The Bitter-sweet: Love’s anxiety
The anxiety caused by our craving for love plays havoc with our emotions from the cradle to the grave. It causes us to behave in strange and contradictory ways. Beginning in primary school, it is often expressed in notes, carefully printed—“I love you. Do you love me? Check yes or no in one of these boxes.”
After writing such a note, I would print carefully on the front of the folded piece of paper, “Please pass to Billy Harris, and then hold my breath until I received a signal from him. If he turned to look at me with his cute grin, I could relax. If he did not look, or looked as if he were angry, I would be certain that some essential part of me was dying from his cruelty—or from my embarrassment. During the interim of the passing, there was not only the anxiety of wondering how he would react, but also the fear that the teacher may intercept the note and commit the crime of reading it to the class. Maybe, there was some denied hope that she might, and then “the whole world” would know that I loved Billy Harris. The immaturity of this experience is easily forgiven in the young. The truth is that the underlying emotions and the anxiety of wanting to be assured that we are loved remain with us throughout our lives, and we will do almost anything to gain that assurance.
With age, the simple love notes often become long letters confessing our feelings to the beloved. We try to find out what the beloved likes and dislikes, and then set about using that knowledge as bait to capture him. Most of us tend to believe that these behaviors apply only to romantic love, but over the years, I’ve come to realize that we will do almost anything to try to obtain whatever kind of love our hearts are hungry for---be it parental love, platonic or erotic love. When there is a hole in our hearts, as there nearly always is at some level by the time we reach young adulthood, or earlier, we seek the type of love most apt to heal the hole. The deep inner-conflict, the cause of the anxiety, is that from the time we are wounded by feeling rejected by someone we love, we fear that the chances of another rejection are higher than the chances of being healed. Therefore, we begin to deny our need and even behave negatively toward the other person to avoid the pain we convince ourselves will be forthcoming. This pattern of reject before being rejected allows us to feel some sense of control over our lives, which is preferable to validating that we might be unable to love, and therefore unable to be loved. To escape this painful knowledge, we close down emotionally, isolate or become addicts to anything that will keep us from living with the anxiety that is a natural part of love.
Aye, there’s the rub. We want love to feel good all the time. It doesn’t. It can’t. It won’t. Why? Because it encompasses all that we each are and that includes our doubts, our fears, our many imperfections—and our deep, dark secrets—those things we know about ourselves that separate us not only from others, but from our own souls. Secrets chisel gaping holes in our minds and hearts, where fear and anxiety grow into demons---killers of love. Dr. “Patch” Adams, whom I recently had the pleasure of hearing give one of his outrageous and thought-provoking lectures, is one of the world’s most effective healers. He believes, and I agree, that we cannot feel totally loved until we are willing to share our secrets, to share our fears and to express our anxieties. When we are able to do this and discover our beloved does not turn away, but begins to share his own dark side, we discover that the light of sharing enables love to grow. We are able to love and be loved with more confidence and less anxiety. With no love, there is no real joy in life.
If you question the validity of anything I have just written, I highly recommend that you read Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts, or any of the books by Patch Adams---then expand your love-life by sharing more of yourself—even your secrets.

A Tapestry becomes a Book

My earliest memories center around the air raid drills of WWII when our family would huddle under a tent constructed of blankets on the tiny back porch of our home in Sanford, NC. My father, a minister, would hold a small, lighted candle and try to explain “war.” My immature mind just could not grasp why people would kill each other just because they couldn’t agree on something. Today my more mature mind is still haunted by the same question, especially when I catch myself in anger wishing the source of my anger (usually a person I love, or they would not have had the power to hurt me) would just drop dead. At some early age, these concepts of love and war began to weave a mysterious tapestry that has hung in the shadows of my thinking for years.

From time to time, I would be made aware of how love and war each elicited our most intense passions and fears. They both possess the power to tap into our deepest fears and our highest hopes. Fear is the basis for war. Hope is the basis for love. Both states place our very souls on trial. One could destroy us and the other could save us. For most of my life, I've focused mainly on the love threads in my mental tapestry. My first two published books explore why and whom we love and how to resolve relationship problems. However, during this past decade, I have become critically and painfully aware that the threads of fear, greed and control have the power to destroy love, our planet--and therefore, ourselves. When we deny them within our psyches, they grow, like mushrooms in the dark, and can dominate our thoughts and behaviors. It then becomes easier for us to follow leaders, who are ruled by these darker aspects of human nature, into unjust wars.

I began to realize that to fully understand human nature I must expand my psychological perspective to include our evolutionary biological history. If I were going to make a serious effort to control my own "demons'--always lurking in the shadows of my mind, ready to sabatoge me and my relationships, I needed to get help. I guess when the author is ready to stretch, a co-author apprears. In this case, it was Rudolf Harmsen, a biologist, retired from Queens University (Kingston, Canada) who shared my interest, my curiosity and my love for writing. We formed a team over five years ago to unravel the mysteries of the human tapestry and from those threads produce a book that could help us understand why we have turned so easily to destructive wars to resolve conflicts and why we must be willing to make alternative choices and some sacrifices. Our choices must be based on cooperation and compassion rather than deadly competitions, involving weapons of mass destruction, if we are to survive as a species beyond this century. We have recently completed the first draft of our book, Love and War: the Dueling Shadows of Our Minds. It has been written as a prescription to educate our minds and hearts as to how we could end war and create more enduring love. The purpose of my blog is to interest you in joining us so that we can live more peacefully while sharing our planetary home.