Some of the most destructive behaviors, commonplace in relationships, are those that people act out in an attempt to ward off loving responses from their partner. In The Ethics of Interpersonal Relationships, I wrote about the dynamics underlying this phenomenon, explaining why we often punish the very person who appreciates and acknowledges us for our positive qualities. The fact that our lover sees us in a way that does not correspond to the negative identity we formed early in life disturbs our psychological equilibrium. Unfortunately, many of us defend our inaccurate negative perceptions of ourselves and resist being viewed in a more positive light. On an unconscious level, we sense that if we were to accept love, the whole world, as we have known it, would be altered and we would no longer know who we are.

It is actually painful on an emotional level to see ourselves as better than we have always believed ourselves to be. In fact, challenging our negative identity arouses anxiety. However, most people react almost immediately and do something to put distance between them and their partner before the anxiety ever reaches conscious awareness. They tend to feel angry at the other person for “luring” them into a less defended position. Often they provoke their partner and induce him or her to criticize or depreciate them thereby confirming their negative identity.

The reasons we avoid love or retreat from a loving relationship can be traced to childhood. During the formative years, people internalize both positive and negative attitudes that their parents had toward them. They easily assimilate parents’ positive attitudes into their self-system; however, parents’ negative attitudes become a nonintegrated, alien part of the personality, the anti-self system. By the time people reach adulthood, most have formed defenses to protect the harsh point of view that now makes up a significant part of their self-image.

People’s intolerance of love and intimacy is not only based on the fear of being vulnerable and open to another person, but also on existential fears. Being close to another in a loving relationship makes us aware that life is precious, and that it will come to an end. When we embrace love, we embrace life; and in embracing life, we face death’s inevitability. When people experience the unique combination of love and sex in a committed, meaningful relationship, they feel that they have more to lose, and are poignantly aware of the fragility of the physical body and the preciousness of life. For this reason, many try to avoid such experiences. It appears that on an unconscious level, they fear being loved and valued because it does make them more vulnerable and aware of their mortality.

It is logical that when faced with pain and frustration in our developmental years, we formed psychological defenses to alleviate our discomfort and anxiety. Later, existential issues of aloneness and an awareness of our eventual demise added to our fears and contributed to a defensive denial of feeling. Paradoxically, the same defenses that helped us to survive the emotional pain of our childhood are not only maladaptive in adulthood and limit our potential for living a full life, but they also lead to the unintentional acting out of harmful behaviors toward others, especially the people closest to us: our mates and our children.

One way that people alter a partner’s feelings is to hold back the personal qualities and behaviors that their partner was originally attracted to or especially loved and admired. The person being withheld from is left feeling emotionally hungry, confused, frustrated, and desperate, which leads to an exaggerated focus on the person who has created the distance through withholding. Ultimately, patterns of withholding practiced by one partner can effectively change the other person’s positive feelings of love to hostility, anger or even worse, to indifference.

We don’t usually think in terms of human rights issues when considering what is at play in interpersonal relationships. However, family researchers have observed that people tend to commit the most egregious human rights violations in their closest, most intimate associations. We are guiltyof such violations when someone’s love challenges our negative self-concept, and, in our desperation to defend ourselves, we disrespect their feelings and use means that are hurtful to push them away.

My associates and I have developed a powerful therapy technique, which we refer to as Voice Therapy, to identify and challenge negative or unethical behavior in interpersonal relationships. The procedures identify the source of most personal problems by revealing a partially conscious system of self critical and hostile attitudes that people harbor towards themselves and others. In this therapy, clients learn to recognize their negative internal dialogue, and then take action against its being lived out destructively. They develop a more objective and realistic self-concept and build up their tolerance for love in intimate relationships. In becoming aware of the underlying threat to their sense of well being and to their feeling for others, people can learn to live by an implicit morality that is basically humane and respectful of each person’s individual rights.

Robert W. Firestone, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist, author, theorist and artist. He is the Consulting Theorist for the non-profit,The Glendon Association. He is author of many books including Voice Therapy, The Fantasy Bond, Compassionate Child-Rearing, Fear of Intimacy and Beyond Death Anxiety among others. He has published more than 30 professional articles and chapters for edited volumes, and produced 35 video documentaries. His art can be viewed on www.theartofrwfirestone.com.

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In 1989, when the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a public report stating that up to a third of all teen suicides were committed by gay youth, there was a flurry of media attention and speculation surrounding the rising rates of teen suicide committed by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered youth. It was suggested that the data indicated that these young people were suicidal because of their sexual orientation.

Where a university study published in the American Journal of Public Health reported that “homosexual or bisexual junior high boys are 7 times more likely than heterosexual boys of the same age to report suicide attempts,” the same study reported that among teenage girls, homosexuality and bisexuality are not significant factors in suicide attempts, suicidal thoughts, or suicidal intentions. These findings make it clear that sexual orientation does not predispose an individual to suicidal thoughts or actions.  They found that factors such as verbal and physical harassment, substance abuse, or isolation from peers for being sexually “different” contribute to their high rates of suicide.

New research reveals that rising rates of suicide in LGBT young adults has less to do with their “minority sexual orientation” status, and everything to do with the social stigma and negative societal responses that LGBT teens face on a daily basis as a result of gender expression outside our accepted norms. Consistent research over the past few years has shown that LGBT youths are disproportionately bullied, and that the effects of that bullying increase a risk of suicide that continues into adulthood.

The media has played a large part in establishing our cultural misconceptions about incidents of suicide among sexual minorities by publicizing isolated cases of bullying related LGBT suicides. The media has to act responsibly in their reporting to not imply that suicide is a natural response among LGBT teens to bullying and thereby perpetuate misperceptions of this minority group. They must be careful not to emphasize details that could actually increase the contagion of risk.

In truth, the circumstances and conditions that lead an individual to commit suicide are extremely complex. However, with LGBT youth, understanding the dynamic of societal and familial conditions that are consistent among reported incidents of suicide or attempted suicide in this group is crucial for prevention. It is our culture’s intolerance of homosexuality, which is often violent, that leads many teens to consider suicide, and an alarming number to take their own lives. The popular assumption that an LGBT individual is inherently at risk for suicide is evidence of our culture’s inability to understand or accept differences in sexual orientation or sexual expression. Our intolerance is reflected in the incidents where these people are targeted and bullied because of their perceived sexual orientation or because they do not conform to accepted gender expectations. In being seen as different and as challenging a societal norm, they are often ostracized and discriminated against. Therefore, in our investigation into the higher rate of suicide among LGBT adolescents, we should not look to them for the cause, but to ourselves and our stigmatization of them because we perceive them as “different from us.”

By: Madeline Romero

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Read an exclusive interview with Father Greg Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, the largest gang intervention group in the country.

What Homeboy Industries Does:

My name is Greg Boyle, I’m the Executive Director and Founder of Homeboy Industries, located in Los Angeles, the largest gang intervention program in the country. We serve about 12,000 people a year, 8,000 of them are gang member from 800 different gangs from all over L.A. County. They come here looking for one thing, and they probably discover other things on our menu of services. They might come to get tattoos removed. We have two laser machines, 12 doctors, 4,000 treatments a year. We have 4 job-developers trying to find jobs in the private sector. We run 5 businesses, where enemy rival gang members work side by side with each other.

So we’re big. We’ got about 400 employees or trainees, and um, anger management, all sorts of classes, mental health services you name it we do it, legal services, housing services.  So that’s who we are, you know, it’s a kind of rehab or recovery place. It’s not for those who need help, it’s for those who want help.

You know, Scripture scholars always say that throughout history and Scripture that the principle suffering of the poor is shame and disgrace. It’s not their inability to feed their families or buy Pampers. It’s shame and disgrace. And so you have to reach in and dismantle those messages of shame and disgrace and replace them with the truth. And the truth is good. It’s always good.

And so they have to redefine themselves. What happens here at Homeboy Industries, which is a therapeutic community really (is that) people get held. So they come in here and they rediscover the first attachment that was denied them when they were infants really. And so it’s delayed.  And they discover that secure base, is what psychologists will call it. And they start to feel soothed, and comforted, and ready, and resilient.

Then they can move out into the world and face whatever the world is going to hand them. So um this place kind of offers that. Alot of them come from a place of insecure, an insecure base, or problems of attachments. And that’s almost always what’s happened with them.

That’s why it’s not just a job here. We can locate jobs for folks. But when they come here they get the full package, which is loving, caring adults, who pay attention. It’s unconditional. There’s a “no matter whatness” to it, so no matter what you do we’re going to be in your corner.

And then they’re part of this family, and then it gives you what you need to kind of move on. And then you re-identify, you start to say “oh, that’s what a man looks like… that’s what courage looks like… that’s what a father ought to be.” They kind of don’t know that because they don’t have uh road signs, you know.

Prevention is key to preventing violence, we need “all hands on deck.”

Gangs a symptom, hopeful kids don’t join gangs, we need to offer an exit ramp from this gang fwy:

A lot of times people rarify this thing and they absent themselves, or say there’s nothing they can do to contribute positively to this issue. Well, all hands on deck — I think everybody needs to help as best they can. It’s an enormously complex social dilemma, so we need to be reverent of its complexity. And many things need to happen. Everything from mentoring to after-school programs, to keeping schools open, to offering an exit ramp from this craziness of this gang freeway. You want to allow them to get off, and to, to exit a previous kind of life.

You know, everybody acknowledges now that you do prevention, intervention and suppression. And you have to do all three um, but you want to do them with equal vigor and equal allocation of resources. We’re not there yet. Especially in intervention, as I understand it to mean.

If prevention is say under 14 kids who aren’t in gangs, how to you want to keep it that way. So you do all the things that you do, from mentoring and helping kids. But intervention is 14 and up, kids who have regrettably found their way into a gang. Now what do you do and how do you help them?

And they’re a tougher sell because society is into demonizing sometimes, and so it’s hard for them to see that these young men and women belong to us. But they do. And that’s, demonizing is always untruth. So we belong to each other, there is no us and them, there’s just us.

And so these are the kinds of things that have to happen first. Nobody, not even cops, say we can arrest our way out of this issue. In fact they always say the opposite. And then they proceed to (try to) arrest their way out of this issue.

Then they proceed to do everything that’s required.  And so, you know, law enforcement will do intervention, law enforcement will do prevention, and I think that’s a bad thing frankly. I think law enforcement shouldn’t do what the community can, because you want to engage more and more stakeholders, not fewer. You know, you want churches and schools and psychologists and therapists and people who can just mentor. You want them to show up.

Society is not telling law enforcement, “please solve this problem, let us know when it’s solved.” They (law enforcement) have one small piece. And then prison, you know, as a deterrent. Gosh, it’s not much of a help, although we’ve added rehabilitation to the title now. But we prepare prisoners for nothing. Nothing awaits them when they return to the community, we’ve lost our right to be surprised that California has the highest recidivism rate in the country. So we need to rethink this. But programs and education and training are the very first things that’re cut when they need to cut prison budgets.  So that’s where we are, regrettably.

So it’s crazy. It’s costly in human lives, it’s costly in resources and money that we don’t have. And so you’d be far better off, in supporting, say, Homeboy Industries,  because it’s not for nothing in Los Angeles County the gang-related homicide rates have been cut in half and then half again, since 1992. And that’s as long as we’ve been around, and lots of programs, like ____, Communities and Schools, A Place Called Home, ___, and L.A. Conservation Corps — these are all, the people decided to do comprehensive services. And it’s worked and there’s proof. Nobody would ever suggest that law enforcement is the reason, because, nor could you suggest that we’re the solitary reason. We’re part of the reason why gang-related homicides have been cut in half and then some.

So all hands on deck, everybody needs to be involved, we belong to each other, and we all need to seek together to create a community of kinship such that God might recognize it.

What drives a person to join a gang? “Kids are never seeking (when they join a gang) they are always fleeing.”

So gang violence is not a problem it’s a symptom, it points beyond itself to all sorts of things that we need to address, from poverty to despair to racism. So nobody’s ever met a hopeful kid who joined a gang. Because hopeful kids don’t join gangs. So if you know that, then you’re going to try to infuse kids with hope and try to identify kids for whom hope is foreign. No kid is ever seeking anything when they join a gang. People always think that, that’s sort of the outsider’s view. Kids are always fleeing something, and so that’s what you want to address.

What are they fleeing? I can remember once being at a high school packed gym with kids, and I had a Homie with me who started to tell his story. And I knew parts of his story. He was about 27 years old, had been in prison, gang member. And he starts to talk and all of a sudden he stops, and he says,  “I think I was 7, I was playing with matches, and my Mom caught me and she dragged me into the kitchen, and she turned on that electric coil on top of the stove. And she put my hand down on the coil and she held it there for a really long time.”

Well, when he says this, the whole high school gym audience gasped. And then he said, “All I remember is waking up in the middle of the night and my hand was in the toilet water trying to seek relief because my hand was all pus-y and red. And severely burned.” Then the gasp again. And then he looks out at them and he said, “That’s why I joined the gang.”

And I thought it was brilliant, I thought here he had come to a sense of his connection, that nobody joins a gang, you know, “join a gang and see the world.” I don’t care what they tell you. They may tell you, “Wow, that’s what I wanted to be, they had the fast cars and the money and the women.” Don’t believe it for a second. I don’t care if a gang member is saying that. Every gang member is fleeing something and that’s why they gravitate in that direction.

There is no pull factor, there’s nothing that draws, attracts. There’s only push factors, whatever pushes this kid into that environment.

Father Boyle addresses the factors that contribute to a kid leading a life of violence, “A kid who is in pain is going to inflict pain.”

Well, I think, you know, again, a kid who is in pain is going to inflict pain, so you have to look, and I try to identify the kids who are hopeless, despondent, unable to imagine a future for themselves.  If a kid can’t imagine a future then their present isn’t compelling. And if their present doesn’t compel them, they won’t care whether they inflict harm, and they won’t care whether they duck to get out of harm’s way, that’s how it works. So you can’t scare any kid straight, because if a kid has stopped caring, it won’t work. You can care a kid straight, through care and loving attention you can get them to a place where they start to recognize the truth of who they are. That they’re exactly what God had in mind when God made them.

And then you watch them as they become that truth, as they inhabit that truth and that’s the most powerful thing in the world.

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“What is going on in me, and why can’t I Stop Reacting” by Diane Renz, LPC.

When we are triggered emotionally, it can all feel sort of choiceless; like we have lost control of ourselves. Even if we have the awareness of our reaction, it is difficult to stop our emotional response, because the nervous system, the brain, the memory centers are all interacting.

Our learned style of relating
Most often our emotional language relationally stems from our earliest attachment styles. If you have had a fairly consistent caregiver who was attuned to your needs, you have what is termed “secure attachment.” When struggles occur in your relationships as an adult, you are able to remain in connection and work through the difficulty. If, however, your early caregiver was inconsistent, either too intrusive or unavailable, your attachment style might be “anxious” or “avoidant” as a child and termed “preoccupied” or “dismissive” as an adult.

People with a dismissive style have a withdrawing quality that implies the lack of trust that anyone will be there for them; they do it themselves, it’s not that big a deal anyway. This person has hard time forming and keeping relationships. Dismissive style relies on the thinking brain and logic.

People with a preoccupied style go toward relationships all the time out of anxiety and uncertainty, anxious to talk and make sure everything is okay. They look for validation and feel they can’t do anything on their own; they are nothing without someone. Preoccupied style relies on the emotional brain.

There is another attachment style category, called “unresolved.” This is relative to traumatic events occurring during childhood, which could be a complicated death or direct physical abuse, incest, etc., and lead to very erratic and chaotic interactions with others. Unresolved style relies on the primal brain, relative to assessing for safety in the environment, a survivalistic hyperarousal of the fight or  flight mechanism.

How our brains respond
Our “M.O.,” our consistent fallback approach when stress or conflict arise in a relationship, happens in rapid-fire motion. We are “reacting” versus “responding,” and the basic difference between the two has to do with two different areas of our brains. Reactivity arising out of the emotional center (Limbic), and responsiveness, from our reasoning center (cortex). When we get triggered, our brains lose connection, go offline so to speak in our higher functioning reasoning cortex. The task is to reconnect the lines between the limbic/emotional and the executive/cortex.

That process begins with awareness of body sensation apart from the story content of “he said, she said.” By attuning to your internal somatic senses, “I notice my racing heart, the tightening in my stomach, I can feel my rapid breath…,” focal attention redirects the brain and allows the pause necessary to bring forth the possibility of changing the repeated past pattern of always doing such and such. The interactive loop between body sensation, nervous system, brain, emotion, thoughts/beliefs, behavior is constantly occurring, and we can learn how to intercede on any level to form new memory and thus, new reaction.

The past is not in the past if we have not integrated the memory. The memory center of our brain includes Explicit and Implicit Memory. Explicit memory is the awareness of the facts and reality of an event as it happened in the past. However, implicit memory involves the activation of our sensations, feelings, perceptions, bodily actions, mental models at the time of the event (generalized frame of understanding experience), as well as our priming to react (nervous system ready to respond to similar experience). Implicit memory enters our nervous system without our even being aware of it. It is the first layer of memory processing, and is all we have until the age of 18 months. To integrate an implicit memory into the conscious, factual past of explicit memory requires an area of the limbic/emotional brain called the hippocampus.

Learning to react differently when triggered Our emotional responses, or “language,” when we are relating, points toward our implicit memory triggers. We need to begin to intercede from a somatic or body level, which can then re-inform the emotion, then re-inform the thought perception, and then change the need to act on the urge toward old patterns of behavior.

When we get triggered and are reminded of the past unresolved issues, our body signals to us the experience of the past as if it is happening now. Take the example of a partner not responding to us; it reminds us of how our father didn’t listen and ignored us; we feel the same sinking feeling in the stomach, the same feelings of anxiety, frustration and hurt rise, the negative self perception of worthlessness begins the loop of negative self talk. Our bodily action or behavior might be to get angry and yell. Our mental model might look like: men = abandonment, and our priming might be to utilize past information to ready us to take action to protect ourselves. However, if we resist these familiar reactions, and “re-inform” with a new mental model and new sensory experience, the new relational interaction, both externally and internally, will create new a memory.

Once we begin to understand the sanity of our insanity, that our brain/bodies, mind/hearts, are trying to keep us safe, we can then inquire into the data in our memory banks, find out how relevant they are, and begin the slow journey back to a more compassionate, conscious interaction with our reactiveness. By learning how to cultivate awareness beyond  basic memory and survival, we can expand the possibility to relate to our inherent safety, belonging, and connectedness.

Diane Renz, a licensed psychotherapist, founder of Your Gateway to Healing, writer, workshop facilitator, utilizes both her academic background and personal experiences to explore how pain can become our possibility. She currently studies with Dr. Dan Siegel integrating the latest scientific understandings on neuroscience and Mindfulness within her work. For more information feel free to visit www.yourgatewaytohealing.com.

Copyright 2011 Diane Renz, L.P.C., Your Gateway to Healing, Inc.

To read more from this author, visit her bio page:

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Strong communication is often said to be at the core of a solid relationship. But for communication to exist, these qualities must not.

It’s sensible to imagine that when two people truly like each other, they’re willing to listen to each other’s struggles and stories, and respond with interest and compassion. But, very often, other elements are at play that prevent a smooth exchange between couples. For one thing, people are emotional creatures. We all get hurt, suspicious, mistrusting and frustrated more than we’d like. Because of how we have learned to process and adapt to emotional experiences, our responses to current situations are often based on past occurrences. Though it may seem at times like an act of self-defense, principle or even psychological survival, engaging in these techniques only leads us to become more and more alienated and estranged from those we wish to keep the closest. To achieve real intimacy, integrity and lasting love in a relationship, it is important to identify and avoid the following killers of communication.

Intimidation

One of the most effective techniques that couples use to manipulate, control and punish each other is intimidation. Many couples report that the behaviors they are most intimidated by are not those that are overt and aggressive but rather the subtle, covert behaviors that leave them feeling guilty and responsible for their partner’s unhappiness. During a conversation, where one partner responds by being miserable, self-hating or self-destructive, it is virtually impossible for the other partner not to submit. The conversation is over; the intimidating partner has won.

The truth is that both members of the couple have suffered disastrous defeats. The dictionary says that to intimidate “implies reduction to a state where the spirit is broken or all courage is lost.” This certainly defines the emotional state of the partner who has been frightened into submission. But the cost to the intimidating person is also high. When we employ intimidation, whether consciously or unconsciously, we must forfeit our autonomy, leaving our spirit broken and courage lost. At these times we are inclined to feel critical toward our partner for their weakness in submitting to us and critical of ourselves for acting out in a manipulative manner.

Parental or childish styles of communicating

It’s important to watch out for ways that you might be communicating from a childish or parental stance. Whether or not we like it, we developed our communication skills in the families we grew up in. Even though we try to relate differently, it is easy to fall into our old familiar, negative patterns. Childish communication can involve deferring and submitting, looking for direction or definition, being servile or subservient, seeking approval or criticism. Parental communication can involve directing and dominating, being condescending and aggressive, acting judgmental and critical. None of these qualities has a place in the communication between two independent adults in an equal relationship. When you communicate, be aware of falling into old, familiar roles, the disapproving parent or the rebellious child. These are not true representations of who you are or who your partner is. When you speak to each other, be respectful of both yourselves and one another.

Non-verbal communication

Non-verbal communication refers to how one’s body language contributes to the process of communicating feelings and reactions. Non-verbal communication doesn’t have to be seen as a negative form of communicating. On the contrary, it can be very helpful in trying to understand what a person is saying.

Sometimes what a person says does not coincide with what they are communicating non-verbally. These mixed messages often cause confusion. When this is the case, you have to acknowledge both messages, even though they conflict. Then you can decide which one more accurately communicates what the person is thinking or feeling. Often the non-verbal message is more truthful.

In couple relationships, partners often give mixed messages. One may say “I love you” while acting indifferent and unaffectionate. Many of us may declare interest and concern about our partners, but whenever our partners talks about themselves, we interrupt or become distracted. Pay attention to what your actions are saying. Make your actions and words match. In other words, be truthful in how you communicate both verbally and non-verbally.

In this clip from our exclusive interview series with relationship expert Dr. Pat Love,  this fundamental issue behind broken relationships and staying connected is addressed.

PsychAlive is excited to present a guest expert webinar with relationship expert Dr. Pat Love: “Keeping Relationships Strong in the Age of Social Media” Click Here to read more and register today!

Related Articles:
Understanding Fear of Intimacy
Where Does Our Love Go?
The Fantasy Bond
How Do I Know if I Have a Fantasy Bond?

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The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Plata on May 23 ordering the state of California to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 (from more than 140,000 to 110,000 inmates) over the next two years has received headlines, editorials and letters to the editor in newspapers around the country, as it should have. But since both the reasons for this decision, and its likely consequences, are easily misunderstood, and its historical implications are not widely appreciated, many fallacious comments about it are already widespread, both among the general public and even in the dissents penned by the four Supreme Court Justices who disagreed with the majority opinion. For that reason, as a psychiatrist with more than forty years’ experience in developing methods of violence prevention both in prisons and following the release of prisoners to the community, and whose testimony as an expert witness in this case was in agreement with what turned out to be the majority opinion of the Court, I would like to explain why this Supreme Court decision is a major, and very positive, historical event.

The main effect of this decision is to begin the process of undoing two of the most damaging and destructive mistakes that have been made in American life in the past half century, one in our criminal justice system, and the other in our mental health system. The mistake in our criminal justice system is the failed experiment in social engineering called “mass incarceration,” as a result of which the U.S. now has a higher rate of imprisonment than we have ever had before in our history, and more than any other country on earth, with rates ten times higher than any European country’s, and even higher than the most repressive police states, such as Iran, Syria, Russia and China. The mistake in our mental health system has been our failed “de-institutionalization” of the mentally ill in America, which would more appropriately be called “trans-institutionalization,” since a majority of the mentally ill have merely been transferred from the failed mental hospitals of the past into the even worse prisons of the present.

But let me first emphasize that the Supreme Court did not justify its decision on the ground that its purpose was to undo those two mistakes, which only legislatures can do. Rather, they ordered the state of California to reduce the overcrowding in its prisons because that was an urgent matter of life and death that violated the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” The severity and consequences of the overcrowding in California’s prisons had caused not merely a problem in living conditions; it had caused a problem in dying conditions. Even as the litigation was going on, solid documentation from the prisons showed that one California prisoner was dying every five to six days from preventable but untreated medical and psychiatric causes, and that the provision of adequate medical and mental health care was impossible when the prisons were so overcrowded that even the doctors’ offices and infirmaries had to be used as bedrooms. This failure to provide necessary medical care amounted to inflicting a de facto death penalty on each prisoner who died as a result.

Nevertheless, even though the express purpose of the Supreme Court’s decision was not to remedy the mistakes I summarized above, I think it is important to recognize that the effects and implications of this decision — its side-effects, if you will — could be to begin the process of correcting the historic errors to which I will devote the remainder of this article.

To deal with the criminal justice and penal systems first: During the first three quarters of the twentieth century the rate of imprisonment in the United States was essentially unchanged, at roughly 100 prisoners (plus or minus twenty) per 100,000 population. Beginning in the mid-1970s, after President Nixon declared wars on both “Crime” and “Drugs,” we began for the first time in our history escalating our incarceration rate uninterruptedly from year to year, so that we now have a rate of more than 700 per 100,000 population.

For the first three quarters of the twentieth century, before we began increasing the rate at which we put people into prison and kept them there, the rate of violent crime in our society increased and decreased from one time period to another, completely independently of the imprisonment rate.

For example, before we began the orgy of mass incarceration, murder rates in America increased to epidemic levels on two occasions, beginning in 1904 and 1921, and then decreased back to normal (endemic) levels without our making any changes in the incarceration rate.

Many people have had the mistaken impression that the era of “mass incarceration” that began after Nixon declared his “war on crime” was responsible for the ending of a third murder epidemic that began in 1970, Nixon’s second year in office, and did not end until 1997, Clinton’s fifth year in office (by which time the majority of new prisoners had for many years been men who had never committed a violent crime in their lives, let alone one as serious as murder). But even a cursory review of the relationship between imprisonment and murder will suffice to show that the theory that the increase in imprisonment led to the decrease in murder is contradicted by the facts. Let me explain.

In 1970, when our imprisonment rate was still about 100 per 100,000 Americans, exactly where it had been for the first three quarters of the century, our age-adjusted murder rate was 8.3. By 1985 our imprisonment rate had doubled, to about 200 per 100,000. What was our murder rate then? Still 8.3 per 100,000. By 1996 our imprisonment rate had doubled again, to about 400 per 100,000. What was our murder rate then? Absolutely unchanged, at 8.3 per 100,000.

In other words, the doubling and even re-doubling of our imprisonment rate did not make the slightest dent in our murder rate. As the National Academy of Sciences concluded in 1994, after reviewing the relationship between the imprisonment rate and the murder rate, these figures are inconsistent with the claim that increased imprisonment has any demonstrable effect in reducing the murder rate. In fact, as the Supreme Court commented in the majority opinion in Plata v. Brown, there is considerable evidence that the over-use and overcrowding of our prisons may do more to increase the rate of violence, both in our prisons and our communities, than to reduce it. For prisons have been known for centuries as “schools for crime” — I would call them “graduate schools.” And my own first-hand observations of prisons and prisoners over the past 40 years has convinced me that the most effective way to turn a non-violent man into a violent one is to send him to prison – which is exactly what we have been doing for the past 35 years.

Between 1993 and 2000 the murder rate in America underwent a sudden, steep and uninterrupted reduction from 10.5 per 100,000 to 6.4, which ended the murder epidemic from which we had been suffering since 1970. What changes in our society could have had such a dramatic and rapid effect on the murder rate? It was not the mass incarceration policy, since we had been following that approach since the mid-1970s with not a single year’s decrease below epidemic levels of 8 to 11. Beginning in 1993, however, Clinton’s first year in office, the murder rate for the first time since 1933 began a steep and uninterrupted year by year decline, beginning at 10.5 in 1993, falling below 8 by 1997, and bottoming out at 6.4 by 2000, his last year in office (following which, under Bush Jr., it began once again increasing).

To explain why this occurred, we need to know what changes in society have been shown to increase or decrease the murder rate. The three best-documented ones are these: the rate and duration of unemployment; the frequency, depth and duration of recessions and depressions; and the degree of social and economic inequality in income and wealth, i.e., the size of the gap between the rich and the poor, or in other words, the degree of relative poverty. Clearly, these three groups of socio-economic variables are closely related to each other, they tend to vary together and reinforce each other. When any one of them has increased, the U.S. murder rate has increased, and when any of them has decreased, the murder rate has decreased – from 1900, when the U.S. first began measuring death rates by cause each year, to 2007, the last year for which we have comparable data.

Thus we have an answer to our mystery. The murder rate reached the lowest level in thirty years by Clinton’s last years in office not because of mass incarceration, but because that is when the rate and duration of unemployment reached the lowest levels in thirty years; both minimum and median wages increased in real terms for the first time in thirty years; the “negative income tax,” the Earned Income Tax Credit, which many economists have cited as the most rapid and effective method of reducing poverty and inequality that we have yet invented, was much increased by Clinton, who defeated Republican efforts to abolish it entirely; the nation experienced the longest uninterrupted economic expansion in its history, with not a single month of recession; and the percentage of families in the demographic groups most vulnerable to homicide (African-Americans and Latinos) whose incomes were below the poverty line reached the lowest level since those figures first began being measured .

In other words, if we want to be safe from the most serious forms of violent crime, mass imprisonment is unnecessary, ineffective and a huge waste of taxpayers’ money, not to mention that it threatens to turn us into a police state rather than the “land of the free” that we like to advertise ourselves as to the rest of the world. And to the extent that it has any effect at all on murder rates, that may only be to increase and prolong the epidemics of murder by subjecting the millions of men who are sent to prison (90 per cent of whom will return to the community within a few years) to the most powerful causes of violence, namely, the humiliation, degradation and brutalization to which prison life exposes them.

If mass imprisonment is so ineffective and even counter-productive as a means of reducing the level of violence in our society (which is ostensibly its main purpose), why did we institute it? And why only in the mid-1970s? The answers are distressingly clear. It was not because our murder rate had increased to unprecedented heights. Our murder rate had been as high or higher than it was in 1970 (8.3 per 100,000) during almost every year between 1904 and 1935, and yet we did not increase our imprisonment rate during those years, and in fact brought the murder rate down again to sub-epidemic levels every time we improved economic equality and well-being — as we did during the administrations of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. So an elevated murder rate is neither necessary nor sufficient to bring about an elevated imprisonment rate, and an elevated imprisonment rate is neither necessary nor sufficient to bring about a decline in the murder rate.

The same is true of the serious “index” crimes in general. Mass incarceration is not the result of, or a response to, an increase in violent crime, for such crimes had increased before 1975 without eliciting any increase in imprisonment, and had decreased without any need for increased imprisonment. But what is true is that the rate of incarceration per crime increased. During the last quarter of the twentieth century the rate of incarceration per crime in state and federal prisons increased five-fold, from 21 per 10,000 index crimes in 1975 to 105 in 1999. In other words, the penal system became five times as punitive, even when we hold the crime rate constant.

So what was unique about 1970-71, when the “wars” on crime and drugs were declared, was not an unprecedented spike in the murder rate. What was unique about it was that this was the era in which the Republican party realized that there was a “white backlash” against the most far-reaching civil rights bills (of 1964 and 1965) since the constitutional amendments that ended slavery after the Civil War, and that they could benefit from that politically if they could find some way to diminish the degree of racial equality those bills promised, and re-institute white supremacy. As Loic Wacquant, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has pointed out, this was hardly a new development in the history of American racism. After the Civil War and its aftermath ended slavery, the South re-instituted racial hierarchy and white supremacy by means of a whole series of tactics: poll taxes and “literacy tests” to limit the black vote; tenant-farming systems, to limit black land-ownership and economic equality; “Jim Crow” laws and segregation to end any possibility of social equality; segregated schools, to end any possibility of educational equality; and regular lynching “parties” — and they were parties, celebrated with picnics by whole families, including young children, who sent postcards with photographs of the murders to their friends and relatives – in which blacks were tortured, castrated, burned alive and hanged, with the full knowledge and collusion of local “law enforcement” authorities, in order to terrorize the black population into abandoning any hope of equality with whites.

I mention these distasteful details in order to remind you that it would be almost impossible to exaggerate the emotional power of racism in American history. As the Civil War demonstrated, white southerners by the millions were so driven by this fever that they did not hesitate to kill as many Yankees as possible, and even to sacrifice their own lives by the hundreds of thousands in their zeal to defend slavery and white supremacy. By the late 1950s racists in the South and the North, from governors and sheriffs and policemen to ordinary citizens, were still so blinded by race hatred that they risked the death penalty and life imprisonment in order to terrorize and kill as many black children and civil rights workers as possible. For millions of Americans, racial prejudice was not just an “attitude,” it was a holy cause that they valued more than their own lives or those of others, both of which they were more than willing to sacrifice in that cause. To speak of this as a kind of “mass psychosis” is hardly an exaggeration.

The modern Democratic party first began fighting against these forms of racial discrimination when President Truman integrated the armed services in the late 1940s. This prompted the beginning of a renewed white backlash against racial equality, leading the Southern Democratic Senator Strom Thurmond to leave that party and form a third one, the “Dixiecrat” party, and run for president against Truman, in an attempt to prevent him from gaining the white southern Democratic vote. (Thurmond, like virtually the entire southern congressional delegation, which had been uniformly Democratic ever since the South lost the Civil War to a Republican president, eventually became a Republican, in reaction against the modern Democratic party’s support of racial equality.)

The racists failed to defeat Truman, however, and suffered another defeat when the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously agreed on the 1954 de-segregation decision, Brown v. Board of Education (which was enforced, to his credit, by a Republican president, Eisenhower, and indeed was written by a Republican former governor of California, Earl Warren, who had been appointed Chief Justice by Eisenhower). But the last straw, for white supremacists, appeared to be Lyndon Johnson’s two landmark Civil Rights bills of 1964 and 1965 that outlawed segregation and guaranteed equal voting rights for blacks. This stimulated even more of a white backlash from politicians like George Wallace and Barry Goldwater, and in 1966 the Republicans made huge electoral gains in Congress and in governorships and state legislatures throughout the country (on such a large scale that some analysts described that election as the end of Johnson’s presidency). And in fact the Republicans, and the remaining Southern Democrats, were able to prevent any significant civil rights legislation from that time on.

When Nixon ran for President in 1968, he succeeded quite consciously in exploiting the anti-black (and hence anti-Democratic) sentiment in the country by means of coded language: as everyone knew, the “War on Crime” and the “War on Drugs,” on which he campaigned and which he and his political allies throughout the country succeeded in turning into law after his election, were code words for “War on Blacks” (and, I should add, for “War on the Poor” generally, including poor whites — although blacks, being even poorer and less powerful than poor whites, were actually the most deeply injured by these political strategies). And it was those “Wars” that led directly to the era of mass incarceration, as the only way to re-institute white supremacy after the previous ones — slavery, lynching, segregation, poll taxes, etc. — had been declared illegal.

Many facts about the history of mass incarceration are consistent with that interpretation. First, the proportion of blacks admitted to our state and federal prisons has nearly doubled since the incarceration rate began increasing from the mid-1970s on. For the first time in our history, more than half of the men being sent to our prisons are blacks, even though black men make up less than seven per cent of our adult population. In fact, the ethnic composition of our prisons has exactly reversed itself, from 70 percent white at mid-century to 70 percent black and Latino in 2000, even though there has not been any fundamental change in the patterns of criminal activity among those different ethnic groups.

Second, as the American Civil Liberties Union pointed out earlier this month, “despite the fact that whites engage in drug offenses at a higher rate than African-Americans, African-Americans are incarcerated for drug offenses at a rate that is 10 times greater than that of whites. …The racial disparities are staggering.” Since non-violent violations of the drug laws are the main “crimes” for which most people have been imprisoned for the past few decades, this clearly contributes to the disproportionate imprisonment of blacks.

Third, now that poll taxes, literacy tests and other means of disenfranchising blacks have been prevented by civil rights laws, the mass incarceration of blacks has made it possible for many states to deprive them of the right to vote, often for life, on the grounds that they are now convicted felons (even when the so-called “felony” is a non-violent and victimless violation of the drug laws, as it most often is) and that felons should not be allowed to vote. The result is that in any given year one black man in every seven is prevented from voting. Counting blacks and poor whites together, nearly four million Americans are legally forbidden to vote. Since blacks and the poor vote overwhelmingly more frequently for Democrats, it is clear which party benefits from this strategy.

Fourth, since a prison inmate cannot work at a job, and a former inmate often cannot find a job, the mass incarceration of blacks removes millions of blacks as potential competitors with whites for the jobs that are increasingly scarce for the members of both ethnic groups.

These are among the reasons that I agree with the many prominent social scientists, such as Loic Wacquant of Berkeley and Michelle Alexander of Ohio State (author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Imprisonment), that the main political function and purpose, and the only obvious reason, for the introduction of mass incarceration since the mid-1970s has to been to re-institute white supremacy, in a white (and Republican-supported) backlash against the success of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.

Many political scientists and historians have commented that the political transformation of the Southern states from Democratic to Republican was the most important political change in American politics in the twentieth century. It certainly was the main change that made it possible for Republican presidents to terminate the New Deal Consensus which since Roosevelt’s election in 1932 had kept Democrats in the White House for the next twenty years, and indeed for 28 of the next 36 years (1932-1968), and led to the most bi-partisan period in American political history. Even the one Republican president during that era, Eisenhower, supported the New Deal, with major expansions of social security and unemployment insurance. In fact, he did so enthusiastically and proudly, and commented that anyone, Republican or Democrat, who would not do the same was “stupid”.

However, all that changed with the elections of 1966 and, especially, 1968, when Nixon became the first Republican president in what became a quarter century of Republicans (with the single one-term exception of Carter, who did not interrupt the Republican juggernaut). In fact, from Nixon’s election to Obama’s, Republicans led the country for 28 of the following 40 years (1968-2008). So the policy of mass incarceration, and the white supremacy movement that it supported and was supported by, proved to be a politically effective strategy for those who felt mortally threatened by social, economic and racial equality. Only now that mass incarceration itself is threatening every state in the country with bankruptcy (for few social practices are more expensive than imprisoning people; as someone said, a year in jail would pay for a year in Yale), are we beginning to be able to reconsider whether we really want to spend so much money just to keep blacks and the poor “in their place.” Even the Supreme Court decision I am writing about here would not result in any decrease in the imprisonment rate if the state of California had sufficient money to build enough more prisons that the overcrowding in them could be diminished without reducing the prison population.

Now let us turn to the mistake we have made in the mental health system. Beginning in the 1960s the U.S. began a laudable endeavor to close down the gargantuan, overcrowded, understaffed, geographically isolated and anti-therapeutic state mental hospitals that had appropriately been nick-named “snake pits” (after a muck-raking novel and movie of the same name that exposed how horrific those travesties of treatment really were). Our mistake was that instead of replacing those madhouses with a comprehensive, humane and well-staffed network of group homes, half-way houses and mental health clinics and day-care centers, supplemented by the flexible use of small general and mental hospitals for those in need of briefer or more prolonged in-patient care, respectively, located near the families and in the neighborhoods from which the patients had come, as advocated by the original exponents of “de-institutionalization,” we simply closed down the so-called mental hospitals and discharged the patients to fend for themselves. As a result, most wound up either homeless, dead, an overwhelming burden to families unequipped to cope with them, or incarcerated in jails and prisons, often for eccentric but non-violent behaviors caused by their mental illnesses that were nevertheless unacceptable and disturbing enough to their neighbors to provoke judges to remove them from the community into the only available alternatives – prisons and jails.

As a result, our prisons and jails, which were originally intended for the punishment of criminals who had knowingly and intentionally harmed their neighbors, became our de facto mental health care system. As the psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey put it, the largest mental hospital in the country is now the Los Angeles Jail. And he is right: there are more mentally ill people there than in any mental hospital in the country (among the few that still exist). This is part of a phenomenon that another psychiatrist, Alan Stone of the Harvard Law and Medical Schools, has called the “expanding balloon” theory of deviance, namely, that in any given society there will be a certain number of people whose behavior makes them unacceptable to their neighbors, so they will be removed from the community into isolated institutions. Thus, if you close down enough mental hospitals and do not replace them with acceptable substitutes, the public may respond — and in the United States, has responded — to the eccentric behavior of some of those who are mentally ill by placing them in prisons and jails instead. One of the most shocking statistics about this phenomenon is that half a century ago the overall rate of removal from the community was almost exactly the same as it is today, except that then about 75 per cent of the institutionalized were in mental hospitals and only about 25 per cent in prisons and jails; whereas nowadays almost 95 per cent are in prisons and jails, and only 5 per cent in mental hospitals. One does not need to be a psychiatrist to realize that prisons are the worst possible places for the mentally ill, for reasons too obvious to need to be enumerated.

Thus the most wonderful consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision in Plata v. Brown may be that it will constitute the first step toward swinging the pendulum back from mass incarceration to the vastly more limited use of prisons as our last resort for protecting the community from the small number of truly violent and dangerous of our fellow citizens; and also that it will begin the job of swinging the pendulum back from the criminalization of mental illness by returning the mentally ill from prisons and jails back to the mental health system, where they belong. This could be our wake-up call, to remind us that we still have not built enough alternatives to the rightfully abandoned “snake pits.”

As we do that, it will also be appropriate, in my opinion, for us to recognize that among the mistakes we made when we got carried away by the “de-institutionalization” movement was to be overly optimistic about our ability to treat some of those with severe and intractable mental illnesses effectively enough that they can live, in a manner that is humane and safe both for them and for those among whom they live, outside of long-term in-patient mental hospitals. Clearly, such institutions should not become reincarnations of the old “snake pits.” They should be much smaller, and located as close as possible to the neighborhoods from which the patients come. But there are a few individuals — a small minority among those who are mentally ill, but each of whom is nevertheless a real human being whom we cannot in good conscience abandon to the tender mercies of the streets or the prisons — who are genuinely dangerous to themselves and/or others, and who can only manage to live in a manner that is safe both for them and for those around them when they are given round-the-clock care, supervision and treatment in a locked, secure in-patient hospital, and not just for a month at a time, as is all too often our current practice, but in some cases for years, which may in some cases constitute a lifetime — at least until our methods of treatment become more successful. But that is a reform that will need to take place within the mental health system itself, and while it may be stimulated by Plata v. Brown, it is at most implicit, not explicit, in the Supreme Court’s decision.

I realize that some people may wonder whether, among the California prisoners who will be returned to the community as a result of Plata v. Brown, aren’t those who suffer from major mental illnesses likely to be more dangerous than the “sane” prisoners? Fortunately, as I testified in my deposition, my “expert witness” report, and in my trial testimony, there is good evidence from a number of studies of this issue that lead to three relevant conclusions: First, that the mentally ill prisoners are actually less likely to commit violent offenses when they are returned to the community than those who are not mentally ill. Second, they are more likely to harm themselves, or to be harmed by someone else, than they are to harm others (both in prison and in the community). Third, that they are little more likely to harm anyone else than are their neighbors in the community who are not mentally ill. That of course does not mean that there are not some mentally ill prisoners (and non-prisoners) who are indeed very dangerous and who should remain in a maximum-security institutional setting, though preferably one that is a mental hospital, not a prison. Some mentally ill people commit homicides, just as some who are not mentally ill do. But that is no reason to discriminate against mentally ill prisoners as a class, or to fear them more than, or even as much as, those who are, according to our current diagnostic criteria, not mentally ill.

The Supreme Court’s decision acknowledges explicitly that the California prison system should make every effort to discriminate between those prisoners who are more dangerous and those who are less so as it makes its decisions concerning which prisoners to release to the community. But making those judgments is part of the every-day responsibilities of any prison system, even among those who remain in the prison, who are routinely and systematically classified as to their perceived level of dangerousness according to a whole set of established criteria.

Some years ago I wrote a psychiatric journal article called “The Last Mental Hospital.” It was about prisons, which had indeed become our last mental hospitals. In it I made the point that “the more things change, the more they remain the same.” What I meant was that in the early nineteenth century one of the greatest social reformers in our history, Dorothea Dix, toured the nation’s jails and found to her distress that the inmates included a large proportion of people who were mentally ill, not criminals. This inspired her, and she in turn inspired the nation, to remove the mentally ill from the jails, and to place them in small, humane mental hospitals. This resulted in what has been called the “moral treatment” era, which was the most successful and effective mental health system we have ever had. Unfortunately, by the late nineteenth century, after one wave of (non-Anglo-Saxon) immigrants after another provoked an ethnocentric, xenophobic reaction from the WASP majority, the moral treatment era was replaced by the “snake pit” era, which was in turn replaced by the “trans-institutionalization” era in which prisons have become, as I said above, the de facto mental health system. In other words, we have returned to exactly the same social pathology that Dorothea Dix diagnosed and cured, with most of the mentally ill members of our society in jails and prisons rather than in mental hospitals or reasonable alternatives in the community.

If we respond to the Supreme Court’s recent decision with good judgment, we will use it as an opportunity to further a new transition to the kind of mental health system that was originally envisioned and recommended by the original leaders of the deinstitutionalization movement that closed down the old snake pits. And that we will end the era of mass incarceration, and thereby move our country back from the brink of becoming one of the most repressive police states in human history. Our prison system is by no means as cruel and destructive as the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, but it is alarmingly similar to the system of apartheid in the pre-Mandela South Africa. For example, the incarceration rate of blacks in the US today is higher than it was in South Africa during the apartheid era. And it is also uncomfortably similar to the “Gulag Archipelago” of the former Soviet Union. That is why the great Norwegian criminologist, Nils Christie, sub-titled his book about America’s mass incarceration system, and the “prison-industrial complex” that both supports and is supported by it, as “Towards GULAGS, Western Style.” My hope is that this historic but narrowly divided five-to-four decision by the Supreme Court will remind us all how fragile and easily overwhelmed democracy, compassion, rationality and non-violence are, and will strengthen our determination to support those bedrock foundations of our lives together in this country.

James Gilligan, M.D., is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry in the School of Medicine, Adjunct Professor in the School of Law, and Collegiate Professor in the School of Arts and Science at New York University. He is a former president of the International Association for Forensic Psychotherapy. He is the author of Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, Preventing Violence: Prospects for Tomorrow, and the forthcoming Why Some Politicians Are More Dangerous Than Others. As a faculty member of the Harvard Medical School for many years, he headed the Institute of Law and Psychiatry, and directed mental health services for the Massachusetts prisons and prison mental hospital. He served as an expert witness in the litigation that was the subject of the Supreme Court decision in Plata V. Brown, to which this article is devoted.

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Its obituary has been announced internationally… in the plot of a thousand books, films, TV shows, articles and tabloids – the sad loss of the initial spark in a relationship. Disapproving wives on evening sitcoms make snide remarks at their lazy husbands. Movies depict failing marriages, worn by routine and destroyed over infidelities. The excitement that builds in the intoxicating plot of a sweet romantic comedy ruined by the tiny tragedies that incur in everyday life. Why does this happen? What turns two happy people into one miserable couple?

To many in the field of psychology, the answer is in the question. It is in this unfortunate fusion between two independent individuals that excitement is killed, identities are lost and routines are established in place of independence, passion and spontaneity. This process is what psychologist and author Dr. Robert Firestone describes as the “fantasy bond.”

A fantasy bond is established when real love, respect and camaraderie is replaced by an illusion of connection; when the substance of the relationship is replaced by the form. Couples are rarely aware of this transition, they just find themselves one day wondering where their love has gone.

To understand why a fantasy bond is formed, it is important to realize that most of us are afraid of real intimacy and closeness. It contradicts our negative feelings about ourselves and threatens our self-protective defenses. Being vulnerable to another person arouses anxiety and fear in us. At this point, we often escape into a fantasy of union to avoid relating on a deeper, more intimate level.

When a bond develops, the couple fails to distinguish between each other as separate individuals. They begin to show less respect for each other, offer more criticism and exhibit less affection, enthusiasm and support. They begin to substitute routines, roles and behaviors for real acts of warmth and kindness.

“As partners start to sacrifice their interests, friends, and other aspects of their independent functioning to become one half of a couple, their natural attraction to one another is jeopardized,” said Firestone. “Responses based on conventional form consist of the everyday routines, rituals, customs, cursory conversations, discussions of practical arrangements and other role-determined behaviors that support their illusion of still being in love. These more habitual responses gradually replace the real substance of the relationship–the genuine love, respect and affection.”

Society perpetuates the myth that love fades as a relationship matures—which leaves us resigned to accepting less than satisfying relationships. It is empowering to realize that this decline is not part of a natural process but the result of our having established a fantasy bond. When we recognize that we are responsible for destroying the intimacy in our relationship, we also recognize that it is within our power to reestablish it. We can go about identifying our harmful attitudes and behaviors that have been creating distance and animosity and consciously act against them.

We can identify ways that we have given up our individuality to create a fantasy of union and oneness. As we do, we can become aware of ways that we are disrespectful of the individuality and independence of our partners. We can stop expecting ourselves and our mates to live up to a fantasy of what love should be like and finally, appreciate one another as interesting individuals with distinct characteristics, each bringing unique and valuable qualities to the relationship.

Click here to learn more about “The Fantasy Bond”

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The Fantasy Bond: Structure of Psychological Defenses by Robert W. Firestone

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When the topic of infidelity spills into our daily dose of media, we may say we saw it coming, or we may react with shock. Either way, we don’t exactly look away. Without even meaning to, we learn details, names, sources and suspicions. Most of us would admit that there is little point in speculating about the ins and outs, agreements and lies, secrets and circumstances of a stranger’s affair, but our fascination with the indiscretions of others should tell us something about ourselves and the world around us.

It’s hard to deny that, as a society, there’s a lot to be examined about the ethics of our own relationships. In the United States, 45 to 55 percent of married women and 50 to 60 percent of married men engage in extramarital sex at some time during their relationship, according to a 2002 study published in Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy. Still, other studies reveal that 90 percent of Americans believe adultery is morally wrong. Infidelity is inarguably prevalent, yet it is extensively frowned upon. Given this discrepancy, it is important for every couple to address how they are going to approach the subject of fidelity and to examine the level of honesty and openness in their relationship.

Earlier this week I got a call from a well-known women’s magazine and was asked to explain when it is okay for a woman to lie to her partner. I declined answering the question, for one simple reason: it’s not! Since when did lying become okay? Lying to someone, especially someone close to us, is one of the most basic violations of a person’s human rights. Whatever one’s stance is on open versus closed relationships, the most painful aspect of infidelity is often the fact that someone is hiding something so significant from their partner. Two adults can agree to whatever terms of a relationship they like, but the hidden violation of the agreement is what makes an act a betrayal and an affair unethical. Thus, the real villain behind infidelity isn’t necessarily the affair itself, but the many secrets and deceptions built around the affair.

In the book “Sex and Love in Intimate Relationships,” I cited extensive research on the subject of infidelity and posed the following:

Deception may be the most damaging aspect of infidelity. Deception and lies shatter the reality of others, eroding their belief in the veracity of their perceptions and subjective experience. The betrayal of trust brought about by a partner’s secret involvement with another person leads to a shocking and painful realization on the part of the deceived party that the person he or she has been involved with has a secret life and that there is an aspect of his or her partner that he or she had no knowledge of.

Damaging another person’s sense of reality is immoral. While keeping a relatively insignificant secret from someone you’re close to diminishes that person’s reality, going to great lengths to deceive someone can actually make them question their sanity. It’s true that feeling an attraction or falling in love may be experiences that are out of our control, but we do have control over whether we act on those emotions, and being honest about taking those actions is key to having a relationship based on real substance.

As kids, we are taught that it is wrong to lie; yet as we get older, the lines tend to become increasingly blurred. This is especially the case when we are faced with the challenging conditions that come with intimate relationships. Too often, when we get close to someone, our innermost defenses come into play, and we unintentionally alter ourselves to “make it work.” The baggage we carry from our past weighs heavily on us, and we have trouble breaking free from old destructive habits and harmful modes of relating that distort both ourselves and our partners. When this happens, jealousy, possessiveness insecurity and distrust can cause us to warp and misuse our relationships.

Once a relationship becomes about compromising ourselves or denying who we are, we are no longer living in the reality of what the relationship is but in a fantasy of what we think a relationship should be. An example of this might be a woman whose boyfriend gets so jealous that he forbids her to be alone with other men. Another example may be a man whose partner feels so insecure that she demands to be constantly reassured of his love and attraction to her. Though these couples may go along behaving as if everything is OK, they’ll more than likely begin to resent one another and lose interest in the relationship. This type of restrictive situation can become a hotbed for dishonesty. The woman may lie about time alone she spent with a male friend or co-worker, or the man may lie about an attraction he is starting to feel for another woman.

When we treat our partners with respect and honesty, we are true not only to them but to ourselves. We can make decisions about our lives and our actions without compromising our integrity or acting on a sense of guilt or obligation. When we restrict our partners, we can compromise their sense of vitality, and we inadvertently set the stage for deception. This is not to say that people shouldn’t expect their partners to be faithful, but rather that couples should try to maintain an open and honest dialogue about their feelings and their relationship.

If our partners trust us enough to admit that they find someone else attractive, we might just be able to trust them enough to believe them when they say they won’t act on this attraction. The more open we are with each other, the cleaner and more resilient our relationships become. Conversely, the more comfortable we become with keeping secrets, the more likely we become to tell bigger and bigger lies.

When an affair occurs, denial is an act of deception that works to preserve the fantasy that everything is okay. Admitting that something is not okay or that you are looking for something outside the relationship is information that your partner deserves to know. Emotions sprung from deception (like suspicion and anger) can tear a relationship apart, but more importantly they can truly hurt another person by shattering their sense of truth.

Psychologist and author Shirley Glass wrote in her book “Not ‘Just Friends‘”:

Relationships are contingent on honesty and openness. They are built and maintained through our faith that we can believe what we are being told. However painful it is for a betrayed spouse to discover a trail of sexual encounters or emotional attachments, the lying and deception are the most appalling violations.

An ideal relationship is built on trust, openness, mutual respect and personal freedom. But real freedom comes with making a choice, not just about who we are with but how we will treat that person. Choosing to be honest with a partner every day is what keeps love real. And truly choosing that partner every day by one’s own free will is what makes love last. So while freedom to choose is a vital aspect of any healthy and honest union, deception is the third party that should never be welcome in a relationship.

Dr. Lisa Firestone, PhD, is the Director of Research and Education for The Glendon Association. Since 1987, she has been involved in clinical training and applied research in suicide and violence. In collaboration with Dr. Robert Firestone, her studies resulted in the development of the Firestone Assessment of Self-Destructive Thoughts (FAST) and the Firestone Assessment of Violent Thoughts (FAVT). Dr. Firestone has published numerous professional articles, and most recently was the co-author of the books: Sex and Love in Intimate Relationships (APA Books, 2006),Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice(New Harbinger, 2002), and Creating a Life of Meaning and Compassion: The Wisdom of Psychotherapy (APA Books, 2003).

Sex and Love in Intimate Relationships

by Robert W. Firestone, Lisa A. Firestone, Joyce Catlett

Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice: A Revolutionary Program to Counter Negative Thoughts and Live Free from Imagined Limitations
by Robert W. Firestone, Lisa Firestone, Joyce Catlett, Pat Love

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I scanned the sea of black-robed 20-somethings for my sister’s familiar face. As I glanced over each aisle, I noted the beaming expressions of the satisfied graduate students about to receive their Masters degrees in Journalism. When I finally caught a glimpse of my sister, I was glad to see that in spite of the 100 degree heat and jumbled instructions on the ceremony, she possessed the same calm and contented look as those around her.

I couldn’t help but think just how different this look was from the one she was sporting only weeks ago, when she was stressing over her workload and uttering all-too-familiar phrases of her student life such as:I’m not going to get everything done. I’m doing a horrible job. They hate my thesis. My grades are going to be terrible. I’m never going to get a job. Yet, in that moment, poised to receive her diploma, she felt her self-attacks subside, as her attitude shifted from “I can’t do it” to “I did it.”

I didn’t have long to ponder this transition, before the dean welcomed the honorary speaker, Arianna Huffington, to the stage. Within minutes, I watched Arianna’s dynamic and honest manner of speaking literally lift the flock of students a little higher in their folding chairs. But what struck me most in her speech was when she introduced her ambitious audience to the idea that each one of us has an obnoxious roommate living in our heads. This “roommate” is there to hold us back and tell us we are not good enough to succeed. Arianna explained how with every step forward, we should be wary of our obnoxious roommate, as it tends to become even more obnoxious, putting us down and warning us of potential failure.

Listening to her speech, I was impressed by the parallels between Arianna’s inspiring message and my father’s, Robert Firestone, and my own 30 years of research into the concept of the “critical inner voice.” Like the “obnoxious roommate” described by Arianna, the inner voice represents an internalized critic that we all possess to varying degrees. Although this isn’t an actual voice we hear, the critical inner voice describes destructive thoughts we all experience toward ourselves, as if a critic is living in our heads commenting on our actions. It was this inner critic that had been telling my sister – a straight-A student – that this time, her grades wouldn’t be good enough. And it was this same critic who told her she wouldn’t get into graduate school in the first place, much less graduate two years later.

Each one of us can recognize those nagging thoughts that occupy our heads causing us to feel fear, humiliation, shame, guilt or dejection. During the recent economic downturn, I was surprised by how quickly clients and friends of mine who’d lost their jobs turned on themselves and began telling themselves things like: You’re worthless. No one wants you. You’ll never get another job. Most of us observe a similar embarrassed and self-hating reaction in people going through break-ups, divorces, first dates, job interviews, college applications and countless other life-shifting events. Although these thoughts or “voices” become more apparent in significant moments, they not only come when we are making a change or moving toward a goal, they are there everyday, second-guessing us, nagging us, extracting energy and inserting doubt. All too often, they are directing our lives much more than we realize.

So where do these voices come from? When we are young, we are deeply affected by the labels put on us and the attitudes we experienced directed toward us. For example, as a shy fifth grader, I was consistently humiliated by a sadistic teacher, who forced me to stand up in front of the class to give reports, then publicly scrutinized my every move. Without knowing it, I internalized this teacher’s point of view, and allowed it to stay with me as an adult. Whenever I had to get up in front of a crowd to speak, I would feel intense fear and attack myself, thinking that I would stumble over my words, forget what I was saying or that people would get bored, and I would once again humiliate myself. It wasn’t until I remembered and made sense of my fifth grade experience that I understood where this mean attitude came from. Had I never made this connection between my fear of public speaking and this early life experience, I may never have been able to separate from this alien point of view. I may never have become a psychologist or had the opportunity to travel the world presenting in my field.

Each of us can relate to childhood experiences in which we felt hurt, embarrassed or afraid. What we may not recognize, however, is how these stressful or traumatic experiences have actually shaped the way we currently feel about ourselves. The voices we internalize can come from parents, caretakers, teachers, bullies – anyone who had an impact on us early in life. Unfortunately, the times we are affected most in our development occur in moments of stress, when a person we trust “loses it” with us. For example, a parent who is usually calm and compassionate can still hurt his or her child by suddenly becoming frustrated and lashing out.

The little things parents say or even a look on their face can feel dramatic to a small child. What affects us as adults isn’t necessarily what happened to us but what we tell ourselves about what happened to us. For example, an interaction in which a parent becomes frustrated with a child for taking too long and making him or her late can seem like no big deal to the parent once they’re on the road. But the child may have been frightened or jarred by the rapid mood change and alteration in their parent’s expression or uncharacteristic roughness. Ultimately, the child may identify with the parent, on whom he or she depends for survival. The child may even take on the parent’s point of view in that moment of stress, seeing him or herself as slow or burdensome. Whether we grow up to embody the image our parents had of us or to rebel against it, we are still being distorted by a point of view other than our own, a view being directed toward us rather than us seeing ourselves as who we really are.

The voices we experience as adults have deep roots in our pasts. They are not simply the flippant comments of an obnoxious roommate, but painful connections to experiences that shaped who we are and how we perceive ourselves. These voices can seem cruel, telling us we are too stupid, fat, lazy or unattractive to go for what we want, or they can seem soothing, telling us not to bother with the job interview, to reward ourselves with another piece of cake or that we are happy being alone. Like an overindulgent parent or the roommate who has a bad influence, these coddling voices are an enemy in disguise, luring us to take self-destructive actions, then punishing us for our mistakes. Whether cruel or seemingly kind, all of these thoughts are the commentary of an inner enemy.

The good news is that the more we recognize this enemy, the more effectively we can fight it. As we understand where these voices came from, we are better able to separate from them and take on a more compassionate and realistic point of view toward ourselves. Freeing ourselves from self-shaming attitudesfacilitates our ability to change qualities in ourselves that we don’t like and appreciate qualities we do. The more we recognize and separate from this critic, the more likely we are to live free of imagined limitations and evict this “obnoxious roommate” once and for all.

Dr. Lisa Firestone, PhD, is the Director of Research and Education for The Glendon Association. Since 1987, she has been involved in clinical training and applied research in suicide and violence. In collaboration with Dr. Robert Firestone, her studies resulted in the development of the Firestone Assessment of Self-Destructive Thoughts (FAST) and the Firestone Assessment of Violent Thoughts (FAVT). Dr. Firestone has published numerous professional articles, and most recently was the co-author of the books: Sex and Love in Intimate Relationships (APA Books, 2006),Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice(New Harbinger, 2002), and Creating a Life of Meaning and Compassion: The Wisdom of Psychotherapy (APA Books, 2003).

This Blogger’s Books from

Sex and Love in Intimate Relationships

by Robert W. Firestone, Lisa A. Firestone, Joyce Catlett

Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice: A Revolutionary Program to Counter Negative Thoughts and Live Free from Imagined Limitations
by Robert W. Firestone, Lisa Firestone, Joyce Catlett, Pat Love

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With everything in the world from our language to our LinkedIn networks growing bigger, more complex and moving faster, it’s easy to feel like we are no longer in control. Our career path, our relationships and our futures are all victims of circumstance. Whether we are bowing to the will of a boss, a paycheck, a parent or a profile on Match.com, it’s important to remember that when it comes to directing our lives, we are still very much at the wheel.

How we perceive ourselves and the world around us largely shapes how we are seen by the world. Truly knowing ourselves can mean the difference between creating the life we want and yielding to the life we lead. And while it’s empowering to acknowledge that we are the strongest source for real change in our lives, it is admittedly scary to realize how much of our lives is in our own hands.

A friend and colleague of mine Dr. Dan Siegel, who also happens to be Executive Director of The Mindsight Institute and a clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, defines people’s ability to understand what is going on in their own mind and the minds of others as “mindsight.” Mindsight is a method of self-understanding through which people can gain insight and empathy by exploring the workings of their own mind. Practicing mindsight entails an openness, observation and objectivity that can help us to be aware of our mental processes without being swept away by them. In this sense, it allows us to reshape and redirect our future and become the author of our own story.

Most people don’t consciously recognize how much the lessons of our past shape our current actions and reactions. Mindsight helps us make sense of who we are and how we see the world by allowing us to reflect on our own story and gain insight into how that story informs our perceptions and emotions. By creating what Dan Siegel refers to as a “cohesive narrative” of our life, we can understand how our past is subconsciously influencing our present and make conscious decisions about how we want to lead our lives.

The situations we adapted to as kids can leave us with old ways of thinking and behaving that hurt us as adults. That stubborn streak we formed as a child may have resulted from feeling constantly controlled by a strict upbringing, but it can become problematic in the context of our careers. An interaction with our child that sends us flying off the deep end may have more to do with our own experience as a child and less to do with how we really feel toward our own children. When emotions feel especially intense, misplaced or out of character, this can be a warning sign that the heightened reaction has more to do with our past than our present. Mindsight can help us separate these old emotions from current circumstances.

When we don’t apply mindsight, we run the risk of getting in our heads and acting on destructive thoughts. The stream of brutal, self-loathing , and second-guessing thoughts we all live with are what psychologist and author Dr. Robert Firestone refers to as the Critical Inner Voice. The Critical Inner Voice is created from experiences we had as children that caused us to turn against ourselves and develop negative self-perceptions. When left unchallenged, this inner critic can dictate our lives. A perfect illustration of this takes place in the classic film “Annie Hall.” When a young couple (Annie and Alvie) first meet, an awkward dialogue takes place between them, while subtitles explain the actual thoughts going through their minds.

In their first conversation in Annie’s apartment, Annie tells Alvie she “dabbles” in photography. At the same moment her thoughts appear on the screen as ” I dabble? Listen to me — what a jerk!” When Alvie compliments her work, she tells him she wants to take a “serious photography course,” at which point the subtitles reveal, “He probably thinks I’m a yo-yo.”

While Annie is wrapped up in criticizing herself for being unintelligent, Alvie is fumbling to impress her by speaking about photography as an art form. As he stumbles over his words, he has thoughts like, “I don’t know what I’m saying — she senses I’m shallow,” and, “Christ, I sound like FM radio.” Even as both Alvie and Annie forge a conversation in an attempt to get together, their own internal dialogues are simultaneously ripping them apart. This is a common scenario in the early stages of a relationship, and it plays out through all phases of forming a connection to another person.

When couples are attuned to this inner dialogue or Critical Inner Voice, they are better able to separate from it. A healthy relationship is formed when each partner can reflect on their own sense of self and form a connection without falling under the influence of an inner critic. For example, rather than tripping over their words or sounding like people they aren’t, Alvie and Annie could have been themselves in their early interaction and challenged insecurities that later plagued their relationship.

Dan Siegel writes of ideal relationships in his book “Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation” that “[a]ttuned couples link together in a mental lovemaking, a joining of minds, in which two people create that beautiful resonant sense of becoming a ‘we.’ The intimacy that blossoms can be amazing, but the journey to get there and remain there can be rough. To become linked as a ‘we,’ a couple needs also to become differentiated as two ‘me’s.’” To illustrate this point, he describes the process of losing one’s identity in a couple relationship as forming a smoothie, whereas when each person brings their individuality to their union, their relationship is like a fruit salad. Unfortunately, in creating an illusion of connection (or “Fantasy Bond“), a couple destroys their true feelings of compatibility and love. Only when a person is self-possessed can they live more harmoniously with their partner.

The same principles hold true for any relationship, be it with our spouse, our children, a family member or a co-worker. As Siegel points out in his book, “The brain is a social organ, and our relationships with one another are not a luxury but an essential nutrient for our survival.” The purpose of mindsight is to attain self-understanding that can help us put a halt to the harmful behaviors that impair our relationships. When we have insight into ourselves, we also form compassion and empathy for another person. We can uncover why we are the way we are, and become who we’ve always wanted to be.

As Robert Firestone wrote, “Perhaps the single most important life affirming human quality is the ability to feel love — to feel compassion and empathy for and express kindness, generosity and tenderness toward other people. Learning to love others requires first valuing oneself.” This is the foundation upon which all human relationships are built.

Dr. Lisa Firestone, PhD, is the Director of Research and Education for The Glendon Association. Since 1987, she has been involved in clinical training and applied research in suicide and violence. In collaboration with Dr. Robert Firestone, her studies resulted in the development of the Firestone Assessment of Self-Destructive Thoughts (FAST) and the Firestone Assessment of Violent Thoughts (FAVT). Dr. Firestone has published numerous professional articles, and most recently was the co-author of the books: Sex and Love in Intimate Relationships (APA Books, 2006),Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice(New Harbinger, 2002), and Creating a Life of Meaning and Compassion: The Wisdom of Psychotherapy (APA Books, 2003).

Sex and Love in Intimate Relationships

by Robert W. Firestone, Lisa A. Firestone, Joyce Catlett

Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice: A Revolutionary Program to Counter Negative Thoughts and Live Free from Imagined Limitations
by Robert W. Firestone, Lisa Firestone, Joyce Catlett, Pat Love

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