Love

This character initially encounters a disapproving look that divides him into internal struggles with heartbreak as a backdrop.

In the encounter with others, the human brothers, he presents defensiveness: he resists all kinds of threats with his omnipresent mistrust. The alert and control positions hold the rudder of the relational journey. The icy distance sculpts his face.

Where was the empathy? The look with the eyes of the heart was obscured by patches attached to the eyelids, and nature is a great unknown.

The mothers and fathers of this subtype pounce on books by educators and pediatricians to voraciously find answers, beyond their own listening and trust in the natural development of the baby and in the signals emitted by the organism. The correct attention, the correct specific phase, the pacifier, the bottle, the weaning, the nursery... Deep down, the enormous mistrust, negativity, and chronic fear block the genuine responses of maternal care.

As for the path to couple love in this character, it goes from isolation and narcissism to otherness and the revealing encounter, where bodies and souls meet and recognize each other.

As Jung points out, "it is a foolish conception that men. They believe that Eros is sex, but they are wrong: Eros is to be linked."

Distortions and Obstacles in Love

The unavoidable steps of the pilgrimage toward a loving encounter are respect, empathy, seeing the other, wishing for their happiness, and bonding: leaving isolation to create spaces of intimacy. These are basic capacities in a river brimming with obstacles and blockages, experiences and distorting conceptions, such as avoidance, the illusion of control, compulsive surrender, intolerance, or the fear of being devoured, invaded, and lost in the other.

This is a character of control, containment, and caution. With control, it blocks emotion, using the mechanisms of rationalization and idealization.

I become demanding with myself. I think everything is going well from this control, and I get blocked. I try to improve this functioning with more and more self-control and self-demand, since the mechanism "seems" to work for me. I am totally disconnected from my emotions—completely forgotten about myself. All the energy is shifted to my controlling mind.

The loop is closed with my self-demand, not allowing myself mistakes. I have to be perfect on all levels: physically, mentally, intellectually, so that everything goes “right” and my partner loves me.

She also projects this demand onto herself: she has to be perfect in everything she does, she says—emotions seem chaotic to me—and so I don't feel tension or frustration in myself. There are no dissonances. Then everything is perfect. "It's right." Everything's fine. “It is as it has to be.”

This comment is enlightening about an armor of control and demand in the face of love experiences, which are threatening and are, therefore, buried. Despite a certain affability and ingratiating behavior, the position is one of global hardness, with emotional distance, lack of involvement and genuine commitment, and avoidance of intimacy as the necessary driving force and guiding thread of the loving encounter.

Opening up to love implies, in this sense, the greatest threat, since it confronts the Social 6 with its most feared ghosts. At the very core of the character is the fear of love. Let's see their defensive mechanisms and the obstacles to a loving encounter.

Their bond is anxious. He is alert, on the lookout for the couple's activities with a fantastical catastrophist and persistent negativity. There is a deep fear of showing oneself, due to the imagined abandonment. "If they really know me, they'll realize I'm a fraud and reject me."

At the bottom of the distrust, there is a conviction of not being worthy of love and a buried experience of helplessness and ontic insecurity. Control becomes possessiveness, suspicion, and dominance, which in turn generate loops of suffering and anguish.

Another means of protection from anxieties and the fear of love is isolation and psychic refuges, like the watchtower of rationalism, with an overvaluation of abstract logic that implies disdain for feelings, for fear of emotional lack of control and for the difficulty managing the flow of experiences beyond strict control and restraint.

Something that reveals itself in phrases like: I easily lose heart when there is an emotional demand. Fear of talking, in case something could go wrong in the relationship, or if I don't know how to meet their emotional demands. Fear of confrontation. I block and I go to the mind. I almost always end up getting a headache after an emotional discussion. The cervicals are contracted.

The active, "giver" position—this clearly manifested role of caretaker—contains a subtle "benefit": avoiding the opening that leads to surrender to the other, in a receptivity that resides where there are access routes to the deep wounds of somatic memory. It is a defensive surrender: active behaviors that offer attention, advice, protection, generous availability... Stopping to receive caresses is most threatening.

This is indicated by the following contribution:

I avoid conflict. I fear it. (My mother does not tolerate conflict; I have always sucked at it. At home, there has always been a cloak that covered all dissent.) In other words, I am afraid that my partner will confront me with something that she sees or thinks and, above all, everything: feel that I have done wrong. Let her talk to me about "negative" feelings or that I have not complied, or have failed in something or other. The loving manipulation of my mother comes to me in this, the introjects: "If you don't behave well, love is going to get angry, and I'm not going to love you." "You have to be obedient." In order not to reach that conflict (“don't love you because you have failed"), I need to be obedient and submissive, reach everything, plan and control all my movements and the other's. I become an ethical and rigid person. With all the energy displaced to the mind. I become cold, calculating pros and cons. And above all, afraid of making mistakes and of the subsequent reproach. This fear blocks me, makes me not spontaneous, I become attentive and helpful and I feel that if I control everything I will be "perfect," “everything will be fine,” “I will not make mistakes.” (U.T.)

Beyond this availability mask, a door remains closed. Something inside resists. It is the nameless, diffuse, and silent resistance. It is in the diaphragm, in the solar plexus, or in a kind of protective aura that prevents a global, intimate delivery.

It is the feared "nudity," the avoided exposure, the distressing vulnerability. Panic entails withdrawal and sustained action. A quiet attitude of non-surrender to lack of control.

The compulsion to approve leads to excessive dedication, heroic efforts that respond to a toxic cognitive distortion: the confusion between meeting the expectations of another and being loved. As a Social 6 says: «Sometimes love for me ends up being a job, an effort, because I am attentive, I am careful not to screw up; I see what he does, I observe...».

Norms not only become an obstacle to love but also prevent the joy of living, the love of life itself. Maternal overprotection, with the inoculation of fears and affective interruption and deep physical contact, plus the paternal invasion of regulations, with an affective absence and genuine guidance configured, along with other factors, a «cobweb» that prevents access to opening, delivery, and vulnerability records.

Many emotional conversations I take as a reproach for something I'm doing wrong. I'm not up to it. I'm not enough. Fear of not being enough. I am not spontaneous. Guilt. They will leave me. They won't love me. I should be more spontaneous. Have ideas to satisfy my partner. Plan the perfect day. I feel demanded. I go rigid. I block. (U.T.)

Rigidity, routinization, and the compulsive pathway, along with mechanisms such as idealization, serve as a refuge. Robotization and behavioral automatism, which maintain the status quo of an organism in emotional disconnection. Another defensive metallic hold is the safety of the judge.

On many occasions, the Social 6 is oscillating in its self-esteem and in the position adopted before the other. On the one hand, superiority from a promontory of rationalism and paternalism (protective guide, advisor...), with a dose of arrogance and supremacy in the face of those annoying irruptions called emotions. On the other, a feeling of awkwardness and ignorance of emotional language implies servility, helplessness, and regressive attitudes.

As another contribution points out:

I do not place myself in an equal relationship. My anxiety places me in a childish, inferior position. I go to the helpless child: I need the other. But I don't trust from low self-esteem and blockage, I don't feel energetic, and the circle is closed with more self-demand, rigidity, and more guilt: I'm not enough.

The titanic efforts, including compulsive sexuality or the need to please and please, are gestating the network of codependency. I am offering you a whole display of attention, I am entering you into my network, and I get you to need me, with it I increase my security and, as a result, I drink from your emotionality and love. I am a "dark vampire" that sucks

affection and life through the delivery of the other, through the needs of the other, in a "vicarious" capture of love.

Romantic ideals are golden clouds to settle on, rising from limitations and wounds. These shortcuts are sometimes stairs to a love that jumps from within. And others, an ideal refuge, the "quixotic" creation above the devalued—a salvific island where shelter from the evils of the world. After the mirages, confronted with the harsh reality, the Icarus on duty falls exhausted.

The Social 6 agrees to secret pacts of «illusion,» of idealization of the other. And establishes a symbiotic, fusional bond, of regressive emotionality, with an idyllic expectation where he feels safe from all danger while making the cherished internal demands in that other. In this pseudo-mystical oasis, springs of "completeness" and unconditional love gush forth. What is behind the door with the rusty lock? Fear and more fear. To be, to flow, to need, to feel fragile, small. To reopen the wounds.

Pray the biblical imperative: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" and the Social 6 shifts attention outward in a desperate search for love but, in the end, forgets itself.

In this character, there was not only a bodily, emotional, and soul contraction, but also an internalization of value schemes so brutal that severe self-criticism generates indignity. And we cannot love another if we live in a climate of troubled condemnation, guilt, and disapproval.

At the bottom of the abyss, the child criticized to the minimum, without the possibility of learning from mistakes, falling and getting up. The undeserving of love.

The Search for Love

An important mobilization of energy towards the conquest of love translates into paternity/maternity full of paternalistic attitudes. With this strategy, which underestimates the emotional aspects, the Social 6 offers itself as a "guide" and adviser, with good arguments. You can make the other person feel comfortable and secure, and thus depend on your generous contributions of protective love.

The "pseudo-goodness" mask implies self-demand. The person makes themselves available to the other to meet their expectations, renouncing themselves, and giving priority to the loved one (a need from the depths of their being).

From the "chivalry" (whether male or female), they perform a whole display of services to feel deserving of love. This helpful attitude, together with an adaptability, weaves a fine web in which to subtly possess the loved one.

These attitudes are safe havens, saving you from the threatening genuine encounter. Its fragility is safeguarded; it is sheltered from the panic of rejection and indignity. But love implies nudity—body, emotional, mental, spiritual; an expositional movement in which one introduces oneself to the other. “Hello, this is who I am, this is me. I feel fragile and trembling, I need you to take a good look at me.”

The only saving move is to jump into the abyss. It is an internal leap to meet one’s own intimacy, with one’s soul. You no longer need to run away from yourself and deploy your energy outwards. You can find your "living flame of love," with God within you.

The Three Loves

We start from the classical theory of the three loves, which differentiates the devotional (love of God), the maternal (agape, compassionate love, neighbor), and the erotic (pleasurable, the inner child). The devotional aspect predominates in the Social 6, with less presence of compassionate, maternal love, and the erotic being even more relegated.

Dynamics of Devotion: "Theopathy"

"Our Father who art in Heaven..." God is alone in heaven. A "quixotic" philosopher, the Social 6 focuses on an existential look at the celestial. The omnipresent Platonic eidos, the mental refuge as a hiding place before the internal emptiness resulting from an affective deficit.

This inclination towards idealized ideas, totems, and authorities becomes a dark prostration, submissive and forced, in a desperate demand not for any answer but for certainties. Devotion remains at the service of the great that can alleviate that internal feeling of insignificance and being lost in the world, in a meaningless existence.

The purification of the polluting aspects of this love comes through the meeting of souls, the rapport. As Erich Fromm points out, "Love is the active penetration into the other person, in which the union satisfies my desire to know. In the act of fusion, 'I know you, I know myself, I know everyone...'" Thus, the prayer of this character becomes: "Our Father and Mother, who are everywhere, even in me, and from my intimacy, I can perceive you..." I renounce control; I renounce "pushing the river" and demanding from God Himself how

things should be, without gratitude. From compulsive action, I go towards "Your Will be done," which leads me to bathe in the river of life. Beyond the virtual library of the mind, an encounter from the intimation, intimate-contemplative action.

Dynamics of Compassion: The Fall

Since the split with the breast-maternal body, which becomes internal, the Social 6 has fallen into a loss of original harmony with nature. The inquisitorial conscience, the excessive demands, are guilty heartbreak. Compassionate love is respect. Ideals, unattainable because they are so lofty, are a dark judge whose gaze nullifies consideration and respect for acts, impulses, and explorations.

The Social 6 learned to forget to look at themselves with benevolence and tenderness. How can they look at the other if they don't know how to look at themselves well? How can they accept the other and be moved by their suffering and limitations? How can they see mistakes as genuine learning?

Control questions everything, labels everything. Body rhythms are neglected. People of this subtype coincide in an underlying sadness, the pain of that body always relegated, its genuine demands postponed. The primacy is of the supreme reason, the control tower up there.

Perhaps the seed of a compassionate attitude towards oneself germinates in an existentially pedagogical, spiritual "fall." From this initiatory defeat, a: "I see myself! I see you!" From surrender emerges the intimate itinerary to embrace vulnerability. I can thus receive myself and receive; give me and give. I see my flame and I see yours.

Dynamics of Enjoyment: The Tears of Eros

The child Eros is entombed. The Social 6 suffers from a disidentification of the body, which lives outside. Uninhabited, the body remains at the mercy of the nebulae of reason, between the restraints of inhibition and civilizing norms. An invasion of coercive laws leaves pleasure relegated to epic, sublime ideals.

The Fall of Paradise

Eros folds his wings and covers his body, crying shrunken to Heaven. Mythical, primal, sexual guilt. Longing for paradise lost. Forbidden apples of times immemorial flood the

psyche with severe gods, bearers of eternal curses. The transtemporal wounds are being sewn with the castrations of pleasure. Looks and words that curtail impulse buds, that paralyze curious, caressing hands.

Diffuse, original guilt, where conception nestles among the shadows of ancestral fear. Guilt sewn into strange inner inhabitants and mysterious life streams.

The sounds wrought by multiple natures were drowned out by furious onslaughts of control. Artificial deities clothed in terror plugged the craters of the volcanoes of being.

The darker drives are associated with praise for sacrifice. A masochistic self-denial. It is the ideal of death in life, the renunciation of oneself and the destruction of the body, as a receptacle of the bestiary and animality. Eros cries in the dark.

Orgasm, Death, and Rebirth: The Illusion of Control

After distrust, inhibition. And still behind, the panic to Life. Uncontrollable life, pregnant with mysteries and enigmas. Amoral, premoral, antimoral life. Unpredictable life, without certainties.

Fearful riders squeeze horses out of instinct. Ejaculation is a release of tension. It is regulatory ejaculation, as opposed to the uncontrolled orgasm, to the radical opening orgasm, orgasm surrender, in short, to the death orgasm. Expansive death, precursor of rebirth.

Fusion meeting. The affective lack crystallizes in an enormous hunger for contact. But the instinctive torrent howls its demands. It floods the living space generating a compulsive sexuality, fusional relationships or a sublimation in idealistic activities.

The bond becomes symbiotic, adherence to another body in a symphony of clinging and longing for thaw. Both the masculine, due to exhaustion, and the feminine, due to exclusion, are damaged.

Sexuality is enormously active and intense. It implies control, an effort to please, and the imperative to be a good lover. The gratification of the couple is prioritized, "complying" with the "duty" of love. This self-forgetfulness is reflected in the difficulty of "stopping" and receiving caresses. It is easier to act, to give pleasure to, and finally, feel the right to personal gratification. It is an over-delivery to feel worthy of love. The fear of being rejected or showing the "dark side" inhibits you. The hunger for tenderness and the instinctive awakening give them a compulsive component. The sexual encounter is required as a

source of release of anxiety, a release of tension that relaxes. This need also generates phases of compulsive masturbation, which reflect retroflexion and isolation.

Sexual Guilt

Family and school experiences have invaded their universe of introjects, toxic looks, negative gestures, and explicit and implicit guilt-ridden messages that seriously penalize pleasure, which is associated with eternal punishment.

The celebratory aspect of existence is relegated. There are many people who refer to castrating experiences in Catholic schools, with Calvary and carrying the sins of others as a model of life in this “valley of tears.”

The right to pleasure and self-listening, essential aspects of the erotic dimension of life, are blocked by the anathema of selfishness. Where "egoism" means enjoyment, delivery, and permission.

In this character, the sexual component is, in short, a turbulent magma, where the energy cuts suffered throughout the development of maturation (breastfeeding, crawling, toilet training, sensory pleasure) due to an endless number of coercive norms, have generated a dynamic of inhibition, tension, and anguish.

The instinctive elements, when combined with ethereal ideals of a destructive nature, have generated a complex web of impulse, desire for pleasure, and guilt. A dance between the most vital and pulsating and the dead and volatile; between the most expansive (tending to uncontrolled delivery) and the most withdrawn.