Love may require some healing

 

I told my client that I would write a “poison pen blog”* about her problematic boyfriend if he failed to ditch his spurious old-school crap. Though we are hopeful for the future (the near future: He is on deadline!), here is a warning exercise:

C–, I know your hold on your identity is to be an emotionally repressed person. Your childhood was terrible, with abuse and coldness and absence of love. A child cannot grow in these circum­stances. What forms and grows is an above-self, an escapist self composed of sooth­ing and projection, of “personality” which is defined as a network of defenses. Identity, in ado­les­cence and adulthood, is a house of cards towering, as Vereshack says, “into the sky on a base of untruth.” It is named macho and controlling, bound, self-reflective, needy but solipsistic. It is a man holding his breath for the rest of his life.

The only way to live, really live, is to do the bravest and scariest act in the world: Undo the false self and fall into the furnace and tearful ocean of the child. That is the real you, which your partner, to your surprise, will love.

To need her to accommodate to your defense structure is to not be alive. To care is to care about her feelings – as essential, really, as it is for a child’s feelings to be known, believed, respected and loved by his parents. That is the essence of “the psychological birth of the human infant” (M. Mahler): to be visible, to be mirrored. It is absolutely essential for her, it is absolutely essential for you.

Yes, it’s true: To feel deeply is to collapse. To feel is to touch your child’s heart that basically had to bury itself to go on. But the heart is not dead. It is in your prison. It needs that touch, but that touch needs to be consistent, not a brief exercise in empathy but a new, transfigured relationship. This is what you’d best become to have her for your partner.

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* I have her permission to publish this piece.