Patients sometimes say things like this: “If psychotherapy is largely a process of cultivating self-love, where is it supposed to come from? I don’t feel like I love myself. I can hardly stand myself. Where do I begin?”

Well, anyone who is alive to ask this question has survived, because at some point in the critical period of their infancy they, too, were loved. And babies love their caregivers, because love works as a circuit, a between-ness, like the glue between two surfaces. The love feels good because it works: my caregiver is loving me and I’m receiving it, and when I love her back, I experience my own goodness in the delight she takes in my smiles, my sounds, my touch, my presence.

My goodness is twofold, without any distinction being drawn: I am worthy of the Mother’s love, and my love for her is good. Therefore: I am good. I love myself. Trauma interferes with the benefits of that good foundational experience—but not completely, since you are still here, even though you’re also in pain. The task at hand is to reawaken those early, primitive good feelings and make them sustainable.

First, who do you love? It need not be a human person, but it must be a person in your eyes: a dog, a cat—a bear or an elephant if you know anyone who is an actual member of those species—or your nephew, grandmother, partner, friend—anybody you love. It could be a figure from religion or the arts, so long as admiration is not the main thing, but love. And if there is nobody in your life, bring to mind your feelings on seeing a baby or an elderly person, your spontaneous compassion for children in distress, even kids you don’t know.

If you can think of someone for whom you feel love, think of your feelings for this person. Feel the feelings. Notice that they arise naturally, without structure or measurement or transaction. Notice that they are not based on achievements, or talents, or cost/benefit calculations. As the philosopher Kant taught in the 18th Century, persons are ends in themselves, not means to an end. Adults love the baby because-the-baby.

An infant is too young to have accomplished anything cultural, and it’s too early to tell whether there are any significant talents present or not—thank goodness. That way, these extrinsic grounds for esteem can’t interfere with the fundamentally non-rational flow of love between caregivers and babies that is absolutely necessary for the survival of individuals, and of the species. As we therapists never tire of mentioning, babies tend to die if they aren’t loved-over-time by at least one individual caretaker, whatever other love, food, and shelter they do receive. If you’re still here, somebody loved you. That means you have some experience of the thing you’re looking for.

Thinking of a person you love brings up feelings of care, protectiveness, belonging, warmth, similarity, compassion, and esteem. You need to get yourself onto the list of beings who deserve this good stuff from you. Then you need to get yourself up to the top of that list. The fundamental reason to love yourself is because it is your right and role, your dharma, your vocation as a living organism on this planet. But if that currently feels too foreign and far-off, be motivated by altruism. Some depressed people only hate themselves, while others hate everybody; right now, I’m addressing the first group. Love yourself because the oxygen mask on your own face will keep you capable of giving oxygen to somebody else, instead of collapsing for lack of it.

After some time spent trying to love yourself so you can help other people, your motives may ripen and expand to include genuine, intrinsic self-love. Meantime, Nietzsche wrote, “The self-despiser nevertheless esteems himself—as a self-despiser.” In other words, if the only thing you can approve of about yourself is that you have sufficiently high standards by which to condemn yourself, well, those high standards are an esteemable form of investment in the Good, so start from there, and build out. Are you using the high standards as guides to improvement, or as a blunt instrument for self-punishment? If switching from punishment to guidance is hard, there is some internal cruelty in the mix, and you may currently be addicted to that cruelty.

Well, how would you feel and act if the person you love was being treated the way you treat yourself? You would intervene protectively; you would make emotional contact, to make sure the person was ok; and you would help your beloved to defend against attacks. Do that for yourself, as a matter of ordinary responsibility, like washing your hands after you use the bathroom, or like offering a glass of water to somebody who obviously needs it. Decency. If you can’t be kind to yourself, start with being polite to yourself, and work your way up to lovingkindness.

Elsewhere on this blog I’ve written about the inner exercise you can do to get better and stronger at self-love. It is an imaginal exercise, something you do with your imagination. What’s “imaginary” is a mental representation of something physical, compared to which the representation is relatively unreal—it is “merely imaginary.” But working to heal your inner child is itself a mental (both emotional and intellectual, both affective and cognitive) job. The problem, the solution, and the work of applying it are all psychic, not material. They all share the same form of realness, namely psychic reality. Inner actions are actions indeed, just as much as taking out the garbage, changing a tire, or dressing a flesh-wound is taking an action. A better analogy would be practicing with a musical instrument, because each session of practice—with all its frustrations and small glimmers of triumph—improves the prospects for progress the next time. Like therapy.

 If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

We often want to help people with their regrets, by telling them: “If you could have done any better, you would have. The reason you didn’t, is that you were constrained by your trauma background, your history.”

They reply that this is a slippery slope; that if they allow themselves the solace of explaining their bad choices by invoking their past history, they might recklessly let themselves off the hook for all kinds of error—laziness, impulsivity, greed—in the present and the future.

But it is not a slippery slope, so long as we locate the determinism in the past, where it belongs, and the freedom in the present, where we need it. Both the past and the present are constrained by the effects of the remote past I call my childhood. But the past of my young adulthood is already fixed, whereas the present is still relatively fluid, with room for choice and decision.

What is the precise extent of today’s freedom? How far can I hope to excel my previous performances? How free am I this morning, to do better than before? The only way to find out is to do the best I can now do, and learn about the flaws in today’s efforts only in hindsight, later on. Only tomorrow’s perspective will reveal the hidden limits of today’s freedom. I can best reach those limits—I can make optimal use of today’s undefined opportunities—by living as if I were entirely free of the constraints my origins impose on me. I am now 55. For my twenties, therefore, this process is now complete, so I’m now free to conclude that at 25 I indeed did the very best I could do—even though some of my choices that year were relatively disastrous. Had I been more free, I would have done better.

This is not a moral framework; the goal is to understand, not to excuse. Understanding will give me the breathing room to choose how to handle the moral dimension of my past conduct, prioritizing compassion over punishment, wisdom over bitterness, edification over regret.

Every child experiences some particular mixture of three things: getting the good stuff (love), not getting the good stuff (neglect), and getting the bad stuff (misuse, or worse: abuse). The particular mixture supplied by a particular childhood has consequences—exerts constraints on our freedom of thought and action—for the whole lifetime. But those constraints can loosen and fade with experience, especially with enough good experience. At no point am I ever in a position to assess exactly how much my early years are still shaping my current actions and perceptions right now.

So: today, I will do the best I can, as if I were no longer limited by the consequences of my origins. Tomorrow will show me why I got as far today as I did, achieving no more and no less than my level of maturation could permit. The psychotherapy that helps me understand the tragedies of my young adulthood also equips me to improve my future, not only because it helps me learn from experience, but because it explains why I suffered from the particular ignorance that I did.

Today’s ignorance will be tomorrow’s knowledge. As I contemplate the ways I fell short in the past, the more compassion I can muster for my youthful self, the less regret I must endure today. From present contemplation of my past mistakes, I must learn both prudence in dealing with the outside world, and mercy in dealing with myself.

Of course my history limits my choices. But exactly how much? I don’t know, and that’s a good thing. Our ignorance of the precise nature and extent of our constraints is part of our freedom. And just as a temperate optimism can enhance my odds of success in the world outside, my inner life will likely go better if I let myself assume I have achieved more growth and healing than I can readily prove. “With every mistake,” wrote the Beatles, “we must surely be learning.” In the absence of an impossible certainty, we are better off trusting in the human spirit’s innate powers of development.

One way to have that experience, to grasp for that faith, is to “see” your elderly future self kindly smiling down on you from the future. You might as well… look.

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great American novel The Great Gatsby, a self-made millionaire aspires to win the heart of a woman he once loved. Daisy is married and unavailable, but Gatsby has idealized her for years. He knows that she appreciates the outward signs of wealth, fame, and power—things that confer status—so he reinvents himself as a wealthy tycoon, hoping this will impress her enough to make her value him. He benefits from this quest because it focuses his energies, motivates him, and brings him the clothes and cars and cash that sometimes make life fun and exciting. Gatsby makes his money by bootlegging liquor during Prohibition, when it was illegal and therefore risky and lucrative. Alcohol has destroyed myriad lives, but in moderation it has been part of the good life in many cultures for millennia; one could argue that Gatsby’s path to success was not so antisocial as to be self-discrediting—he is no Al Capone, and no Macbeth. But such success itself poses a problem: if it all works out, and Daisy is won over by glitz and bling, how will he know she really loves him? Gatsby is a man, not a Rolls Royce or a bank account.

The book ends in tragedy, when Gatsby is killed by another character. But had he lived, one possible outcome would’ve been a temporary affair between him and Daisy, followed by some kind of disillusion. Either she would reject him and stay with her boorish husband (Tom), or Gatsby would tire of her upon realizing that she loves his status, his money, his power, more than she is capable of loving him. Such disillusion would be agonizing, but it would do him a world of good. Disillusion is the way out of illusion, and some illusions can be extremely hard to escape because their logic has a seamless continuity that conceals the exits. Of course I want to live in a giant mansion; of course more money is always better, ad infinitum; of course a higher status will enhance my success at anything I could possibly undertake in life, including finding a mate. It is because these assumptions seem so obvious that their fundamental error is so hard to detect.

Freud taught that the purpose of psychoanalysis (it applies to mental health treatment in general) was to help people to love and to work. The idea that more-is-always-better has serious drawbacks on both sides. In work, it threatens what we call “work/life balance” and risks work addiction, in pursuit of ever-more earnings, far beyond our ability to enjoy them. In love, more-is-better can mean either of two troublesome things. It can mean I am stuck in a compulsive accumulation of temporary partners, building my “body count” without checking its effect on my wellbeing. Or it can mean I am doing what Gatsby did, pursuing just one partner, but using means that are accumulation-based: if I have more status than these competitors, then I’ll win the competition for her. What gets neglected here is the way my toys and my success can upstage the merely human, unique individual I actually am. I also may fail to notice how much my attention is diverted from my “Daisy” onto the men with whom I’m busy competing, jockeying for position, comparing the size of our houses (paging Dr. Freud), etc.

If such a disillusioned Gatsby can survive the disillusioning experience, he may win the real prize, one more valuable than the solid gold toilet, or the victory over his male rivals, or even Daisy herself. The real prize is a mature freedom: freedom from the endless compulsion to accumulate ever more status and wealth, and with it, freedom from the need to woo the kind of person who remains focused on that kind of stuff. Whoever escapes from the prison-house of status-seeking gets to love and be loved by people who are also free of it.

There are plenty of good reasons for a couple to want lots of money, or for a single person to want wealth in an eventual marriage. Raising kids, running a small business, keeping a theater afloat, endowing a community’s nonprofit, all these require plenty of cash and become impossible if there isn’t enough, and the list goes on and on. What’s not so good, is chasing wealth as a substitute for self-love, and hoping that the display of this wealth will attract somebody else who has the same confusion between wealth and love.

People who are unconsciously afraid of love might not be able to tolerate getting the love they really need, but do not want. So they collude with similar people to form relatively loveless couples, held together not by deep affection, acceptance, and desire, but by the glue of status, purchasing power, and the conspicuous display of resources. Real love is associated with eventual death, because if I fall in love with one unique, mortal, individual person, I will one day lose them and it will matter to me. If I marry someone I really love who really loves me, I move forward on what Kierkegaard called “the stages on life’s way,” and this means leaving youth behind and getting closer to the end. Focusing on status and trophies can instead create the illusion that I am outside of the arc of the life cycle, that my world is one of endless youthful playdates and context-free experience, often of a dissociative, thrill-seeking kind. Diverse pleasures have their place, and there’s nothing inherently bad about thrills. But it’s worth checking: am I doing this as a defense against something else? Might I be partying quite this much because I am avoiding something?

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.

Infidelity is always happening somewhere, and it always involves at least three people; a cheater (let’s call that person Delta), a cheated-on (call this one Epsilon), and a third person, who comes from outside. Couple’s therapy rarely includes that one, so we’ll only discuss those two genderless Greek-lettered persons. The concept of infidelity only has meaning in the context of an attempt at a monogamous commitment, so the world of polyamory and other alternative arrangements is respectfully set aside for the purposes of this discussion.

Most people have either cheated or been cheated on, at least once in their romantic lives; many have been in each position at one time or another. The pains of guilt or betrayal are extreme when we’re young and naive, full of huge feelings without the wisdom of experience. Disillusion can be embittering. But if we endure infidelity early in life, we get to enjoy plenty of future decades with those lessons already installed. Big mistakes and betrayals are always possible, but people who have learned from experience can successfully make such crises extremely unlikely. Cheating on your boo in high school can put a guilty wretch in your mirror, and getting jilted in eleventh grade hurts plenty—but it’s much worse when it happens ten years into a marriage, especially if the couple has to tell their kids about it.

Cheating is: a mistake. Like most mistakes, it does not have to define you. It might forever define you in the eyes of the one you betray, but if you stop cheating, you can reinvent yourself—with or without that injured partner, by yourself, or with someone new. You may be Delta this time around, but you need never be in that awful role again. You can use the ordeal as a schoolhouse whose central lesson is that the price of cheating is extremely high, whether you get caught or not, so that almost no circumstances make cheating a good enough option to be worth it. You may be Epsilon (cheated on) this time, but you can turn this disaster to good account by distilling from it the knowledge necessary to avoid any future repetitions and Never. Be. Cheated. On. Again. Since this lesson is a bit more subtle and complicated than Delta’s lesson, let’s discuss it further.

Most cheaters aren’t sociopaths; some are. Other personality disorders, in particular narcissistic and borderline pathologies, can resemble sociopathy in this striking capacity for deception. Persons thus afflicted can lie well, all the time, to anybody, uninhibited by conscience or principle, with a skill that makes their deceptions very hard to detect. They lack the inner psychic structure that would otherwise generate inconvenient compassion for those they deceive. The missing psychic structure leaves plenty of room for a frictionless compartmentalization that gives them remarkably little trouble. They can smoothly escalate from withholding important information to outright lying. Unlike ordinary liars, sociopaths don’t just blunder forward in hasty improvisations, hoping for the best. They actively manipulate their partners, implementing strategic webs of bad data and false signals whose exquisite architecture is their own delicious secret. Some even lead truly double lives, with whole families that don’t know about each other’s existence. But these people are quite rare, with antisocial personality disorder (the current term for sociopathy) occurring in 2% to 4% of the general population. If you find yourself with such a person, your task is to end the relationship; to discover why you chose such a person; to develop criteria for screening out similar people in the future; and to heal from any underlying masochism that might have influenced your choice. Again, it’s very rare that the problem is a genuine sociopathy, so let’s set those cases aside at this point and consider infidelity dynamics that are much more common.

Most people who cheat have, by the time they bring their sexual and/or emotional needs outside the relationship, already sulked for months or years before they become sufficiently despairing about the relationship to go ahead and ruin it. They start by sending signals that they’re unhappy, the biggest of which is emotional withdrawal. If Delta’s signals of unhappiness don’t get through, it’s generally because Epsilon is too busy idealizing the relationship to consider Delta’s new and troublesome information. Idealization isn’t always a happy state. Its main feature is avoidance of reality, either by pretending that the relationship is rosy and trouble-free (“other people have to work at marriage, but lucky us, we don’t”), or by pretending that the relationship may be troubled, but is somehow uniquely indestructible.

The error—Epsilon’s blindness to Delta’s unhappiness signals—is of course a distorted perception, a misapprehension of the other person’s state of mind. But it is also (and perhaps more profoundly) rooted in an identity issue: one says to oneself, “I am someone who has married well, would never get cheated on, will never become divorced—that bad stuff only happens to other people.” Such self-deception is only human, but it is hubristic. Your partner is not an angel, and neither are you. This fact need not, must not, ruin anything—except the idealization, which began as a valuable element of falling in love, but must sooner or later be outgrown, replaced by a deeper, more mellow form of enduring esteem.

The lesson that will protect you from being cheated on in the future is: signals of unhappiness must be taken seriously, without procrastination, even if it makes you feel less lucky, or successful, or safe, than you are used to feeling. Have the necessary conversations about how each of you is doing, what hurts, what’s boring, what’s missing—what aspects of the relationship are giving each of you trouble of various kinds. If you’re too scared to have those conversations, or if they aren’t going well, get the help you need. Couple’s therapy can do ten times more good for your relationship before infidelity than it can do after it. Idealization blocks you off from the possibility of seeking couple’s therapy. But once you get started, it can facilitate a warm, good-faith, emotionally connected critique that is more humane and wholesome than the idealization.

If this post resonates with you, consider booking an appointment with me at 917-873-0292, or email Jamey@drjameyhecht.com. Sessions are available in-office in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and remotely in NY, NJ, TX, and CA.