nearly as big as one’s thumb—you’ll know why it needed to be included on this list. The hornet’s wingspan is bigger than that of some hummingbirds, and can fly at an impressive 25 miles per hour–even faster when in a hive. This huge hornet, also referred to as the Japanese giant hornet, is responsible for numerous deaths in Japan every year.
World’s Deadliest Animals: Asian Giant Hornet
Source: Grace Rain
source: http://all-that-is-interesting.com/deadliest-animals-you-dont-know-about#jXmy22eB2WPTp16M.99
Habits of Miserable
The 14 Habits of Highly Miserable People
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/aastock
November 18, 2013 |
Most of us claim we want to be happy—to have meaningful lives, enjoy ourselves, experience fulfillment, and share love and friendship with other people and maybe other species, like dogs, cats, birds, and whatnot. Strangely enough, however, some people act as if they just want to be miserable, and they succeed remarkably at inviting misery into their lives, even though they get little apparent benefit from it, since being miserable doesn’t help them find lovers and friends, get better jobs, make more money, or go on more interesting vacations. Why do they do this? After perusing the output of some of the finest brains in the therapy profession, I’ve come to the conclusion that misery is an art form, and the satisfaction people seem to find in it reflects the creative effort required to cultivate it. In other words, when your living conditions are stable, peaceful, and prosperous—no civil wars raging in your streets, no mass hunger, no epidemic disease, no vexation from poverty—making yourself miserable is a craft all its own, requiring imagination, vision, and ingenuity. It can even give life a distinctive meaning.
Happy Couples
10 Habits of Happy Couples
What does it take to be happy in a relationship?
1. Go to bed at the same time
Remember the beginning of your relationship, when you couldn’t wait to go to bed with each other to make love? Happy couples resist the temptation to go to bed at different times. They go to bed at the same time, even if one partner wakes up later to do things while their partner sleeps. And when their skins touch it still causes each of them to tingle and unless one or both are completely exhausted to feel sexually excited.
2. Cultivate common interests
After the passion settles down, it’s common to realize that you have few interests in common. But don’t minimize the importance of activities you can do together that you both enjoy. If common interests are not present, happy couples develop them. At the same time, be sure to cultivate interests of your own; this will make you more interesting to your mate and prevent you from appearing too dependent.
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3. Walk hand in hand or side by side
Rather than one partner lagging or dragging behind the other, happy couples walk comfortably hand in hand or side by side. They know it’s more important to be with their partner than to see the sights along the way.
4. Make trust and forgiveness your default mode
If and when they have a disagreement or argument, and if they can’t resolve it, happy couples default to trusting and forgiving rather than distrusting and begrudging.
5. Focus more on what your partner does right than what he or she does wrong
If you look for things your partner does wrong, you can always find something. If you look for what he or she does right, you can always find something, too. It all depends on what you want to look for. Happy couples accentuate the positive.
6. Hug each other as soon as you see each other after work
Our skin has a memory of “good touch” (loved), “bad touch” (abused) and “no touch” (neglected). Couples who say hello with a hug keep their skin bathed in the “good touch,” which can inoculate your spirit against anonymity in the world.
7. Say “I love you” and “Have a good day” every morning
This is a great way to buy some patience and tolerance as each partner sets out each day to battle traffic jams, long lines and other annoyances.
8. Say “Good night” every night, regardless of how you feel
This tells your partner that, regardless of how upset you are with him or her, you still want to be in the relationship. It says that what you and your partner have is bigger than any single upsetting incident.
9. Do a “weather” check during the day
Call your partner at home or at work to see how his or her day is going. This is a great way to adjust expectations so that you’re more in sync when you connect after work. For instance, if your partner is having an awful day, it might be unreasonable to expect him or her to be enthusiastic about something good that happened to you.
10. Be proud to be seen with your partner
Happy couples are pleased to be seen together and are often in some kind of affectionate contact — hand on hand or hand on shoulder or knee or back of neck. They are not showing off but rather just saying that they belong with each other.
Happy couples have different habits than unhappy couples. A habit is a discrete behavior that you do automatically and that takes little effort to maintain. It takes 21 days of daily repetition of a new a behavior to become a habit. So select one of the behaviors in the list above to do for 21 days and voila, it will become a habit…and make you happier as a couple. And if you fall off the wagon, don’t despair, just apologize to your partner, ask their forgiveness and recommit yourself to getting back in the habit.
If there was one key to happiness in love and life and possibly even success it would be to go into each conversation you have with this commandment to yourself front and foremost in your mind, "Just Listen" and be more interested than interesting, more fascinated than fascinating and more adoring than adorable.
AND...
Rather than one partner lagging or dragging behind the other, happy couples walk comfortably hand in hand or side by side. They know it’s more important to be with their partner than to see the sights along the way.
4. Make trust and forgiveness your default mode
If and when they have a disagreement or argument, and if they can’t resolve it, happy couples default to trusting and forgiving rather than distrusting and begrudging.
5. Focus more on what your partner does right than what he or she does wrong
If you look for things your partner does wrong, you can always find something. If you look for what he or she does right, you can always find something, too. It all depends on what you want to look for. Happy couples accentuate the positive.
6. Hug each other as soon as you see each other after work
Our skin has a memory of “good touch” (loved), “bad touch” (abused) and “no touch” (neglected). Couples who say hello with a hug keep their skin bathed in the “good touch,” which can inoculate your spirit against anonymity in the world.
7. Say “I love you” and “Have a good day” every morning
This is a great way to buy some patience and tolerance as each partner sets out each day to battle traffic jams, long lines and other annoyances.
8. Say “Good night” every night, regardless of how you feel
This tells your partner that, regardless of how upset you are with him or her, you still want to be in the relationship. It says that what you and your partner have is bigger than any single upsetting incident.
9. Do a “weather” check during the day
Call your partner at home or at work to see how his or her day is going. This is a great way to adjust expectations so that you’re more in sync when you connect after work. For instance, if your partner is having an awful day, it might be unreasonable to expect him or her to be enthusiastic about something good that happened to you.
10. Be proud to be seen with your partner
Happy couples are pleased to be seen together and are often in some kind of affectionate contact — hand on hand or hand on shoulder or knee or back of neck. They are not showing off but rather just saying that they belong with each other.
Happy couples have different habits than unhappy couples. A habit is a discrete behavior that you do automatically and that takes little effort to maintain. It takes 21 days of daily repetition of a new a behavior to become a habit. So select one of the behaviors in the list above to do for 21 days and voila, it will become a habit…and make you happier as a couple. And if you fall off the wagon, don’t despair, just apologize to your partner, ask their forgiveness and recommit yourself to getting back in the habit.
If there was one key to happiness in love and life and possibly even success it would be to go into each conversation you have with this commandment to yourself front and foremost in your mind, "Just Listen" and be more interested than interesting, more fascinated than fascinating and more adoring than adorable.
AND...
- have One of the Best Conversations You'll Ever Have with Your Partner
- see if your relationship is built to last
- learn The 6 Secrets of a Lasting Relationship: How to Fall in Love Again...and Stay There
- start to "Just Listen" and Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone
- avoid The 14 Habits of Highly Miserable Peopl
e
Reasons Afraid of Love
7 Reasons Most People are Afraid of Love
What keeps us from finding and keeping the love we say we want?
Around this time last year, Virgin Mobile USA proclaimed Feb. 13 to be “National Breakup Day.” They did so after conducting a survey in which 59 percent of people said that if they were looking to end their relationship, they would hypothetically do so before Valentine’s Day to save money. The beginning of the year is often said to see a spike in couple splits, with various sources claiming that January hosts most divorce filings and couple separations. You may even have heard it referred to as “National Breakup Month.” In this so-called breakup season, we may be unfortunate enough to witness once-happy couples splitting up left and right, or we may recount our own painful parting from a partner we once loved.
No matter what the timeline, the story of lost love is one most of us can tell. This leaves the question “why do relationships fail?” to linger heavily in the back of our minds. The answer for many of us can be found within. Whether we know it or not, most of us are afraid of really being in love. While our fears may manifest themselves in different ways or show themselves at different stages of a relationship, we all harbor defenses that we believe on some level will protect us from getting hurt. These defenses may offer us a false illusion of safety or security, but they keep us from attaining the closeness we most desire. So what drives our fears of intimacy? What keeps us from finding and keeping the love we say we want?
1. Real love makes us feel vulnerable. A new relationship is uncharted territory, and most of us have natural fears of the unknown. Letting ourselves fall in love means taking a real risk. We are placing a great amount of trust in another person, allowing them to affect us, which makes us feel exposed and vulnerable. Our core defenses are challenged. Any habits we’ve long had that allow us to feel self-focused or self-contained start to fall by the wayside. We tend to believe that the more we care, the more we can get hurt.
2. New love stirs up past hurts. When we enter into a relationship, we are rarely fully aware of how we’ve been impacted by our history. The ways we were hurt in previous relationships, starting from our childhood, have a strong influence on how we perceive the people we get close to as well as how we act in our romantic relationships. Old, negative dynamics may make us wary of opening ourselves up to someone new. We may steer away from intimacy, because it stirs up old feelings of hurt, loss,anger or rejection. As Dr. Pat Love said in an interview with PsychAlive, “when you long for something, like love, it becomes associated with pain,” the pain you felt at not having it in the past.
3. Love challenges an old identity. Many of us struggle with underlying feelings of being unlovable. We have trouble feeling our own value and believing anyone could really care for us. We all have a “critical inner voice,” which acts like a cruel coach inside our heads that tells us we are worthless or undeserving of happiness. This coach is shaped from painful childhood experiences and critical attitudes we were exposed to early in life as well as feelings our parents had about themselves.
While these attitudes can be hurtful, over time, they have become engrained in us. As adults, we may fail to see them as an enemy, instead accepting their destructive point of view as our own. These critical thoughts or “inner voices” are often harmful and unpleasant, but they’re also comfortable in their familiarity. When another person sees us differently from our voices, loving and appreciating us, we may actually start to feel uncomfortable and defensive, as it challenges these long-held points of identification.
4. With real joy comes real pain. Any time we fully experience true joy or feel the preciousness of life on an emotional level, we can expect to feel a great amount of sadness. Many of us shy away from the things that would make us happiest, because they also make us feel pain. The opposite is also true. We cannot selectively numb ourselves to sadness without numbing ourselves to joy. When it comes to falling in love, we may be hesitant to go “all in,” for fear of the sadness it would stir up in us.
5. Love is often unequal. Many people I’ve talked to have expressed hesitation over getting involved with someone, because that person “likes them too much.” They worry that if they got involved with this person, their own feelings wouldn’t evolve, and the other person would wind up getting hurt or feeling rejected. The truth is that love is often imbalanced, with one person feeling more or less from moment to moment. Our feelings toward someone are an ever-changing force. In a matter of seconds, we can feel anger, irritation or even hate for a person we love. Worrying over how we will feel keeps us from seeing where our feelings would naturally go. It’s better to be open to how our feelings develop over time. Allowing worry or guilt over how we may or may not feel keeps us from getting to know someone who is expressing interest in us and may prevent us from forming a relationship that could really make us happy.
6. Relationships can break your connection to your family. Relationships can be the ultimate symbol of growing up. They represent starting our own lives as independent, autonomous individuals. This development can also represent a parting from our family. Much like breaking from an old identity, this separation isn’t physical. It doesn’t mean literally giving up our family, but rather letting go on an emotional level – no longer feeling like a kid and differentiating from the more negative dynamics that plagued our early relationships and shaped our identity.
7. Love stirs up existential fears. The more we have, the more we have to lose. The more someone means to us, the more afraid we are of losing that person. When we fall in love, we not only face the fear of losing our partner, but we become more aware of our mortality. Our life now holds more value and meaning, so the thought of losing it becomes more frightening. In an attempt to cover over this fear, we may focus on more superficial concerns, pick fights with our partner or, in extreme cases, completely give up the relationship. We are rarely fully aware of how we defend against these existential fears. We may even try to rationalize to ourselves a million reasons we shouldn’t be in the relationship. However, the reasons we give may have workable solutions, and what’s really driving us are those deeper fears of loss.
Most relationships bring up an onslaught of challenges. Getting to know our fears of intimacy and how they inform our behavior is an important step to having a fulfilling, long-term relationship. These fears can be masked by various justifications for why things aren’t working out, however we may be surprised to learn about all of the ways that we self-sabotage when getting close to someone else. This is one of the subjects I will address in the upcoming eCourse “Creating Your Ideal Relationship.” By getting to know ourselves, we give ourselves the best chance of finding and maintaining lasting love.
Read more from Dr. Lisa Firestone at PsychAlive.org
Join Dr. Lisa Firestone for the Jan. 21 CE Webinar "Overcoming the Fear of Intimacy."
Learn more about Dr. Lisa Firestone's eCourse "Creating Your Ideal Relationship.
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1. Real love makes us feel vulnerable. A new relationship is uncharted territory, and most of us have natural fears of the unknown. Letting ourselves fall in love means taking a real risk. We are placing a great amount of trust in another person, allowing them to affect us, which makes us feel exposed and vulnerable. Our core defenses are challenged. Any habits we’ve long had that allow us to feel self-focused or self-contained start to fall by the wayside. We tend to believe that the more we care, the more we can get hurt.
2. New love stirs up past hurts. When we enter into a relationship, we are rarely fully aware of how we’ve been impacted by our history. The ways we were hurt in previous relationships, starting from our childhood, have a strong influence on how we perceive the people we get close to as well as how we act in our romantic relationships. Old, negative dynamics may make us wary of opening ourselves up to someone new. We may steer away from intimacy, because it stirs up old feelings of hurt, loss,anger or rejection. As Dr. Pat Love said in an interview with PsychAlive, “when you long for something, like love, it becomes associated with pain,” the pain you felt at not having it in the past.
3. Love challenges an old identity. Many of us struggle with underlying feelings of being unlovable. We have trouble feeling our own value and believing anyone could really care for us. We all have a “critical inner voice,” which acts like a cruel coach inside our heads that tells us we are worthless or undeserving of happiness. This coach is shaped from painful childhood experiences and critical attitudes we were exposed to early in life as well as feelings our parents had about themselves.
While these attitudes can be hurtful, over time, they have become engrained in us. As adults, we may fail to see them as an enemy, instead accepting their destructive point of view as our own. These critical thoughts or “inner voices” are often harmful and unpleasant, but they’re also comfortable in their familiarity. When another person sees us differently from our voices, loving and appreciating us, we may actually start to feel uncomfortable and defensive, as it challenges these long-held points of identification.
4. With real joy comes real pain. Any time we fully experience true joy or feel the preciousness of life on an emotional level, we can expect to feel a great amount of sadness. Many of us shy away from the things that would make us happiest, because they also make us feel pain. The opposite is also true. We cannot selectively numb ourselves to sadness without numbing ourselves to joy. When it comes to falling in love, we may be hesitant to go “all in,” for fear of the sadness it would stir up in us.
5. Love is often unequal. Many people I’ve talked to have expressed hesitation over getting involved with someone, because that person “likes them too much.” They worry that if they got involved with this person, their own feelings wouldn’t evolve, and the other person would wind up getting hurt or feeling rejected. The truth is that love is often imbalanced, with one person feeling more or less from moment to moment. Our feelings toward someone are an ever-changing force. In a matter of seconds, we can feel anger, irritation or even hate for a person we love. Worrying over how we will feel keeps us from seeing where our feelings would naturally go. It’s better to be open to how our feelings develop over time. Allowing worry or guilt over how we may or may not feel keeps us from getting to know someone who is expressing interest in us and may prevent us from forming a relationship that could really make us happy.
6. Relationships can break your connection to your family. Relationships can be the ultimate symbol of growing up. They represent starting our own lives as independent, autonomous individuals. This development can also represent a parting from our family. Much like breaking from an old identity, this separation isn’t physical. It doesn’t mean literally giving up our family, but rather letting go on an emotional level – no longer feeling like a kid and differentiating from the more negative dynamics that plagued our early relationships and shaped our identity.
7. Love stirs up existential fears. The more we have, the more we have to lose. The more someone means to us, the more afraid we are of losing that person. When we fall in love, we not only face the fear of losing our partner, but we become more aware of our mortality. Our life now holds more value and meaning, so the thought of losing it becomes more frightening. In an attempt to cover over this fear, we may focus on more superficial concerns, pick fights with our partner or, in extreme cases, completely give up the relationship. We are rarely fully aware of how we defend against these existential fears. We may even try to rationalize to ourselves a million reasons we shouldn’t be in the relationship. However, the reasons we give may have workable solutions, and what’s really driving us are those deeper fears of loss.
Most relationships bring up an onslaught of challenges. Getting to know our fears of intimacy and how they inform our behavior is an important step to having a fulfilling, long-term relationship. These fears can be masked by various justifications for why things aren’t working out, however we may be surprised to learn about all of the ways that we self-sabotage when getting close to someone else. This is one of the subjects I will address in the upcoming eCourse “Creating Your Ideal Relationship.” By getting to know ourselves, we give ourselves the best chance of finding and maintaining lasting love.
Read more from Dr. Lisa Firestone at PsychAlive.org
Join Dr. Lisa Firestone for the Jan. 21 CE Webinar "Overcoming the Fear of Intimacy."
Learn more about Dr. Lisa Firestone's eCourse "Creating Your Ideal Relationship.
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Mindful Meaningful Mouthful
What do Buddhism, biology, existentialism and free will have in common? Read on!
In earlier blogs, as well as my recent book, "Buddhist Biology," I’ve been writing about convergences between Buddhism and biology. Let’s talk now about the Buddhist idea of karma – updated to reflect what we know from modern science – and how it connects to an old debate in Western philosophy: that surrounding free will. As already explained, I think we are not only justified, but downright obligated to reject the older Eastern perspective (notably deriving from Hindu doctrines) whereby our freedom as well as responsibility is severely circumscribed by pre-existing “karma.”
This rejection is mandated not only by ethics as well as biology, but is also, intriguingly, necessitated by the fact that Buddhist thought makes much of the role of free will in addition to a notably modern, deep sense of responsibility, summarized by karma. Choosing to act “mindfully” – a key component in Buddhist practice, especially the form of “engaged Buddhism” promoted by one of Buddhism’s “living saints,” Thich Nhat Hanh – would be meaningless if we did not, in fact, have to option of making such a choice!
This rejection is mandated not only by ethics as well as biology, but is also, intriguingly, necessitated by the fact that Buddhist thought makes much of the role of free will in addition to a notably modern, deep sense of responsibility, summarized by karma. Choosing to act “mindfully” – a key component in Buddhist practice, especially the form of “engaged Buddhism” promoted by one of Buddhism’s “living saints,” Thich Nhat Hanh – would be meaningless if we did not, in fact, have to option of making such a choice!
It is important to observe in this regard that molecular biology long ago rejected the idea that genes determine outcomes – whether anatomic, physiologic or behavioral - with anything approaching rigid control. There are numerous genes, for example, whose sole function is to regulate the activities of other genes, and gene expression itself is modified by the surrounding environment in crucial ways. Our genes whisper to us; they do not bark orders. Thus, eastern Buddhism and Western existentialism are closely allied when it comes to the question of free will in that both acknowledge its presence and, moreover, they both celebrate it. By contrast, a strictly biological mind-set, insofar as it is materialist, balks at the very idea – not so much from its focus upon genes as because of its commitment to material causation.
This is because if the mind derives entirely from physical actions in the realm of neurobiology – and so far as we can tell, it does – then thoughts, feelings and conscious actions must also be the consequence of charged ions crossing nerve cell membranes: And such a naturalistic, automatic process leaves no room for “free will.” Or, as Schopenhauer put it (without benefit of neurobiology) “a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants.”
The only scientifically valid alternative to materialist causation would be a literally uncaused, spontaneous event, such as the “behavior” of a radioactive nucleus when it unpredictably throws off alpha or beta particles, or gamma rays. But insofar as such events are truly random and spontaneous - and one could argue that nothing really is - the result is hardly bed-rock for free will! Alternatively, if neurobiological phenomena are physically caused after all, then free will once again must be abandoned.
Even though such abandonment accords quite closely with a strictly scientific world-view, it goes against the widespread, common-sense perspective by which each of us feels that he or she is fundamentally in control of our thoughts and actions – even if not quite sovereign when it comes to emotions. No less a scientist than Albert Einstein actually derived comfort from the assumption that people aren’t necessarily responsible for their actions, especially when these actions are regrettable. “This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will,” he explained in a 1932 speech given to the German League of Human Rights, “protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals.”
Here, then, in the realm of free will, we have a case in which existentialism and Buddhism join forces in opposition to a strictly anti-free will, biologically confirmed viewpoint, in the process sharing a perspective that, although admittedly unscientific, is also one that accords very well with nearly everyone’s subjective experience. It is difficult indeed to find anyone who isn’t privately convinced that she has free will.
There is, incidentally, yet another problem with the Buddhist embrace of free will, one that I cannot solve but nonetheless feel obliged to acknowledge: How to reconcile anatman (“not-self”) anitya (“impermanence”) and especially pratitya-samutpada (“dependent co-arising,” aka the interconnectedness of all things) with free will? Given the realities of not-self, impermanence and interconnectedness, isn’t “freedom” unavoidably constrained? As Yul Brynner’s regal character laments in The King and I, “Is a puzzlement”!
In any event, Buddhist thought diverges in this regard from materialist biological science, asserting that genuine intentionality exists even though strict cause-and-effect thinking (supported by biology) requires that free will be an illusion. In the process, moreover, Buddhism converges with existentialism, a notably hard-headed, mysticism-denying Western philosophy that isn’t usually encountered in the same sentence as “Buddhism.”
Will wonders never cease?
David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist, long-time aspiring Buddhist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington, whose most recent book is “Buddhist Biology: ancient Eastern wisdom meets modern Western science,” just published by Oxford University Press.
This is because if the mind derives entirely from physical actions in the realm of neurobiology – and so far as we can tell, it does – then thoughts, feelings and conscious actions must also be the consequence of charged ions crossing nerve cell membranes: And such a naturalistic, automatic process leaves no room for “free will.” Or, as Schopenhauer put it (without benefit of neurobiology) “a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants.”
The only scientifically valid alternative to materialist causation would be a literally uncaused, spontaneous event, such as the “behavior” of a radioactive nucleus when it unpredictably throws off alpha or beta particles, or gamma rays. But insofar as such events are truly random and spontaneous - and one could argue that nothing really is - the result is hardly bed-rock for free will! Alternatively, if neurobiological phenomena are physically caused after all, then free will once again must be abandoned.
Even though such abandonment accords quite closely with a strictly scientific world-view, it goes against the widespread, common-sense perspective by which each of us feels that he or she is fundamentally in control of our thoughts and actions – even if not quite sovereign when it comes to emotions. No less a scientist than Albert Einstein actually derived comfort from the assumption that people aren’t necessarily responsible for their actions, especially when these actions are regrettable. “This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will,” he explained in a 1932 speech given to the German League of Human Rights, “protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals.”
Here, then, in the realm of free will, we have a case in which existentialism and Buddhism join forces in opposition to a strictly anti-free will, biologically confirmed viewpoint, in the process sharing a perspective that, although admittedly unscientific, is also one that accords very well with nearly everyone’s subjective experience. It is difficult indeed to find anyone who isn’t privately convinced that she has free will.
There is, incidentally, yet another problem with the Buddhist embrace of free will, one that I cannot solve but nonetheless feel obliged to acknowledge: How to reconcile anatman (“not-self”) anitya (“impermanence”) and especially pratitya-samutpada (“dependent co-arising,” aka the interconnectedness of all things) with free will? Given the realities of not-self, impermanence and interconnectedness, isn’t “freedom” unavoidably constrained? As Yul Brynner’s regal character laments in The King and I, “Is a puzzlement”!
In any event, Buddhist thought diverges in this regard from materialist biological science, asserting that genuine intentionality exists even though strict cause-and-effect thinking (supported by biology) requires that free will be an illusion. In the process, moreover, Buddhism converges with existentialism, a notably hard-headed, mysticism-denying Western philosophy that isn’t usually encountered in the same sentence as “Buddhism.”
Will wonders never cease?
David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist, long-time aspiring Buddhist and professor of psychology at the University of Washington, whose most recent book is “Buddhist Biology: ancient Eastern wisdom meets modern Western science,” just published by Oxford University Press.
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