Using Love as a Healing Tool - for Therapists and Healers
RK. Is this a trick question? I don’t know.
SD. It is absolutely necessary for us to exhale. All life sustaining energies are cyclical. In and out. Oxygen, food and water must enter, be utilized and exit for us to be healthy. If love is a life sustaining energy it must also be cyclical. And the fact is we need to receive it and we need to give it. Interrupt this cycle anywhere and you have pain. So when we withhold love from someone for any reason, we are hurting ourselves equally. It became clear to me that one area that needed immediate attention, by acknowledging it, is the deprivation of love a client experiences, as well as their withholding of it from another. And what I found as soon as I brought up the subject of getting and giving of love is people breaking down in tears. So what that tells me and it would tell any therapist witnessing a client’s reaction is that we are dealing with a central issue.
RK. So far what you said is very clear to me, but how does a therapist take it from there? How do you help people to receive more love and to give more love?
SD. Roberta, we’re skipping years ahead. That’s how long it took me to work out effective applications of this concept. Generally people who come into therapy are looking for healing. They are in pain. In the 19th century they used the deprivation of food and water to teach and discipline, sending children to bed hungry who disobeyed or displeased parents. Today we might think that is barbaric. And of course depriving an adult of food and water today, because we’re upset with them, is impossible. So what do we have left to wield as a force for letting a child or an adult know that we’re displeased, upset, or angry with them? We turn away and deprive them of loving energy. It never leaves black and blue marks, but it leaves deep scars emotionally.
RK. So where would you start working with a client?
SD. The first thing I work on with a client is teaching him or her to love oneself, like oneself. I explain to my clients that they had to learn to get off of the nipple, then the bottle, then learn to chew, then learn to use the fork and knife, then learn to get their own food from the pantry or refrigerator, and ultimately they had to learn how to get a job, buy their own food, cook it and eat it. Fortunately parents helped along the way, by teaching, correcting, modeling these various tasks. They were taught self sufficiency, taking care of one’s own needs. A similar process of developmental learning never happens with learning to give oneself the love one needs. It always seems to come from an outside source starting with parents, siblings, family. We soon learn to assume that the only source for loving energy is from the outside. What we learn to do is to try our best and get as much of it from outside sources as possible. Once parents become critical and conditional, which makes us angry and causes pain, we turn to friends, peer groups. That is why children who are in homes where the parenting is dysfunctional or lacking turn toward groups, smoke, drink, try drugs, and join gangs. The reason being accepted is so important is because most young people, teenagers, don’t have a loving sense of themselves. Acceptance is a source of loving energy, even when there is violence attached to it. If you are starving and have to rob for food you’ll do it. If you’re starved for love you’ll rob for acceptance. In therapy I teach that this loving energy you were deprived of, and have continually looked for from the outside, is something you will now have to learn to give to yourself, like you do food and water. And my clients get it, big time. Without this understanding of the general need for love, and what they have been doing to get it, it is hard for people to want to do any behavioral changes we might suggest. To love themselves we might suggest that they take a hot bath, buy something they always wanted, eat some chocolate, etc. But they will still say they don’t feel love because they are still waiting for someone to give love to them. If they don’t understand that they as adults have to learn to be responsible for loving themselves, as they are responsible for feeding themselves, they will not understand why the suggestions will help, they will listen politely, after all you are the expert, but next week they will come with the same story.
RK. What about a person who doesn’t like themselves, or hates themselves?
SD. That is something very painful for a therapist to witness. I usually acknowledge to the client how sad that makes me feel. This work is sometimes slow and painful, but where we begin is with the concept of deserving. Just like you deserve to take your next breath, you deserve love. We all do. It is our birth right. There is nothing you have to do to deserve being loved or loving yourself. This is what I explain to all my clients and I can immediately see a change in their affect. Eventually they come to believe it. Sadly, when we are not treated with love as children we get the crazy idea that we don’t deserve it. Or that we have to be perfect to deserve it. They have to realize that their system requires loving energy and it is not going to come from the outside, unless they create loving relationships. That may take time, perhaps a lifetime. Meanwhile they still need love. And just like they learned to feed themselves food, they need to become self-sufficient in loving themselves.
