Authentic Love: Theory and Therapy

INTRODUCTION

Love begins shyly, so there is surely no graceful way to begin a book on love.  Authentic love is always a little reticent at first, a little awkward, and love at its best is a mystical experience that leaves us in awe, dumb-stuck, mouths agape -- silent. Indeed, love is an unfathomable mystery. Yet, it is the ambitious goal of this book to reach for its ethereal heights and to bring love down to earth. We must do that, I believe, if we are ever going to understand ourselves, much less obtain healing. Love alone heals. That is the fundamental premise of love therapy, a new model of psychotherapy introduced here.

The word “love” has been romanticized, sentimentalized, sugar-coated, sing-songed, pulpiteered, hypersexualized, hawked, valentined, prostituted and slandered. Love has been written about till its pages are yellowed and brittle. Yet, sailing into the face of all that misuse, I must adopt that same pitiful old baglady of a word as the name of a new model of psychotherapy. Love therapy boldly promises new insights into mental and emotional disorders, and even – imagine! -- an understanding of what authentic love is all about.

But all of us use the word “love” repeatedly every day, so is a new exploration of the subject really needed? Don’t we all understand what love is? I trust that many will agree when I dare answer unequivocally and emphatically, but sadly: no. A quick glance at the latest statistics on divorce – is it now fifty percent of marriages that fail? – provides the first hint that at least that many people made one of the biggest decisions of their lives without knowing what they were doing. Look at the crime rate, at wars throughout the world, at the discrimination in all its forms, at the injustices of poverty, the abuse and neglect of millions of our children, at the desperation of the homeless and the criminality of hunger in a land of plenty, and then decide if you believe that most people know what love is – authentic love, that is. Adjust your vision to a panoramic view of the huge numbers of sexually abused women and men, at the devastation of the worldwide drug epidemic, at the rampant promiscuity proved by the spread of herpes alone, at the huge numbers of battered wives and children, at the inhumanity of slavery the still exists in a dozen countries, not to mention the worldwide scourge of mental illness and emotional disorders, and then answer, “Does the world seem to know what authentic love is all about?”

ove, the ultimate mystery, offers astounding answers to the perplexities that every human being grapples with from birth to death -- Who am I? Indeed, what am I? What is the fundamental drive and purpose of my life? How can I explain my feelings, my thoughts, my deepest yearnings? This volume is intended to ease the inevitable and normal pain of wrestling with those inescapable perplexities of daily life. But life can become rough sometimes, so painful that some of us – maybe all of us at some time or another – will admit to periods of suffering a mental or emotional disorder. This in-depth exploration offers a personality theory grounded in love, and a model of psychotherapy which integrates that theory, love therapy. Together, the theory and therapy are contained in eighteen principles.

 In Part One, on love theory, our human personality is described through nine principles which collectively define day-to-day life in terms of normalcy, to wit., only love is normal. Immediately, that equation, love and normalcy, presents a challenge that is best handled, I would suggest, with a good sense of humor. Thus, as normal as I like to consider myself, I must honestly admit that there are times when I am not at all loving and thus “abnormal,” and thus “a little bit crazy.” Hey, we need to be able to laugh at ourselves because love’s logic insists that even the sanest, most “normal” among us is sometimes a little bit daffy.

Love theory, though, is intended to teach us how love works. Then, knowing how it works should make it a little easier to bring love down to earth and into practice. Thence we will be able to love both others and ourselves a little more, and that, per love theory, is all that any of us really want, to love and to be loved.

It is only in Part Two, on love therapy, that we address the extremes of the abnormal, the mental and emotional disorders. Herein, the new model of psychotherapy is contained in a second set of nine principles. Love theory and therapy both are founded on Principle One, which I preview here in abbreviated form. Love is simultaneously the fundamental drive and goal of human life and the basic motivation for every human act. Before this book ends, every emotion will be reinterpreted as a product and expression of that universal need, to love and be loved. Then, all mental and emotional disorders will be understood as distinct love disorders. Thence, after showing why love and only love heals emotional disorders, a new approach to psychotherapy will be presented. This new theory of personality reinterprets and then subsumes many earlier, respected schools and methods of therapy. That is a bold statement, so let me hasten to add that love therapy does not pretend to wholly replace, and would surely never denigrate, any earlier form of therapy. There is a collective wealth of wisdom in those methods, and love therapy gratefully incorporates and utilizes many of them. But there is a distinct difference in the way love therapy incorporates many therapies than the way the widely used “eclectic therapy” does.  Eclectic therapy utilizes “this theory, that method -- whatever works.” In contrast, in love therapy, it is love that guides and infuses every theory and method that it incorporates.

t sounds as if I am saying that love can virtually revolutionize psychotherapy and the entire mental health system! Precisely. And that every emotion is somehow explained in terms of love. Exactly. And that love is the bottom-line explanation for every thought, every feeling, every decision, and every human act. Righto! And that love is simply a panacea for every human problem. Forsooth! -- except, I must add, there is absolutely nothing simple about love.

And with that, the response of some professional cohorts has often been, "Love?! Why, that's not even a professional word. If you want people to seriously consider such revolutionary ideas, why not use 'agape' or 'philia' or some other Latin word that sounds scientific? Why 'love' therapy? Why even try to explain or reinterpret such a hackneyed old term? Why not just find another word?"

Believe me, I tried. For forty years I tried. Yet, I could never find another word that conveyed what I became convinced was the "heart of the matter" of not just emotional disorders, but of life itself. More importantly, while counseling thousands of people with panic disorders, psychoses, phobias, sexual disorders, depression -- the whole wide scope of human misery -- I never met a person who did not know what love meant. Even those who had sustained horrible inner damage because love had been so terribly absent in their lives, somehow knew what the word meant, albeit vaguely. Even when I tried to damn and discard the word, as I did many times, a suffering client would open her/his heart wide, show me an open wound, and tell me what caused it -- love that had been battered, rejected or betrayed -- and then teach me what would be required to heal that wound -- yes, love.