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.
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