Heart of the Matter: How to Find Love, How to Make It Work - Hardcover

Austin, Linda, M.D.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743437713 ISBN 13: 9780743437714

Publisher: Atria, 2003

Synopsis

Why is it that love seems to come easily to some people and not to others?In her first book, What's Holding You Back? Eight Critical Choices for Women's Success, Dr. Linda Austin explored the "psychological glass ceiling," the emotional barriers that keep women from achieving career success. This book is about a different kind of inner glass ceiling: the one that holds you back from the heights of great love. Dr. Austin is convinced that there's nothing fundamentally wrong with those who have difficulty finding and keeping love; BUT there may be specific behaviors that you engage in -- and specific behaviors that you do not engage in -- that have a profound impact on whether you find and keep love. The good news? Those behaviors can be learned, practiced, and eventually incorporated into your personality.Dr. Austin wants you to know that small adjustments in your outlook and actions can have enormous impact on your ability to get the love you want. And in this perceptive, highly original book, she identifies the five core behaviors that determine your ability to have successful, loving relationships, as well as the patterns of behavior that can subtly sabotage those efforts.

The Core Behaviors 1. Engage with the World around You 2. Evaluate the Choices You Make for Love 3. Expand Your Safety Zone 4. Establish Emotional Independence 5. Evolve Consciously, Willfully, Healthily

Heart of the Matter shows how these five essential practices can deepen and transform your ability to give and receive love and loyalty. It explains how to make those small and specific changes that will have huge ripple effects on what happens to you in life -- and most important of all, it demonstrates how to identify and use your strengths so that you can move toward the life and love you want so much.Heart of the Matter reflects Dr. Linda Austin's twenty-five years as a psychiatrist, assisting all sorts of people in their efforts to live more fully in the real world of loving human relationships. Pragmatic and sensible, this book is based on the conviction that each of us has the capacity to improve our ability to find and inspire love through specific behaviors. So whether you're currently in a relationship, or it's been so long since you've dated that you think "seeing someone" refers to a psychiatrist, Heart of the Matter can help you move toward that healthy, loving relationship you want -- and so richly deserve.

About this title

About the Author:

Linda Austin, M.D., is a practicing psychiatrist in Bangor, Maine, and a Professor of Psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina. A frequent lecturer, she is best known for her nationally syndicated radio program, What's On Your Mind? She lives with her husband in Bangor, Maine.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

CHAPTER ONE

So Just What Is Love, Anyway?

Love is an extraordinary word, an infinite container for all the wishes, fantasies, needs, and impulses we have for connection. It's a one-size-fits-all term that is applied to an enormous range of relationships and emotions. Charlie Brown said that love is a warm puppy. But love also describes the way you feel about your mate on your wedding day; it's the way you feel about a beloved relative who is being laid to rest; and it's even the desperate wish a child has to earn the affection of an abusive parent. We call it love when you surrender to sexual union with your beloved, but it's also love that lashes you with pain when that same lover has betrayed you. Love may be as exhilarating as your wildest infatuation, as depressing as changing your demented mother's diaper, or as enraging as picking up your drunk sister at a local bar.

So what is love, anyway?

Loyalty

The basic instinct uniting all of these experiences has nothing whatever to do with the feel-good quality we commonly think of as love. Rather, the core of love is loyalty, simple, blind loyalty. In Porgy and Bess, Bess described it well:

Maybe he's lazy, maybe he's slow

Maybe I'm crazy, baby I know

Can't help lovin' that man of mine.

"Can't help lovin' " is the strongest bond of connection a human can feel. That recognition of core loyalty as the basis for love appears over and over again in human culture. Our wedding vows promise love "for better or worse." Our marines pledge Semper fidelis. Even children cement their loyalty to their friends by pricking their skin and becoming blood brothers or sisters.

Go a bit deeper, though, and it's obvious that the drive to be loyal isn't even uniquely human at all. It's embedded within animal nature and may be particularly strong within some mammalian species. Primates live in troops and establish relationships of loyalty and obedience to other individual animals. Dogs are remarkably loyal, even reaching outside their own species to form lifelong relationships; God give us the strength to be the people our dogs think we are. Tiny mountain voles form bonded relationships, living as lifelong monogamous pairs in furry affection. It's clear that the drive to be loyal to specific, familiar individuals is hardwired in evolutionarily ancient centers of our brains. The power of the drive emerges in human infancy, for by seven months babies howl in protest if they are held by a stranger. Love is an instinct that's central to our human, even our animal, nature, and you shouldn't try to fool Mother Nature.

Given the power of loyalty, if you could learn to really harness and direct that drive, your life would be graced with an enhanced sense of meaning and fulfillment. If you were able to inspire the loyalty of those you care about -- inspire and maintain it throughout your lifetime -- imagine how enriched every aspect of your life would feel. If you were able to channel your own ability to remain loyal -- to choose the right people to love, to nurture and sustain that love throughout your life -- imagine how sustaining your relationships would feel.

Hidden Dangers of Loyalty

But as powerful and wonderful as loyalty is, it does carry hidden dangers.

The first danger is that in a long-term committed relationship it's easy to take your "other's" loyalty for granted. You may become so convinced that it's an entitlement you've earned through the passage of time or shared hardship that you become insensitive to strains you are placing on the relationship. Loyalty is indeed powerful, but it's not absolutely reliable. Two people in a relationship may have very different levels of loyalty, and very different tolerance for the stresses that erode love. The increasing rates of divorce and infidelity in our society are testimony that loyalty can be overridden by many factors. When that happens, the spouse who has been faithful often feels blindsided. In fact it may be that their loyalty itself was a blindfold, blocking their view of problems.

The second danger is that you both may take loyalty so for granted that you've stopped asking important questions about your relationship. You're not in danger of losing the relationship, but questions like "Are we happy?" or "Are we really good for each other?" aren't addressed. For some couples, their loyalty carries a self-righteous stamp of approval, whether or not the relationship promotes mental health or personal growth.

In fact, some of the most pain-inflicting relationships are the most loyal, at least in some sense of the word. For some couples, the remorse, the professions of love, and even the passionate renewal that follow ugly verbal or physical fights serve as relationship Super Glue. Nothing is more seductive than the tenderness of reconciliation. Yet the repeated wounds of conflicts may be very damaging to the self-esteem of one or both people in the relationship, resulting in permanent scars of cynicism and mistrust.

So yes, you want love. But make it a quest for good love, really good love. Love that not only has a strong foundation of loyalty, but love that makes you genuinely happy and promotes your emotional growth and personal evolution.

Cheating Yourself out of Love

If you have begun to believe that you are cheating yourself out of love, your first question is "Why have I done that?" The answer is simple: for a good reason. Human beings do not deprive themselves of love because they wish to be unhappy. They do not behave in self-defeating ways out of an inherent desire for isolation. You developed your repertoire of attitudes and behaviors about love for reasons that made a great deal of sense in the context in which they formed.

Joyce, for instance, is a young woman who almost never dates at all. Occasional blind dates seem to go nowhere, and she is never spontaneously asked out by men she knows. Although her girlfriends like her, men are put off by her sarcasm and a certain toughness in her personality. Yet she's terribly lonely, especially at night, and increasingly spends her evenings with a box of DoubleStuf Oreos for comfort.

Obviously Joyce's toughness holds her back from love, and she herself knows it's a problem. But her personality developed as it did for a good reason. Joyce was raised in a large, boisterous family with three older brothers who teased her mercilessly. Her mother was too overwhelmed to intervene in the children's squabbles, and Joyce was left to deal with her brothers' venom on her own. Sarcasm and toughness were good emotional survival mechanisms, certainly much more helpful than bursting into tears every time she was teased.

Betsy's story is different. She started to date in her late teens and had several casual relationships in college. In her midtwenties Betsy fell in love with Tony, who was ten years older than she and had children from his first marriage. They dated for six years, and during the last several years she pressed him to get married several times. Each time, they weathered the crisis, Tony reassuring her of his love and his intention to marry when his kids got a little older and more settled. Then one day Betsy came to see him unexpectedly. In his bathroom wastebasket she found an empty panty-hose package -- a brand that she had never used. After a tearful confrontation Tony confessed to his affair and admitted that he had begun to feel that he wanted to end the relationship with Betsy. She was devastated.

That was ten years ago. Betsy has not been in a serious relationship since Tony. She has remained frozen in her ability to love and trust again, and though she pays lip service to wanting to have a relationship, she does not make any serious effort to meet men.

If you are holding yourself back from love, your good reasons are probably some variation on the themes of Joyce and Betsy. At some period, or point in time, you felt the need to protect yourself from the vulnerability of love. Perhaps you experienced sustained assaults over a long period, through relationships at home or in school, that made you wall off your heart from further hurts. Or perhaps you experienced deep betrayal or disappointment once or more and began to believe that love was too risky a business to try again.

It's important to try to understand those experiences, and to compassionately acknowledge and accept the decisions you once made about love as simply the best way you knew to respond at the time. But it's even more important to be able to say: That was then and this is now. Make those words your mantra. The price you pay by remaining in a freeze-frame of old trauma is too enormous, too tragic. It's time to move on.

I once worked with a woman in therapy who was struggling to change an aspect of her emotional life. At one point she looked at me and said, "I've just got to change this. This is my one life, and I'm going to get to be dead for a long time."

I told that story to a friend who believes in reincarnation, and he said, "Well, I disagree. But it's because I believe I must prepare for the next life that I feel it's my responsibility to myself to live as fully as I can in this life."

So no matter what your philosophy of life is, you owe it to yourself to make the most of your time here on planet Earth. To allow one period of bad relationships to become the determining factor of everything else that ever happens to you may be understandable -- but it's a terrible waste nonetheless.

Life on Both Sides

I've lived on both sides of the love fence. I married at twenty-one, went through medical school, residency, started my psychiatry practice, had two children, and was divorced at thirty-six. When I divorced, it quite literally never dawned on me that I would not quickly remarry, but in fact, I did not meet Jeb, the man who was to become my life partner, until I was forty-eight. Although I had several good dating relationships, I increasingly began to believe that I would never again find a soul mate, and that I would therefore never marry again.

Early on, though, I was struck by an image that stayed with me through the next twelve years. On my first Thanksgiving as a single person, I decided to fill my home with love and laughter by inviting all of my single friends for the feast. Thanksgiving morning, I began making the pumpkin pies. I kneaded the dough for the crust, rolled it out, and cut one perfect circle for the first pie. The sight of the remaining dough filled me with a sense of utter aloneness, for I was suddenly reminded of the loss of my one central relationship, my marriage. But I then gathered up the remaining bits and pieces, rolled them out, and made a second pie. The second pie looked rather homely, for there were cracks and crevasses where the bits were joined together. But when I served up both pies, they tasted just as good as each other, and the second pie was consumed with as much gusto as the first.

Love is like that. Of course you want that one, whole, perfect love that will meet all your needs and never desert you. Deprived of that love, you may forget that you can find bits and pieces of wonderfully loving relationships all around you -- from family, friends, coworkers, people at church or other organizations, or even from small, simple moments in daily living. Every single person experiences that challenge: Will you retreat from life when you don't get that one perfect pie, or can you create and enjoy the richness of the second pie?

I truly loved that second pie during my long period of singlehood. Nonetheless, I understood myself well enough to recognize that I fundamentally wanted that one central relationship. I admit it, I have always been a happy little piggy at the trough of life, and I wanted the first and the second pie. So I had to search within get to the heart of the matter and to understand the issues that were holding me back from love.

Maybe you do, too.

You Have to Break a Rule

To change your love life, you have to break

the psychological "rules" that are holding you back.

Simply put, if your current strategies for finding love have been unsuccessful, you have to use new strategies to have better results. Whatever it is that you're doing, it isn't working. The passage of time has proven that, right? Why keep making the same mistakes over and over?

Each of us has a lengthy, detailed code of rules written deep within our unconscious minds that guides our behavior in matters of the heart. Your rule book determines to whom you will be attracted; how you will present yourself to that person; what your implicit and explicit expectations will be; what you are willing to give and what you expect to get; and so forth. If you repeatedly lose out in love, some of your rules need to be rewritten. Maybe they're in the section "Who Rings My Chimes?" Maybe it's later on, in "What Am I Willing to Invest in a Relationship?" Maybe it comes under "What Stresses Do I Get to Dump on the Schmo Who Tries to Love Me?"

The rule I had to change to find my relationship was simple, but it had had a profound impact on my life. It was under the section "How Much Discomfort and Frustration Am I Willing to Tolerate in a Relationship to Make It Work?" This section was actually quite short, for there was just one rule: NOT VERY MUCH. And while that rule made my life pleasant in the short run, on several occasions it had prevented me from developing deeper relationships. I had to change that rule to tolerate the frustrations of the long-distance relationship I began with Jeb, for it was really scary to fall in love with him when our future together was extremely uncertain. But then I really had to change that rule to leave my home and career in South Carolina and move to Maine to put our lives together.

If you're drawing a blank on which of your rules might be standing in the way of finding love, think about potential mates you know. Do you find yourself thinking:

"Lee's terrific, but I couldn't be married to someone who smokes."

"Terry's really neat, but I wouldn't want to have to deal with those kids from that first marriage."

"Shelley's been such a wonderful friend, but it would be tough to live with someone who is so messy."

"I really like Kyle, but I don't think I could stand living with a workaholic."

Perhaps your rule book contains prohibitions such as: No smokers. No kids or major baggage. Has to be neat. Can't be a workaholic.

All of those are good rules, no question about it. But the issue remains, whatever your rules are, are they worth the price of a life without love?

You alone can answer that question.

Maintaining "Good Love" in a Long-Term Relationship

As challenging as it is to be aware of your rule book for starting a relationship, it's even more challenging to be aware of the gazillions of rules you unconsciously impose when your relationship becomes permanent. The...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0743437713
• ISBN 13: 9780743437714
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288