Heart's reasons

Relationship recovery and self help stuff is extremely helpful, highly recommended. There's probably no way anyone has been raised in this culture and escaped toxic and false narratives about love and relationships. 

Dog and Peach: an unlikely love affair?

I draw a fairly hard line between recovery and self help, as the goals and methods are totally different for these two areas. In self help, and therapy for that matter, the effort is to gain control of one's decisions and behaviors- the self is still at the center of the enterprise, and solutions involve behavioral change that one manages on one's own. In recovery, one surrenders, unlearns, and endeavors to form a relationship with a greater power, re-centering the business in spiritual principles (admittedly a subjective experience), diminishing the role of the self. 

Both efforts are useful, but I think self help and therapy have limits that recovery does not. The crux of self help and therapy is the assumption that I myself can help and heal myself using myself, which, if you're myself, is demonstrably iffy, and the essential core of recovery is that the self is not effective at overcoming the core wounds and brokenness of the self, just by itself. The process of behavioral change in recovery requires a power greater than the self. This is a confusing sticking point for a lot of people, and I don;t blame them, but, even though I am an atheist, I have never had trouble with it. There is something that works for me, that is a power greater than I, and on which I can rely, and that's all I have needed. 

Anyway, I have been reading Melody Beattie's pioneering syntheses about codependency, and she's fucking annoying. Here's why, thanks for asking: her advice (usually delivered in the manner of a condescending and bossy friend with a smile and an "oh honey listen" kind of brittle exterior) usually amounts to this syllogism: "Behavior x is hurting you. Think about why you do behavior x! Stop doing it!" haha. Okay sis. "Doctor, it hurts when I do this!" "Well, don't do that!" I mean, really, if I were capable of *following advice* do you really think I'd have the relationship history I have? Her essential solution, practically, is to THINK, REALIZE and then CHANGE- a sequence that almost never has worked for me. 

What's your love language?

The early relationship recovery and self help work of a great many popular helpers has an interesting, cynical, dismissive and even contemptuous attitude toward love. Essentially, it's like when someone discovers a new thing and then just runs to the extreme with it. In this case, the "new thing" was the discovery that romantic love in its inherited and unexamined forms is a hot bed (heh heh) of dysfunctional misconceptions (heh heh) and projections and harmful assumptions and behaviors. Having discovered this, the earlier helpers went to town on smashing all of this shit to bits, and were quite thorough in their dismissals and rejections. Very helpful, in the short term. The level of mockery and contempt for falling in love, being in love, romantic attachment, etc. is really amazing though. And you hear it "in the rooms" as well, especially from newcomers. 

I want to balance it all back to more tenderness and understanding, a more accepting and gentle approach. It feels to me like falling in love and being in love are core, key, very real experiences, and among the peak experiences of most lifetimes (and will *always* be a "bad decision," but more on that later) and the acidulous cynicism probably is overdone most of the time, and probably also causes real harm. There's an element also of "rational" and controlling energy in a lot of it. The pure light of reason is great to expose bullshit, but nothing worth living for stands up under scrutiny, and the sheer messy humanity and blood and guts unmanageability of love definitely does not. 

Insight and the human potential movement seem to believe that reason can out reason the heart. But wisdom knows, and knows well, and has known for thousands of years and has shown the tragic effects of trying otherwise, that the heart has its reasons that reason knows not.