Heart of the Matter: How to Find Love, How to Make it Work - Softcover

Austin M.D., Linda

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743437721 ISBN 13: 9780743437721

Publisher: Atria Books, 2004

Synopsis

Why is it that love seems to come easily to some people and not to others?
According to acclaimed author and psychologist Linda Austin, M.D., there is nothing fundamentally wrong with those of us who have difficulty finding and keeping love. However, there may be specific behaviors that we engage in, or do not engage in, that limit our capacity to love -- even ourselves. In Heart of the Matter, Dr. Austin identifies the five core behaviors that determine our 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 teaches us how these five essential practices can deepen and transform our ability to experience profound and lasting love. In this fascinating guidebook, Dr. Austin walks us through the process of making small, specific changes that are bound to have huge ripple effects in our interpersonal relationships. Most important, Heart of the Matter demonstrates how to identify and use our strengths to our fullest advantage in seeking the love -- and lives -- of our dreams.

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.

Introduction

You know what it feels like when "something's missing."

You sense a vague discomfort, a whiff of uneasy numbness that creeps up during quiet moments. Nonsense, you scold yourself. Snap out of it. There's no reason to mope. Don't let anyone notice. I have so much to be grateful for.

A few hours, a few days, pass. There it is again. That flatness. I feel like I'm just going through the motions. I hope no one notices.

Perhaps that feeling steals over you when you least expect it, at times when you really ought to feel happy. You may be in a decent relationship and can't quite figure out what's wrong. Where's that sense of detachment coming from? Is there something wrong with your relationship? Or is something wrong within you?

Maybe it's clear to you that there is something wrong with your current relationship. You just don't feel an exchange with your "other." No connection. Perhaps your interactions feel hollow, maybe even contentious, and you're not sure what to do about it. Whose fault is it? Can you fix it, or is this what happens to all long-term relationships?

Or perhaps you know there's something missing because you're not in a love relationship at all. Maybe it's been so long since you've dated that when your friend asked you if you were seeing someone, you thought she meant a psychiatrist. You've learned to keep a stiff upper lip. You have good friends and you like your job. But all too frequently you have that thought: There's something missing.

And you know what it is: love.

Love is a vital emotional nutrient. In its absence you experience psychological hunger pains, a gnawing sense of inner emptiness. In small doses, lack of love produces brief pangs that send you scurrying to connect with someone, like a dieter who can't pass by the refrigerator without making a raid. But just as prolonged physical starvation actually becomes painful, prolonged lack of love inflicts an emotional pain of its own.

Whether your starvation is caused by an unsatisfying relationship or by having no relationship at all, you have just two ways to respond to the "something's missing" feeling. The first is to "try harder" to connect with others. If you're in a relationship, you "try harder" with your "other." You get a new outfit, suggest a weekend away, or propose a new activity to share. You ask your mate what's wrong, and you may or may not get a reply that helps you reconnect. If you're single, you "try harder" by reaching outside your routine life. You call your friends and ask them to set you up. You scan the singles' ads on-line and in the newspaper or maybe you call a dating service. You decide to go to the next reception you're invited to -- who knows, maybe there will be someone interesting there.

But if despite your best efforts you just can't reconnect with someone, you take the second choice. You begin to give up -- not all at once, but in bits and pieces. You retreat from your discomfort by hiding out within your "secret self." You withdraw from your mate, zoning out in your private thoughts and fantasies. If you're single, you develop solitary routines that comfort you -- pizza and a video on a Friday night, lengthy long-distance calls to friends on weekends -- that ward off loneliness and fortify you as a self-contained unit. Within your secret self you create distractions that block awareness of your loneliness. You find ways to protect yourself from intimate contact with others who are disappointing or frustrating.

Hiding away in your secret self may take many forms. Maybe you escape from your current relationship by developing a big, whopping crush on someone who's out of reach; even while you're making love to your mate, you're imagining you're in the arms of another. Perhaps you spend hours slouched in front of the television, preferring to watch the battles of Survivor rather than fight for survival in your own family. Maybe you retreat from opportunities to meet a new love by staying in your apartment night after night, cocooned in a world of the Internet or videos. Maybe you marry your career or your aging mother or the gym down the street. Or you bury yourself in work conflicts...or spend hours surfing the Net...or become preoccupied by the ups and downs of your stock portfolio.

As you pull your heart and mind away from the reality of the here and now, you substitute a fantasy world you create for yourself. The ability to live within a world of fantasy begins at an early age, for even tiny children love the world of "Pretend." Think back to your own childhood. You may remember times when you dealt with pain, confusion, or betrayal by immersing yourself in an imaginary experience that lifted you out of the hurt of the moment.

Carrie, a woman who suffered from lifelong depression, told me how she dealt with the neglect she'd experienced in childhood from her emotionally disturbed mother. "At night, in bed, I would snuggle down in my pillow and I'd imagine that the Good Fairy was there to take care of me. The Good Fairy was my wonderful friend, like a mother and father put together for me. She was always there, making me feel loved and cared about.

"Then, as I got older, it was the Virgin Mary who was my mother. We were raised Catholic, and the Virgin Mary was really a big thing for me. So whenever my mother failed me, which was all the time, I would just pray to the Virgin Mary and be comforted.

"My life now should be fine. I have a good job and friends who care about me. So I don't know quite why I'm depressed, except that I think that all of those years as a child have left their mark. I lived in my fantasies, but it's just not the same as having a real mother."

It's just not the same. Whether you're five or sixty-five, love in your own head is just not the same as love in the here-and-now world. As with a plant whose roots begin to shrivel and die from prolonged drought, retreating into your own head makes you progressively less able to receive emotional nutrients from the world. Your growth becomes stunted, your color fades, your spirit droops.

As disconnection progresses, a vicious cycle begins. The more you retreat, the more comfortable you become in your own world, and the harder it is to take a risk in the interpersonal world -- the real world. As you pull away from others, they start to pull away from you as well, and your opportunities for connection diminish. What you need is a jump-start out of that vicious cycle. A concrete plan of action to get you reconnected with the human world...and opportunities to find love.

So What's at the Heart of the Matter?

If you are aware that your life is suffering from a love deficit, you've doubtless asked yourself the questions Is there something wrong with me? What am I doing wrong? You look around and see friends -- or worse yet, people you can't stand -- who are not as attractive or bright or even pleasant as you. Yet some of them seem to have found love, good love. If they can do it, why not you? What's at the heart of the matter?

In my first book, What's Holding You Back? Eight Critical Choices for Women's Success, I 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. Just as many women perceive barriers to career success as external rather than self-imposed, it's easy to believe that what holds you back from love is "out there." There just aren't any good men out there. My work is too demanding. My first priority is raising my kids. It's hard to find someone who shares my values.

There may well be at least a kernel of reality in all of those barriers to love. Of course it may take time to find someone who is really the right fit for you. But you may also be using those external issues as shields against looking at your internal issues. Your goal is to find ways around those problems, not to use them as barricades against love.

Why is it that love seems to come easily to some people and not to others? I'm 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. And I'm convinced that those behaviors can be learned, practiced, and eventually incorporated into your basic personality.

This book is based on the conviction that each of us has the ability to improve our ability to find and inspire love through specific behaviors. There are five core behaviors, Essential Practices, that will deepen and transform your ability to give and receive love and loyalty:

Engagement is the fundamental currency of love. Engagement is the way you first connect to the people you meet, and the way you remain connected with a few precious people throughout your life. There are in fact simple terms of engagement that you can begin to practice today that will enrich your relationship life and that will help you connect and grow in a living, breathing, dynamic exchange.

Evaluation is the process by which you thoughtfully, proactively determine who in your life is worthy of your deepest love -- and of whom you are worthy. Evaluation is a rational process in which you ask the tough questions about whether a prospective relationship will really bring you happiness. It slows down the impulsiveness of your primitive brain at moments when you want to connect with someone, anyone, who seems to protect you from the dread of aloneness. Evaluation is essential for screening out potentially disastrous relationships, for it checks your unconscious belief that the devil you know is better than no one at all. The instinct to create powerful bonds of loyalty to others is a basic human drive that is so necessary for emotional health and well-being. Learning to channel this wonderful gift of yours, your loyalty drive, to one who is able to truly reciprocate is an Essential Practice.

Expanding your capacity to love is the third great Essential. Instinctively you recognize the danger of aloneness, with its attendant emotional starvation. But because of the power of the loyalty drive, you also fear the danger of connection, with its possibilities of suffocation and loss of freedom and control. Between those dual dangers lies your safety zone in which you feel safe and free to experiment in intimacy. The more you can expand this zone, the more comfortable you will feel when you're in an intimate relationship -- and when you're experiencing important growth periods of singlehood.

The optimal psychological state for connection is one of emotional independence, the fourth Essential. The closer a relationship is, the greater its power to trigger ancient roles and feelings that distort your ability to perceive yourself and your "other" accurately and to interact in a mature and loving way. Emotional independence is a way of understanding and actualizing the authentic "you" and to allow your "other" to maintain his or her own authenticity as well.

The fifth Essential reflects that we live long lives, growing, changing, and developing from cradle to grave. The capacity for emotional evolution allows you to guide your personal growth in the service of improving your relationships, and to use your relationships to stimulate your own development. At any point in which your human environment changes, you have three choices. You may choose evolution, gradually adapting yourself to the needs of your relationship. Alternatively, you may choose a special form of evolution, revolution, choosing to change your environment rather than change yourself; breaking up with your lover or spouse is an example of revolution. The third choice, stagnation, is an attempt not to change at all despite the changes of the world outside you. Your goal should be to make proactive choices about how you evolve, or at times, choose to revolt, and to become aware of the areas in your life in which you have become stagnant.

Erosives

As in physics, every action in emotional life potentially has an equal and opposite reaction. Just as there are behaviors that foster love, there are behaviors that kill it, and no book about helping you move toward love could be complete without exploring the ways you unwittingly damage the love that comes your way.

It's relatively easy to be aware of the big, hairy, disastrous things you can do to kill love. I call those really obvious behaviors catastrophics -- things such as cheating, lying, or betraying confidences -- which destroy love as predictably as a heat-seeking missiles delivering dirty bombs.

You know these things already, so there's no point in elaborating them. What is far more interesting to explore are what I call little-e erosives -- the tiny, unconscious behaviors you engage in that imperceptibly shape your relationship, like rainwater dripping on limestone, drop by drop shaping the form of your interactions. Erosives may weaken your relationship so gradually that you may be quite unaware of the danger of an imminent collapse. Indeed, sometimes the most seemingly loyal relationships can be severely damaged by erosion, for both parties may take the love of the other so for granted that they cease to pay attention to the subtle nuances of the relationship dynamics. So as we explore the Essentials, I'll also encourage you to think about the erosives, which need to be cleaned up along the way.

Change

This book reflects twenty-five years of my life as a psychiatrist working with all sorts of people -- men, women, elderly folks, teenagers, housewives, executives, homeless people -- who were trying to break out of their secret selves to live more fully in the real world of loving human relationships. Several observations have been common to all:

1. Four major problems drive people to therapy: how to love, how to work, how to be happy, and how to find meaning in life. Underlying all four, however, is a core question: How can I connect more richly to the human world around me?

2. The default mode of the human mind is to ascribe blame to others, not to ourselves. Most people begin self-examination by first blaming others, especially parents and spouses, for their interpersonal problems and only gradually perceive their own issues. It takes great courage, humility, and self-honesty to dig within to understand why you construct your relationship world as you do.

3. The only people who do find the love and the life they want eventually give up believing they can change others and take responsibility to change themselves.

4. People who choose not to change continue to struggle with the same issues year after year...and sometimes decade after decade.

Zen Buddhists say that all of life is change, and all suffering comes from resisting change. Inner change is hardest of all, for it starts with the humbling realization that y...

About this edition

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0743437721
• ISBN 13: 9780743437721
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288