Posted by 64bowtie on November 3, 2004, at 16:28:08
More to ponder….
Please ponder that usually a husband is best as a partner, a lover, a co-conspirator….lol. A husband that is a parent in the mind can lead to internal conflictedness; demons.
Children begin by good and bad; if it feels good, continue; if it feels bad, stop, and avoid it next time, toooo. By age three, if they do good, they feel the approval. Conversely, if they are bad, approval feelings are withheld. By age seven, they generalize that if they do bad, they are bad, and assume approval will be withheld. Again, if they do good, they assume they are good, and deserve approval.
Approval-vs-love is not much undertaken by therapists, since the dichotomy isn’t well understood. The fact that approval is a province of childhood, and love belongs to adulthood, may be a new concept to many who can’t separate their childhood from what they are today.
Approval feels conditional…. because it is. So, feeling that a person’s love is conditional points toward a vision that may never have seen two people sharing appropriate (not sex) love and loving, over time. I have seen two people loving each other over time. I’ve born witness to the evolution of that love. I can sense that point where it stops being conditional-caring, approval, and becomes unconditional-caring, love.
Abstract reflection, remembering, tends to flatten time when not done carefully and with purpose. It takes discipline to create historical time and chronologies. Sadly, hard work or not, memories not framed correctly in time, are by definition a distortion of whatever happened. If we then overlay a feeling onto the distortion, inevitably we create chaos, and faulty opinions and false beliefs.
I sense that toooo many folks never get past this level for the majority of their grown-up relationships, acquaintances, and contacts. By discussing it here, perhaps we can make a difference sometime, somewhere.
Rod
poster:64bowtie
thread:411216
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/relate/20041015/msgs/411216.html