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Changing ourselves on a deep level merits a ferocious battle Read More
Opposites Attract
Thank you for your article. I appreciate your honesty.
Could it be that our American culture is at odds with our human nature? The speed at which we are running makes us vulnerable to manipulation. Independent thinking is not taught or encouraged. Fitting in and sameness is. Therefor we have little practice.
Enter the therapist. How do you do what you do knowing the odds are so stacked? Empathy? Where is the anger? Seems that you therapists should have a good dose of that secondary emotion. Do you redirect it to empathy in your discipline? In our society it is acted out in the form of violence. But much real change has been born of violence. Hmmmmmmm. I am not advocating violence. But want an honest look at anger and it's function.
Change is often accompanied by hi emotion. I suggest we use the opposite emotion of joy to facilitate more change. This requires independent thought since our culture glorifies the negative.
What a miracle that opposites seem to attract.
Change
Thanks so much for your comment. I really don't get angry at clients for being resistant because I think that change is extremely difficult. And, while I do think that opposites attract on a surface level, on a deeper level, I think we are attracted to our twins--our twin-in-conflict. Why? Because if we marry someone with the same underlying conflict, then we don't have to change. Check out my book Magnetic Partners for more on this controversial topic.
When you say a person can
When you say a person can only change if they hate their symptoms, do you realize that, despite how angry and violent and full of hate people can sometimes be, we have trouble hating things when we see them in ourselves? It's like we finally understand in those moments that this world isn't black and white. That there are definitely personality traits and characteristics in people that are positive and those that are negative, but you finally have an appreciation (or at least understanding) of the full breadth of characteristics/traits when you see them in yourself and realize life just distributes "symptoms" at random and all things are to be appreciated, even the stuff you say we should hate.
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