The Road Less Traveled - SECTION II - LOVE - Episodes 7 - 12

 

Episode 7:        "Self-Sacrifice"

The motives behind injudicious giving and destructive nurturing are many, but such cases invariably have a basic feature in common: the "giver," under the guise of love, is responding to and meeting his or her own needs without regard to the spiritual needs of the receiver.

A Minister reluctantly came to see me because his wife was suffering from a chronic depression and both his sons had dropped out of college and were living at home and receiving psychiatric attention.

Despite the fact that his whole family was "ill," he was initially completely unable to comprehend that he might be playing a role in their illnesses. "I do everything in my power to take care of them and their problems," he reported. "I don't have a waking moment when I am not concerned about them."

Analysis of the situation revealed that this man was indeed working himself to the bone to meet the demands of his wife and children.

He had given both of his sons new cars and paid the insurance on them even though he felt the boys should be putting more effort into being self-supporting.

Each week he took his wife to the opera or the theater in the city even though he intensely disliked going to the city, and opera bored him to death.

Busy though he was on his job, he spent most of his free time at home picking up after his wife and sons, who had a total disregard for housecleaning. "Don't you get tired of laying yourself out for them all the time?" I asked him. "Of course," he replied, "but what else am I to do? I love them and I have too much compassion not to take care of them. My concern for them is so great that I will never allow myself to stand by as long as they have needs to be filled. I may not be a brilliant man, but at least I have love and concern."

Interestingly, it emerged that his own father had been a brilliant scholar of considerable renown, but also an alcoholic and philanderer who showed a total lack of concern for the family and was grossly neglectful of them. Gradually my patient was helped to see that as a child he had vowed to be as different from his father as possible, to be as compassionate and concerned as his father was heartless and unconcerned.

He was even able to understand after a while that he had a tremendous stake in maintaining an image of himself as loving and compassionate, and that much of his behavior, including his career in the ministry, had been devoted to fostering this image.

What he did not understand so easily was the degree to which he was infantilizing his family. He continually referred to his wife as "my kitten" and to his full-grown, strapping sons as "my little ones." "How else can I behave?" he pleaded. "I may be loving in reaction to my father, but that doesn't mean I'm going to become unloving or turn myself into a bastard." 

What he literally had to be taught was that loving is a complicated rather than a simple activity, requiring the participation of his entire being-his head as well as his heart. 

Because of his need to be as unlike his father as possible, he had not been able to develop a flexible response system for expressing his love. He had to learn that not giving at the right time was more compassionate than giving at the wrong time, and that fostering independence was more loving than taking care of people who could otherwise take care of themselves. He even had to learn that expressing his own needs, anger, resentments and expectations was every bit as necessary to the mental health of his family as his self-sacrifice, and therefore that love must be manifested in confrontation as much as in beatific acceptance.

Gradually coming to realize how he infantilized his family, he began to make changes.

He stopped picking up after everyone and became openly angry when his sons did not adequately participate in the care of the home.

He refused to continue paying for the insurance on his sons' cars, telling them that if they wanted to drive they would have to pay for it themselves.

He suggested that his wife should go alone to the opera in New York. In making these changes he had to risk appearing to be the "bad guy" and had to give up the omnipotence of his former role as provider for all the needs of the family.

But even though his previous behavior had been motivated primarily by a need to maintain an image of himself as a loving person, he had at his core a capacity for genuine love, and because of this capacity he was able to accomplish these alterations in himself.

Both his wife and his sons reacted to these changes initially with anger.

But soon one son went back to college, and the other found a more demanding job and got an apartment for himself.

His wife began to enjoy her new independence and to grow in ways of her own.

The man found himself becoming more effective as a Minister and at the same time his life became more enjoyable.

The Minister's misguided love bordered on the more serious perversion of love that is masochism.

Laymen tend to associate sadism and masochism with purely sexual activity, thinking of them as the sexual enjoyment derived from inflicting or receiving physical pain.

Actually, true sexual sadomasochism is a relatively uncommon form of psychopathology. Much, much more common, and ultimately more serious, is the phenomenon of social sadomasochism, in which people unconsciously desire to hurt and be hurt by each other through their nonsexual interpersonal relations. Prototypically a woman will seek psychiatric attention for depression in response to desertion by her husband. She will regale the Psychiatrist with an endless tale of repeated mistreatment by her husband: he paid her no attention, he had a string of mistresses, he gambled away the food money, he went away for days at a time whenever he pleased, he came home drunk and beat her, and now, finally, he's deserted her and the children on Christmas Eve-Christmas Eve yet! The neophyte therapist tends to respond to this "poor woman" and her tale with instant sympathy, but it does not take long for the sympathy to evaporate in the light of further knowledge.

First, the therapist discovers that this pattern of mistreatment has existed for twenty years, and that while the poor woman divorced her brute of a husband twice, she also remarried him twice, and those innumerable separations were followed by innumerable reconciliations. 

Next, after working with her for a month or two to assist her in gaining independence, and when everything seemingly is going well and the woman appears to be enjoying the tranquility of life apart from her husband, the therapist sees the cycle enacted all over again. The woman happily bounces into the office one day to announce, "Well, Henry's come back. He called up the other night saying he wanted to see me, so I did see him. He pleaded with me to come back, and he really seems changed, so I took him back."

When the therapist points out that this seems to be but a repetition of a pattern they had agreed was destructive, the woman says, "But I love him. You can't deny love." If the therapist attempts to examine this "love" with any strenuousness, then the patient terminates therapy.

What is going on here? In trying to understand what has happened, the therapist recalls the obvious relish with which the woman had recounted the long history of her husband's brutality and mistreatment.

Suddenly a strange idea begins to dawn; maybe this woman endures her husband's mistreatment, and even seeks it out, for the very pleasure of talking about it.

But what would be the nature of such pleasure? The therapist remembers the woman's self-righteousness. Could it be that the most important thing in the woman's life is to have a sense of moral superiority and that in order to maintain this sense she needs to be mistreated? The nature of the pattern now becomes clear. By allowing herself to be treated basely she can feel superior. Ultimately she can even have the sadistic pleasure of seeing her husband beg and plead to return, and momentarily acknowledge her superiority from his humbled position, while she decides whether or not to magnanimously take him back. And in this moment she achieves her revenge. When such women are examined it is generally found that they were particularly humiliated as children. As a result they seek revenge through their sense of moral superiority, which requires repeated humiliation and mistreatment.

If the world is treating us well we have no need to avenge ourselves on it. If seeking revenge is our goal in life, we will have to see to it that the world treats us badly in order to justify our goal.

Masochists look on their submission to mistreatment as love, whereas in fact it is a necessity in their never-ceasing search for revenge and is basically motivated by hatred.

The issue of masochism highlights still another very major misconception about love-that it is self-sacrifice. By virtue of this belief the prototypical masochist was enabled to see her tolerance of mistreatment as self-sacrifice and hence as love, and therefore did not have to acknowledge her hatred.

The minister also saw his self-sacrificial behavior as love, although actually it was motivated not by the needs of his family but by his own need to maintain an image of himself. Early in his treatment he would continually talk about how he "did things for" his wife and his children, leading one to believe that he himself got nothing out of such acts. But he did.

Whenever we think of ourselves as doing something for another we are actually in some way  doing that for ourselves

Whatever we do is done because we choose to do it, and. we make justification for it as it serves us most.

Whatever we do for-someone actually fulfills a need we have.

Parents who say to their children, - 'You should be grateful for all that we have done for you" are invariably parents who are lacking in love to a significant degree.

Anyone who genuinely loves knows the pleasure of loving. When we genuinely love we do so because we want to love. We have children because we want to have children, and if we are loving parents, it is because we want to be loving parents .. It is true that love involves a change limit and this is an extension of the self rather than a sacrifice of the whole, that is replenishing activities that even enlarge rather than diminish the self; it fills the self rather than depleting it.

In a real sense. love cannot sometimes be selfish -again there is a paradox in that love is both selfish and unselfish at the same time. It is not selfishness or unselfishness that distinguishes love from non-love; it is the aim of the action. In the case of genuine love, the aim is always spiritual growth. In the case of non-love, the aim is always something else.

Episode 8:        Love Is Not a Feeling

I have said that love is an action, an activity. This leads to the final major misconception of love which needs to be addressed.

Love is not a feeling.

Many, many people possessing a feeling of love and even acting in response to that feeling act in all manner of unloving and destructive ways.

On the other hand, a genuinely loving individual will often take loving and constructive action toward a person he or she consciously dislikes, actually feeling no love toward the person at the time and perhaps even finding the person loveable in some way.

The feeling of love is the emotion that accompanies the experience of cathecting.

Cathecting, it will be remembered, is the process by which an object becomes important to us.

Once cathected, the object, commonly referred to as a "love object," is invested with our energy as if it were a part of ourselves, and this relationship between us and the invested object is called a cathexis. Since we may have many such relationships going on at the same time, we speak of our cathexes.

The process of withdrawing our energy from a love object so that it loses its sense of importance for us is known as decathecting.

The misconception that love is a feeling exists because we confuse cathecting with loving. This confusion is understandable since they are similar processes, but there are also striking differences.

First of all, as has been pointed out, we may cathect any object, animate or inanimate, with or without a spirit.

Thus a person may cathect the stock market or a piece of jewelry and may feel love for these things.

Second, the fact that we have cathected another human being does not mean that we care a whit for that person's spiritual development.

The dependent person, in fact, usually fears the spiritual development of a cathected spouse. The mother who insisted upon driving her adolescent son to and from school clearly cathected the boy; he was important to her but his spiritual growth was not.

Third, the intensity of our cathexes frequently has nothing to do with wisdom or commitment.

Two strangers may meet in a bar and cathect each other in such a way that nothing-not previously scheduled appointments, promises made, or family stability-is more important for the moment than their sexual consummation.

Finally, our cathexes may be fleeting and momentary. Immediately following their sexual consummation the just mentioned couple may find each other unattractive and undesirable.

We may decathect something almost as soon as we have cathected it.

Genuine love, on the other hand, implies commitment and the exercise of wisdom. 

When we are concerned for someone's spiritual growth, we know that a lack of commitment is likely to be harmful and that commitment to that person is probably necessary for us to manifest our concern effectively. It is for this reason that commitment is the cornerstone of the psychotherapeutic relationship. It is almost impossible for a patient to experience significant personality growth without a "therapeutic alliance" with the therapist. In other words, before the patient can risk major change he or she must feel the strength and security that come from believing that the therapist is the patient's constant and stable ally. For this alliance to occur the therapist must demonstrate to the patient, usually over a considerable length of time, the consistent and steadfast caring that can arise only from a capacity for commitment. This does not mean that the therapist always feels like listening to the patient.

Commitment means that the therapist listens to the patient, like it or not. It is no different in a marriage.

In a constructive marriage, just as in constructive therapy, the partners must regularly, routinely and predictably, attend to each other and their relationship no matter how they feel.

As has been mentioned, couples sooner or later always fall out of love, and it is at the moment when the mating instinct has run its course that the opportunity for genuine love begins.

It is when the spouses no longer feel like being in each other's company always, when they would rather be elsewhere some of the time, that their love begins to be tested and will be found to be present or absent.

This is not to say that the partners in a stable, constructive relationship such as intensive psychotherapy or marriage do not cathect each other and the relationship itself in various ways; they do. 

What it does say is that genuine love transcends the matter of cathexes. When love exists it does so with or without cathexis and with or without a loving feeling. It is easier-indeed, it is fun-to love with cathexis and the feeling of love. But it is possible to love without cathexis and without loving feelings, and it is in the fulfillment of this possibility that genuine and transcendent love is distinguished from simple cathexis.

The key word in this distinction is "will." I have defined love as the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one's own and another's spiritual growth.

Genuine love is volitional rather than emotional.

The person who truly loves does so because of a decision to love.

This person has made a commitment to be loving whether or not the loving feeling is present.

If it is, so much the better; but if it isn't, the commitment to love, the will to love, still stands and is still exercised.

Conversely, it is not only possible but necessary for a loving person to avoid acting on feelings of love. I may meet a woman who strongly attracts me, whom I feel like loving, but because it would be destructive to my marriage to have an affair at that time, I will say vocally or in the silence of my heart, "I feel like loving you, but I am not going to." Similarly, I may refuse to take on a new patient who is most attractive and likely to succeed in therapy because my time is already committed to other patients, some of whom may be considerably less attractive and more difficult.

My feelings of love may be unbounded, but my capacity to be loving is limited. I therefore must choose the person on whom to focus my capacity to love, toward whom to direct my will to love.

True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed. It is a committed, thoughtful decision.

The common tendency to confuse love with the feeling of love allows people all manner of self-deception. An alcoholic man, whose wife and children are desperately in need of his attention at that very moment, may be sitting in a bar with tears in his eyes, telling the bartender, "I really love my family."

People who neglect their children in the grossest of ways more often than not will consider themselves the most loving of parents.

It is clear that there may be a self-serving quality in this tendency to confuse love with the feeling of love; it is easy and not at all unpleasant to find evidence of love in one's feelings. It may be difficult and painful to search for evidence of love in one's actions. But because true love is an act of will that often transcends ephemeral feelings of love or cathexis, it is correct to say, "Love is as love does." Love and nonlove, as good and evil, are objective and not purely subjective phenomena.

Episode 9:        The Work of Attention

Having looked at some of the things that love is not, let us now examine some that love is.

It was mentioned in the introduction to this section that the definition of love implied effort.

When we extend ourselves, when we take an extra step or walk an extra mile, we do so in opposition to the inertia of laziness or the resistance of fear.

Extension of ourselves or moving out against the inertia of laziness we call work. Moving out in the face of fear we call courage.

Love, then, is a form of work or form of courage.

Specifically, it is work or courage directed toward the nurture of our own or another's

spiritual growth.

We may work or exert courage in directions other than toward spiritual growth, and for this reason all work and all courage is not love. But since it requires the extension of ourselves, love is always either work or courage.

If an act is not one of work or courage, then it is not an act of love. There are no exceptions.

The principal form that the work of love takes is attention.

When we love another we give him or her our attention; we attend to that's person's growth. When we love ourselves we attend to our own growth.

When we attend to someone we are caring for that person.

The act of attending requires that we make the effort to set aside our existing preoccupations (as was described in regard to the discipline of bracketing) and actively shift our consciousness.

Attention is an act of will, of work against the inertia of our own minds. As Rollo May says, "When we analyze will with all the tools modern psychoanalysis brings us, we shall find ourselves pushed back to the level of attention or intention as the seat of will. The effort which goes into the exercise of the will is really effort of attention; the strain in willing is the effort to keep the consciousness clear, i.e., the strain of keeping the attention focused."

By far the most common and important way in which we can exercise our attention is by listening. We spend an enormous amount of time listening, most of which we waste, because on the whole most of us listen very poorly. An industrial psychologist once pointed out to me that the amount of time we devote to teaching certain subjects to our children in school is inversely proportional to the frequency with which the children will make use of the subject when they grow up.

Thus a business executive will spend roughly an hour of his day reading, two hours talking and eight hours listening.

Yet in school we spend a large amount of time teaching children how to read, a very small amount of time teaching them how to speak, and usually no time at all teaching them how to listen. I do not believe it would be a good thing to make what we teach in school exactly proportional to what we do after school, but I do think we would be wise to give our children some instruction in the process of listening-not so that listening can be made easy but rather that they will understand how difficult it is to listen well. Listening well is an exercise of attention and by necessity hard work. It is because they do not realize this or because they are not willing to do the work that most people do not listen well.

Not very long ago I attended a lecture by a famous man on an aspect of the relationship between psychology and religion in which I have long been interested. Because of my interest I had a certain amount of expertise in the subject and immediately recognized the lecturer to be a great sage indeed. I also sensed love in the tremendous effort that he was exerting to communicate, with all manner of examples, highly abstract concepts that were difficult for us, his audience, to comprehend.

I therefore listened to him with all the intentness of which I was capable. Throughout the hour and a half he talked sweat was literally dripping down my face in the air-conditioned auditorium. By the time he was finished I had a throbbing headache, the muscles in my neck were rigid from my effort at concentration, and I felt completely drained and exhausted. Although I estimated that I had understood no more than 50 percent of what this great man had said to us that afternoon, I was amazed by the large number of brilliant insights he had given me. Following the lecture, which was well attended by culture-seeking individuals, I wandered about through the audience during a coffee break listening to their comments. Generally they were disappointed. Knowing his reputation, they had expected more. They found him hard to follow and his talk confusing. He was not as competent a speaker as they had hoped to hear. One woman proclaimed to nods of agreement, "He really didn't tell us anything."

In contra-distinction to the others, I was able to hear much of what this great man said, precisely because I was willing to do the work of listening to him. I was willing to do this work for two reasons: 

one, because I recognized his greatness and that what he had to say would likely be of great value; 

second, because of my interest in the field, I deeply wanted to absorb what he had to say so as to enhance my own understanding and spiritual growth.

My listening to him was an act of love.

I loved him because I perceived him to be a person of great value worth attending to, and I loved myself because I was willing to work on behalf of my growth. Since he was the teacher and I the pupil, he the giver and I the receiver, my love was primarily self-directed, motivated by what I could get out of our relationship and not what I could give him.

Nonetheless, it is entirely possible that he could sense within his audience the intensity of my concentration, my attention, my love, and he may have been thereby rewarded.

Love, as we shall see again and again, is invariably a two-way street, a reciprocal phenomenon whereby the receiver also gives and the giver also receives.

From this example of listening in the receiver role let us proceed to our most common opportunity to listen in the giver role: listening to children. The process of listening to children differs depending upon the age of the child. For the present let us consider a six-year-old first-grader. Given the chance, a first-grader will talk almost incessantly. 

How can parents deal with this never-ending chatter? Perhaps the easiest way is to forbid it. Believe it or not, there are families in which the children are virtually not allowed to talk, in which the dictum "Children should be seen and not heard" applies twenty-four hours a day. Such children may be seen, never interacting, silently staring at adults from the corners, mute onlookers from the shadows.

A second way is to permit the chatter but simply not listen to it, so that your child is not interacting with you but is literally talking to thin air or to him- or herself, creating background noise that may or may not be annoying.

A third way is to pretend to listen, proceeding along as best you can with what you are doing or with your train of thought while appearing to give the child your attention and occasionally making "unh huh" or "that's nice" noises at more or less appropriate times in response to the monologue.

 A fourth way is selective listening, which is a particularly alert form of pretend listening, wherein parents may prick up their ears if the child seems to be saying something of significance, hoping to separate the wheat from the chaff with a minimum of effort.

The problem with this way is that the human mind's capacity to filter selectively is not terribly competent or efficient, with the result that a fair amount of chaff is retained and a great deal of the wheat lost.

The fifth and final way, of course, is to truly listen to the child, giving him or her your full and complete attention, weighing each word and understanding each sentence.

These five ways of responding to the talking of children have been represented in ascending order of effort, with the fifth way, true listening, requiring from the parent a quantum leap of energy compared to the less effortful ways. The reader may naively suppose that I will recommend to parents that they should always follow the fifth way and always truly listen to their children.

Hardly! First of all, the six-year-old's propensity to talk is so great that a parent who always truly listened would have negligible time left to accomplish anything else.

Second, the effort required to truly listen is so great that the parent would be too exhausted to accomplish anything else.

Finally, it would be unbelievably boring, because the fact of the matter is that the chatter of a six-year-old is generally boring. What is required, therefore, is a balance of all five ways. It is necessary at times to tell children simply to shut up-when, for instance, their talk may be distracting in situations that critically require attention elsewhere or when it may represent a rude interruption of others and an attempt to achieve hostile or unrealistic dominance. Frequently six-year-olds will chatter for the pure joy of chattering, and there is nothing to be served by giving them attention when they are not even requesting it and are quite clearly happy talking to themselves.

There are other times when children are not content to talk to themselves but desire to interact with parents, and yet their need can be quite adequately met by pretend listening. At these times what children want from interaction is not communication but simply closeness, and pretend listening will suffice to provide them with the sense of "being with" that they want.

Furthermore, children themselves often like to drift in and out of communication and will be understanding of their parents' selective listening, since they are only selectively communicating. They understand this to be the rule of the game. So it is only during a relatively small proportion of their total talking time that six-year-old children need or even desire a response of true and total listening.

One of the many extremely complex tasks of parenting is to be able to strike a close to ideal balance of styles of listening and not listening, responding with the appropriate style to a child's varying needs.

Such a balance is frequently not struck because, even though the duration need not be long, many parents are unwilling or unable to expend the energy required for true listening.

Perhaps most parents. They may think they are truly listening when all they are doing is pretend listening, or at best selective listening, but this is self-deception, designed to hide from themselves their laziness.

For true listening, no matter how brief, requires tremendous effort.

First of all, it requires total concentration. You cannot truly listen to anyone and do anything else at the same time. If a parent wants to truly listen to a child, the parent must put aside everything else. The time of true listening must be devoted solely to the child; it must be the child's time. If you are not willing to put aside everything, including your own worries and preoccupations for such a time, then you are not willing to truly listen.

Second, the effort required for total concentration on the words of a six-year-old child is considerably greater than that required for listening to a great lecturer. The child's speech patterns are uneven-occasional rushes of words interspersed with pauses and repetitions-which makes concentration difficult. Then the child will usually be talking of matters that have no inherent interest for the adult, whereas the great lecturer's audience is specifically interested in the topic of his speech. In other words, it is dull to listen to a six-year-old, which makes it doubly difficult to keep concentration focused.

Consequently truly listening to a child of this age is a real labor of love. Without love to motivate the parent it couldn't be done.

But why bother? Why exert all this effort to focus totally on the boring prattlings of a six-year-old?

First, your willingness to do so is the best possible concrete evidence of your esteem you can give your child. If you give your child the same esteem you would give a great lecturer, then the child will know him- or herself to be valued and therefore will feel valuable. There is no better and ultimately no other way to teach your children that they are valuable people than by valuing them.

Second, the more children feel valuable, the more they will begin to say things of value. They will rise to your expectation of them.

Third, the more you listen to your child, the more you will realize that in amongst the pauses, the stutterings, the seemingly innocent chatter, your child does indeed have valuable things to say. The dictum that great wisdom comes from "the mouths of babes" is recognized as an absolute fact by anyone who truly listens to children. Listen to your child enough and you will come to realize that he or she is quite an extraordinary individual. And the more extraordinary you realize your child to be, the more you will be willing to listen. And the more you will learn.

Fourth, the more you know about your child, the more you will be able to teach. Know little about your children, and usually you will be teaching things that either they are not ready to learn or they already know and perhaps understand better than you.

Finally, the more children know that you value them, that you consider them extraordinary people, the more willing they will be to listen to you and afford you the same esteem. And the more appropriate your teaching, based on your knowledge of them, the more eager your children will be to learn from you. And the more they learn, the more extraordinary they will become. If the reader senses the cyclical character of this process, he or she is quite correct and is appreciating the truth of the reciprocity of love. Instead of a vicious downward cycle, it is a creative upward cycle of evolution and growth. Value creates value.

Love begets love.

Parents and child together spin forward faster and faster in the pas de deux of love.

We have been talking with a six-year-old in mind. With younger or older children the proper balance of listening and non-listening differs, but the process is basically the same.

With younger children the communication is more and more nonverbal but still ideally requires periods of total concentration.

You can't play patty-cake very well when your mind is elsewhere. And if you can only play patty-cake halfheartedly, you are running the risk of having a halfhearted child.

Adolescent children require less total listening time from their parents than a six-year-old but even more true listening time.

They are much less likely to chatter aimlessly, but when they do talk, they want their parents' full attention even more than do the younger children.

The need for one's parents to listen is never outgrown. A thirty-year-old talented professional man in treatment for feelings of anxiety related to low self-esteem could recall numerous instances in which his parents, also professionals, had been unwilling to listen to what he had to say or had regarded what he had to say as being of little worth and consequence.

But of all these memories the most vivid and painful was that of his twenty-second year, when he wrote a lengthy provocative thesis that earned his graduation from college with high honors. Being ambitious for him, his parents were absolutely delighted by the honors he had received. Yet despite the fact that for a whole year he left a copy of the thesis around in full view in the family living room and made frequent hints to his parents that "they might like to have a look at it," neither one of them ever took the time to read it. "I daresay they would have read it," he said toward the end of his therapy, "I daresay they would have even complimented me on it had I gone to them and asked them point-blank, 'Look, would you please, please read my thesis? I want you to know and appreciate the kinds of things I am thinking.' But that would have been begging them to listen to me, and I was damned if at twenty-two I was going to go around begging for their attention.

Having to beg for it wouldn't have made me feel any more valuable."

True listening, total concentration on the other, is always a manifestation of love.

An essential part of true listening is the discipline of bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one's own prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker's world from the inside, stepping inside his or her shoes. This unification of speaker and listener is actually an extension and enlargement of ourself, and new knowledge is always gained from this. Moreover, since true listening involves bracketing, a setting aside of the self, it also temporarily involves a total acceptance of the other. Sensing this acceptance, the speaker will feel less and less vulnerable and more and more inclined to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener.

As this happens, speaker and listener begin to appreciate each other more and more, and the duet dance of love is again begun. 

The energy required for the discipline of bracketing and the focusing of total attention is so great that it can be accomplished only by love, by the will to extend oneself for mutual growth.

Most of the time we lack this energy. Even though we may feel in our business dealings or social relationships that we are listening very hard, what we are usually doing is listening selectively, with a preset agenda in mind, wondering as we listen how we can achieve certain desired results and get the conversation over with as quickly as possible or redirected in ways more satisfactory to us.

Since true listening is love in action, nowhere is it more appropriate than in marriage. Yet most couples never truly listen to each other. Consequently, when couples come to us for counseling or therapy, a major task we must accomplish if the process is to be successful is to teach them how to listen.

Not infrequently we fail, the energy and discipline involved being more than they are willing to expend or submit themselves to. Couples are often surprised, even horrified, when we suggest to them that among the things they should do is talk to each other by appointment. It seems rigid and unromantic and un-spontaneous to them.

Yet true listening can occur only when time is set aside for it and conditions are supportive of it. It cannot occur when people are driving, or cooking or tired and anxious to sleep or easily interrupted or in a hurry.

Romantic "love" is effortless, and couples are frequently reluctant to shoulder the effort and discipline of true love and listening. But when and if they finally do, the results are superbly gratifying.

Again and again we have the experience of hearing one spouse say to another with real joy, once the process of true listening has been started, "We've been married twenty-nine years and I never knew that about you before." When this occurs we know that growth in the marriage has begun.

While it is true that one's capacity to truly listen may improve gradually with practice, it never becomes an effortless process. Perhaps the primary requisite for a good psychiatrist is a capacity to truly listen, yet half a dozen times during the average "fifty-minute hour" I will catch myself failing to truly listen to what my patient is saying. Sometimes I may lose the thread of my patient's associations entirely, and it is then necessary for me to say, "I'm sorry, but I allowed my mind to wander for a moment and I was not truly listening to you. Could you run over the past few sentences again?" Interestingly, patients are usually not resentful when this occurs. On the contrary, they seem to understand intuitively that a vital element of the capacity to truly listen is being on the alert for those lapses when one is not truly listening, and my acknowledgment that my attention has wandered actually reassures them that most of the time I am truly listening. This knowledge that one is being truly listened to is frequently in and of itself remarkably therapeutic. In approximately a quarter of our cases, whether patients are adults or children, considerable and even dramatic improvement is shown during the first few months of psychotherapy, before any of the roots of problems have been uncovered or significant interpretations have been made.

There are several reasons for this phenomenon, but chief among them, I believe, is the patient's sense that he or she is being truly listened to, often for the first time in years, and perhaps for the first time ever.

While listening is by far the most important form of attention, other forms are also necessary in most loving relationships, particularly with children.

The variety of such possible forms is great.

One is game-playing.

With the infant

this will be patty-cake and peekaboo;

with the six-year-old

it will be magic tricks, go fish, or hide-and-seek;

with the twelve-year old

it will be badminton and gin rummy; and so on. 

Reading to young children is attention, as is helping older ones with their homework. Family activities are important: movies, picnics, drives, trips, fairs, carnivals. Some forms of attention are pure service to the child: sitting on the beach attending a four-year-old or the almost endless chauffeuring required by early adolescents. But what all these forms of attention have in common-and they have it in common with listening as well-is that they involve time spent with the child.

Basically, to attend is to spend time with, and the quality of the attention is proportional to the intensity of concentration during that time.

The time spent with children in these activities, if used well, gives parents countless opportunities to observe their children and come to know them better.

Whether children are good losers or bad, how they do their homework and how they learn, what appeals to them and what doesn't, when they are courageous and when they are frightened in such activities-all are vital pieces of information for the loving parent.

This time with the child in activity also gives the parents innumerable opportunities for the teaching of skills and the basic principles of discipline.

The usefulness of activity for observing and teaching the child is of course the basic principle of play therapy and experienced child therapists may become extremely adept at using the time spent with their child patients in play for making significant observations and therapeutic interventions.

Keeping one's eye on a four-year-old at the beach, concentrating on an interminable a disjointed story told by a six-year-old, teaching an adolescent how to drive, truly listening to the tale of your spouse's day at the office or laundromat, and understanding his or her problems from the inside, attempting to be as consistently patient and bracketing as much as possible-all these are tasks that are often boring, frequently inconvenient and always energy-draining; they mean work. If we were lazier we would not do them at all. If we were less lazy we would do them more often or better. Since love is work, the essence of nonlove is laziness.

The subject of laziness is an extremely important one.

It is a hidden theme running throughout the first section on discipline and this one on love. We will focus it specifically in the final section when we should have a clearer perspective.

Episode 10:             The Risk of Loss

The act of love-extending oneself-as I have said, requires a moving out against the inertia of laziness (work) or the resistance engendered by fear (courage).

Let us turn now from the work of love to the courage of love. When we extend ourselves, our self enters new and unfamiliar territory, so to speak. Our self becomes a new and different self. We do things we are not accustomed to do. We change. The very thought of that change, of unaccustomed activity, of being on unfamiliar ground, of doing things differently is frightening. It always was and always will be.

People handle their fear of change in different ways, but the fear is inescapable if they are in fact to change. it is the making of action in spite of fear, the moving out against the resistance engendered by fear into the unknown and into the future. On some level spiritual growth, and therefore love, always requires courage and involves risk.

It is the risking of love that we will now consider.

If you are a regular churchgoer you might notice a woman in her late forties who every Sunday exactly five minutes before the start of the service inconspicuously takes the same seat in a side pew on the aisle at the very back of the church.

The moment the service is over she quietly but quickly makes for the door and is gone before any of the other parishioners and before the Minister can come out onto the steps to meet with his flock. Should you manage to accost her-which is unlikely-and invite her to the coffee social hour following the service, she would thank you politely, nervously looking away from you, but tell you that she has a pressing engagement, and would then dash away. Were you to follow her toward her pressing engagement you would find that she returns directly to her home, a little apartment where the blinds are always drawn, unlocks her door, enters, immediately locks the door behind her, and is not seen again that Sunday.

If you could keep watch over her you might see that she has a job as a low ranking typist in a large office, where she accepts her assignments wordlessly, types them faultlessly, and returns her finished work without comment. She eats her lunch at her desk and has no friends. She walks home, stopping always at the same impersonal supermarket for a few provisions before she vanishes behind her door until she appears again for the next day's work. On Saturday afternoons she goes alone to a local movie theater that has a weekly change of shows. She has a TV set. She has no phone. She almost never receives mail. Were you somehow able to communicate with her and comment that her life seemed lonely, she would tell you that she rather enjoyed her loneliness. If you asked her if she didn't even have any pets, she would tell you that she had had a dog of whom she was very fond but that he had died eight years before and no other dog could take his place.

Who is this woman?

We do not know the secrets of her heart.

What we do know is that her whole life is devoted to avoiding risks especially in investing in herself, she has narrowed and diminished it almost to the point of non-existence

She cathects no other no other living being

Now, we have said that is not love, that which transends cathexis. This is true; but love does require cathexis at least for a beginning:

We' can love only that which in one way or another has importance for us.

But with cathexis there is always loss or rejection which leads to a move out to the human being, there is always the risk that that person, will move you out of where you were before.

Love anything that lives-a person, a pet, a plant and it will die.

Trust anybody and you may be hurt;

depend on anyone and that one may let you down.

The price of cathexis is pain.

If someone is determined not to risk pain, then such a person must do without many things: having children, getting married, the ecstasy of sex, the hope of ambition, friendship-all that makes life alive, meaningful and significant. But the only alternative is not to live fully or not to live at all.

The main essence of life is change,  which may end up in decay. \

Elect life and growth, and you elect the prospect of death.

A likely determinant for the isolated, narrow life of the woman described was an experience or series of experiences with death which she found so painful that she was determined never to experience death again, even at the cost of living.

In avoiding the experience of death she had to avoid growth and change. But this avoidance gives the semblance of actually living free from the hassles of life whereas it is more like the living dead, without risk or challenge.

I have said that the attempt to avold legitimate "suffering lies at the root of all emotional illness. Not surprisingly, most psychotherapy patients (and probably most non-patients, since neurosis is the norm rather than the exception) have a problem, whether they are young or old, in facing the reality of death squarely and clearly.

What is surprising is that the psychiatric literature is only beginning to examine the significance of this phenomenon. If we can live with the knowledge that death is our constant companion, traveling on our "left shoulder," then death can become in the words of

Don Juan, our "ally," still fearsome but continually a source of wise counsel. * With death's counsel, the constant awareness of the limit of our time to live and love, we can always * See Carlos Casteneda's The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of

Knowledge, A Separate Reality, Journey to Ixtlan, and Tales of Power.

On a major level these are books about the psychotherapeutic process, be guided to make the best use of our time and live life to the fullest.

But if we are unwilling to fully face the fearsome presence of death on our left shoulder, we deprive ourselves of its counsel and cannot possibly live or love with clarity.

When we shy away from the changing nature of life and living, we inevitably shy away from living life to the hilt.

Episode 11:      The Risk of Independence

Thus all life itself represents a risk, and the more lovingly we live our lives the more risks we take.

Of the thousands, maybe even millions, of risks we can take in a lifetime the greatest is the risk of growing up.

Growing up is the act of stepping from childhood into adulthood.

Actually it is more of a fearful leap than a step, and it is a leap that many people never really take in their lifetimes.

Though they may outwardly appear to be adults, even successful adults, perhaps the majority of "grown-ups" remain until their death psychological children who have never truly separated themselves from their parents and the power that their parents have over them.

Perhaps because it was so poignantly personal to me, I feel I can best illustrate the essence of growing up and the enormity of the risk involved by describing the giant step I myself took into adulthood at the end of my fifteenth year fortunately very early in life. Although this step was a conscious decision, let me preface my account of it by saying that

I had no awareness whatsoever at the time that what I was doing was growing up. I only knew that I was leaping into the unknown.

At the age of thirteen I went away from home to Phillips Exeter Academy, a boy's preparatory school of the very highest reputation, to which my brother had gone before me. I knew that I was fortunate to be going there, because attendance at Exeter was part of a well-defined pattern that would lead me to one of the best Ivy League colleges and from there into the highest echelons of the Establishment, whose doors would be wide open to me on account of my educational background. I felt extremely lucky to have been born the child of well-to-do parents who could afford "the best education that money could buy," and I had a great sense of security which came from being a part of what was so obviously a proper pattern.

The only problem was that almost immediately after starting Exeter I became miserably unhappy. The reasons for my unhappiness were totally obscure to me then and are still quite profoundly mysterious to me today.

I just did not seem to fit. I didn't seem to fit with the faculty, the students, the courses, the architecture, the social life, the total environment.

Yet there seemed nothing to do other than to try to make the best of it and try to mold my imperfections so that I could fit more comfortably into this pattern that had been laid out for me and that was so obviously the right pattern. And try I did for two and a half years. Yet daily my life appeared more meaningless and I felt more wretched. The last year I did little but sleep, for only in sleep could I find any comfort.

In retrospect I think perhaps in my sleep I was resting and unconsciously preparing myself for the leap I was about to take.

I took it when I returned home for spring vacation of my third year and announced that I was not going to return to school. My father said, "But you can't quit-it's the best education money can buy. Don't you realize what you'd be throwing away?"

"I know it's a good school," I replied, "but I'm not going back."

"Why can't you adjust to it, make another go of it?" my parents asked.

"I don't know," I answered, feeling totally inadequate. "I don't even know why I hate it so. But I hate it and I'm not going back. "

"Well, what are you going to do, then? Since you seem to want to play so loose with your future, just what is it you plan to do?"

Again I miserably replied, "I don't know. All I know is I'm not going back there."

My parents were understandably alarmed and took me forthwith to a Psychiatrist, who stated that I was depressed and recommended a month's hospitalization, giving me a day to decide whether or not this was what I wanted. That night was the only time I ever considered suicide. Entering a psychiatric hospital seemed quite appropriate to me. I was, as the Psychiatrist said, depressed.

My brother had adjusted to Exeter; why couldn't I?

I knew that my difficulty in adjusting was entirely my fault, and I felt totally inadequate, incompetent and worthless. Worse, I believed that I was probably insane. Had not my father said, "You must be crazy to throw away such a good education"?

If I returned to Exeter I would be returning to all that was safe, secure, right, proper, constructive, proven and known. Yet it was not me. In the depths of my being, I knew it was not my path. But what was my path? If I did not return, all that lay ahead was unknown, undetermined, unsafe, insecure, unsanctified, unpredictable.

Anyone who would take such a path must be mad. I was terrified. But then, at the moment of my greatest despair, from my unconscious there came a sequence of words, like a strange disembodied oracle from a voice that was not mine: "The only real security in life lies in relishing life on your own terms, flowing with the doubts and still having faith in those doubts, being crazy at some points and sane at other points and all that seemed way out of my control so I decided to be me.

I rested.

In the morning I went to see the Psychiatrist again and told him that I would never return to Exeter but that I was ready to enter his  Hospital.

I had taken the leap into the unknown.

 I had taken my destiny into my own hands.

The process of growing up usually occurs very gradually, with multiple little leaps into the unknown, such as when an eight-year-old boy first takes the risk of riding his bike down to the country store all by himself or a fifteen-year-old goes out on his or her first date.

If you doubt that these represent real risks, then you cannot remember the anxiety involved.

If you observe even the healthiest of children you will see not only an eagerness to risk new and adult activities but also, side by side, a reluctance, a shrinking back, a clinging to the safe and familiar, a holding onto dependency and childhood.

Moreover, on more or less subtle levels, you can find this same ambivalence in an adult, including yourself, with the elderly particularly tending to cling to the old, known and familiar.

Almost daily at the age of forty I am presented with subtle opportunities to risk doing things differently, opportunities to grow. I am still growing up, and not as fast as I might. Among all the little leaps we might take, there are also some enormous ones, as when by leaving school I was also forsaking a whole  pattern of life and values according to which I had been raised.

Many never take any of these potential enormous leaps, and consequently many do not ever really grow up at all.

Despite their outward appearances they remain psychologically still very much the children of their parents, living by hand-me-down values, motivated primarily by their parents' approval and disapproval (even when their parents are long dead and buried), never having dared to truly take their destiny into their own hands.

While such great leaps are most 'commonly made during adolescence, they can be made at any age.

A thirty-five-year-old mother of three, married to a controlling, stultifying, inflexible, chauvinistic husband gradually and painfully comes to realize that her dependency on him and their marriage is a living death. He blocks all her attempts to change the nature of their relationship. With incredible bravery, she divorces him, sustaining the burden of his recriminations and the criticism of neighbors, and risks an unknown future alone with her children, but free for the first time in her life to be her own person.

Depressed following a heart attack, a fifty-two year- old businessman looks back on a life of frantic ambition to constantly make more money and rise ever higher in the corporate hierarchy and finds it meaningless. After long reflection, he realizes that he has been driven by a need for approval from a domineering, constantly critical mother; he has almost worked himself to death so as to be finally successful in her eyes. Risking and transcending her disapproval for the first time in his life, as well as braving the ire of his high living wife and children, who are reluctant to give up their expensive lifestyle, he moves to the country and opens up a little shop where he restores antique furniture.

Such major changes, such leaps into independence and self-determination, are enormously painful at any age and require supreme courage, yet they are not infrequent results of psychotherapy.

Indeed, because of the enormity of the risks involved, they often require psychotherapy for their accomplishment, not because therapy diminishes the risk but because it supports and teaches courage.

But what has this business of growing up to do with love, apart from the fact that the extension of the self-involved in loving is an enlargement of the self into new dimensions?

First of all, the examples of the changes described and all other such major changes are acts of self-love.

It is precisely because I valued myself that I was unwilling to remain miserable in a school and whole social environment that did not fit my needs.

It is because the housewife had regard for herself that she refused to tolerate any longer a marriage that so totally limited her freedom and repressed her personality.

 It is because the businessman cared for himself that he was no longer willing to nearly kill himself in order to meet the expectations of his mother.

Second, not only does love for oneself provide the motive for such major changes; it also is the basis for the courage to risk them.

It is only because my parents had clearly loved and valued me as a young child that I felt sufficiently secure in myself to defy their expectations and radically depart from the pattern they had laid out for me.

Although I felt inadequate and worthless and possibly crazy in doing what I did, I was able to tolerate these feelings only because at the same time, on an even deeper level, I sensed myself to be a good person no matter how different I might be.

In daring to be different, even if it meant to be crazy, I was responding to earlier loving messages from my parents, hundreds of them, which said, "You are a beautiful and beloved individual. It is good to be you. We will love you no matter what you do, as long as you are you."

Without that security of my parents' love reflected in my own self-love, I would have chosen the known instead of the unknown and continued to follow my parents' preferred pattern at the extreme cost of my self's basic uniqueness.

Finally, it is only when one has taken the leap into the unknown of total selfhood, psychological independence and unique individuality that one is free to proceed along still higher paths of spiritual growth and free to manifest love in its greatest dimensions.

As long as one marries, enters a career or has children to satisfy one's parents or the expectations of anyone else, including society as a whole, the commitment by its very nature will be a shallow one.

As long as one loves one's children primarily because one is expected to behave in a loving manner toward them, then the parent will be insensitive to the more subtle needs of the children and unable to express love in the more subtle, yet often most important ways.

The highest forms of love are inevitably totally free choices and not acts of conformity.

Episode 12:      The Risk of Commitment

Whether it be shallow or not, commitment is the foundation, the bedrock of any genuinely loving relationship.

Deep commitment does not guarantee the success of the relationship but does help more than any other factor to assure it.

Initially shallow commitments may grow deep with time; if not, the relationship will likely crumble or else be inevitably sickly or chronically frail.

Frequently we are not consciously aware of the immensity of the risk involved in making a deep commitment.

I have already suggested that one of the functions served by the instinctual phenomenon of falling in love is to provide the participants with a magic cloak of omnipotence which blissfully blinds them to the riskiness of what they are doing when they undertake marriage.

For my own part, I was reasonably calm until the very moment that my wife joined me before the altar, when my whole body began to tremble. I then became so frightened that I can remember almost nothing of the ceremony or the reception following.

In any case, it is our sense of commitment after the wedding which makes possible the transition from falling in love to genuine love.

And it is our commitment after conception which transforms us from biological into psychological parents.

Commitment is inherent in any genuinely loving relationship.

Anyone who is truly concerned for the spiritual growth of another knows, consciously or instinctively, that he or she can significantly foster that growth only through a relationship of constancy.

Children cannot grow to psychological maturity in an atmosphere of unpredictability, haunted by the specter of abandonment.

Couples cannot resolve in any healthy way the universal issues of marriage-dependency and independency, dominance and submission, freedom and fidelity, for example - without the security of knowing that the act of struggling over these issues will not destroy the relationship.

Problems of commitment are a major, inherent part of most psychiatric disorders, and issues of commitment are crucial in the course of psychotherapy.

Character-disordered individuals tend to form only shallow commitments, and when their disorders are severe these individuals seem to lack totally the capacity to form commitments at all. It is not so much that they fear the risk of committing themselves as that they basically do not understand what commitment is all about. Because their parents failed to commit themselves to them as children in any meaningful way, they grew up without the experience of commitment. Commitment for them represents an abstract beyond their ken, a phenomenon of which they cannot fully conceive.

Neurotics, on the other hand, are generally aware of the nature of commitment but are frequently paralyzed by the fear of it. Usually, their experience of early childhood was one in which their parents were sufficiently committed to them for them to form a commitment to their parents in return. Subsequently, however, cessation of parental love through death, abandonment or chronic rejection has the effect of making the child's unrequited commitment an experience of intolerable pain.

New commitments, then, are naturally dreaded.

Such injuries can be healed only if it is possible for the person to have a basic and more satisfying experience with commitment at a later date.

It is for this reason, among others, that commitment is the cornerstone of the psychotherapeutic relationship.

There are times when I shudder at the enormity of what I am doing when I accept another patient for long-term therapy.

For basic healing to take place it is necessary for the psychotherapist to bring to his or her relationship with a new patient the same high sense and degree of commitment that  genuinely loving parents bring to their children.

The therapist's sense of commitment and the constancy of concern will usually be tested and inevitably made manifest to the patient in myriad ways over the course of months or years of therapy.

Rachel, a cold and distantly proper young woman of twenty-seven came to see me at the end of a brief marriage.

Her husband, Mark, had left her because of her frigidity. "I know I'm frigid," Rachel acknowledged. "I thought I would warm up to Mark in time, but it never happened. I don't think it's just Mark. I've never enjoyed sex with anyone. And, to tell you the truth, I'm not sure I want to. One part of me wants to, because I'd like to have a happy marriage someday, and I'd like to be normal- normal people seem to find something wonderful in sex. But another part of me is quite content to stay the way I am. Mark always said, 'Relax and let go.' Well, maybe I don't want to relax and let go even if I could. "

In the third month of our work together I pointed out to Rachel that she always said "Thank you" to me at least twice before she even sat down to begin a session-first when I met her in the waiting room and again as she passed through the door into my office. "What's wrong with being polite?" she asked.

"Nothing per se," I replied. "But in this particular case it seems so unnecessary . You are acting as if you were a guest in here and not even sure of your welcome."

"But I am a guest in here. It's your house."

"True," I said. "But it's also true that you're paying me forty dollars an hour for your time in here. You have purchased this time and this office space, and because you've purchased it, you have a right to it. You're not a guest. This office, this waiting room, and our time together are your right. It's yours. You've paid me for this right, so why thank me for what is yours?"

"I can't believe you really feel that way," Rachel exclaimed.

"Then you must believe that 1 can kick you out of here any time 1 want to," 1 countered. "You must feel that it's possible for you to come in here some morning and have me tell you,

'Rachel, working with you has become a bore. I've decided not to see you again. Goodbye and good luck.' "

"That's exactly the way 1 feel," Rachel agreed. "I've never thought of anything being my right before, at least not in regard to any person. You mean you couldn't kick me out?"

"Oh, I suppose I could. But I wouldn't. I wouldn't want to. It wouldn't be ethical, among other things. Look, Rachel,"

I said, "when I take on a case such as yours in long-term therapy I make a commitment to that case, that person. And I've made a commitment to you I will work with you as long as is necessary, whether it takes one year or five years or ten years or whatever.

I don't know whether you will quit our work together when you're ready or before you're ready.

But whichever it is, you are the one who will terminate our relationship.

Short of my death, my services will be available to you as long as you want them.

It was not difficult for me to understand Rachel's problem.

At the beginning of her therapy her ex-husband, Mark, had said to me: "I think Rachel's mother has a lot to do with this.

She's a remarkable woman. She'd make a great President of General Motors, but I'm not sure she's a very good mother."

Quite so.

Rachel had been raised, or rather ruled, with the feeling that she might be fired at any moment if she didn't toe the line

Rather than giving Rachel the sense that her place in the home as a child was secure-a sense that can come solely from committed parents-Rachel's mother had instead consistently communicated the opposite: like that of an employee, Rachel's position was guaranteed only insofar as she produced what was required and behaved according to expectations.

Since her place in the home was not secure as a child, how could she feel that her place with me was secure?

Such injuries caused by a parental failure of commitment are not healed by a few words, a few superficial reassurances.

On successively deeper levels they must be worked through again and again.

One such working-through, for instance, occurred more than a year later. We had been focusing on the fact that Rachel never cried in my presence-another way in which she could not allow herself to "let go." One day as she was talking of the terrible loneliness that came from having to constantly be on guard, I sensed that she was on the brink of weeping but that some slight push was needed from me, so I did something out of the ordinary: I reached over to where she was lying on the couch and gently stroked her head, murmuring,

"Poor Rachel. Poor Rachel." The gesture failed.

Rachel immediately stiffened and sat up, dry-eyed. "I cannot do it," she said. "I cannot let myself go." This was toward the end of the session. At her next session, Rachel came in and sat on the couch instead of lying down. "Well, now it's your time to talk," she announced.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"You're going to tell me all the things that are wrong with me."

I was puzzled. "I still don't understand what you mean, Rachel. "

"This is our last session. You're going to sum up all the things wrong with me, all the reasons why you can't treat me any more."

"I don't have the foggiest idea what's going on," I said.

It was Rachel's turn to be puzzled. "Well," she said, "last session you wanted me to cry. You've wanted me to cry for a long time. Last session you did everything you could to help me to cry and I still wouldn't do it, so you're going to give up on me. I can't do what you want me to do. That's why today will be our last session."

"You really believe I'm going to fire you, don't you, Rachel?"

"Yes. Anyone would."

"No, Rachel, not anyone. Your mother might have. But I'm not your mother. Not everyone in this world is like your mother. You're not my employee. You're not here to do what I want you to do. You're here to do what you want to do, when you want to do it. I may push you, but I have no power over you. I will never fire you. You're here for as long as you want to be."

One of the problems that people commonly have in their adult relationships if they have never received a firm commitment from their parents is the "I'll desert you before you desert me" syndrome. This syndrome will take many forms or disguises.

One form was Rachel's frigidity.

Although it was never on a conscious level, what Rachel's frigidity was expressing to her husband and previous boyfriends was, "I'm not going to give myself to you when I know damn well that you're going to dump me one of these days." For Rachel, "letting go," sexually or otherwise, represented a commitment of herself, and she was unwilling to make a commitment when the map of her past experience made it seem certain she would not receive any commitment in return.

The "I'll desert you before you desert me" syndrome becomes more and more powerful the closer such a person as Rachel comes to another. After a year of therapy on a twice-a-week basis, Rachel announced to me that she could no longer afford eighty dollars a week. Since her divorce, she said, she was having a difficult time making ends meet, and she would simply have to stop seeing me or cut back to once a week. On a realistic level, this was ridiculous. I knew that Rachel had an inheritance of fifty thousand dollars in addition to the modest salary she earned at her job, and in the community, she was known to be a member of an old and wealthy family. Ordinarily, I would have confronted her vigorously with the fact that she could afford my services more easily than many patients and was clearly using the issue of money spuriously to flee from an increasing closeness to me. On the other hand, I also knew that her inheritance represented something more for Rachel than just money; it was hers, something that would not desert her, a bulwark of security in an uncommitted world. Although it was quite reasonable for me to ask her to dip into her inheritance to pay my standard fee, I guessed that that was a risk she was not yet ready to make and that if I insisted she would indeed flee. She had said she thought that on her income she could afford to pay fifty dollars a week, and she offered me that amount for just one session. I told her I would reduce my fee to twenty-five dollars a session and continue to see her twice weekly. She looked at me with a mixture of fear, disbelief and joy. "You'd really do that?" she asked. I nodded. A long period of silence followed. Finally, closer to tears than she had ever yet been, Rachel said, "Because I came from a wealthy family, the merchants in town have always charged me the highest the traffic would bear.

You are offering me a break. No one ever offered me a break before."

Actually, Rachel quit therapy several times during the following year in the struggle over whether she could permit our mutual commitment to grow. Each time, through a combination of letters and phone calls over a week or two, I was able to persuade her to return. Finally, by the end of the second year of therapy we were able to deal more directly with the issues involved. I'd learned that Rachel wrote poetry and I asked her to show it to me. First she refused. Then she agreed, but week after week she would "forget" to bring it to me. I pointed out that withholding her poetry from me had the same significance as withholding her sexuality from Mark and other men.

Why did she feel that the offering of her poems to me represented a total commitment of herself? Why did she feel that the sharing of her sexuality was a similar total commitment? Even if I were not responsive to her poetry, would that mean a total rejection of her? Would I terminate our friendship because she was not a great poet? Perhaps the sharing of her poetry would deepen our relationship. Why was she fearful of such deepening? Et cetera. Et cetera. Et cetera.

Finally coming to accept the fact that she did have a commitment from me, in the third year of her therapy Rachel began to "let go." She finally took the risk of letting me see her poetry. Then she was able to giggle and laugh and tease.

Our relationship, which had previously been stiff and formal, became warm, spontaneous and often light-hearted and joyful.

"I never knew what it was like to be relaxed with another person before," she said. "This is the first place in my life I've ever felt secure." From the security of my office and our time together she was rapidly able to venture forth into other relationships.

She realized that sex was not a matter of commitment but one of self-expression and play and exploration and learning and joyful abandonment. Knowing that I would always be available to her if she became bruised, like the good mother she had never had, she was free to allow her sexuality to burst forth. Her frigidity melted. By the time she terminated therapy in the fourth year, Rachel had become a vivacious and openly passionate person who was busily enjoying all that human relationships have to offer.

I was, fortunately, able to offer Rachel a sufficient degree of commitment to overcome the ill effects of the lack of commitment that she had never experienced during her childhood.

I have often been not so fortunate. The computer technician I described in the first section as an example of transference was a case in point. His need for commitment from me was so total that I was not able, or willing, to meet it. If the therapist's commitment is insufficient to survive the vicissitudes of the relationship, basic healing will not occur. However, if the therapist's commitment is sufficient, then usually-although not inevitably-the patient will respond sooner or later with a developing commitment of his or her own, a commitment to the therapist and to therapy itself. The point at which the patient begins to demonstrate this commitment is the turning point of therapy. For Rachel, I think this point came when she finally offered me her poetry. Strangely, some patients may come to therapy faithfully two or three hours a week for years and yet never reach this point.

Others may reach it within the first few months. But reach it they must if they are to be healed.

For the therapist it is a wonderful moment of relief and joy when this point is reached, for then he or she knows that the patient has assumed the risk of commitment to getting well and that therefore therapy will succeed.

The. risk of commitment to therapy is akin to the risk of commItment itself but also the "risk of self-confrontation and change.

In the previous section,  in the discussion on discipline and of dedication to the truth, I elaborated on the difficulties of changing one's map of reality, world views and transferences.

Yet changed they must be if one is to lead a life of loving involving frequent extensions of oneself into new dimensions and territories of involvement.

There come many points on one's journey of spiritual growth, whether one is alone or has a psychotherapist as guide, when one must take new and unfamiliar actions in consonance with one's new world view. The taking of such new action-behaving differently from the way one has always behaved before-may represent an extraordinary personal risk.

The passively homosexual young man for the first time summons the initiative to ask a girl for a date; the person who has never trusted anyone lies down for the first time on the analyst's couch allowing the analyst to be hidden from his view; the previously dependent housewife announces to her controlling husband that she is obtaining a job whether he likes it or not, that she has her own life to live; the fifty-year-old mama's boy tells his mother to stop addressing him by his infantile nickname; the emotionally distant, seemingly self-sufficient "strong"man first allows himself to weep in public; or Rachel "let's go" and cries for the first time in my office: these actions, and many more, involve a risk more personal and therefore frequently more fearsome and frightening than that of any soldier entering battle. The soldier cannot run because the gun is pointed at his back as well as his front. But the individual trying to grow can always retreat into the easy and familiar patterns of a more limited past.

It has been said that the successful psychotherapist must bring to the psychotherapeutic relationship the same courage and the same sense of commitment as the patient. The therapist also risks change.

Of all the good and useful rules of psychotherapy that I have been taught, there are very few that I have not chosen to break at one time or another, not out of laziness and lack of discipline but rather in fear and trembling, because my patient's therapy seemed to require that, one way or another, I should step out of the safety of the prescribed analyst's role, be different and risk the unconventional.

As I look back on every successful case I have had I can see that at some point or points in each case I had to lay myself on the line. The willingness of the therapist to suffer at such moments is perhaps the essence of therapy, and when perceived by the patient, as it usually is, it is always therapeutic.

It is also through this willingness to extend themselves and suffer with and over their patients that therapists grow and change.

Again as I look back on my successful cases, there is not one that did not result in some very meaningful, often radical, change in my attitudes and perspectives. It has to be this way.

It is impossible to truly understand another without making room for that person within yourself. This making room, which once again is the discipline of bracketing requires an extension of and therefore a changing of the self.

So it is in good parenting as well as in good psychotherapy.

The same bracketing and extension of ourselves is involved in listening to our children.

To respond to their healthy needs we must change ourselves. Only when we are willing to undergo the suffering of such changing can we become the parents our children need us to be. And since children are constantly growing and their needs are changing, we are obliged to change and grow with them. Everyone is familiar with parents, for instance, who can deal effectively with their children until the time of adolescence, but who then become totally ineffective as parents because they are unable to change and adjust their attitudes toward their now older and different children. And, as in all other instances of love, it would be incorrect to view the suffering and changing involved in good parenting as some kind of self-sacrifice or martyrdom; to the contrary, parents have more to gain from the process than their children. Parents who are unwilling to risk the suffering of changing and growing and learning from their children are choosing a path of senility-whether they know it or not and their children and the world will leave them far behind.

Learning from their children is the best opportunity most people have to assure themselves of a meaningful old age.

Sadly, most do not take this opportunity.