Going way, way back

In this phase of my life, I can see very clearly how some things led to other things, and times when some things needed to happen first, and how that order mattered. That makes it seem valuable to trace histories.

There were 31 books on the long reading list that I knew I would go over, but there was another book that ended up being more influential for Everything Else, especially at the end. How I came to that book in the first place has its own story.

In March of 1996 - just over twenty years ago - I was getting ready to go on vacation with my mother and younger sisters. I stopped by the U of O student store, and the Psychology Today cover really grabbed my attention.

The actual article was about the 1995 sweaty T-shirt experiment (Major Histocompatibility Complex Dependent Mate Preference in Humans) by Claus Wedekind. It was fascinating to me because fairly recently there had been all this talk about pheromones, and people wanting to harness them but they weren't supposed to work on humans. Here they could be a factor, but there is so much variation in who was attracted to what - based on immune system - that there would be no point in making it a cologne. (Unless maybe you found someone with an unusually robust immune system that could appeal to anyone.)

So there was that, but also as still kind of a starry-eyed romantic with a tendency to fall in love at first sight (was it at first smell?), learning more about attraction was really interesting to me.

I don't know for sure when I read about the next thing. I did end up subscribing to Psychology Today for many years, and it would be hard to overstate how much I learned not just from the articles, but from further reading that was suggested through the articles and reviews. It was in 1997 that Arthur Aron published "The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness", so I would have read about it sometime after that. That's the one about two people falling in love through 36 questions. It fascinated me too.

At some point during my long stay in singles wards, I would think about these things and want to understand it all better (and help move it along). I really wanted to find more on Aron's work, but I didn't remember his name, and I couldn't find any traces of it. Still wanting something more led to me ordering three books. They were all about love, but there were so many books on love that I could have ordered, I can't explain why it ended up being these three. It just did.

A General Theory of Love, by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, 2000.

This was much more neurological than I expected, but beautifully written -- much more literary than normally happens with scientific material.

The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate, by Gary Chapman, 1992.

This was really helpful for me. When I say I am the oddball in my family, one of the differences is that physical expressions of affection are most important to me. Not only is that not how anyone else does it, they specifically don't like it. Deeper delving can be done there, and it's not anyone's fault, but it's there. Being able to frame the issue correctly was important.

The 9 Types of Lovers: Why We Love the People We Do and How They Make Us Crazy, by Daphne Rose Kingma, 1999.

I know the title indicates that it is about relationships, but it gets there through what your emotional wound and your coping strategy for it are, and it had me and the people who frustrate me the most pegged, and it all made sense.

I have loaned it to other people who found themselves in it. It is often a frame of reference for how I understand various people. I periodically go back to it.

The People Pleaser's emotional wound is feeling unworthy. Yes, I've done that. Her coping behavior is accommodation. All the time. The unconscious emotion that needs to be addressed is Shame. Even knowing it for years now, there was so much I didn't comprehend about it. Even though it came up very early in the process (11/23, pages 7 and 8), I needed to circle back to it before I could really be done.

I hadn't really understood how pervasive the shame was before. I had made progress before, and it mattered, but it was on the surface. Getting underneath was necessary, and going back to the book helped.

So, for my blogging next week, I'm probably going to start at the end of Everything Else.