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Closure and Contentment

This post isn't going to be about research as much as philosophy I've drawn from my experiences and observations.

Though we tend to reserve the word closure for relationships, closure is, in my opinion, the most important concept in someone's quest to overcome life-struggling. To see why, we have to consider what causes struggling in the first place.

The Source of Struggle and Contentment

You can approach struggle (or dysfunction) from a lot of different "zoom-levels" and angles. A biologist zooms in far and see genetics and chemistry as being responsible. A sociologist might see struggle as a result of unevenly allocated resources. I prefer to look at human experience the way it's felt.

There is some struggle that's a natural part of life, but this isn't what I'd call struggling. Struggling is the result of disconnection from ourselves. We disconnect when we get inappropriately lost in our thinking, our worries about what might happen, and our past. When we disconnect, we lose touch with our inner-awesomeness: our kindness, our talents, our insight, our joy, our peace, and our levity. These are all aspects of the same experience. Only if we're self-connected can we form a connection to another person, otherwise it's like trying to have a conversation with someone who's phone is off. For that reason, inner-awesomeness is also the root of intimacy and belonging.

The inner-awesomeness is contentment.* The state of contentment -- which is a state of mind, not a lasting possession you acquire -- opens up new ways of dealing with tricky situations that normally would suck us back into the trance of thought. Not only will you have self-connection, but you will improvise ways to maintaining that connection in the face of new or familiar challenges.

The Role of Closure

There are many self-help gurus and teachers, most of whom have earned by utmost respect, who teach methods of withdrawing from thinking and reinhabiting the body in its present state. The practice is called meditation and while it comes in different forms -- breathing, kindness, mindfulness of a certain aspect of your experience, insight/vipassana -- it always shares the same common denominator: let go of your compulsion to think and analyze and see what's already here.

This is hard for people, me included, to do. We're addicted to thinking and believe that with enough thinking, we'll work our way out of our problems. Sometimes it works, because your thinking can help you compare experiences and arrive at the conclusion that your thinking is the culprit of struggle, rather than the solution. In this way, thinking can self-cannibalize. Most of the time, though, you find that people are deep into their thinking. If it's a trauma, they're lost in their past, replaying memories and continuously reviving their emotional pain. If it's fear or mistrust, they're lost in the future, worrying, paralyzed by their expectations. Either way, the person slowly loses self-connection and inner-awesomeness as thinking overwhelms them and starts to grow lonely.

A good counselor might advise this person to start practicing mindfulness by surrendering the need to think and to start watching what's already here. But there is another way to surrender the need to think: closure. That's precisely what closure is, a device used to interrupt a pattern of habitual thought (or behavior triggered by thought) and surrender to the current situation. It is the event that convinces a person to end habitual thinking. Closure is condensed meditation and requires an equal degree of surrender.

Closure allows a person to make major life transitions and climb out of spirals of shame, grief, guilt, anger, worry, fear, obsession, and loss. Fostering it is an crucial tool in an Amateur Psychologists kit.

Recipe for Achieving Closure

Common sense tells us that there's no right way to get closure. There is no trick or special forumla to produce it. The most important thing is that the event (a letter, a discussion, burning something) is significant for the person. If it is not significant, it won't convince the person to surrender their habitual thinking. For that reason, a good guide should suggest ways to achieve closure but ultimately put it in the hands of the person seeking relief.

A second consideration is make the closure lasting and memorable with something ceremonial. The ceremony can involve 2 stages. The first stage is related to the trauma or issue the person faces and is a symbol of surrendering the old patterns. If they lost a loved one, they can gather belonging together and wear them, or make a website dedicated to the person, create a collage out of their best pictures and memories, or create a personal momento. The second stage has to do with creating a new, fresh path. To accomplish that, they might dye their hair, change their room, or change their wardrobe. These changes symbolize a new direction in life and offer the seeker an alternative to the old patterns.

A third consideration is to remind the seeker that revisiting the old thought patterns is a normal part of the closure process. Closure doesn't mean the old ways will suddenly evaporate. The thoughts may continue, but in a less severe manner, and should be viewed as a relic from the past rather than something to freak out about.

Final Thoughts

This is the reason I don't knock New Age-type therapies. It's not that I believe in them, but the consumers do. That's all they need to take a troubling issue, find closure, and move on.

If you think about your life, you can probably recall moments where you achieved closure. It feels freeing. Here's a picture where I had it. You can see how the face is relaxed and the eyes and soft and calm. There's a smile waiting to erupt. As you can see with my brother, sometimes it does.

* Fuck the word "happiness" and avoid it at all costs. It sounds like someone no one can ever get without a book deal, good teeth, and a job that pays more than whatever you're already making.

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Transference in Online Relationships? (user submitted)

Dear AmateurShrink,

What are your thoughts on transference and countertransference with particular regard to online friend/relationships?

Attentively yours,

Lustful in London

~ ~ ~

Dear Lustful,

Lets quickly define the terms tranference and counter-transference. Webster's defines transference as "a reproduction of emotions relating to repressed experiences, esp[ecially] of childhood, and the substitution of another person ... for the original object of the repressed impulses." In other words, I was mad at my father, but I'm taking it out on you, or, you were afraid of some guy, and now you're afraid of me. While transference implies a patient projecting feelings onto a therapist, counter-transference contemplates the reverse situation.

Transference is interesting, but not as interesting as it's hot sister, erotic transference. Erotic transference happens when patients fall in love with their therapists. Remember that this idea is Freudian, so we have to start from infancy, where you only had five major psychological disorders. The sequence goes something like this:

1. Baby needs mother's attention to survive.

2. Mother gives baby attention. Baby becomes attached to mother and fixates on her.

3. Baby craves mother and feels "love."

4. Mother has other things to do in her life and must occasionally neglect baby's needs.

5. (Cry)Baby is distraught and represses traumatic breach with mother. Wah!

6. Baby grows up, gets into several dysfunctional relationships, starts smoking crack, becomes a prostitute, and changes her name to Trixie.

7. Trixie visits Therapist seeking advice.

8. Therapist is attentive to Trixie's feelings and needs.

9. Trixie is reminded of the attention she received from her mother, back in 1-3.

10. Trixie transfers the feelings of love she felt for her mother onto Therapist and now begins fixating on him.

11. Therapist says "it must have been hard to be disappointed when you were a child" to coax Trixie into releasing the trauma incurred when she was disappointed by her mother in 4.

Interesting, huh? I don't buy it, but it's interesting. I think it's more likely that we evolved certain fixed emotional "programs" to help us cling to our caretakers, and that these program are executed when we meet new caretakers. But I don't really think that we're thinking about our mothers when we meet these people, and I don't think we need to rehash past traumas. That only reinforces and validates weak, needy living. Instead, tell the person that their feelings make sense, but that real love is something that grows out of independence, not neediness.

Okay, finally, lets get back to your question. Can transference happen in online relationships? It probably happens in all your relationships in some mild form. If you've been rejected by a guy, you'll transfer some of your hurt and fear onto the next guy you meet and perceive him as untrustworthy. Same goes if you're angry.

And what about the erotic type? Look, if you're attracted to me, just say so.

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Transactional Analysis: A Guide to Deconstructing Dialogue

In the 1960, Erick Berne (formerly Bernstein) wrote an immensely popular book called Games People Play that kicked off the Pop Psychology movement. His book laid the foundation for a new set of tools to codify and understand human interaction, collectively named Transactional Analysis.

At the core of Transactional Analysis lies Berne’s idea of “Strokes.” You can think of a stroke as an offering of praise, pity, sympathy, mushiness, sappy adoration, or admiration.* "That so bad, I'm sorry!" or "you've such a good person, he doesn't deserve you" are examples of strokes. Transactional Analysts nicknamed them "warm fuzzies." I think of them as "gooey."

Berne noticed that sometimes people communicated honestly and authentically, but other times communicated with a hidden purpose: to obtain strokes. Because these exchanges (or "transactions") followed predictable sequences and had a goal -- a stroke -- in mind, Berne saw them as Games and catalogued a shit-ton of them in his book..

For example, a person might confess they've been having some problem in their life or relationship. You offer solutions, but they reject them all, starting with the phrase “Yes, but…” and find some technical fault. The conversation might cycle like that for a while until you (or someone else) says “yeah, I know, it’s really hard isn’t it?” STROKE! The person then might look you in the eyes, desperate, and thank you for listening. The conversation moves on. The person was not interested in honest, adult-like communication, but in getting you to pity them and console them, like a parent would do for a child. At that point, both people are playing the game of “Why don't you / Yes, but ("YDYB").

Berne saw people as being in one of 3 ego states at all times: the Adult, the Child, and the Parent. The Adult is the rational, authentic, and honest. It neither initiates nor plays games. The Child behaves like a child would. It is needy and avoids responsibility. The Parent acts as a parent would, critical or nurturing. All games are played from Child to Parent, Parent to Parent, or Child to Child.

In Berne’s view, the stroke reinforced the person’s Life Script, a story they developed about the world and how it ran. In this case, saying “it’s really hard” might reinforce the script that “life is hard, and bad things happen anyway, so I am not responsible for my failures and don’t need to try.”

Homework!

Theories are great, but they're useless unless you put them to work. Do you know any game-players? What ego-state do they communicate from? How do you communicate with your parents or kids? When do you seek strokes?

Final Thoughts

Berne's theory is cool. His division of ego-states can be useful but isn't always the best way of conceptualizing personality. Like any psych theory, you should think of it as one analytical tool among many that is right for some jobs and wrong for others. The real contribution of Transactional Analysis lies in the idea that communication often has some ulterior, concealed motive. Once you practice and become sensitive to that possibility, you start to see dialogue in a new light and can develop very quick insight into people, their motivations, and their core fears.

* Berne defined stroke more broadly as "a fundamental unit of social action" and discussed positive strokes and negative strokes. The positive strokes are the ones discussed in his book, as well as in this post.

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Why do men go for needy girls? (user submitted)

Dear Edahn,

Why do men sometimes like women who I would characterize as crazy or disturbed or excessively needy? I have my own theory, but yours is probably more informed/better articulated.

Curious in Cali

~ ~ ~

Dear Curious,

To make sure I understood your question, I interpreted "crazy, disturbed, and needy" as the kind of girl who is always making problems, needs lots of assurances, has a pervasive feeling of abandonment-anxiety, and can't sit still and go with the flow. Does that match your image? If so, off the top of my head, I can think of 4 reasons men get involved with girls who are needy. For the purposes of this post, I'm going to refer to the female as the needy partner, though obviously it can be reversed.

1. The men don't realize that their partners are needy until after they become attracted to other qualities. To borrow an idea from economics, they end up invested in part of the person and become unwilling to relinquish that investment after having sunk so much time, money, and effort.

2. Some men like needy girls because it gives them power. It makes them feel accepted and cared for. Needy girls also do not pose threats to men. They are inherently subservient/submissive, and that gives men an upper hand in the relationship. It gives them power. According to Emerson (1962) dependency is the basis of power. Supply/demand relationships (which in relationships, you can think of as merely having other quality dating options) are the basis of dependency. The theory is called Power-Dependence Theory and is full of awesome.

Power gives guys freedom from insecurity and self-consciousness. They can feel free to act however they want because they know they'll be accepted in the end. In my experience, if there is too great a disparity in power and dependence, the guy will lose interest.

3. Needy girls conjure up pity and sympathy in their counterparts and make guys feel "gooey" or feel the intensity of drama. This is the modus operandi of the needy person: they play psychological games for "strokes." Strokes are offerings of superficial praise, pity, or commitment-assurances. Strokes give the needy person a temporary feeling of acceptance and security that should really be coming from the needy person themselves. For example, the needy person might pick a fight over something she twisted to look like a rejection. The fight ends when the guy professes his love, apologizes (triggering pity), or gives the girl some sweeping praise. The common thread is the feeling that's produced, which I can only describe as gooey, fuzzy, and warm that drowns out insecurity and fear. The warm fuzz, however, fades like a cheap high and the needy individual starts to want it more and more. It becomes a form of addiction and the neediness spirals out of control as they become desensitized to the drug, needing bigger and strong doses.

What about the guy? The girl's games evoke one of two reactions in the guy. Some games will evoke pity. The girl will feign weakness or vulnerability to trigger the guy's nurturing response. The nurturing response is gooey and fuzzy and the guy enjoys it. He likes the warm fuzz and even starts to think it has something to do with love. Part of his confusion is based on media protrayals of love as a painful, dramatic, intense pushing-and-pulling. Those stereotypes help him justify what is obviously an unhealthy pattern. Sometimes he will respond with anger, where the guy will reject the girl's attempts at control and manipulation. The anger is a form of drama and is, imho, the most addictive substance.

The fuzzy-feeling he gets, the drama, and the way it conforms with his expectations of love make him pursue rather than withdraw from the relationship. You end up with 2 addicts whose addictions are mutually reinforcing. That's a very strong pattern.

4. Needy relationships fill up silences. The neediness creates a dynamic that gives both players a role, as well as a script. This helps the couple avoid feelings of silence, emptiness, and loneliness. Those feelings crop up when people don't know themselves (or trust themselves) well enough to create their own script naturally. They look for a script that'll help them structure their interaction in a way that is supposed to ensure the survival of the relationship. I see this all the time without drama too -- people playing the role of a husband and wife. Of course, not having your own script, you have no chance for real intimacy, just its synthetic counterpart; you are just an actor in your own life.

What're some of your ideas, Curious?

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