Giving up Secrecy to Give up Love: Notes to a Client

Love is an obsession that can become something like an addiction under certain circumstances. It can consume you emotionally and psychologically in the way that any obsession or addiction will consume you emotionally and psychologically.  That is ok if this is a ‘love’ that can actually exist in the world, in everyday life. If this is a secret ‘love’ then the secrecy itself will do its own business and intensify this ‘love’ and warp and corrupt you, it can make a liar out of an honest man; and eventually corrupt that ‘love’. 

• A healthy ‘love’ exists on the ‘inside’ of your head; in your mind, your heart, your brain, your nervous system, in the neural loops that make up your brain, and the brain begins to make an adaptation around the existence of this ‘love’. This ‘love’ begins to shape how you think and feel, what you think and feel about and when and with whom and so on.
• A healthy ‘love’ also, perhaps equally, exists on the ‘outside’ of your head; it appears in your closest and most attached relationships, it is evident to acquaintances, friends, family, colleagues, and ordinary passers-by. It is visible; not hidden away; not a secret; it is witnessed by the world around you.
• Of significance is the fact that the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’ need to be congruent with each other, they need to match each other so this ‘love’ is not a secret.
• It is the secrecy that shrouds this ‘love’ of yours that is pernicious. That changes you, corrupts you, turns you toward the very finely crafted pathways of deception. These pathways of secrecy and deception are located on the ‘inside’ of your head, your heart, your belly; and they are in the repetitive interactions between you and other people, especially in those very fine and delicate interactions between you and those who believe they know you and are closest to you. In other words, deception becomes hard wired into your head, your heart and your belly and at the same time this deception becomes hard wired into your every interaction in your immediate relational world. The ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ become congruent, similar and self-reinforcing. The loop closes in and upon itself allowing this ‘love’ to become its own self-fulfilling obsession to flourish into something that looks and feels very much like an addiction that threatens to derail and paralyse your life.
• How do you address this? Most people attempt to change this by either:
• Trying to find an explanation or the root cause of the problem somewhere in their past; usually in some kind of early trauma or traumatic experience inside your family 
• Trying to change the ‘inside’ of your head by yourself;
• Cutting yourself off from the person who is the object of this ‘love’.
• These approaches usually don’t succeed for completely separate reasons. 
• Most of the time there is no root cause, apart from the randomness of love itself; and if there is a root cause it is often long gone and not all that relevant to the ongoing obsession/addiction. Root causes are often more relevant once you have taken steps to free yourself of the obsession/addiction;
• Changing from the ‘inside’ is supremely difficult as this is, in significant part, where the problem exists in the first place and there it is shrouded in secrecy and self-deception; not a good basis for clarity and an honest appraisal of yourself; especially at this early stage of the process.
• My view is that to turn this situation around your first move is to change this from the ‘outside’ in; not from the ‘inside’ out; often a deeply profound shift for people who are accustomed to change being generated by the person, on the ‘inside’, ordinarily undertaking some process of self-examination or self-flagellation.
• To achieve this you must first call a halt to secrecy. If an obsession/addiction is a fish then secrecy is the water in which this fish swims; and this is no longer a nice clean, clear, uninterrupted mountain stream. By now it has become a murky swamp with all kinds of by-ways and back waters that are very difficult to know about, let alone drain.
•  How do you halt secrecy? We create an external loop between you and me that contains no secrecy of any kind about this situation. No behavioural, emotional or cognitive secrecy about ‘love’ or the object of this ‘love’, no deception, no half-truths, no slippages of any kind are to be kept secret. Breaking the secrecy is everything; that’s where we must be so vigilant; and it all commences by you and I creating an artificial, personal, electronic, potentially endless loop, between us; an electronic loop that can carry this change process forward as quickly or as slowly as you require. 
• In due course this external loop will become your internal loop for dealing with your now well-developed proclivity for self-deception and secrecy.
• We ritualize this and embed the process in morning yoga, an exercise regime or something where you reflect upon the fact that you have decided to give her and your ‘love’ for her up, and the secrecy that sustains her and your ‘love’ for her.
• This is followed by a text message to me which states your dedication, on this day only, to have no contact with her deliberately, incidentally, accidentally, unintentionally.
• And if there is any contact at all or any desire for contact you will text me that information.  You will not keep anything about her, and this ‘love’ locked up inside your head. The secrecy must be broken; the swamp must be drained. 
• At the close of day you will text me again about your success, or, otherwise, in, achieving your stated aim from the morning. 
• I will ordinarily respond to each text to facilitate the creation of this new external loop.
• We will do this in blocks of time commencing with 30 days followed by 100 days then 235 days until we’ve completed one whole year. This is followed by another full year by which time our therapeutic relationship over this is renegotiated. It ordinarily takes two full years for an obsession/addiction to change and transform, not surprising given the power this ‘love’ had held over you and your life for so long. 
• My task here is to find a way for you to call to a halt the secrecy and the ‘love’ that has threatened to paralyze your life and strip your life of love itself. Oddly, we will need to remove this ‘love’ for love to have a chance in your future, either in your marriage or elsewhere. 
• This obsession, addiction, secrecy and ‘love’ has stripped you of your future and must ultimately be removed from your life, as these have no legitimate place in that future.  We will need to invent a future for you that excludes the dark pernicious things that depress and paralyse you and invent a future that includes only that which is right and good about you. Broadly, my task is to take care of the downside and yours is to attend to the upside.
• Change happens when you call a halt to the things that constrain, constrict and paralyse your life, your head and your heart. Once these can be halted it is then possible for what is right and good about you, your life and your world to genuinely do its business. The presence of dark, pernicious, corrupt and secret things prevents what is right and good about you doing what is right and good in your life.