A love story from a scientist

Let me share a little more from my previously mentioned Dr Sue Johnson's Hold Me Tight. (If you prefer to just listen to some interviews, there's some posted here.) In one of her interviews she says there's still all these old ideas about relationships still on the book shelves and in the media, and "we know better now" because of all this research that's been done. So consider these posts my contribution to getting her ideas out there. ;-) Though I really just keep delivering up little slices of the pie, so maybe tomorrow I'll try to post a better skeletal frame of the theory.

It's a very romantic relationship book, in two ways. First, in the theory itself, and second, often the couple's stories touch me. Today I'll give you some excerpts of the couple story, and leave the theory for tomorrow.

Her therapy works by having the couple use 7 types of conversations with each other, that they can use more than once. The first conversations help the couple self-identify the harmful patterns they use in their fights and get in the habit of stopping them faster. Later conversations help them identify what they're feeling underneath the blaming etc., and express that in a vulnerable way, and accept the other person's communications. She calls it going down the elevator, deeper and deeper into emotional territory. And then the second half of the conversations are for creating new attachments.

Johnson finds that when people are panicking at the lack of connection in the relationship they either fight or flight, which makes the problem even worse--she calls it the Protest Polka. Usually one person is "fight" (not necessarily fighting, but they're trying to provoke a response) and the other person is shutting down.

Chapter 4 is about an immigrant couple named Kyoko and Charlie. Poor Kyoko is going practically mental to try and get a reaction out of her husband, and the "crazier" she gets, the more it's freaking him out, because he needs everything to be controlled and logical, both from his upbringing but he's also a computer geek. So then he criticizes her and tells her what she needs to do to change, and the more controlling he gets, the more unloved she feels, so she gets crazier, which panics him all the more.

Sometimes Johnson's retelling of her clients' stories is a bit stiff (she's not really a writer after all), but I could picture these two, upright stiff emotionally boarded up Charlie, and worn out emotionally starved Kyoko, and I was all "Ohhh sadness" for them. Here Kyoko's been pouring out her heart, and now Charlie's been trying to figure out how to describe his emotions, which is very difficult for him:

[Johnson's addressing him] Listening now to this sense of fear and helplessness, what is the main threat? What is the most frightening message? Can you tell Kyoko?" He sits bolt upright and shouts out, "I don't know how to do this. I can't figure it out." He turns more to Kyoko and continue, "I don't know how to deal with it when you're not happy with me. And you can explode at any time. I never feel sure of myself with you. And I need that. I feel very sad. We came across the world together. If I don't have you..." He weeps. Kyoko weeps with him. What has happened here? ... He is shaping a coherent attachment message out of his emotional turmoil.

Awwww. Shniff shniff. I felt like I was reading a good, if poorly written novel. They keep talking, growing emotionally closer. Kyoko tells him "If I am sad or scared or upset with you, you just turn off. You don't comfort me. Just when I need you, you go off in your disapproval. You turn away and discard me. I am not the wife you want." He's finally hearing her and just says: "This is sad, to hear this. I am sad."

He's sad! I was sad reading it! I was skipping ahead to find out how it ended!!

Johnson then got Charlie to name what it is he needs from Kyoko:

"I need to know that when I am not the perfect husband and get confused, do not know what to do, you still want to be with me. Even if I get overwhelmed and make mistakes, hurt your feelings. I need to know you will not leave me. When you are depressed or very mad, it seems like you have already gone. Yes, this is right. I have said it right." And then, as if suddenly realizing the risk he has taken, he turns away and nervously rubs his knees. He says quietly, "This is very hard for me to ask. I have never asked anyone for such a thing."

The obvious emotion on Charlie's face moves Kyoko. "Charlie, I am here with you. That is all I want, to be with you. I do not need a perfect husband. If we can talk like this, we can be close again. That is all I have ever wanted." Charlie looks relieved and a little dazed.

Then Kyoko says what she needs:

I want you to accept that I am more emotional than you and that this is okay. It is not a flaw in me. I want you to stay with me and come close, to show me you care when I don't feel strong. I want you to touch me and hold me and tell me I matter to you. That is all I need.

Charlie looks completely stunned. "You mean you just want me to come close? It is like I have been working so hard to keep us on this one track that I have not seen the simple easy way just off to the side here." Then he smiles softly. "I can do this. I can do this with you."

Yay! Happy ending!

Ayn Rand: just a hot mess of emotions

 So yesterday I talked about Dr Sue Johnson's theory about love attachment, and said I'd talk about Ayn Rand. Joseph Campbell warned that if you believe the brain is running everything, and ignore the emotions, you get Darth Vader, and Rand is a perfect example. Sorry if this looks long, but it's a damn good story I promise. Rand's life was way more interesting than her books!

Ayn (rhymes with pine) was a woman who valued thought and intellect and logic above everything else, and believed real emotion flowed out of perfect logic. You loved a great work of music because it elevated Man, so art could be objectively judged by what it said about human beings. Ridiculous even by her own standard, of course. For example, she disliked jazz--she had some "reason" but of course she just disliked it for aesthetic reasons she didn't admit to. Because logically she *should* have loved it since jazz is independence personified, and she valued independence above all else. This was the mind of Ayn Rand.

Since she was such a logical person, if she felt something, it must be based on logic! (As opposed to other people's messy feelings.) So as far as I can tell she built an entire philosophy based on her own personal preferences. When she laid eyes on her husband, she knew he was the perfect logical hero of her girlish dreams. Really because he looked the way she imagined her perfect hero should look. Sort of like Gary Cooper, who ended up playing the hero of Rand's Fountainhead (one of the great Mary Sue's of all time)

 (Gary above, Frank below)

Not that Frank was a bad choice of husband--he was a beta male, and she an ambitious woman. But she talked about him like he was one of the cool, masterly heroes of her novels, whereas he seems to have been a quiet, unassuming man, happy to sit in her shadow and support her. So when the real alpha male came along she fell for him like a brick through a soufflé.

Nathaniel Branden--future father of the self help movement--was part of her inner circle, along with a woman named Barbara, and let's-ruin-the-economy Alan Greenspan. Her inner circle would gather at her apartment to read her works and debate her ideas, but not really because she could demolish any argument with one simple trick which forms the backbone of The Fountainhead: If you don't agree with my ideas then you're still in The Matrix, and you wouldn't want that! (These kind of arguments work on modern day teenagers, which is why she's considered one of the most influential authors to this day.) If you still disagreed then you were kicked out of the Ayny Rand Club. They jokingly called themselves The Collective. Jokingly.

"Two novels can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other involves orcs."

Nathaniel was the intellectual equal Ayn hadn't actually found in Frank, so of course she couldn't (a) divorce Frank, cause that would admit she'd made a mistake in Frank, or (b) just have a crush and eventually get over it and be friends with the guy, cause actually she was a pretty passionate woman. So she decided it was logically imperative that they have an affair--they were intellectual soul mates, and therefore should be physical soul mates (you gotta read the sex scenes in Fountainhead, my days.)

I seem to recall in all this that she even convinced Nathaniel and Barbara to marry each other though their feelings for each other weren't sure, or weren't mutual. I don't even remember why.

Then she logically argued Nathaniel into having the affair with her. Though blown away by her mind, he wasn't able to sustain hotness for her for long. I don't think men develop the same Hot for My Older Mentor Professor thing like young women do. Less so in the 1950s.

Then she logically argued Frank and Barbara to agree. Nathaniel and Barbara both felt sorry for Frank. The affair went on for awhile, but Nathaniel eventually broke it off. He met another woman and fell in love. He and Barbara hid it from Ayn, but when she found out she kicked them both out of the collective. They (or at least Nathaniel) were prevented from going to her funeral. Meanwhile Ayn's poor Frank locked himself in his studio and drank himself into a stupor throughout the whole thing.

It was the biggest, saddest fiasco you can imagine. She broke Frank's heart, broke her own heart, made Barbara miserable, lost two of her best friends, and though Nathaniel wasn't an innocent pawn, I think she took advantage of him as much as we'd say that of any male professor-mentor figure having an affair with a young student who looks up to him. All because she couldn't admit to herself one little crush.*

When you ignore your feelings, they don't go away, the opposite happens--they become more powerful and out of control. I know most people who read my blog are women and most women don't usually need to learn this. But I've known some guys, usually young idealistic guys in their 20s, who didn't. There are probably some perfectly innocent geeks (think Big Bang Theory) who don't either. Ayn Rand's love life is a good morality play--tuck it away in case you need it one day.

If you don't want your emotions to rule you, 

the worst thing you can do is deny having any.

Ooh! Tomorrow I have a little example from Dr Johnson's book that shows this too. It's very sweet. :-)

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* Just reading an interview with a new biographer of Rand, and her account is just the way I remember it being in Barbara and Nathaniel's books: In my view, Rand engineered the Brandens' disastrous marriage so that she could safely take Nathaniel, then 24, as her lover. She was 49. She browbeat Barbara and her own husband, Frank O'Connor, a passive, gentle man, into agreeing to the affair and keeping it a secret. It lasted 14 years. And when finally, at 38, Nathaniel fell in love with a 23-year-old artists' model and Rand devotee, Rand ousted him, the model, and Barbara from her Objectivist cult and tried to sabotage his career. The Brandens, now divorced and living in L.A., argued to me that her moral absolutism, her appetite for admiration, and her strong cruel streak had damaged them and ruined many others' lives.

Romance Novels: on the cutting edge of science

I've just started a book called Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love by Dr Sue Johnson. Already the introduction and the first few chapters are fascinating.

She's a clinical psychologist and has made adult love--specifically between couples--the focus of her research, pretty much her entire career. She gives a long description of John Bowlby, the main psychiatrist who pioneered the idea that children have an actual physical, survival need to be held and cuddled and cared for, back when it was believed that this would make them weaklings and sick adults. It took him years of experiments to convince his colleagues that when parents are emotionally and physically close to their children it results in happier, more well-adjusted children, which of course revolutionized how we see child-rearing.

Johnson and her colleagues believe the same thing about adults and love relationships. She cites all the studies that show how emotionally close relationships make you less sick, lower stress, help you face challenges, and so forth--that's the part I'm on. I'm sure you've heard many of those studies, as I have. But I've never seen them framed quite this way--as being part of a wave of revolution in the field of relationship studies, as big as what took place in child-rearing studies. The child-parent bonding is called "attachment theory" and that's the term she uses for her theory as well:

"when I tried to get my views published, most of my colleagues did not agree at all. First they said that emotion was something that adults should control. ... But most important, they argues, healthy adults are self-sufficient. Only dysfunctional people need or depend on others. We had names for these people: they were enmeshed, codependent, merged, fused. In other words, they were messed up. Spouses depending on each other too much was what wrecked marriages!"

I find this all veddy fascinating. I'm not someone who's naturally physically affectionate, or very emotional (except when pumped up on Topomax) but that doesn't mean I approve of myself, or am not making efforts to change. There are two stories that always come to my mind when I think about the importance of physical affection and emotion. The first is the Romanian orphanages.

It must have been in 1990, I was 17 years old, that I read a magazine story about them. That's when I learned that when babies aren't held and interacted with, they just tune of this world--they don't become social. It was one of the saddest but also most horrifying things I'd ever heard of (and it applies to animals too.) It's just a fact--living beings beings need other beings to interact with them, and touch them and I don't see why that would change in adulthood.

Which is why we all loved this photo, right?

The second is the story of Ayn Rand, but it's so good let's talk about it tomorrow. The point I wanted to make today is that allll of this reminded me, once more, of just how annoying it is that people make fun of romance novels.*

Because one of the ideas you find in good romance novels is that a relationship can be a soft place to fall, and a springboard from which to jump and take chances, and a safe place to rediscover yourself, a mirror in which to see yourself better, and a firm hand to hold onto when you take the plunge. Romance novels these days walk a really fine balance between independence and dependence.

In novels by people like Jennifer Crusie and Susan Elizabeth Phillips, the women are very strong, but they still reach out and ask for help from their friends, and family, and from the hero, and it doesn't make them weak. They're learning to be vulnerable, they're learning to be trusting, but like in those child-rearing studies, being dependent on someone doesn't make you a weakling. And the good romance novels--of which there are many these days--show that.

Romance novels spend all their time exploring the science of love, and how it helps us survive. Which kind of makes it science fiction. ;-)

"We now know that love is, in actuality, the pinnacle of evolution, the most compelling survival mechanism of the human species. Not because it induces us to mate and reproduce. We do manage to mate without love! But because love drives us to bond emotionally with a precious few others who offer us safe haven from the storms of life. Love is our bulwark, designed to provide emotional protection so we can cope with the ups and downs of existence. ... We need emotional attachments with a few irreplaceable others to be physically and mentally healthy--to survive." Dr Sue Johnson

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*I consider it all the more important for me to defend romance novels because I don't exclusively read them, so no one can say, "Ohh she's just being defensive cause she's a junky." I've read just as many books in the mystery genre as I have in the romance genre. And again in science fiction, and again in teen fiction. And certainly more general and "literary" fiction. ;-)