SPARKY IN LOVE

The question that I want to ask myself is the following: Am I in love with my clients/students? While the question is easy to ask, the answer, as can be predicted is, perhaps, hopelessly complicated; but I will do the best that I can.

My initial answer to the question is, of course, “Yes,” but that is just the starting point. What is the nature of my love and what meaning do I attach to it?

First of all, and this is necessary to state, upfront, the love that I feel is not sexual although in some important ways there is a clear physiological component. Now, to be a bit vulgar for a minute, I do not get an erection and I do not have sexual fantasies toward my clients/students. In what way, then, do I have a physiological reaction? That question is easy to answer: I am aware of vasodilatation and an endocrine flood of neuropeptides. This, of course, heightens my emotional sensitivity, increases the illumination in the environment, (take that Rembrandt!) and, if I listen carefully, I can hear birds singing in the trees.(The Seasons, La Primavera, by Vivaldi)

In somewhat academic terms what I feel is not Limerence or, what can be called. “A crush.” What, then, am I talking about?

I now have to invoke my atypical definition of celibacy as follows:

CELIBACY: An expanding awareness of universal inter- relatedness. The refinement of practicing celibacy leads a person to the depths of human ambiguity, desire, pain, passion and the light. Power and control over one's self are the issues. Individual celibate striving must wrestle with the interaction of sex and aggression in the deepest level of the psyche. Transformation of these forces into productive love is gradually, but inevitably marked by radical self-knowledge, self-confrontation, and self- honesty. Since no desire is unacknowledged, the true celibate emerges with a sense of universal identification: in the words of the ancients, with humility. In psychoanalytic terms, where the id was, there is ego.

Paraphrased from Richard Sipe: Sex, Priests and Power,Brunner/Mazel, 1995.

My love then comes closer to words like Caritas or, perhaps more closely with Agape. (altruistic love)

Now, to answer the offstage chorus of the yapping professional mental health jackals, I am comfortable with protecting both my own boundaries and the boundaries of my clients/students.

Adding to the words of Richard Sipe, quoted above, in psychoanalytic terms, I have a nonpunitive superego who is my friend and who treats me gently with compassion so that guilt and shame are absent from the picture. As a result, these thoughts do not need to be repressed but can be brought right out into the open as I am now doing.

I hope that my words on this subject are not thought to be examples of prolixity or obfuscation. They were complicated to think about but, surprisingly, not hard to write about. (Go figure)