How well do you treat yourself?
I grew up in a very religious, Christian family where Sunday’s activities were predetermined and strictly enforced. Like many of my generation, come Sunday, our parents faithfully saw that we were dressed in our best attire and dutifully marched to church like preprogrammed automatons. With unblinking obedience, we reenacted this liturgy—week after week, year after unrelenting year—seemingly ad infinitum.
Growing into adolescence, however, my mind began to fill with questions—many of them—but one upstaged the rest: “What was the purpose of our never ending churchgoing?”
Then, one Sunday, with little sleuthing on my part, the proverbial light bulb blinked on: The Sunday sermons, which often repeated the same boilerplate admonitions, were primarily intended to teach love. But alas, we weren’t learning very quickly.
A Difficult Subject Matter
Apparently, we were expected to become inveterate, life-long learners, Afterall, love is a complex, slippery subject matter that easily eludes mastery in everyday, practical application and as a definable, concrete concept. Doubtless, we wouldn’t get our arms wrapped tightly around it attending a few church services.
A Perpetual Pursuit
But the spigot on the flow of my questions would not turn off. And they began to take a facetious turn: “Is there no end to our religious schooling…No stopping point…No final exam…But if there is, will I be awarded a certificate or a diploma, as is customary at other schools?”
Of course, the answer was no. There are no certificates, diplomas or triumphant graduation ceremonies. Our training was to be ongoing and open-ended, presumably because the concept and practice of love are complicated and make towering, virtually unreachable demands of its aspirants.
Love, a Madness
I drew consolation from a potpourri of work by poets, theologians, philosophers, authors, psychologists, songwriters and others, who, throughout the ages, have tackled love’s intricacies to render them intelligible or otherwise make sense of them. For example, in his pastoral comedy, “As you like it,” Shakespeare lightheartedly wrote, “Love is a madness.”
Not so lightheartedly, however, sanity itself can flounder and even sink into love’s abysmal quagmire. Shockingly, one study found that 35% of female homicides were committed by someone who claimed to love the victim. Tragically, love can become over-impassioned, perverted, even totally derailed, convulsing a lethal form of conflict wherein lovers kill one another. Less tragic but still painful, I thought of the high-soaring divorce rate with its attendant miseries.
Sadly, love’s head-scratching conundrums can include a “dark passenger.”
The Greeks and the Inuit
As a college student taking philosophy, I learned the ancient Greeks boldly packaged love into three neatly wrapped bundles: Eros, referring to passionate love, Philos, or brotherly love, and Agape, a spiritual, godly form of love. Antiquated as this “love-trio” may be, it has weathered the centuries, yet still unpacks life’s most enriching emotion. However, love’s fulfillments come well-nested in a “lovescape” that can be inhospitable and formidable to navigate.
The Inuit also inhabit an inhospitable environment—albeit a physical one—but do so successfully. Their success may lie in part to having roughly fifty names to describe snow’s fluctuating characteristics. With this in mind, my questioning meandered over this possibility: Given love’s kaleidoscopic characteristics, if there were fifty ways to characterize it, would this help us more successfully maneuver over love’s sometimes craggy, inhospitable emotional landscape?”
Back to Sunday School
Some of my favorite, most sentimental maxims on love come from the Sermon on the Mount: “Love thy neighbor as thyself” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” As much as I revere these lodestar guidelines, I still questioned them: “What is the best way to love my neighbor?” “How exactly would I do this?” “What’s the best way to love myself?” “What would that look like?” “And specifically, what would I have others do unto me?”
A Jaguar XKE
I began reflecting on these questions when I was roughly sixteen years old—driving age. At that time, I was madly in love with the Jaguar XK-E. I thought no other car had its sleek, sophisticated, sexy appearance. So, had someone gifted me an XK-E, that would have answered the question of what to “do unto me.”
Fortunately, no one gave me an XK-E. Had I been given one, I might have destroyed myself in it. With this glaring caveat in mind, I concluded there must be huge qualifiers connected to doing unto self and others that would demand considerations of age, experience and maturity, along with any number of other situation-specific concerns. My questions mushroomed.
The Buddha and the Self
The Buddha embellished the meaning of love by reasoning that the quality of love we render others pivots on the quality of love we provide ourselves. While this thinking appeals to me, I’m left with unanswered questions: “What is the self exactly?” “And whatever its nature, how is it targeted with affection, an affection derived from the very self-furnishing of the affection?” Also, “How is this self-targeted affection generated?” These seem to be pertinent questions since their answers, per the Buddha, predispose love for oneself and others.
Up for Theoretical Grabs—A New GPS
In an effort to answer these puzzling questions, I humbly but eagerly jumped into the theoretical fray—along with an old friend and fellow theorist—to develop interfacing theories of the self and love. Reaching for the scientific ideals of simplicity and elegance, we define the self as a composite of circulating needs of varying types and magnitudes which vie for expression and/or gratification.
We reason the learned ability to fully identify our personal needs and related feelings, in a variety of social contexts, constructs a healthy sense of our self which, in turn, is key to targeting our self with affection. Then, extending our reasoning, we assert the importance of acknowledging the legitimacy of our fundamental needs at their most irreducible level, thus “crowning” them with positive status and elevating the probability of proactively managing them.
Need Management Therapy (NMT)
Applied in a simple, stepwise fashion, identifying our needs and feelings while acknowledging their underlying validity, then actively representing them, effectively addresses the quintessential questions concerning the nature of the self, as well as the specific steps by which to love oneself.
We’ve named this approach, “Need Management Therapy,” and its goal is to provide a new GPS for learning compassion for the self and other, a prerequisite—as Buddha advised—for successfully inhabiting love’s complex but deeply enriching terrain.