Unrequited (27 page)

Several CBT-based approaches emphasize disrupting the unsatisfying cycle of the reward-seeking behaviors of obsessive love. You may look for solace in photos of your beloved, but the relief is only momentary. The more you give in to the impulse, the more accustomed your brain becomes to this quick yet weak dose of reassurance. It becomes a habit that feels crucial to your very survival. Not long after you stop gazing at the picture, or even while you’re still looking at it, the craving to reconnect builds again. Cognitive behavioral therapy essentially guides patients to recognize the craving as misguided urgings of their brain—not the call of a truly essential need—and then directs their attention to an activity or thought that’s more beneficial. This approach taps in to the brain’s neuroplasticity, the capacity to take on new roles and functions in response to changes in the brain’s environment. CBT, in short, can literally transform the way the brain works. A small study of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder found that after ten weeks of CBT, two thirds of the patients suffered fewer OCD symptoms—and their brain chemistry shifted accordingly. When OCD symptoms are intense, more glucose is metabolized in the area of the brain that signals when something has gone wrong with an expected reward.
After the treatment, glucose metabolism in that area decreased, along with the symptoms.

Los Angeles–based clinical psychologist Jennifer Taitz uses a CBT-based technique to help her clients gain more control over their thoughts and their behavior. “People think that if they have
a desire, they need to act on it. They think it’s cathartic to send an email or talk about the person. But that’s a myth,” she said. “If you change your behavior, you can change the way you feel. If you don’t talk about him, your feelings may pass faster, and you’ll surely live better.” She teaches a tool called “Opposite to Emotion Action.” Instead of giving in to the urge to satisfy your desire to connect, you “gently avoid” it and do the opposite: Put away the pictures, delete the person’s number, and refrain from talking about him.

Key to Taitz’s process is having her patients focus on values. She asks them to assess what they want out of life. Her therapeutic approach helps them move toward a renewed commitment to their personal values. “Values motivate people,” she said. “If someone values integrity and can really look at that, that can help more than anything else.” Assessing values helps them see that their struggle is for something bigger and better in their life—
not
the particular person they’ve been obsessing over. “If people realize that they care about taking care of themselves and having compassion for themselves, they’ll see that they are not going to get those things by seeing someone whose love is not reciprocal.”

Taitz’s approach struck me as a concrete way to dismantle goal linking by guiding the patient to see how her higher-order goals have little to do with the lower-order goal of a relationship with the beloved. Taitz emphasized that moving beyond the fixation on the beloved can be a “really tortuous and really brutal” process, but keeping your values in mind can help. “It’s almost like a firefighter goes into a building and is willing to endure the flames to rescue a baby,” she said.

For several of the women I interviewed, the beliefs they once had about their beloved dissolved in an abrupt epiphany, as if the curtain had been drawn back on their Wizard of Oz and he was revealed to be nothing more than human—and not the right human
for them to love. Some of these turning points seem, like my fever, sent from some divine place, as if Aphrodite and Athena agreed that it was time for the madness to cease. One woman’s obsession ended in the Oakland firestorm of 1991. Her home burned down, and all her possessions were destroyed. She and her husband had to focus on basic needs: consoling their son, finding a place to live, buying underwear and toothpaste. Her unrequited love, for months the guiding force for everything she did, seemed extraneous. The fire “was a cleansing,” she said. “You lose your history, and you’re down to just your physical being. You don’t have your stuff anymore. The facade of the drama, the passion, was part of that stuff. You get down to your core life.”

Other women undergo a long, gradual process before their moment of realization. Amalia, a fifty-four-year-old inn owner, spent her early twenties obsessed with Rick, a close friend she met while working at a restaurant. He had a drawn, bony face (“like Daniel Day-Lewis in
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
”) and a tortured spirit, a seductive combination for her and, she suspected, many others. They were roommates and occasional lovers, but he always pulled away from her when he sensed she wanted too much. She believed she represented stability and unconditional love as he immersed himself in the creative ferment of film school in New York City. She was more grounded than he was; plus, she had a dog they both adored.

When living together became too fraught, they decided he should move out. She nursed hopes that once he left, their relationship would grow stronger. Then she discovered she was pregnant. He urged her to get an abortion. After a lot of soul-searching, she reluctantly went ahead with terminating the pregnancy. He stayed with her throughout the procedure and cared for her afterward. “Then he began to extricate himself from me,
even from our friendship,” she said. A few months after she lost touch with him, she spotted him as she was heading into a movie theater in midtown Manhattan to see
The Last Métro.
The sight of him across the avenue, laughing and happy with a friend, made her feel so ill that she couldn’t make it through the movie. She got into a cab and threw up all over the seat.

She didn’t see Rick again for about two years. She got married and had a baby son. One morning, as she was strolling her baby on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, she spotted Rick riding on his bicycle and waved. As he approached, she watched him, fascinated. She knew she didn’t love him anymore. But not long before that morning, her husband had mentioned his name—they both worked in the film industry—and she’d felt her heart twinge with the memory of what he had meant to her.

She greeted him warmly. “This is my son,” she said. “You’re not going to believe what I named him!”

“Rick?”

“What?” she gasped, startled.

In that moment, she told me, she saw him for who he really was in a way she never could when she was in love with him. “There was something so heinous and narcissistic in his belief that I would actually
name my child after him
! I saw how ludicrous he was—he thought I still had that much unresolved feeling for him. It blew me away. I already felt I had moved on, and I was grateful for where I was at in life. But if I had any feeling left for him, it vaporized in that moment. It was the ultimate closure.”

She graciously corrected him. “No, Rick. I named him Monte.” It was the name of the dog she had when they lived together.

Like Amalia, Rina, the opera singer, took years to get over her love for her college conductor. She saw him from time to time in the music world, and their encounters were often disappointing,
sometimes devastatingly so. At graduate school, she was thrilled to learn he would be visiting for a professional meeting. When she spotted his bobbing walk in the distance, she called out to him. She was certain he heard her, but he ignored her and walked in the opposite direction. At his conducting debut with a major symphony orchestra, she went backstage to congratulate him. She found herself in a throng of many “adoring female acolytes” who, she suspected, felt for him as she had. “To see them all assembled made me feel embarrassed and pathetic,” she said.

Then her own career began to take off. She was asked to perform an orchestral song cycle by Leonard Bernstein at a prestigious music festival. The lyrics, a poem by Conrad Aiken, were all about lost love: “Music I heard with you was more than music / And bread I broke with you was more than bread / Now that I am without you, all is desolate /
All that was once so beautiful is dead.” While she rehearsed the piece, she sometimes choked up, thinking of the conductor. In performance, she was flawless. The song cycle was met with a thunderous ovation. Afterward, to her utter surprise, her beloved conductor walked through the backstage door and embraced her. “It was a triumph on my own terms,” she said. “I now had the bravery to sing without emotions overcoming me. It was a good apotheosis and really allowed me to let go.” She didn’t need him in order to become the performer she wanted to be, and the idea of him no longer held the same power.

THERE ARE WAYS
to catalyze the moment of awakening that ends romantic obsession. Emma, a documentary filmmaker, began practicing Buddhism in her early thirties. Her teacher, a monk named Peter, suggested she move into the Zen monastery where he worked. The idea of a semi-monastic existence appealed to her. She had been bedridden for several weeks with chicken pox, followed by a bout
of mononucleosis. The isolation of being sick for so long had left her with the feeling that something was “profoundly missing” from her life. Though her career was showing strong signs of promise, her parents didn’t really understand what she was doing. She was burdened with the feeling that she wasn’t meeting their expectations. Deepening her practice at the monastery offered solace. “You bring your hands together, and it’s like a wake-up bell,” she said. “There’s a way you become very, very close to people when you sit in silence for hours on end.”

The monastery had a strict rule for newcomers: no relationships for the first six months. “They’ve seen that when people first move in, they are very sensitive and more vulnerable than they normally are,” Emma said.

The restriction didn’t stop her from becoming obsessed with Jack, a senior monk. When she sat down to meditate at five each morning, all she could think about was having sex with him. Buddhist monks don’t have to be celibate, and she knew Jack wanted her, too. She took her dilemma to her teacher. “I know there’s this six-month rule, but I just want to hop into the sack with this guy,” she confessed. “I can’t stop thinking about him. We’re made for each other.”

Her teacher, Peter, told her a story. In his twenties, he traveled to Asia to escape the violence in his native Ireland and seek enlightenment. He moved into a monastery in a remote forest in Thailand, but all he could think about was raunchy sex. Pornographic scenes invaded his meditation. He went to his teacher for help. The teacher sent him to live in a brothel for a year. His explanation was that he needed to “study desire.”

Emma was shocked. “Did you have sex?” she asked. Peter said that at first he did. But then the prostitutes started seeking his friendship. They shared with him the pain in their lives. “I became
their brother,” he said. “I couldn’t objectify them, and I couldn’t see them in this raunchy and sexy way.” He stopped sleeping with the prostitutes, and his lust faded.

Then Peter gave Emma his advice. “If you want to have sex with Jack, have sex with Jack. But wait two weeks. Try studying your desire.”

She followed his advice. The more she held back, the more Jack pursued her. There were no locks on the bedroom doors, and he would wait naked in her room for her. But she didn’t give in. She began to see him more clearly. “It was like being zoomed in on a close-up shot, and then the lens slowly opens up to a medium shot, and I saw all these layers of him I couldn’t see before because we weren’t sleeping together,” she said. “This nuance gets crushed once you go fuck someone. You just want to merge.”

Her longing for him, she realized, was about an ideal, not a reality. “The more I felt I had to be with him, the more I was not really seeing him,” she said. “I was focused on how I was finally going to feel once I was with him. I was finally going to be really myself. I was finally going to land in the world.”

Once she studied her desire, she realized how unrealistic that line of thinking was—and how little she felt for him. “It’s always simpler, the way you fantasize about it,” she said. “You don’t fantasize about the messiness of intimacy. It never includes the stuff that really gets on your nerves. It filters all that out. I took what was attractive about him and purified it and imagined that being with him was somehow going to make me feel whole.”

What Emma learned—to sit with her feelings instead of acting on them—is part of the strategy behind dialectical behavior therapy (DBT). Developed by psychologist Marsha Linehan to treat chronically suicidal women, DBT emphasizes both self-acceptance and the need to change destructive behaviors. DBT programs
combine individual therapy sessions with phone coaching and skills groups to help clients learn how to manage anger, depression, impulsivity, stress, relationships, and other challenges. Barry Rosenfeld, a psychology professor at Fordham University, created a stalking treatment program that uses DBT. Participants, all criminal offenders who are court-ordered to participate in treatment, are taught to use mindfulness techniques to observe their urges to contact the target of their harassment without acting on them. “A lot of offenders are just not accustomed to thinking before they act,” Rosenfeld said. “A lot of people are very impulsive. Something happens, and then they do something to react. We are trying to break that chain and get people to tolerate feeling bad and not go right into action to stop feeling bad.” None of the people who completed Rosenfeld’s pilot program were arrested again for a stalking offense, while
nearly half of all convicted stalkers overall reoffend.

This idea—of learning how to sit with your feelings—is useful in controlling less extreme forms of pursuit. It’s at the heart of the approach developed by Rhonda Findling, who counsels women all over the world about how to stop the obsessive urge to connect and get over romantic obsession. She recently developed a “Don’t Text That Man” app that helps you keep track of the last time you contacted your beloved. The app delivers encouraging bits of advice: “Isn’t it better to be the girl who got away rather than the clingy desperate girl?” The approach may be a bit techno-cheesy, but I view Findling as a valuable figure in the self-help world. She doesn’t shame women about not being feminine enough, and she doesn’t tell them not to initiate relationships. Rather, she urges them to stop compulsive pursuit and regain self-control. Her core message is an important one: You have to learn to tolerate your distress. Otherwise, you’ll become masochistic, offering yourself up again and again to the pain of rejection. “What you have to do
is go against the grain,” Findling said. “You’re thinking, ‘He has to see how much I love and desire him!’ Containing your feelings and waiting doesn’t feel natural. It goes against the instinct.”