Psychological Damage and Emotional Transformation

Joseph Burgoin
Destinations
·
The Psychotherapy Relationship
29

A recent comment by 'TB' on my post about my inner brat, along with this piece on resentment forwarded to me by Marla Estes, got me thinking about authentic change and how to describe it.  As I discussed in my earlier post about change, most people want to believe that insight and understanding produce a transformation that can make you
into a different person. The language current in the self-help field uses words such as "triumphing" over this problem, or "conquering" that issue.  As the author of the linked article makes clear, however, self-knowledge really means you have a choice about whether to express or inhibit certain tendencies that will always be with you.

It's difficult to describe what this choice involves, but I've come up with two examples that demonstrate the real, in-the-moment process of putting self-knowledge to work in a way that transforms emotional experience.  One comes from my own internal world, an everyday process for me; the other from one of my clients.

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Love Junkies and Other Addicts

Joseph Burgoin
Love and Hatred
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Relationship Issues
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Sexuality
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Society and Culture
18

Next month, there's a new movie coming out with Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal called "Love and Other Drugs," so I thought I'd take this opportunity to discuss the ways that romantic love can function as an intoxicant and how serial romance relates to other forms of addiction.

In an earlier post about different forms of love, I described one version where loving a person springs from the way he or she makes you feel and involves little concern for the other. What the "lover" wants is the heady feeling of intoxication, that blissful state where you feel as if life has become a sort of heaven on earth and all your troubles have disappeared.  Falling in love means living happily ever after.  Hollywood, that relentless pusher, pedals this drug in one romantic comedy after another.

Unfortunately, it's impossible to stay high forever.  As we come down, we begin to realize that the person we love isn't so perfect after all.  Even worse, we find that we still hate our job, we still don't make enough money, and nothing about reality and its frustrations has changed.  Obviously, we made a mistake in our choice of love object ... time to move on. Lather, rinse and repeat.

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Celebrities — Why We Love and Hate Them

Joseph Burgoin
Envy and Jealousy
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Society and Culture
28

Whenever I'm in line at the grocery store, like everyone else I scan the tabloid headlines.  It always amazes me that so many people are fascinated by the soap opera lives of celebrities. Why, after all, does the wedding of someone we don't even know hold such interest?  Why do we care about Brad and Angelina's latest tiff when we've never met them?

I've noticed there's a cycle to the stories.  First, you have the article about how Celebrity A has been spotted on dates with Celebrity B.  Then there's the one confirming they're an item, followed in due course by the big splashy cover story about their wedding.  Next you have rumors that there are signs of trouble in the relationship.  "Close personal friends" begin to hint at insensitivity and heartache at home, followed by reports that the couple has separated.  To complete the cycle, the tabloids run a story that details their messy divorce, full of bitterness and recriminations, with angst-ridden faces on the cover.  Of course there are many different versions of the cycle; if you're Brangelina, you can spin out variations for years.  But in general, the cycle runs from idealizing someone's life, followed by doubts about its goodness and concluding with its demise.

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What We Mean When We Use the Word ‘Love’

Joseph Burgoin
Love and Hatred
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Points of Departure
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Relationship Issues
19

(1) I love french fries.  (2) I love the way I feel when I'm on vacation in Mexico.  (3) I love my children. (4) I love my profession.

All four of these statements are true but the word "love" in each one describes a very different experience.  In the first, it means I enjoy having french fries inside my mouth, the way they taste and then swallowing them down.  Sentence number two describes a subjective experience of pleasure aroused by my environment.  The third sentence concerns emotions I have about other people, while the fourth applies to a value or ideal that I hold.

At first blush, it would seem these experiences or feeling states are so diverse that to use the word "love" for all of them is absurd.  Does it make any sense to use the same verb to describe how you feel towards your children as well as your favorite food?  In most cases, those experiences are entirely different; but in truth, there are varieties of love where the feeling someone has for another person isn't so different from "loving" french fries.  If individuals who suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder fall in love, it usually means they "love" how the other person makes them feel about themselves. Continue "What We Mean When We Use the Word ‘Love’"

Love in the Face of Hatred

Joseph Burgoin
Destinations
·
Love and Hatred
·
The Psychotherapy Relationship
14

In an earlier post, I talked about how clients sometimes feel anger and hatred for their therapists; I believe this is inevitable on occasion and appropriate.  Today I’d like to discuss how therapists may respond when they’re hated, and how much it can help the people we treat if we’re able to tolerate them and not retaliate in kind.

Often these clients, especially severely troubled individuals, need to express their hatred.  They need to feel they can show what they actually feel and still be accepted.  One of my long-term clients, a man in his early 30s, would scream at me during session after session.  He’d vent in the most vicious tones, week after week, accusing me of any number of crimes even when I might have said very little.  For me as his therapist, it was extremely painful to be in the same room and feel his hatred -- hard to be the object of his hostility but also to feel his pain. (See my much later post on countertransference issues in treating depression).  I knew he suffered from profound shame and that venting his hatred was a desperate effort to ward off that shame and hold himself together (see my earlier post on the ways in which hostility can function as a kind of psychic glue).

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