Heart of the Matter: How to Find Love, How to Make it Work - Softcover

Austin, M.D. Linda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743437721 ISBN 13: 9780743437721

Verlag: Atria, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

Why is it that love seems to come easily to some people and not to others?
According to acclaimed author and psychologist Linda Austin, M.D., there is nothing fundamentally wrong with those of us who have difficulty finding and keeping love. However, there may be specific behaviors that we engage in, or do not engage in, that limit our capacity to love -- even ourselves. In Heart of the Matter, Dr. Austin identifies the five core behaviors that determine our ability to have successful, loving relationships, as well as the patterns of behavior that can subtly sabotage those efforts.
The Core Behaviors
1. Engage with the World Around You
2. Evaluate the Choices You Make for Love
3. Expand Your Safety Zone
4. Establish Emotional Independence
5. Evolve Consciously, Willfully, Healthily
Heart of the Matter teaches us how these five essential practices can deepen and transform our ability to experience profound and lasting love. In this fascinating guidebook, Dr. Austin walks us through the process of making small, specific changes that are bound to have huge ripple effects in our interpersonal relationships. Most important, Heart of the Matter demonstrates how to identify and use our strengths to our fullest advantage in seeking the love -- and lives -- of our dreams.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Linda Austin, M.D., is a practicing psychiatrist in Bangor, Maine, and a Professor of Psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina. A frequent lecturer, she is best known for her nationally syndicated radio program, What's On Your Mind? She lives with her husband in Bangor, Maine.

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CHAPTER ONE

So Just What Is Love, Anyway?

Love is an extraordinary word, an infinite container for all the wishes, fantasies, needs, and impulses we have for connection. It's a one-size-fits-all term that is applied to an enormous range of relationships and emotions. Charlie Brown said that love is a warm puppy. But love also describes the way you feel about your mate on your wedding day; it's the way you feel about a beloved relative who is being laid to rest; and it's even the desperate wish a child has to earn the affection of an abusive parent. We call it love when you surrender to sexual union with your beloved, but it's also love that lashes you with pain when that same lover has betrayed you. Love may be as exhilarating as your wildest infatuation, as depressing as changing your demented mother's diaper, or as enraging as picking up your drunk sister at a local bar.

So what is love, anyway?

Loyalty

The basic instinct uniting all of these experiences has nothing whatever to do with the feel-good quality we commonly think of as love. Rather, the core of love is loyalty, simple, blind loyalty. In Porgy and Bess, Bess described it well:

Maybe he's lazy, maybe he's slow

Maybe I'm crazy, baby I know

Can't help lovin' that man of mine.

"Can't help lovin' " is the strongest bond of connection a human can feel. That recognition of core loyalty as the basis for love appears over and over again in human culture. Our wedding vows promise love "for better or worse." Our marines pledge Semper fidelis. Even children cement their loyalty to their friends by pricking their skin and becoming blood brothers or sisters.

Go a bit deeper, though, and it's obvious that the drive to be loyal isn't even uniquely human at all. It's embedded within animal nature and may be particularly strong within some mammalian species. Primates live in troops and establish relationships of loyalty and obedience to other individual animals. Dogs are remarkably loyal, even reaching outside their own species to form lifelong relationships; God give us the strength to be the people our dogs think we are. Tiny mountain voles form bonded relationships, living as lifelong monogamous pairs in furry affection. It's clear that the drive to be loyal to specific, familiar individuals is hardwired in evolutionarily ancient centers of our brains. The power of the drive emerges in human infancy, for by seven months babies howl in protest if they are held by a stranger. Love is an instinct that's central to our human, even our animal, nature, and you shouldn't try to fool Mother Nature.

Given the power of loyalty, if you could learn to really harness and direct that drive, your life would be graced with an enhanced sense of meaning and fulfillment. If you were able to inspire the loyalty of those you care about -- inspire and maintain it throughout your lifetime -- imagine how enriched every aspect of your life would feel. If you were able to channel your own ability to remain loyal -- to choose the right people to love, to nurture and sustain that love throughout your life -- imagine how sustaining your relationships would feel.

Hidden Dangers of Loyalty

But as powerful and wonderful as loyalty is, it does carry hidden dangers.

The first danger is that in a long-term committed relationship it's easy to take your "other's" loyalty for granted. You may become so convinced that it's an entitlement you've earned through the passage of time or shared hardship that you become insensitive to strains you are placing on the relationship. Loyalty is indeed powerful, but it's not absolutely reliable. Two people in a relationship may have very different levels of loyalty, and very different tolerance for the stresses that erode love. The increasing rates of divorce and infidelity in our society are testimony that loyalty can be overridden by many factors. When that happens, the spouse who has been faithful often feels blindsided. In fact it may be that their loyalty itself was a blindfold, blocking their view of problems.

The second danger is that you both may take loyalty so for granted that you've stopped asking important questions about your relationship. You're not in danger of losing the relationship, but questions like "Are we happy?" or "Are we really good for each other?" aren't addressed. For some couples, their loyalty carries a self-righteous stamp of approval, whether or not the relationship promotes mental health or personal growth.

In fact, some of the most pain-inflicting relationships are the most loyal, at least in some sense of the word. For some couples, the remorse, the professions of love, and even the passionate renewal that follow ugly verbal or physical fights serve as relationship Super Glue. Nothing is more seductive than the tenderness of reconciliation. Yet the repeated wounds of conflicts may be very damaging to the self-esteem of one or both people in the relationship, resulting in permanent scars of cynicism and mistrust.

So yes, you want love. But make it a quest for good love, really good love. Love that not only has a strong foundation of loyalty, but love that makes you genuinely happy and promotes your emotional growth and personal evolution.

Cheating Yourself out of Love

If you have begun to believe that you are cheating yourself out of love, your first question is "Why have I done that?" The answer is simple: for a good reason. Human beings do not deprive themselves of love because they wish to be unhappy. They do not behave in self-defeating ways out of an inherent desire for isolation. You developed your repertoire of attitudes and behaviors about love for reasons that made a great deal of sense in the context in which they formed.

Joyce, for instance, is a young woman who almost never dates at all. Occasional blind dates seem to go nowhere, and she is never spontaneously asked out by men she knows. Although her girlfriends like her, men are put off by her sarcasm and a certain toughness in her personality. Yet she's terribly lonely, especially at night, and increasingly spends her evenings with a box of DoubleStuf Oreos for comfort.

Obviously Joyce's toughness holds her back from love, and she herself knows it's a problem. But her personality developed as it did for a good reason. Joyce was raised in a large, boisterous family with three older brothers who teased her mercilessly. Her mother was too overwhelmed to intervene in the children's squabbles, and Joyce was left to deal with her brothers' venom on her own. Sarcasm and toughness were good emotional survival mechanisms, certainly much more helpful than bursting into tears every time she was teased.

Betsy's story is different. She started to date in her late teens and had several casual relationships in college. In her midtwenties Betsy fell in love with Tony, who was ten years older than she and had children from his first marriage. They dated for six years, and during the last several years she pressed him to get married several times. Each time, they weathered the crisis, Tony reassuring her of his love and his intention to marry when his kids got a little older and more settled. Then one day Betsy came to see him unexpectedly. In his bathroom wastebasket she found an empty panty-hose package -- a brand that she had never used. After a tearful confrontation Tony confessed to his affair and admitted that he had begun to feel that he wanted to end the relationship with Betsy. She was devastated.

That was ten years ago. Betsy has not been in a serious relationship since Tony. She has remained frozen in her ability to love and trust again, and though she pays lip service to wanting to have a relationship, she does not make any serious effort to meet...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Atria
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0743437721
• ISBN 13: 9780743437721
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 286
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande