mindfulness

Wanting it Both Ways

Ron Johnson appreciation, Development, emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, mindfulness, Self-Awareness

I have often “wanted it both ways” in many of life’s circumstances:

  • I want to eat as much sugar as I want. I also want to have low glucose in my blood
  • I want to lose weight. I also want to eat too much food at night
  • I want to slim down my belly. I don’t want to do the planking that might help
  • I want to have friends who know me. I don’t want them to know enough to know me
  • I want to be able to play good basketball. I don’t want to practice enough to do that
  • I want to work a lot (because I enjoy what I do). I don’t want the fatigue that comes with too much work
  • I want to write blogs without grammatical/spelling errors. I don’t want to do the careful editing required to do that
  • I want to go to Europe. I don’t want to have to abide by the Covid rules to do so
  • When in college I wanted to postpone studying until the wee hours of Sunday night with the result of my grades suffering and restricting me in future endeavors. I wanted people to see that I am capable and intelligent without the “union card” of a good GPA.
  • …and many more

You might have such dilemmas or perhaps more serious ones like some of the people with whom I engage in some way:

  • A family individual who seriously assaulted me with vicious gossip some time ago, but wants to have a good relationship with me without apologizing for his/her action
  • Another family member who created a huge mess in my house that I found after he/she left the house. They also want to have a trusting relationship with me
  • The patient for whom I did an extensive neuropsychological evaluation that cost her pennies but she wasn’t didn’t think I spent enough time with her to write the report I did so she won’t pay the pennies until she is satisfied.
  • The guy who races by me on the right side on the interstate together with a one-finger salute because he is not satisfied that I am driving only the speed limit

Or, you may be like some of my patients who want it both ways, like:

  • The guy who wants his wife to trust him but isn’t honest with him
  • The guy who wants to get over the basic fear of life that has plagued him all his life but doesn’t want to face the terror of the origin of this fear
  • The introverted man who wants people to love him but is unable to reveal enough of himself to allow people to see him enough to love him
  • The guy who is gay but wants to be married and have children
  • The guy who is very bright but quite under-employed because of his lack of advanced education, but doesn’t want to go to college in order to be professionally satisfied
  • The kid who wants to be liked but is unable to manage his selfishness in order to have people like him
  • The mom who wants her child to grow up but can’t let go of her undue mothering of him
  • The dad who wants to have a relationship with his introverted son but doesn’t want to affirm the challenge of knowing and loving an introvert
  • The extravert who says anything that comes to his mind but doesn’t want the effects of many people being irritated with him.
  • The guy who wants to drink as much as he can but doesn’t want to suffer the negative effects his drinking has on his family
  • The man who tends to tell people what they should do because he is a high boundary person but also wants low boundary people to like him
  • The guy who married the wrong woman but wants to magically fix that by staying with her despite his being unable to love her
  • The adolescent who wants to reserve sex for marriage but gives herself to boys for the sake of “being loved”
  • The man who wants to express his beliefs openly but is afraid of losing friends as a result, so he has no friends
  • The man who was abusive with his wife for 30-odd years but wants her to “forgive and forget” now that he has admitted his error
  • The man who did not maintain a good financial basis in his life but wants some kind of miracle to bail him out of his dilemma
  • The man who has distrusted everyone all his life but wants to “just learn to trust” people so he can have a meaningful relationship
  • The man who has been married unsuccessfully five times because he “needed” a mother figure but wants to have a companion, not a mother
  • The man who used illicit and expensive drugs for 10 years but also wants to have financial security
  • The man who makes a lot of money in a job he hates but doesn’t want to change jobs because he will not make as much money in a profession he would really like to do
  • The man who stays legally married and as such damages his current relationship because he needs the “benefits” of his wife’s insurance

These and many more are but some of the people in my office who “want it both ways.” They want what they want and then they want something else that is not consistent with their first wants. In most cases, these people have made understandable mistakes in their lives, the things that we all do, but they don’t want to pay the price for what they have done.

Paying the price

  • The two family members I mentioned above have caused great damage to me psychologically but aren’t willing to pay the price for their errors. The price would be a simple apology without justification, something that most people seem unable to do readily.
  • The people who have not pursued the education necessary to achieve a place in society and in a profession that suits them don’t want to pay the price of going back to school and doing so. They would rather pay the price of unhappiness in their current lives.
  • The people who entered intimate relationships honorably but somehow knowing that the relationship was not good for them. They don’t want the stigma of a divorce so they pay the price for ongoing personal unhappiness
  • The man who suffered great damage from his alcoholic home, something that caused him to suffer through life so much so that his life is largely suffering and surviving, not thriving. He is unwilling to pay the price of deep therapy to heal his early wounds.
  • The man of Muslim heritage and birth who has hidden his homosexuality all his life and suffered failure in relationships, family, and vocation. He isn’t willing to pay the price of rejection in order to have a meaningful life.

I think we all “want it both ways” and don’t want to “pay the price.” Paying the price for an honest, loving, and meaningful life can be huge, but there is always the price. Sometimes, the price is excessive and it is just not possible to pay the price, but I think this is rare. More often, we carry childlike beliefs that we can do as we want and not pay the price in later years. I pay the price for not attending to the potential damage to my lungs from working around asbestos. Now, I must cope with how to live with the results or find some way to rectify it. Whatever I do, I will be paying the price because I can’t have it both ways.

Love V: Love Problems

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, happiness, love, mindfulness, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

This is (probably) the last of the blogs on love. Previously, we looked at a bit of theory of love, “not being love right”, temperament-based love, and being “seen” so you could be loved.  This blog will be devoted to a very basic concept that we have developed about feelings, emotions, and love. If you have read our blogs or the books we have written, you will be familiar with the concept of “love problems,” but allow me to summarize.

Theory of feelings

We propose that “feelings” are a central ingredient of human existence, that they are an so important that they are undefinable, like time, space, and love, and that they are never wrong because they emanate from our souls, which are most certainly never wrong. That having been said, the expression of these feelings can be “wrong,” or at the very least, inadequate. We experience our feelings sequentially physically, emotionally, cognitively, and actively (which includes speaking). The physical and emotional aspects of our experience of feelings are both unconscious, while the cognitive and active experiences are conscious. Furthermore, we usually have a natural tendency to note the experience of feelings in one of these ways, and then we may have the same or a different means of expressing these feelings. Perhaps the most prominent element in the experience and expression of feelings is within the emotional range although many people are much more cognitive or active, and some are almost entirely physical.

Theory of emotions

You will note that we make an important distinction between feelings and emotions, with emotions being a subset of feelings. We propose that there are four basic emotions, and then combinations, cognates, and expressions of these emotions. Importantly, all of the emotions have to do with love in some way. These four basic emotions have to do with time, namely:

  • Joy is the experience in of loving something in the present
  • Sadness is the experience of losing something that I love in the present
  • Anger is the experience of feeling the loss of something in the past
  • Fear is the experience of feeling the possible loss of something in the future.

Note that all of the emotions relate in some way to something that I love. Note further that three of these four emotions have to do with loss: present loss leads to sadness, past loss leads to anger, and future loss leads to fear.

Love problems and emotions

So, why do we talk about “problems” with love? We do that because we have so much difficulty with the emotions surrounding sadness, anger, and fear. We somehow think that we should be joyful all the time. Two important facts are related to this theory of feelings and emotions: (1) love is at center of life and (2) we lose everything we love…eventually. We find that people have trouble losing something that they love, whether that loss is in the past, the present, or the future. We try to help people (1) trust that their feelings are never wrong, (2) that their feelings erupt towards loving something, and (3) this love always leads to some kind of joy.

What we love is very important to notice because we do not restrict the concept of love to the love people. Rather, we suggest that we can love anything with equal passion. Many people have a primary orientation towards love of people, but many more have just as deep a love for nature, property, ideas, history, science, or something else, whether physical or theoretical. I wrote a bit about this in the Love III blog, Temperamental Love. Expanding love beyond the love of people is very important if we are to understand each other. Thus, it is hard for people with what we call the “lover” temperament to understand “caretaker” people who love property more deeply than people. As you can see, this can lead to relational problems, but I am not speaking so much about relationships as I am speaking of just what happens when we love something. Importantly, whatever we love, we will eventually lose. That is the “love problem.”

Sadness: this is the natural emotion that erupts from losing something. When I am sad, I am in the present. I may be thinking of something that I loved and lost in the past, but if I am sad about that loss, I experience it in the present. We will examine potential loss in the future momentarily.

Anger: this is very important because anger is also a “love problem.” If I am angry, I have lost something in the past, the past being a few minutes ago or a few years ago. We refer to anger as delusional, namely being an emotion that erupts as a way of changing the past. Why do I throw the hammer and swear when I missed the nail? Because I (delusionally) think that this hammer-throwing expression of anger will change the fact that I missed the hammer.

Fear: this is equally important because if I am afraid that I will lose something in the future. This “something” could be a dollar on a bet, a good friendship, a job, or anything. Fear is also delusional because if I think/worry/fret about what I might lose in the future, this anxiety will somehow change the future.

As you can see, all losses have to do with love. So, how do we cope with loss?

Coping with loss is a love problem

We normally cope with loss with sadness, anger, or fear. We content that we need to be sadder and hence less angry and less afraid. But this is no easy task. The difficulty with facing loss, at least in America, is the fact that our culture is not particularly emotionally mature. We do not generally understand emotions and allow them to run their natural course. Particularly, we tend to get angry way too easily and stay angry longer, and likewise we get way too worried and stay with worry way too long. Both emotions are hard on one’s health, work, play, relationships, and life at large.

It is hard enough to allow to be sad, especially for us men because sadness is normally portrayed as weakness. Indeed, there are some people that come to sadness and tears so easily that it seems to be an escape from reality. But the larger number of people simply haven’t found a way to be sad, which means loving, losing, feeling sad, and getting over being sad. Getting over being sad? What does that mean? It means allowing sadness to run its course. The key of all of these emotions is that sadness ends. Anger doesn’t end. Fear doesn’t end. Sadness ends…if we allow it to run its course and finish. However, this is a challenge because I am truly sad, that moment of my existence is filled with the feeling (= intuition) that I will be sad forever. Simply put, I need to allow myself the freedom to be sad frequently enough to get familiar with the process:

  • Love something
  • Enjoy this something
  • Lose this something for some reason
  • Feel sad
  • Allow sadness to run its course
  • Finish being sad
  • Love again
  • Love better knowing that whatever I love, I will lose.

Dealing with anger and fear are more difficult but the “cure” for these emotions (the subtitle of our book, The Positive Power of Sadness, is to learn to be sad. It is easier with anger, but it is not easy. Whenever I am angry, I have a “love problem,” i.e. I have lost something that I loved, whether it is the nail I was hammering or my favorite friend. I got angry because I raced right past the sadness of losing my friend or hammer and got “delusionally” angry. Unfortunately, anger doesn’t end like sadness. It just metastasizes into my physical, cognitive, emotional, and relational systems and becomes an unfortunate and harmful part of those systems. The cure for anger is to realize that I love something and lost it. I have a love problem when I’m angry.

If anger is hard to move back to sadness, fear is much harder largely because when I am afraid, my brain gets into the action and “protects” me by churning up cortisol so that I can be prepared to fight. The brain doesn’t know that I am thinking/worrying about something in the future because the brain, as a machine, doesn’t understand the future. The brain is singularly in the present and has all it can do in order to keep you alive with blood flow and breathing. So, while fear is also a love problem, it is much harder to “cure”.

Curing anger and fear

I say what many patients think is an outrageous statement: “I am going to help you get to the place where you are never afraid and never angry. Just how will I propose to do that? I will help you feel the sadness that is under both fear and anger, and the love that is under the sadness.

It’s easier to “cure” anger than fear. If I am angry, I can point to a specific loss, like someone who hated me for some reason. I lost his/her approval. Curing the anger I feel towards him will simply be facing the fact that I loved him and loved our relationship, but now I have lost both. I have a love problem. If I stick with the love, I will eventually feel sad, my sadness will run a course, I will finish being sad, and then I can go on with my life. Perhaps, I will find a way to reinstate my friendship with my friend or establish another friendship. Or maybe I will just fix the garage up as a way of loving a fixed up garage. I will replace anger with sadness and when sadness, I will love something better, perhaps realizing that garages have a nasty tendency to deteriorate over time leading to…sadness.

It’s harder to cure fear, but this is how we try to help people do it. I ask the individual to picture the potential loss, attempt to replace the fear of loss with actual loss and allow the feeling of sadness to erupt. This is simple but very hard to do. It is hard because people (their brains) are so use to worrying that doing this anticipatory loss feeling of sadness is quite a challenge. Properly done, you will actually feel the potential loss and sadness and love in the present. This will cure your anxiety. A lot harder than it sounds because you are going against the brain, the culture, and the individual’s resistance to feeling anticipatory sadness.

Sadness is a lover problem. So are anger and fear. But sadness ends and makes you a better person and a more loving person because you know that you love but for a moment, however long that moment is. Anger and fear do no such thing.

Love IV: I See You

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, love, marital, mindfulness, relationships, Self-Awareness, Spiritual

Deb and I have many statements that occasionally comprise elements of our many conversations, some of which I noted in a previous blog called Racks and Cutters. Thinking and writing about love these days reminded me of a statement that we heard in a movie that has stuck with us. The movie is Avatar and the statement is “I see you.” The natives of the planet sometimes greeted each other with what amounts to a “hello” or “how are you” with a deeper statement: “I see you,” which meant that they “saw” (= understood, valued, and loved) the other person. Deb and I frequently “see” each other in this way, and I invite you to consider doing the same with the people you love. Perhaps you will “see” them better. So, how does one see people better, and how can I make myself seen better? And what does seeing have to do with loving? Perhaps this “seeing” thing is another undefinable thing, like feelings, time, and love. It seems so important in my trade, but even more important in daily life, especially around people who are important to us. “Seeing” is based on how you feel, what you see, how you react to what you see, what you do, and what you say. However, seeing someone also is dependent on whether that person is “seeable.” We will first discuss what you see and then discuss the being seen part of this process.

Seeing

What you feel

Again, I dare refer you to our little book, I Want to Tell You How I Feel, where we suggested the heart of saying how you feel is to know that there is a “something” inside of you that you want to say or otherwise express. Likewise, in this business of seeing other people, the element of knowing how you feel is the first and most important ingredient of “seeing” someone. Deb and I often tell budding therapists that the most important thing that they have to do is know how they feel when they are with a patient. But what does it mean to “feel”?

When we wrote the feelings book, we spent a good deal of time thinking and eventually writing about what this feeling thing actually means. Briefly stated, feelings erupt first in the unconscious elements of physical sensations and emotions, and then move into the conscious elements of cognition. To know what you feel, note these four elements: physical, emotional, cognitive, and active (or verbal). You will note that you always have these four elements of feelings but likely you gravitate towards one of them, say cognition or emotion. When you feel “something,” this something is not wrong, but it may not be clear to you why you feel it. I often feel quite emotionally moved, often to tears, when I hear someone tell me about themselves in my office. This is because I “see” the individual in front of me, something that we will shortly discuss.

What you see

When you understand how you feel, the next item in “seeing” is really believing what you see with the other person. You may see one of the four elements of feeling: physical, emotional, cognitive, or active. You may see what the person does. You may “see” what the person says. You may “see” something that doesn’t fit into physical/emotional/cognitive/active: you may have a “sense” or an intuition about the other person. If you are interested in the whole matter of relationships, which are always founded on some kind of love, you may see something that you really love, whether it is your friends’ actions, words, or otherwise. This kind of intuitional seeing is perhaps the most important of all because ideally your intuition does not depend on what you see physically, think logically, or feel emotionally.

Intuitional seeing be quite brilliant. It tends to come at what we must call a “spiritual” level. People often say something like, “I just feel…” or “I just know…” when they see something in someone by intuition. I must advise you that there are two very important matters when you have an intuition of someone, one beautiful and valuable, one dangerous. If your intuitional seeing is truly spiritual, i.e. godly and true, it is not wrong. The words that you come up with in this kind of seeing may be wrong. Everything we ever say that is primarily emotional is wrong in the sense of an imperfect reflection of inner feeling. But be careful with this kind of seeing because you will have an inclination to think too much or feel emotional too much. If thinking and feeling are fused into an intuition, you cannot trust the intuition. Thinking and feeling are part of you and your inner self, not a part of the other person. It is very hard to focus on true seeing rather than seeing through your own lens, like emotion, cognition, or some other judgment. This is not to say that you shouldn’t have emotion and thought but rather a recognition that when you see someone, it is not about you at all. It is not about what you feel emotionally or think cognitively. It is about the other person.

What you do with what you see

This is very delicate because if you really see something in another person, something deeply spiritual has happened: you have seen the person’s soul. When you see someone’s soul, you see God, or perhaps a part of God or a reflection of God. You are in the holy of holies that is spoken of in the Hebrew Scriptures. This is a very sacred place and you need to see it as godly and sacred. It is also a very private place, not one that you enter without great respect and caution. Hopefully, you see that this kind of seeing is deeply spiritual and very real but not something that we very often do for many reasons, not the least of which is that most people do not allow themselves to be seen. So, if you really see your friend, hold your breath, hold your thoughts, hold your feelings, and just observe this wonder. It will be wonderful.

Wonderful as it is to see someone, this is not generally a time to say anything. Rather, it is a time to feel something. I use the term “feeling” in its four components (physical, emotional, cognitive, and active), so depending on your own tendency to experience and express your own feelings, you will “feel” one of these four things. Keep your feelings to yourself. This is not a recommendation to repress your feelings but rather to value them and govern them so you can keep your focus on “seeing” your friend.

If you trust your intuition and keep your own feelings at bay, you have the opportunity to see the person…if that person is “see-able” (we’ll get there in a minute). Now comes the remarkable thing about seeing someone: You will love the person you see. No doubt about it: if you see someone, really see the person, you will be compelled to love the person. I won’t attempt to define this basic human need/experience of love because it is simply to profound to be defined. Love can be felt, and it can be carefully expressed. But love has to first be felt before you can decide if and when you say something about it. If you see someone and come to have this godly experience of loving the person, this experience is good in and of itself. You don’t have to say it; you don’t have to do anything. You just need to feel it. People tend to do this kind of seeing and loving with infants and animals although people with what we call naturalistic intelligence can also do this kind of seeing and loving with nature. Other people have love for property, ideas, or activity. But our focus is not so much on non-personal elements of love but rather the love that comes naturally and unavoidably when you see someone. Grasp it. Name it. Feel it. If it is good for you to see and love, it is good for your friend to be seen and loved.

When you see and ultimately love your friend, you are being something like a therapist to that person. The English word “therapist” comes from the Greek word, therapeuo, which means healing. Good therapy is healing, and the best of therapy comes from seeing…and the natural addition of loving the person you see. This happens to me all the time, in fact so often that I feel truly privileged to see and love the people I see. Sometimes, granted, I get lost in my thoughts or emotions, but when I’m at my best I see and love without trying to do so. The best therapists have found ways to encourage a spirit of openness to being seen. Unfortunately, many therapists don’t know how to understand and value this seeing, much less manage it. This leads us to our next discussion: how can we be “seen”?

Being seen

I want to be seen

There is a real oddity about this whole business of being “seen” because it seems that sometimes we want to be seen and other times we don’t want to be seen. Let me try to make some sense of this conundrum because it really does make sense. Furthermore, there are people who want to be seen by everyone and there are people who want to be seen by only a few people. We call the former “external” people, otherwise known as extraverts, and we call the latter “internal” people, otherwise known as introverts. Furthermore, there are times when I want to be seen and there are times that I don’t want to be seen. And there are things about me that I want to keep private and others that I want to be public. Setting aside these differences in psychological type for a moment, I will assert that everyone wants to be seen, but at the same time don’t want to be seen. Finally, there is the further paradox of wanting to be seen but not wanting to be open enough to be able to be seen. This is what I see with most of the people I see. This is wanting it both ways, something that often plagues us as humans, like I want to have a job I like but I want to make a lot of money that doesn’t come with doing what I like. Or, I want to be safe at all times but I want the things that come from stepping out of my safety zone. Let’s examine this paradox.

I am afraid of being seen

A book written not long ago was entitled, Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am (J. Power, 1969), but there have been many more books and articles written about why people are afraid to be open. In a nutshell, I am afraid to be seen because I have been hurt in the past when I was seen and I don’t want to be hurt again. Sometimes, people can remember why they are afraid to be open and some cannot, but more importantly, most people have been hurt many times over many years when they have been open, so it is natural that they would be reticent about being open again. I won’t elaborate on this experience of how people have been hurt in the past because it lies beyond the scope of our current discussion aside from stating that resistance to being open is always related to unfinished hurts. I must also defer you to previous writings about what the term “unfinished hurts” means.

So, if I am reticent to be open, how can I be seen, how can I be loved, and how can I be healed? I can’t be. I can’t be loved, really loved, healingly loved without being seen This is why people with so-called mental health problems (a term I almost never use because of its negative implications) rarely overcome these problems: they can’t be open, so they can’t be loved, so they can’t be healed. Good therapy makes an attempt to engage this process of seeing-come-loving-come healing. Good parenting, good friendships, good partnerships, and good marriages do the same. But even in the best of therapists’ offices, it is difficult for people to be open because they have just been too hurt over too many years and to go there is frightening. Just as often as people actively resist being open, they don’t actually know how to be open.

I don’t know how to allow someone to see me

Why is it that people don’t know how to be open? Basically and simply because they have been hurt too much when they have been open. The hurt that people have experienced has been in the form of criticism and judgment. They had times when they have been open but the person with whom they were open was not capable of loving them. More importantly, the other person didn’t really see them, much less love them. The other person saw something that they didn’t understand or didn’t like. But they didn’t actually see the person: they only saw something that was a reflection of that person, like what they wore, what they said, or what they did. Most failure to develop a spirit of openness comes from a myriad of times of having been open only to have been criticized and judged. You see, when someone criticizes you or judges you, they are not seeing you; they see something about you, like what you said or did, but they didn’t see your soul. In some cases, people have never been seen, which is the tragedy that often leads to what used to be called a character disorder, now called a personality disorder. These people are not truly disordered; rather, they are not developed. They have not developed because they have not been loved, and they have not been loved because they have not been seen. Whether in a therapist’s office, the living room with a family member, or in a park with a friend, they need to be seen. It is very hard for people to be open when they have long ago forgotten what it was like to be seen and loved, if that ever even happened. They have to learn to be open. And it will be painful.

Learning to be open

This is intrinsically difficult for most people, difficult for many reasons, not the least of which is the aforementioned personal history of having been criticized or judged, or worse yet never haven seen. What happens in these circumstances is that the brain takes over and protects you from further hurt and harm. By the way, the brain does not distinguish hurt and harm; it is all the same to the brain and it is to be avoided, quite naturally if you think about it. Furthermore, the brain does not know time, so everything that is potentially hurtful or harmful is felt by the brain to be in the present. This is the cause of all anxiety, which is fear of future hurt, while anger is the feeling of past hurt. But the brain does not distinguish past and future from the present. It is all in the present. So the fear of openness is a brain function that has to be challenged by the mind, and it is not easy to do. This brain/mind duality is the cause of your “being of two minds,” “feeling one thing and thinking another,” “thinking in two directions” and many more paradoxes of mind/brain functioning. Learning to be open is a challenge because your brain is protecting you from hurt/harm thinking that the danger is in the present. The brain has logged the hurt that you experienced when you were open and damaged as a result.

Learning to be open needs to come in stages. You have to learn when to be open (not when you’re drinking or at 2 o’clock in the morning), where to be open (not in the grocery store), what to say, if anything, when you’re open, and with whom to be open. Importantly, most people are intrinsically dangerous to you when you are open because most people simply don’t trust what they see, much the love that seeing might engender. Rather, they get overwhelmed with their own thoughts and feelings and possibly their own hurts. So, when I suggest you need to be open to be seen and loved, I offer this suggestion with great caution because you shouldn’t do it with most people at most times and in most places. Know your audience and you will be seen.

If you are going to try to be open, you might need to instruct the person in front of you how to see, how to keep criticism and suggestion out of the picture and just see. Try this once or twice and you will likely fail, or the listener might fail. Then try again, maybe with the same person, maybe with a different person, maybe in a different place. You need practice. What you will find is that you will be hurt many times, but then you will also be seen and love at other times. It is worth the risk. Then there is the possibility that you and your friend can see each other, know each other, and ultimately love each other…better. Remember the previous blog: Not Loved Right. Perhaps you can be loved right for the first time in a long time.

Being open with each other

This is the ideal, especially in intimate relationships and it can be done. For instance in my current and recent past I have seen many couples who do not see one another because each of the partners does not allow themselves to be open for fear of being hurt, which is itself based on some earlier life event that was very damaging. Then over time, each of these people hurt each other more leading them to come to my office for “marriage counseling.” They don’t need marriage counseling. They need therapy, they need to be healed, and most importantly, they need each other to heal each other. For example:

  • Couple A. She is a very successful professional person who lived with a very angry father. As a result she comes to anger too quickly skipping the hurt that always underlies anger. The man came from a very abusive and restrictive family with a stepparent who was clearly abusive. This led to him being afraid of being open and being hurt more.
  • Couple B. He is a very devote pastor who came from a sexually abusive family with all that goes with it, namely sexual dysfunction. She came from a family much like the previous man’s family where she could do no right and learned to be so careful with what she said or did that she essentially never says what she feels…again, for fear of being hurt again.
  • Couple C. She is very extraverted and outspoken having been raised in a largely good family but one in which he was given the permission to speak his thoughts and feelings, so much so that she has a tendency of expressing herself with little understanding, much less any regard for the impact of his speech. He is much more introverted and came into the family without much privilege to say how he feels. Unfortunately, he saw that his potential wife was a stable and fun person but most probably did not really love him. Rather she saw her as a good partner. Over time they both hurt each other, so much so that the man is divorcing his “good” wife with a great amount of hostility
  • Couple D. Both parties came into the marriage with wounds from their previous marriages and saw the goodness of each other but not the wounds. Unfortunately, these wounds not only failed to heal, the people in the marriage hurt each other for years without meaning to do so and with little awareness of how what they said or did was hurtful, adding flames to the fire of hurt from their previous marriages.

These are but a few examples (identifying information adjusted) of how people fail to be open and thus fail to be seen and eventually loved. In my work with all of these couples I am attempting to help them be open with each other so they can be seen, loved, and healed. I can’t do it myself.

I leave you with the admonition previously stated that you need to be loved as we all do. To be loved you need to be seen. To be seen, you need to be open. To be open, you will be vulnerable to hurt and love with about a 50-50 chance for either. It is worth the bet. You are older now, and even if you were terribly wounded as a child, as an adolescent, or in your previous relationship, you can weather the storm of hurt better. Moreover, you just might be loved…and healed