Using Love as a Healing Tool - for Therapists and Healers
The Power of Using Love in Therapeutic Interventions
RK. Stefan, I glanced over your writings on your “theory of life span” and your concept of “a developmental self”. There are several Doctoral dissertations in there, but I want to concentrate on only one. You talk about the need to cultivate 4 distinct and underdeveloped, even damaged, capacities so that people can experience a healthy way of functioning. Awareness, Vision, Communication, and Loving Unconditionally. It is this last one I would really like to talk to you about today. How did you come up with such a functional, useful, simple definition of love?
SD: My field is human development and I had been working on a new life span theory. It is part of my conceptual framework that self is developmental. I was looking for a strong, experiential way of proving, deductively, that self was real. One day I woke up and there seemed to be a chorus in my head chanting, “Why does it hurt when we are deprived of love? Why are people in pain just because someone raises their voice, looks at them funny, or doesn’t want to be their friend? Actually, going back years before I developed my theory of love, I wondered why we felt such pain when someone wasn’t nice to us. And why we felt so good when people were nice to us. It was obvious to me why a person is in pain when they are punched – the body receives a shock and our nerve receptors interpret that shock as pain. People scream, cry, or moan when there is physical pain. Science allows us to state that events such as birthing, kidney stones, or black and blue marks hurt, are painful, and thus the responses are appropriate. But how can we explain someone crying because someone ‘broke up’ with them? How do unkind words, criticism, yelling, hurt us – cause us to become depressed? After all there are no black and blue marks, no broken bones, no kidney stones. There’s nothing physical that we can see.
RK. I remember going through a lot of pain during relationship breakups. I never stopped to think why. It seemed so obvious. We all feel pain when people we love hurt our feelings or no longer love us. So what did you come up with at this point?
SD. I started to think about love as something real, not a notion, like eros, or agape or familial love, because they are just names for examples of the way love is experienced in relationships. Romantic love, self sacrificing love or a mother’s love doesn’t explain what love is. It just acknowledges that some unique exchange of energy is happening between two people.
RK. You say ‘real’. Can you say more about that?
SD. What happens when we receive love is that we thrive. Feeling energized, feeling happy, is real. What happens when we are deprived of love is that we feel pain, life isn’t worth living. Pain is real. Both ways a very real transaction of energies happens to people universally. Only something real can cause real experiences and real reactions. Therefore my logic tells me love is something real in a tangible, scientific sense. It occurred to me that there are other things we react to in exactly the same way. When we are deprived of oxygen, food and water, we experience pain. When we receive them we thrive, we feel energized. These three things, in various forms, are life sustaining energies. Since we seem to react to the deprivation of love and the getting of love the same way, again my logic says that that makes love a very similar life sustaining energy.
RK. Can you give us your definition of love?
SD. My definition of love, loving energy is; “A consciously generated, positive, transferable, life-sustaining energy, that can be given and received, or withheld and blocked.” All terms like kind, patient, considerate, encouraging, affectionate, accepting, respectful are functional manifestations of this loving energy.
RK. That would explain why I would feel pain when someone mistreats me or feel so great when someone behaves in a loving way towards me. How did you bring this concept into your therapeutic interventions?
SD. It took a few years to figure out the most useful ways of presenting and working with this system. Bottom line is that when clients come to see me, and present issues that have to do with self-esteem – what I hear is a client who is not loving him or herself. Or parental issues – what I hear is that they are not being loved by parents. Or marital issues – what I hear is that they are not being loved by a spouse – and so on. The majority of issues seem to be revolving around the fact that most of us were and still are loved conditionally.
Jean Watson, Ph.D. has done a lot of work within the nursing profession regarding the positive affect caring, ‘caring competencies’, as she calls them, as opposed to “technological curing competencies", has on the patient population. The more nurses exhibited transpersonal caring behaviors the better results in both wellbeing and satisfaction were reported by both nurses and patients. The transpersonal caring that Dr. Watson has been utilizing so effectively is what I would call ‘loving energy’. I believe people need unconditional loving energy for their wellbeing and healing. For therapist this implies that not only the concepts and techniques of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, but the very way we care about our clients and help them care for themselves and others becomes vitally important for their healing.
I digressed a bit so let me get back to the fact that most of us were loved conditionally.
Now if love is a life sustaining energy and we received it based on when we pleased our parents and friends, and were deprived of it when we didn’t please them, we are going to remember a lot of pain. That almost always led us to withhold our love as a way of getting back. Here is a similarity that became clear to me as I got into working more and more with my concept of love. It is absolutely necessary for us to inhale. But what else is also absolutely necessary?
