Get disturbed when other people disagree with them, sometimes even about small things

Their bodies remember. And their bodies react. Do you suppose that the children in this family are securely attached--or avoidantly attached, or anxiously attached? Well, at best they are anxiously attached, but most likely they are avoidantly attached. So, unaccountably, as these children grow, their bodies turn sour at the approach of attachment. Unaccountably, they grow up terrified of truly deep, intimate relationships. The very fact that people brought the painful irrationality of their love lives--their love sickness--into therapy created the opportunity for them to rework their troubling emotional scripts from the past. Falling in love is a common feature of transference, and transference is a key aspect of falling in love. The powerful sense of recognition that underlies both transference and falling in love is the kindling spark that lies at the start of virtually every meaningful emotional relationship. It hooks us in and sets the stage for something new and real to happen. Recall what we learned in article 4: we are healed by love relationships because they reopen the channels between our early emotional experience and our conscious story of self. Love is what catalyzes a subjective sense of emotional receptivity and loosens the grip of the psychic compromises we've made to forge our personalities. A truth of emotional life is that we only learn how to do things differently in relationships by actually doing them differently in relationships. Love relationships enable the imaginative reorganization of self and story by generating a fluid interplay between past and present, between conscious and unconscious experience, and between embodied emotional memory and the articulated story of self. Through this process, we re-create ourselves, gaining a sense of psychological wholeness and the feeling that our life is meaningful. How does all of this help us understand lovesickness? In EUie's case, this had already been tried several times with no lasting change. I wanted to show her that there were better ways to control her life than being sick. When she left I didn't know what would happen. Not long after, I found out.

Several of her college friends came to see me, referred by her for therapy. EUie talks about you all the time, they said, about how you helped change her life in one visit. Miracle stories are so flattering. The only trouble is that her friends also expected one-session cures. Her friends reported that she was doing well, healthy, more lovely than ever, and excited about her new job with a travel agency in London. EUie had changed for the better. She's winnowed her goals down to three items. That's more than enough. She's not giving up; she's letting go (a valuable skill we'll return to in article 13). On Day 63, when she stopped the strict juicing program, Emily had lost 56 pounds. She had also passed her Stage 2 Master Sommelier exam. She was swimming or going to yoga classes at least five days a week. She had achieved the longest sustained stretch of planned behavioral change in her young life. She was feeling good about herself. The hard part was just beginning. It's obvious, then, to any of us, that traumatic events that are not processed and given context and named remain isolated from the more mature forms of memory, and seriously impinge upon development. These events continue to shape our lives without conscious awareness of their origins. Said William Faulkner, presciently, The past is never dead. It's not even past.

And so, we become a mystery to ourselves. We are guided by implicit mental models whose origins we do not understand--guided by powerful mental models that create anxiety, fear, apprehension. These mental models create a profound learning disability, for they are not based on the reality of the present moment--but on an unconscious past reality that still lives in the present. Freud made significant headway here, in a life devoted to these issues. He discovered that these unconscious aspects of experience can indeed very often be made conscious. They can be felt, observed, named, understood, and at least partly integrated into true autobiographical memory. As we discussed in article 5, people continue to fall in love in adult life with people and things, and these experiences must find a place. Marriage is no protection against the kindling spark, nor should it be. We certainly don't want our love affair with the world to be dominated by the currents that make actual love affairs exciting, but we don't want these currents to be entirely absent, either. Our openness to people and things out there provide moments of poetic joy at being alive, and they connect us to ourselves in new and surprising ways. Sudden attraction, yearning, a mutual spark--these are all true on the level of human feeling, on the level of the soul. Any subjective experience of love is real in the sense that it offers, for whatever enigmatic set of reasons, a profound feeling of fit between one's desire and the world. For people in committed relationships, the question isn't How could this happen? --of course it can happen. The question is How do I understand what's happening? Our answer depends on whether our story is basically working. This is the most fundamental rule and in many ways the most difficult to understand. If you've never felt it, love sounds phony. But it's true. Love is the key.

It frees you from your fears and gives you the courage to grow. Not that you'll never hurt again. Forget that right now. Life has pain. But through love of yourself and of others, the pain won't matter as much. You'll have an indestructible sanctuary. As discussed in article 8, we change by creating, preserving, accepting, or eliminating. So far Emily was focused on eliminating. After years of bad eating habits, she opted for extreme denial, sacrificing solid food in order to shock her system, reset her metabolism, and jump-start rapid weight loss. But man or woman does not live by juice alone. After two months Emily knew she would have to stop her program of severe deprivation. The juice cleanse had done its job. It gave her a rigid structure and severely narrowed the eating choices she had to make each day. When your dining options are between a tall glass of kale, celery, and mango juice and a tall glass of liquid sweet potato, carrot, red peppers, red beets, and apple, it's well-nigh impossible to make a decision you'll regret. You can't be tempted by a plate of cheese and crackers, or a bowl of ice cream, or even a healthy handful of almonds if you banish them from your environment. Now Emily would have to come up with cooking and eating habits that went beyond the quick fix of juicing. They can be brought from the timeless unconscious sphere into time and sequence and cause and effect. They can be made real. But here's the key: We cannot correct these distortions by ourselves. We can only do it in the context of a trusted relationship--a Soul Friendship.

And one of the central features of these special friendships is the psychological mechanism called mirroring. Oh, for Christ's sake, I thought. This guy can read me like a article. John and I were meeting for coffee at a cafe around the corner from the church. He was sitting across from me at a small table, leaning in close. Okay, yes, I was sad, for Christ's sake. When happily married people come across a pull with someone other than their spouse, they tend to simply notice and appreciate, rather than intensify or pursue. They may permit a drip-drip-drip infusion of loveliness into their day, but they refrain from turning on the spigot. They don't start weaving the moment into a full-blown alternative story because they don't feel the need to do so. What they perceive as their authentic emotions fit with a generally coherent, satisfying story of themselves and their marriage. But as we've seen, not everyone's story works in the rough patch. People's sense that their emotions and their story don't fit together might be its defining feature, its central problem of meaning. Some portion of these people will use a falling in love experience to begin constructing an alternative story line. They'll allow the deeply evocative meaning of another person to crack open the personal and professional personae they've built until now. They may begin to feel as if things are actually starting to make sense, to fall into place. Perhaps they feel unshackled, for the first time, from the shame- or guilt-based emotional contracts that have, until now, constrained their choices. It begins with self-love. Avoid loving yourself and you will be trapped in a desperate life. It's just you and you; without your cooperation, you're not going to get anywhere at all.