"Love's executioner", I.D. Yalom
Sunday, 10 June 2012 19:14![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kroharatI have found that four givens are particularly relevant to psychotherapy: the inevitability of death for each of us and for thhose we love; the freedom to make our lives as we will; our ultimate aloneness; and, finally, the absence of any obvious meaning or sense to life. However grim these givens may seem, they contain the seeds of wisdom and redemption.
In many years of work with cancer patients facing imminent death, I have noted two particularly powerful and common methods of allaying fears about death, two beliefs, or delusions, that afford a sense of safety. One is the belief in personal specialness; the other, the belief in an ultimate rescuer.
Some people are wish-blocked, knowing neither what they feel nor what they want. Other patients cannot decide. Decisions are difficult for many reasons, some reaching down into the very socket of being. Decision invariably involves renunciation: for every yes there must be a no, each decision eliminating or killing other options (the root of the word decide means "slay", as in homicide or suicide). Ср. русское решить - порешить.
Existential isolation, a third given, refers to the unbridgeable gap between self and others, a gap that exists even in the presence of deeply gratifying interpersonal relationship. One is isolated not only from other beings but, ti the extent that one constitutes one's world, from world as well. Such isolation is to be distinguished from two other type of isolation: interpersonal and intrapersonal. One experiences interpersonal isolation, or loneliness, if one lacks the social skills or personality style that permit intimate social interactions. Intrapersonal isolation occurs when parts of the self are split off, as when one splits off emotion from the memory of an event.
One of the great paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety. Fusion eradicates anxiety in a radical fashion - by eliminating self-awareness. The person who has fallen in love, and entered a blissful state of merger, is not self-reflective because the questioning lonely I dissolves into WE. Thus one sheds anxiety but loses oneself.
Meaning ensues from meaningful activity: the more we deliberately pursue it, the less likely we are to find it... In therapy, as in life, meaningfulness is a byproduct of engagement and commitment, and that is where therapists must direct their efforts - not that engagement provides the rational answer to questions of meaning, but it causes these questions not to matter.
In many years of work with cancer patients facing imminent death, I have noted two particularly powerful and common methods of allaying fears about death, two beliefs, or delusions, that afford a sense of safety. One is the belief in personal specialness; the other, the belief in an ultimate rescuer.
Some people are wish-blocked, knowing neither what they feel nor what they want. Other patients cannot decide. Decisions are difficult for many reasons, some reaching down into the very socket of being. Decision invariably involves renunciation: for every yes there must be a no, each decision eliminating or killing other options (the root of the word decide means "slay", as in homicide or suicide). Ср. русское решить - порешить.
Existential isolation, a third given, refers to the unbridgeable gap between self and others, a gap that exists even in the presence of deeply gratifying interpersonal relationship. One is isolated not only from other beings but, ti the extent that one constitutes one's world, from world as well. Such isolation is to be distinguished from two other type of isolation: interpersonal and intrapersonal. One experiences interpersonal isolation, or loneliness, if one lacks the social skills or personality style that permit intimate social interactions. Intrapersonal isolation occurs when parts of the self are split off, as when one splits off emotion from the memory of an event.
One of the great paradoxes of life is that self-awareness breeds anxiety. Fusion eradicates anxiety in a radical fashion - by eliminating self-awareness. The person who has fallen in love, and entered a blissful state of merger, is not self-reflective because the questioning lonely I dissolves into WE. Thus one sheds anxiety but loses oneself.
Meaning ensues from meaningful activity: the more we deliberately pursue it, the less likely we are to find it... In therapy, as in life, meaningfulness is a byproduct of engagement and commitment, and that is where therapists must direct their efforts - not that engagement provides the rational answer to questions of meaning, but it causes these questions not to matter.
