Can We Learn to Love?

Is that possible?  To learn to love?   Is it ever possible? Nope.   Just a wee bit?  Nope.   How about liking someone more?   Yep.  Then learning to love should be possible?  Nope.  What can we learn as adults?  How to build a computer, fix a propeller, mow the lawn, blah blah.  But love?  Here we are confusing two parts of us that are often antithetical.  Learning is top level; cerebral, a brain devoid of feeling.   Don’t forget; it cannot feel and is not supposed to.  It can interpret feelings, explain them and write about them ad nauseum.  But when feelings surge forth,  the top level recedes.  Love is deeper in the brain, does not need language or learning.   In fact, it is impervious to learning.    The more lessons we have on how to love, the less loving we become.  Saying “I love you,” all day long is not a substitute for hugging and kissing and showing joy at seeing each other.

The military learns to take orders, and  obey without thinking.  Feeling would screw it all up and we wouldn’t be able to kill any more.  And why is obeying so important?  Because it blocks feeling.  You would not hear a woman who is hugged and kissed often complain, “You never say you love me.”  It was just said in the language of love.  It exudes out of every pore. But what you can actually learn is motivation, a willingness to work and study.  That comes within a loving environment.  The teachers that I had who patted me or put their arms around me are the ones I learned from.  So I perfected Spanish and typing; and after about 12 years of four universities I learned very little else.  I learned a lot from those who called my name and asked me how I felt and how I was doing. So, Mr Reagan, it is not the three R’s, readin, writin and rithmatic.  It is kindness, generosity and interest from those who teach; who show approval and encouragement.   Who love teaching and the students who learn.  School is not the military and “military intelligence” is a contradiction in terms. ….,an oxymoron.

What was so important that I learned about child rearing was from my dog.  She taught me about loving and how important it was. I gave her every freedom yet she always stayed by my side.  That is why I always took my dog to therapy sessions.  She heard cries and licked my patients who then cried and screamed—they never cared and never showed empathy like my dog.   When we are loved the right feeling brain grows and develops and we learn nuance and music and art and kindness and empathy and love; that is a lot of learning.   And that is the springboard for real learning.  That is why most of my Ph.D’s cannot learn to do the therapy, even though they know every theoretical answer.  They cannot sense what the patient is feeling; cannot  know when they make a right or wrong move in a session.   Cannot know when to stop pushing a patient (in order to feel that they got the patient to a feeling, even though they overloaded her.).

How do we learn to love?   How do we learn to be a good therapist?  We don’t.  My kids, when they were young, did my therapy and they were right on most of the time.   If they got a doctor’s degree I am afraid that all feelings would have been squeezed out of them. Primal Therapy is an art within a science.  We need to understand nuance coupled with scientific understanding.  Not one or the other, but both at once, conjoined into one outlook; one therapeutic perspective.
So we know what is going on inside patient, both in her feeling brain and in her intellectual one.   But alas, we have very smart therapists talking endlessly to patients while crushing their feelings and taking them out of any chance to get well.   Because, they cannot get well in their head alone , but everywhere in their system.   But intellectual therapists are satisfied to get patients well in their thinking, intellectual brain.   The feeling part, the sexual one, the artistic one is neglected and overlooked.   And what do we get?  a smart dummy, who knows history and literature but not their own history and not what they could write if they were in touch with their personal literature.

I would like to redesign a doctoral program that includes empathy, touch, hugs and kindness.  I would remove all statistics and graphs and concentrate on the doctor herself; help her understand her life, her beginnings and how it shaped and sculpted her.  I would offer her Primal Therapy so she could learn everything she needs to know about treating another person.   And guess what? No charge.  I do not think medicine and therapy should be paid for.  We do that with our taxes.  It is not a profit making venture.   I tried for years to offer my therapy to several governments. I took my son to see the English Minister of health and offered him my therapy.  He smoked a pipe, took a deep breath and said, “Let me see if I got this right.  You have a psychotherapy that cures, are willing to have it examined by our specialists and there will be no costs?   Whereupon my 12 year old son said, “Dad let’s get the hell out of here before it is too late.”  And we did.