Love for better and for worse

Love is always healthy for us. Only what we love can be healthy or unhealthy – says psychiatrist and psychotherapist Dr. Mariusz Wirga.

The text comes from the magazine Newsweek Psychologia

Iwona Zabielska-Stadnik: Increased heart rate, heart palpitations, insomnia, mood swings, even depression, abdominal pain, lack of appetite … Such symptoms are associated with some serious illness, but they often occur when we are hit by love. Is it really possible to get sick out of love?

Dr Mariusz Wirga: When we fall in love with reciprocity, we do not see the world outside of ourselves. We idealize not only the person but also the feeling itself. We believe that this has never happened to us before, and we are the only people in the world who feel it. It’s just us. Two halves, a relationship of souls. We neglect other matters, other, maybe even more important, love, family, work, healthy eating or a hygienic lifestyle. Our neurotransmitters, especially in the hypothalamus, are doing extraordinary things and hence the physiological responses you mention. This is the firework phase that I would hardly call love. And it is an unsustainable condition. Physiologically, we cannot function that long.

The body couldn’t stand it? Pity.

It’s a drug! Fortunately, we are passing it, because if this was what real love looked like, we would still feel the storm of hormones, pheromones, neuropeptides and other neurotransmitters. So they were living in a kind of emergency all the time, like getting high.

What then is genuinely love?

What is part of our nature comes naturally to us and is healthy for us. I like this definition that love is kindness, concern, compassion, as understanding the emotions of another person. As Olga Tokarczuk said in her Nobel Prize speech: “Tenderness is the most modest kind of love. It’s the kind that doesn’t appear in the scriptures or the gospels, no one swears by it, no one refers to it. It has no emblems or symbols, it does not lead to crime or jealousy. It appears where we look carefully and focused into the other being, into what is not ‘I’. ” It is a deep human bond, a certain community. The point is not that we have common interests, but that we find something in common that resonates all the time and allows us to grow together.

A foundation on which to build?

Yes. I think this is just that love that doesn’t need to be learned. Just like the one that the child feels for its parents. You don’t have to teach him how to love. Children love even those parents who use violence, abandon them. This love is hard to discourage, it can overcome many obstacles. But through the need for that love, we can engage in activities that are unhealthy for us.

What makes loving someone unhealthy for us?

No self-love. In our culture, it is not fitting to love yourself. Rather, we are to love others, sacrifice ourselves for someone else. To neglect yourself in all of this. And it seems to me that true healthy love can only flow from us if we love ourselves. Throughout our lives, we tell a story about the world, people around us, about ourselves. It’s easier for us to be understanding and even affectionate narrators towards others. We are often very ruthless narrators with ourselves. I would encourage us to become affectionate storytellers and start with ourselves.

And is it even possible?

We even have the commandment: Love your neighbor as yourself. No more and no less than himself, just as much as himself. This wisdom from thousands of years ago says that my love for others is measured by my love for myself. And that it should be at all. This is the primary condition.

Then why do we have a problem with that?

I think there are people who have a healthy self-love, but they don’t show it because it’s not socially acceptable. Because seen as self-centered.

Are feelings for yourself more important than feelings for your partner?

I have never done such an analysis, but it seems to me that self-love is primal. Or it would be good if it was. That it would become the foundation.

How do we know that this love we feel is healthy?

The love that I am talking about, the one that comes naturally to us, the one we define as kindness, caring, compassion, tenderness that brings us joy. This is something other than happiness, because it’s hard to know if you’re happy or not yet. But we all know more or less what it means to feel joy. Healthy love is when we feel joy. From it flows a deep human bond.

It was Dr. Carl Simonton, an oncologist, who emphasized the importance of this genuine joy, healthy eudaimonia, which is also pleasant, but not the same as pleasure. (editor’s note: Aristotle and Epicurus believed that eudaimonia is a state of mind achieved when all needs are equally met; hedonists understood eudaimonia as a state identical to the feeling of pleasure.).

Can a disease bring people closer, deepen a bond? How does it look from the perspective of your psycho-oncology practice?

There are loves that make such a challenge deeper. But many relationships break down during cancer.

Why do they fall apart most often? Lack of closeness, fear?

Both sides can break up. A sick person may say that he or she does not want to waste time on just any relationship. I do not want to stay in it out of fear or to have cheap care. This is the display of self-love.

Find out more:

1. What is the game at, or what roles do we play in relationships
2. Couples psychotherapy – when is it worth choosing?
3. A toxic relationship, or what exactly?

What we help our patients do is reevaluate certain things that we can perceive precisely because a serious illness makes them stand out. But I don’t like to divide us into the healthy and the sick. In fact, we’re all a little sick and a little healthy. And all of these things apply to us as to all other people.

Can the disease be good for the relationship?

In Simonton therapy* we help patients, but also their relatives, to see the benefits of the disease. We ask: what good has happened in your life because of your illness? It turns out that it can be more time for yourself, more time for loved ones, it is easier for certain things to say “no” or “yes”. These can be manifestations of this healthy self-love of mine. I’m starting to see beauty in little things. Appreciate them. Appreciate the present moment for what I have. Appreciation is an important part of love. Whether it’s your own or others. And it could be things like: my husband is kinder to me. Conflicts have been resolved because now we know what is the most important in life and it is a pity to waste time on them.

Why are you asking this question?

Because these benefits of disease indicate important needs that we allow ourselves to be met only when we are sick. And we teach our patients how to meet these needs without disease.

But those who are recovering or healthy?

All of them. This is true for all of us. Whatever I say, it applies to all of us. But illness or any serious crisis sharpens our vision. And then you have to ask yourself, what good is happening thanks to this crisis? What good is happening in this difficult situation in which I find myself. And then pay attention to what needs this situation helps me to satisfy. And once we know it, learn to meet those needs without this crisis, without this disease. At the same time, I’m not saying that this disease is caused by not meeting these needs. I don’t know where cancer comes from, but I do know what helps to live with or recover from cancer. I am not saying that the person who performs the reevaluation will start to meet the needs that the disease has exacerbated will suddenly recover from the cancer. But her quality of life will definitely improve at the moment. As long as we live, we have this moment. Anyway, Carl Simonton has always emphasized that the goal of Simonton therapy is to improve the quality of life here and now, not to prolong it.

How much does how we think affect how we feel? Does man use the disease instrumentally?

Often, as a psychiatrist, I am called to patients and I hear that the physical cause of ill health cannot be found, and it may be “getting sick” or “it’s just in her head”, or even worse – “faking”. These are very unfair terms. It is detrimental to a person, if that is what we call what is happening to him, before we show him how to recover.

Dlaczego?

Because she found out that she ran away from illness, that it’s all in her head. She is suffering, and no one has told her how to stop suffering.

How can we find the source of this suffering?

We refer to a healthy life, to joy found at different times. This is the first task that we do with the participants. We ask them to list the things and activities that bring them joy. We do it in a group because we like to share joy. One person talks about it, the other talks about something else, they inspire each other. It is a joyful experience because the real joy of other people resonates naturally in us. We encourage them to engage in activities that they enjoy on a daily basis. And if they don’t, we talk about what’s in the way. Most often, these are unhealthy beliefs.

What about people who have no love in their lives? After all, there are those who have not met it, have not experienced it.

Professor Maultsby, a psychiatrist, used to say: you always have someone to love, yourself. You are someone, so someone loves you already.

What if they want to love someone and not themselves?

Again, it stems from an unhealthy belief that I need the love of others for me in order to be happy. We have many unhealthy beliefs about love. The love that gives us true joy and happiness is my love for myself and for others (acting in accordance with this love). My love for me and for others is my own creation. I can love myself the way I want, perfectly. We require others to love us when we often hate ourselves. Because we look for healthy self-love in another person, what we do not give ourselves, and no one else can give it to us. If we first give this love to ourselves, only then can we focus on the other and give love to others generously.

I don’t know, we can also hurt ourselves.

Yes, I know. And more than anyone else.

And more than anyone else.

Yes, because it is not appropriate, we inhibit. And we can torture ourselves ruthlessly. Mainly through his cruel, fierce to himself, narrator.

Self-focus, self-love, frees you from loneliness?

I can be alone but happy.

But I’m talking about loneliness, not being alone.

But loneliness is also a product of unhealthy beliefs. Sorry, but being a CBT, I always start with this, and come back to it. One of these core beliefs is, “I shouldn’t be lonely.” But if I start to engage in activities that make me happy, without analyzing whether I should be happy or unhappy, lonely, not self-sufficient, just focusing on feeling and expressing that joy, then I will be more attracted to other people. Why keep focusing on the fact that people should like me more than they like me, that I shouldn’t be lonely.

Or why I don’t have someone who loves me.

But I have someone who can love me. Perfect. Myself.

Only people don’t want it. If self-love were enough for us and it really was an ideal dimension, we would not be looking for other people, we would not form relationships.

We go back to what we talked about at the beginning – that it is part of our nature. Like breathing. You cannot find fulfillment in a relationship or in love with another if you do not have love for yourself.

Dr Mariusz Wirga – a psychiatrist, medical director of psychosocial oncology at the Todd Cancer Institute in Long Beach, California. Certified cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist. Certified psycho-oncologist and psycho-oncology supervisor of the Polish Psycho-oncological Society. Trainer of Simonton and Rational Behavior Therapy (RTZ) and cognitive behavioral therapy. From 1990, a close associate of Carl Simonton, and after his death, the medical director of the Simonton Cancer Center. Since 1992, he has been the closest associate of Maxie C. Maultsby, Jr., the founder of RTZ. Co-author of the book “ABC of your emotions”.