Author: Justice Schanfarber

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The trouble with desire – Why do we fear what we want?

The trouble with desire
Photo by Sudheendra Kadri | Dreamstime Photos

Desire is instinctual. It lives deep in our animal selves. Desire wants what it wants, without rationale, often without full awareness.

Freedom. Pleasure. Rest. Nourishment. These are just a few names for our desire. Desire lives at our core. It can appear abstract and complex through the filters of reason and language, but when followed to its source it is made of basic stuff.

Desire is old. Desire, presumably, was around before words. It is pre-verbal. Perhaps that is why we sometimes have difficulty explaining precisely what we want.

In a baby or young child we see desire in its raw form. Shameless wanting. Shameless demands. Shameless pursuit of desire fulfillment. Shameless satisfaction. As civilized adults we tolerate this shamelessness for a short time and then we begin the work of socialization, which includes organizing desires into boxes labelled “good” and “bad”. As children we internalize these judgements.

Religious, political, family, community and economic ideologies provide us with sanctioned avenues for pursuing approved desires. Other desires we are expected to deny ourselves altogether. Most of us wrestle throughout our lives with the desires we’ve denied ourselves in order to fit into the “good” box and to be accepted in our family and community.

Feeling is unreasonable. Reason is unfeeling.

One of the primary tools we use against desire, our own and others’, is reason. When our wanting makes us uncomfortable we try to convince ourselves to stop wanting what we want.

We live in an age of reason and we tend to think of reason as our saviour from the dark ages of superstition. This may be, but reason can also be the murderer of important aspects of ourselves. The opposite of reason is not just superstition or un-reason. On the flipside of reason is also feeling, and feeling is where desire lives.

Nestled beneath our cerebral cortex (the relatively new and exclusively human part of our brain) is an older part that we share with other mammals. This deeper part of the brain is sometimes called the mammalian or limbic brain. As the conduit for empathy and emotion it connects us to others. It is, by definition, unreasonable. Two fundamental parts of our human selves, rational and emotional, are represented by these two parts of our brain. These two parts, both intrinsic to the human experience, do not always communicate well with each other. Feeling is unreasonable. Reason is unfeeling.

Wanting what we believe we should not have, head and heart find themselves at war. The self is turned against the self. This is such a common occurrence that we consider it a normal part of being human. More accurately, this is such a common occurrence that we tend not to consider it at all. This war against the self may be expressed as drug and alcohol abuse, addictive behaviour, depression, anxiety, even violence and self-harm.

Client couples often arrive in my office with each vigorously representing one or the other of these twin aspects of self – head and heart. The internal split has been projected out onto the relationship with one person taking a stand for reason, the other embodying feeling. In heterosexual couples it is most often the man who takes the position of reason, and the woman who champions emotion (but not always – sometimes it is reversed) –

“She’s unreasonable.”
“He doesn’t care about my feelings.”

As each projects either cold reason or emotional chaos onto the other, neither gets the opportunity to confront (and integrate) the same in their self.

Desire frightens us because it contradicts the ideas we have about our lives, each other and the world. We like to believe that reason is king, and all else its subjects. The logic of reason demands dominion over feeling and so also over desire. In the age of reason, desire is expected to conform to the shape of the intellect. The reasoning part of our brain, of our humanity, wants to understand desire in reasonable terms before acknowledging its legitimacy. This precludes letting ourselves actually experience the desire that is present, however dormant and boxed in.

Paradoxically, we reject desire that we don’t understand, but we don’t let ourselves experience desire fully enough to understand it.

Understanding comes from observation, and observation requires proximity. When we dismiss our desire as bad or unacceptable, we never get close enough to observe it, to feel it and thus to receive its message.

Putting words to desire helps bridge the complex and frustrating gap between feeling and thinking. Language supports the understanding of feeling and, obviously, its communication between human beings. But we must risk getting close to desire if we are to know it well enough to name it. Even acknowledging our desire is, in many instances, deeply taboo. For this reason we keep it hidden, from ourselves even, until we have built enough resource and courage to face the truth of our wanting.

The counselling or therapy process often includes an unearthing of our own awareness around our own desire.

The client/therapist relationship creates a container where it is safe to allow the presence of desire, sexual or otherwise, without the risk of judgement or condemnation. In this space desire can be felt fully without an expectation or requirement to necessarily act upon it. By allowing ourselves to simply get close to our desire through fantasy, visualization, and feeling we can begin to develop a deeper personal relationship with it. With practice, we may see it in its most basic form, free from distortion. Only then can we hope to measure our desire against our internal guiding principles and then choose actions that are truly discerning and wise. Only when we have a direct relationship with our desire can we represent ourselves accurately and negotiate effectively with others to get our needs and wants met.

Recommended reading –
Open to Desire: Embracing a Lust for Life – Insights from Buddhism and Psychotherapy – Mark Epstein

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Campbell River Marriage Counselling Justice Schanfarber Trying to grow, fix, change, understand or save your marriage? I provide couples therapy, marriage counselling, coaching and mentoring to individuals and couples on the issues that make or break relationships – Sessions by telephone/skype worldwide. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

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Counselling Articles

Is victim a dirty word? On victim blame, victim denial, victim mentality and what the victim archetype can teach us.

Is victim a dirty word?Have you noticed that it has become fashionable in personal growth and self-help circles to believe that no one is a victim of anything, ever?

Virtually every day I see some book title, workshop or facebook meme that essentially tells me that victim is a bad word. Not because it’s wrong to harm or victimize others, but because it has become shameful to let any life circumstance stand in the way of you getting what you want. Victim has become synonymous with loser, dupe, sucker, chump.

One implication of this position is that perpetrators, tyrants, bullies, and abusers (even industrial accidents and natural disasters!) apparently no longer exist or hold any power in this magical world of total self-determination where “no one can make you feel anything” and where “we create our own reality”.

Perhaps most troubling is that the blanket denial of victim-hood brings with it a general denial of wounding. To deny our wounds is to rob us of a primary source of wisdom and depth. If we fail to acknowledge the wounds inflicted upon us, we may never get around to examining them, and we we may never allow ourselves the experience of grief, of anger, of tenderness, of humility – experiences that ultimately forge our character and connect us to each other in incomparable and crucial ways.

Victim-hood can be seen archetypally.

Archetypes are universal aspects of ourselves; universal because we can be certain we share them with other human beings. In other words, we all have an inner victim, whether we like it or not. Our inner victim provides us with practice in the areas of receiving, of surrender, of smallness, weakness, tenderness and vulnerability. On the other end of the archetypal spectrum, we all have an inner warrior. Our culture places high value on the warrior, while shunning the victim. We much prefer to see ourselves as strong, powerful, courageous. (The warrior archetype can also be seen as the Hero archetype.)

If our inner victim represents vulnerability, our inner warrior represents strength. Both victim and warrior – vulnerability and strength – have expressions ranging from immature to mature. Our inner victim ultimately needs the strength of the inner warrior to mature (vulnerability, then strength). Our inner warrior ultimately needs the vulnerability of the inner victim in order to mature (strength, then vulnerability). In this way the polar energies of victim and warrior are paradoxically aligned. (As a sidenote, this paradox can sometimes be seen in the couples I work with in therapy. One person is expressing the victim archetype and the other is expressing the warrior archetype. Each simultaneously needs/fears/rejects/desires what the other represents. But wait, when the right cues are triggered the roles switch… No wonder relationships feel complicated!)

We will all identify with different archetypes at different points in our journey, and if there is a goal in this journey perhaps it is to grow through each one without concretizing it into a rigid permanent identity. It is our task to KNOW each archetypal aspect without getting locked into BEING any single one.

Be humble for you are made of earth. Be noble for you are made of stars. ~ Serbian proverb

Honouring weakness, smallness, woundedness and vulnerability in ourselves and in others can be uncomfortable for those who are currently growing into their warrior archetype. The warrior fears the weakness of the victim (“It may be contagious!”). And so the immature warrior, or “pseudo-warrior”, exploits or dismisses the weak. On the other hand, the mature warrior, the warrior who has learned to honour their own inner victim, protects and supports the weak. The mature warrior may choose to create a protective space for the victim to attend to the task at hand, simultaneously supporting the victim’s journey, and also the warrior’s own journey. This is difficult work.

When we condemn the victim in others, we can be sure there are “victim tasks” remaining undone in ourselves.

When we sneer at victim-hood we reveal our own neglected work in the victim realm. If we attend to our own victim tasks, we will have patience and understanding and support for others when they are faced with theirs.

We are not victims merely of our own thinking, as new age gurus would have us believe.

We are also victims of unjust social and economic systems. We are victims of war and hurricanes, car accidents and cancer. We are victims of family abuse and neglect. Acknowledging victim-hood where it exists challenges a culture that essentially preaches meritocracy – we get what we deserve. If we allow the idea of victim-hood, we allow the possibility that injustice exists, and that it causes harm. This crosses into political and cultural territory, a place that inward focused self-helpers and even therapists seem reluctant to go. It also crosses into the realm of chaos, where bad things happen to good people.

I’m reminded now of a popular term, “victim mentality”. Dismissing victim-hood as a simple error in perspective attempts to provide a tidy solution to the problem of bad things happening to good people. I get the appeal, and I have been seduced by it at times. It’s easy for me to believe that behind the victim denial trend is, at least partly, a well-meaning desire to help people get unstuck, to push them along in a culturally predictable pseudo-warrior “I-did-it-you-can-do-it-hurry-up-and-get-over-it” kind of way. But I’ve come to suspect that it often has the opposite effect. By denying victim-hood altogether, and by abandoning the complex and uncomfortable tasks that the victim archetype asks of us, victim-hood is never allowed to mature, to complete and give way to whatever wants to come next. We collude in our own stuckness.

This collusion is at least partially conscious. Our suspension of disbelief only goes so deep. I recall being at a personal growth workshop where we were dutifully doing some kind of “re-framing” exercises around traumatic life events. At the break, one of the participants told me flatly that these types of workshops are routine for her – There’s a lot of talk of transformation, a lot of shows of deep significance, and a general going through the motions. Then she goes home to reality. She knew I was a therapist and so asked me, how does real change happen? How do we truly get past our victim selves, not just pretend with affirmations and bolster ourselves with self-help jargon?

I didn’t know exactly what to tell her then (“Quick, what’s the key to transformation?”) and I’m not sure I would know exactly what to tell her now. But I think I might say something about our willingness to feel what we feel. To stop pretending that we’re more powerful, or weak, than we are. To take a break from striving to be different and better. To settle more deeply into our experience of ourselves, others, and the world. To go through what we’re going through and to stop looking for shortcuts, for a way around. To question the cultural assumptions we have internalized. To be curious about our experience rather than hell bent on fixing or changing it. To acknowledge the presence and contributions of those who have come before and those who will follow.

We’ll end with a paradox – By rejecting victim-hood, we risk never getting the chance to fulfill the tasks like surrender, vulnerability and compassion that it requires of us. By identifying too strongly with victim-hood we risk concretizing the victim experience. But don’t worry too much about these things. Neither are permanent, or a problem to be solved. Life will provide plenty of opportunities for motion in both directions – toward integrating the victim, and the warrior – whether we like it or not. We need but remain present to the life we live, which is often the most difficult task of all, for victim and warrior alike.

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Campbell River Marriage Counselling Justice Schanfarber Trying to grow, fix, change, understand or save your marriage? I provide couples therapy, marriage counselling, coaching and mentoring to individuals and couples on the issues that make or break relationships – Sessions by telephone/skype worldwide. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

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“Mating in Captivity – Have you read it?”

Mating in captivity book - Esther Perel

A reader asks Have you read Esther Perel’s book Mating in Captivity?

Dear Justice,

I really like the articles you share on your facebook page and on your website. I’m wondering if you have read the book Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel and if so, what do you think of it?

My response –

Esther Perel’s book Mating in Captivity has been recommended to me often enough that I picked up a copy recently and gave it a speed read. Here are my initial thoughts –

Perel’s observations and experiences mostly match my own, professionally and personally. Early in the book Perel gives nods to both David Schnarch’s Passionate Marriage and Mark Epstein’s lesser known and wonderful book Open To Desire. Her influences are my influences, and so I quickly felt resonance.

I appreciate how she respects the tension between the two poles of desire that commonly define relationships – the desire for security/safety and the desire for excitement/freedom. Rather than offer some easy solution to this dilemma, she invites the reader to sit in the uncomfortable paradox of wanting two seemingly contradictory experiences. This feels like a wise and respectful approach, and one that I employ in my own practice.

Her legitimization of the underlying impulses that drive extra-marital affairs, namely the desire for “aliveness”, will certainly be mistaken for advocacy by those who can’t discern between descriptive and prescriptive voices. Likewise, her willingness to explore kink/bdsm without pathologizing it, and to explore eroticism outside the marriage unit, including consensual non-monogamy, will likely confuse or offend those with fundamentalist ideologies.

Perel gives voice to the elephants in the room. Her truths suddenly seem obvious upon reading, and one wonders how they escaped recognition until now. (The answer likely has to do with the power of taboo and with our unexamined assumptions about sex and love.)

Mating in Captivity acknowledges traditional gender roles and the ways they have shaped our beliefs about marriage and relationship, while offering thoroughly realistic current assessments of how these roles are becoming fluid matters of choice rather than matters of inherited social convention.

Perel’s cross-cultural (and sub-cultural) points of view challenge core American beliefs about the nature of romance, marriage, and intimacy; beliefs that couples therapy as an institution has, itself, largely internalized. For example, you’ll find nothing about “emotional cheating” in this book. In fact, acknowledging and working with the presence of “the third” (whether real, metaphorical or fantasy) is presented as a valuable erotic tool for couples.

In a cultural environment where marriage is expected to become an increasingly serious, responsible, secure and, frankly, non-erotic venture, intentionally nurturing eroticism in the home becomes, as Perel puts it, “an open act of defiance.” Accordingly, Mating in Captivity speaks to those who have a defiant streak.

I’m grateful for the author’s contribution, and the book has earned a place on my shelf. For readers struggling with affairs, the loss of eroticism, waning desire, sexual shame, disconnection or other common relationship issues, Mating In Captivity will be a beacon of illumination and hope, while also posing significant challenges to the ways we are accustomed to thinking about fidelity, love, sex and marriage.

All My Best,
Justice

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“Why is it that men are always responsible for what women do or think? Do women have any responsibility to correct their own misbehavior?”

Why is it that men are always responsible for what women do or think? Do women have any responsibility to correct their own misbehavior?

A male reader asks about women’s responsibility in marriage –

I just finished reading your article on “Why women leave men they love”, and I have a major question. Why is it that men are always responsible for what women do or think? Do women have any responsibility to correct their own misbehavior?

I raise some ancillary questions. Why are most women incapable of recognizing their own failures? Whatever happened to women accepting their responsibilities? Whatever happened to “for better or worse,” or “forsaking all others,” or “in sickness and in health”? Women seem to have a very difficult time with loyalty or fidelity. It seems to me that a major element in their makeup is narcissism. Is there, anymore, any moral dimension or constraint that married women accept with regard to marriage?

It will be interesting to read what a postmodern marriage counselor has to say.

Thank you!

My response –

The content of your letter appears to be founded on certain beliefs. I hear these beliefs as something like this – “Lifelong marriage as an institution is intrinsically right and natural. Remaining married in spite of changes in circumstances and personal values is the goal and the moral imperative. People who can not or do not remain married despite their unhappiness in marriage are flawed. These people are mostly women.”

While I do not personally share these beliefs, as a counsellor I am accustomed to working effectively and compassionately within a variety of belief systems.

The term “postmodern” implies a deconstruction of meaning, and aptly describes the state of marriage and relationships for many men and women today. Not long ago we remained bound to social structures that dictated the terms of marriage and relationships. Today many people are re-assessing these institutions, along with the “moral dimension or constraint” that you ask about.

Women especially have been deconstructing their roles and exercising the new choices they have in postmodern relationships (though men too are increasingly rising to this challenge). I’m not at all convinced that women cheat more than men, although perhaps the double standard on fidelity is crumbling and so women are becoming more free to do what has previously been a male privilege.

As for recognizing one’s failures, this appears to be difficult for many of us, men and women alike; perhaps because the social, family, or internal consequence of failing has been so punitive. It requires a certain kind of maturity to confront our own failure. This maturity, for men and for women, is mostly discouraged in our culture. The very notion of failure (and success) is rooted in a system that rewards winners, punishes losers and fails to see the value of those experiences unconcerned with either.

In my practice I see many women and men struggling to preserve a marriage in challenging times because they value it, and each other, to the depths of their soul. I also see women and men make themselves literally sick or insane from the misery of staying in a marriage that they don’t want, that they have rejected but cling to for a variety of reasons. But mostly I see women and men trying to make sense of themselves and each other in a world where old rules no longer fully apply.

Many men are hurt and confused as women challenge conventional views of manhood, womanhood, family, marriage, sex and relationships. I get numerous messages from men that essentially say some version of this – “I work at a job I hate to provide for my family. I’m loyal. I make sacrifices. My wife has a duty to loyalty and sacrifice as well.” And so there is rage and bewilderment when a wife chooses loyalty to herself and leaves a marriage rather than continuing to sacrifice according to terms set by others.

If men are feeling comfortable and secure (or just sufficiently trapped) in their own dutiful sacrificial role, then they are probably going to forgo taking the life journey that may be calling. This causes additional stress, internal conflict and resentment. These men will see women who choose to take their own journey at the cost of their marriage as narcissistic and irresponsible.

It’s up to each of us to determine what sacrifice means, its role in our lives, and what an acceptable level of sacrifice might be. Sacrifice can be an important task that calls us to develop maturity, and it can be a tool of oppression that we use to crush ourselves and each other. My job is to help people discern these differences for themselves.

I actually endeavour to be a post postmodern (metamodern?) counsellor; I encourage flexibility of perspective depending on context. This requires an ability to sometimes resist the reflexive postmodern dismissal of traditional values, AND also to sometimes question the blind adherence to convention.

If I took for granted the “naturalness” and moral superiority of conventional marriage, with its views on fidelity, loyalty and responsibility I would impart this bias into my client relationships, which is precisely what many marriage counsellors do.

Who am I to say that someone is bound to remain in relationship with someone else for their entire life because they made an extreme but socially encouraged pact when they were twenty years old? Come to think of it, where else do we find such contracts in our culture? Where else do we say “No matter what happens for the rest of your life, you are bound to this agreement that restricts who you love, who you have sex with and virtually every other aspect of your life.” Even the most extreme business arrangements typically have a renegotiation clause, or some mechanism to ensure ongoing mutual benefit.

Whatever the benefits of toughing it out through an agreement we made two or twenty or fifty years ago – and there are many – there can also be benefits to changing or ending the agreement. When a woman comes to counselling and says “My marriage is a misery. I want to change it but my husband refuses to even discuss our relationship with me. We haven’t had sex in six years and he won’t talk about it. I don’t want to die without being held again…” shall I remind her of the vows she made twenty-five years ago and give her a pep talk on loyalty and fidelity? Do I know better than she about her experience? Does marriage?

Perhaps we’re being called to rethink this institution of marriage that we’ve inherited. I recently met someone who agreed to a five year marriage with a renewal option. They’ve been going for twenty and are now adding some unconventional clauses.

Thanks for responding to my article and for asking the questions that are on your mind. We live in a world of vast choices and infinite paradox. I lay no claim to “the truth” in all this, but I’m committed to exploring these complex topics.

All My Best,
Justice

Also read –
The surprising role of conflict in relationships – How the arguments that tear us apart also hold us together (Part 1)

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Campbell River Marriage Counselling Justice Schanfarber Trying to grow, fix, change, understand or save your marriage? I provide couples therapy, marriage counselling, coaching and mentoring to individuals and couples on the issues that make or break relationships – Sessions by telephone/skype worldwide. Email justice@justiceschanfarber.com to request a client info package. www.JusticeSchanfarber.com

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