| Subject: Pride and Love |
Author:
Thalia
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Date Posted: 06:17:07 04/28/09 Tue
PRIDE AND LOVE
Have you ever heard someone complain, “I don’t understand it. I give so much to others, and yet I get no recognition or respect. What’s wrong with this world?”
Well, the world is simply doing what it does best. And it’s going to keep on doing it, no matter how much you protest. The problem, then, is with the person who confuses pride with love.
For example, many persons in the helping professions—nurses, physicians, social workers, counselors, psychologists, and so on—feel motivated to take care of and help others. But all too often the motivation to be a caretaker derives from a need to project a certain image of oneself into the world, an image such as a “peacekeeper” that in itself might derive from a childhood role within a family system of conflict. In such cases, the caretaking becomes not much more than an exercise of authority and power over the patient. It happens all the time. Check into a hospital sometime and see how you’re really treated. It’s probably not with love.
In other words, many persons “give” in order to advertise an identity and to maintain a position of power. This is pride, not love, because love empties itself of worldly desires through service, in order to give selflessly. Pride, however, makes “giving” into a form of bribery, in order to get something bigger in return.
Maybe you will say, “Wait a minute. What can I give? I feel like mush inside. I’m already empty. I feel barren. It feels as if I have no identity. I have nothing to give.” Well, there is always something to give up, something that everyone holds on to as a final defense: you can give up the pride of feeling victimized, along with your secret hope to taste revenge for all the hurt and abuse you have ever suffered.
Victimization and Locus of Control
Rotter [4] proposed the concept of locus of control (from the Latin locus, place) to refer to the psychological “place” in which a person puts responsibility for the outcomes of various life situations. Persons with an internal locus of control perceive that they can personally exert “control” over the outcome of a situation, whereas persons with an external locus of control attribute outcomes not so much to personal actions as to the actions of other people—or luck.
So notice the encounter in the complaint described at the beginning of this section. “I don’t understand.” These are the only words of “truth” in the entire complaint. Of course this person doesn’t understand. Understanding requires submission and true love, and that, sadly, is what he or she lacks. When you’re caught up in the unconscious desire to feel victimized, it feels as if your life is being stolen from you. You’re always clinging to what you’re afraid of losing. You can never rest, and you can never get enough in return to feel satisfied. In psychological terms, when you have an external locus of control you essentially live in a perpetual feeling of victimization, always blown about by the whims of the world around you. But when you love—and function from an internal locus of control—you lay down your life for others. When you love, you have nothing to lose, because you have already given up your pride—willingly.
Identification with the Aggressor
In 1973, in Stockholm, Sweden, a bank robber held four bank employees as hostages in the bank vault for six days. Oddly enough, when the standoff was finally ended, it was found that the employees had formed an emotional bond with their captor. This odd behavior came to be called the Stockholm Syndrome. A similar thing happened in the US when the heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped in 1974; two months later she robbed a bank along with her captors.
All of this shows that when an emotional trauma threatens a person’s life, one form of psychological—and physical—defense is to bond with the threatening person. Thus, to preserve their lives, individuals will emotionally identify with the aggressors rather than resist them. Hence the name of the psychological defense, Identification with the Aggressor. (In contrast, and just for clarification, when victims of domestic violence kill their abusers, it has been called Battered Women’s Syndrome.)
But make no mistake about it. In a situation of total helplessness this sort of “traumatic bonding” may serve to keep you alive, and it may help to preserve your sanity, but it has nothing to do with real love or genuine forgiveness.
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