Pep
This book came in what I think of as The Amazon Delivery From Heaven. Of all the dozens of Amazon packages I've had, this one was delivered by someone whose wings were carefully folded under a postman's uniform.
There were two books - Schnarch's 'Passionate Marriage', and 'Undefended Love'. They were the two most influential books I've read in this whole experience - and I've read HUNDREDS.
Schnarch utterly convinced me of the need to bring a whole person to the marriage, rather than a partial, misformed person leaning heavily on my spouse. The enmeshment concept was the Holy Grail of my FOO, so Schnarch's words were like waking up from a nightmare. What Schnarch didn't do was to tell me HOW to be a whole person.
Then I picked up 'Undefended Love' - and the serendipity was astounding. This book is all about finding out who you really are, and it works.
The book explains the concept of the False Self; that all of us, from childhood on, build defences to protect the vulnerable inner self...until eventually we come to believe that the Defended Self is the real person. However, the things that the Defended Self (or Compensatory Identity, as they call it) thinks it needs for happiness and fulfillment, often don't make us happy at all, and we find ourselves unhappy and even destructive. The book conjectures that we need to uncover the real self (they call it 'Essence') and start nourishing that.
All pretty well-trodden stuff, standard fare these days in therapeutic circles. Since I read the book, I've met these concepts in many other books, but I have to say that UL is the best and most carefully explained description I've encountered.
But the gold in 'Undefended Love' is its method of actually attacking the defences and working out what's really going on underneath.
They have the concept of a ladder - a downwards ladder - which you work your way down rung by rung. You start with a situation that troubles you, and you challenge yourself to get to what the fear is. But they go into all the ways that your mind tries to get you NOT to do it - the ditractions, rationalisations, intellectualisations, etc. In fact, they spend a lot of time teaching you to recognise the avoidance strategies, and learning how to push through them.
Eventually, you reach a point where the real fear emerges. That you're not worth loving, or that you're not capable of surviving on your own, or whatever.
Now, I know this sounds terribly New Age and all, but I'm the most practical of Scots, and I've found this method amazingly effective. I've got better and better at doing it, and it's astonishing when I work my way from a moment of anger in a supermarket to the realisation that I'm actually scared that someone is going to push me out of a car and drive away! But once you've done it, the 'top level' problem is quite different, and the unconscious fear is no longer driving the behaviour.
I would have been glad just to discover this book for myself, but there was another surprising outcome. I had no idea that H had read the book when I wasn't around - but one day he announced that he'd made an amazing discovery by trying out their approach. For years, he'd woken up with a feeling of dread, which he struggled to shake off as the morning progressed. After reading the book, he'd tried 'facing into the fear' instead of fighting it as he usually did. And he discovered that 'it just dissolves away'. This was a revelation to him. It wasn't quite the ladder-all-the-way-to-the-bottom deal, but even just applying it to the top levels made a major difference to his life.
I recommended this book to t2r because I think it's a superb (and wholly non-judgemental) way to introduce yourself to the concept of false self and defences - and when someone finds themselves acting in contradiction to who they believe they are, there's some kind of false self in operation. But I'd recommend it to anyone...and particularly anyone who's trying to put Schnarch into operation!
TA
