My Personal Reflections on Love

# My Personal Reflections on Love

I've been thinking about what I wrote.

Perhaps it sounds wrong. Maybe that is why I received no response. I hope I can accept it when someone thinks differently from me. In fact, perhaps that could even help me.

I don't know a single doctor who has listened to patients talk about their lives in the way I have tried to do. Certainly not an orthopedic or trauma surgeon.

I learned how to help people express what weighs heavily on their hearts. Some returned years later simply to thank me.

Yet I myself have experienced that kind of listening only once. It happened during a Rogerian psychotherapy training course, where I was studying and it was part of a practical exercise.

I constantly feel the absence of people who are genuinely capable of expressing empathy.

In my medical work, there have been many occasions when a patient's problem was discovered precisely because I approached them with this same attitude. These were patients who had been living with their problems for a long time.

On several occasions, this brought me into conflict with my superiors, and I was fired.

When I reached adolescence, nobody seemed to know what love really was. I tried to understand it.

It took years before I gained the experiences that helped me find answers. I discovered early on that there could be a kind of relationship capable of producing much stronger emotions than love at first sight.

Later, I began to see how capable people were of self-reflection, and I realized that without self-reflection, parents cannot recognize their own darker sides or understand how these affect their children.

Only later did I begin to understand how our own unconscious develops.

And then I thought about what an enormous difference it makes to a child whether their parents understand these things.

To be frank, I only became capable of this kind of understanding at the age of forty, after a very long psychological journey.

Yet these experiences differ completely from what today's world considers a proper relationship.

There is another experience that shaped my thinking.

In order to understand myself, I needed approximately five years, between the ages of nineteen and twenty-four. I spent those years learning to describe what I experienced in factual terms, and to call something true only when I had evidence for it.

It was incredibly difficult.

But without this discipline, I would never have discovered the roots of my own unconscious behavioral patterns.

That is why I asked myself whether modern people are wasting an opportunity. They could train their minds to do this, but they don't. And as a result, when they become parents, they have very little insight into how they shape their children's unconscious behavioral patterns.

I have not seen that a woman can acquire this particular kind of understanding entirely on her own.

And this is where today's world judges me.

But I don't believe that men and women are the same. I believe they complement each other.

If a man's primary drive is to obtain a woman's body, she will presumably respond to that and develop in that direction.

If a man's primary need is for a woman to understand him, I imagine she will respond to that and develop in that direction instead.

Unfortunately, the ability to understand another person is not acquired automatically.

Becoming a mother does not make someone capable of it. She can only develop this ability if she has learned it beforehand, and I suspect that, as in my own case, this process may take several years after adolescence.

Perhaps the theory I have developed is nonsense.

After all, I'm happy even when a woman is simply curious about my life. Perhaps she doesn't understand me, but I can be myself beside her.

Of course, it feels better when she understands me. The people I understood deeply loved being understood.

Because of this way of thinking, through which I helped people, I was fired several times.

And because I believed that men and women are not identical in love but complementary, many people interpreted this as a power relationship.

I almost lost my life because of this theory.

Around me, I see relationships in which one person laughs at the other's suffering, blackmails them, or exercises power over them.

I know very few people who possess genuine self-insight.

I suspect their children suffer from this, just as I suffered.

Perhaps psychology has always been concerned with treating people's psychological wounds, most of which originate in childhood, when they were hurt through the influence of their parents.

And in the end, here I sit in this world, wasting away alone, lonely, and frequently exposed to attacks.

Because many people want to exercise power over others. Others insist on maintaining established practices at work, even though medical science has already moved beyond them. Or they insist on maintaining conventions in life that, as far as I can see, cause suffering.

I think perhaps this doesn't offend anyone.

It could be published in the Love article or in The Woman's Transformation.

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## Why I Believe Men and Women May Complement Each Other

For several reasons, my hypothesis is that a woman cannot go through this particular journey entirely on her own.

I'm sorry. Perhaps some people will find that offensive. But that is my suspicion.

And in fact, my entire theory of love is based on this. This is where the idea of complementarity derives its strength.

Why do I think a woman cannot go through this journey on her own?

Because a woman's testosterone level is approximately one-tenth that of a man's.

I believe that with lower testosterone levels, fear has a stronger influence on women.

And I think that at the end of adolescence, everyone experiences fear because they lack the experience necessary to find their way in the world.

While a man may be more courageous in venturing into unknown areas of life, and may even dare to stand against society, I suspect that a woman, with her lower testosterone levels, may find this much more difficult.

To resolve her insecurity, following group norms, exercising power, deception, and maintaining appearances may more easily become part of her life.

But this represents a choice.

Either you create appearances, or you name things as they are.

To understand things, you have to be able to name them.

You can learn this either on your own or from someone else.

I believe that a woman may learn this when she finds security beside a man, rather than when she follows the norms of a group and practices maintaining appearances.

I don't think there is conclusive evidence either for or against this entire hypothesis.

It is my hypothesis.

And I think fairy tales symbolically describe this process.

The domineering witch or the dragon may represent the fear-driven side of the woman's psyche.

Perhaps it sounds terrible to say such things.

But I believe that witches and dragons are symbols of parts of the psyche, not actual human beings.

There is something else, parallel to fairy tales, that strengthens my suspicion.

When someone abuses power, they become alienated from their own emotions, whether they are a man or a woman.

Otherwise, they could not bear the harm they have caused.

I suspect that after a certain point there may be no way back, because if the person fully experienced the suffering they had caused others, they might lose their mind.

And so rejecting their own emotions becomes the only remaining possibility.

If a man who provides genuine security appears in a woman's life early enough, she may still be able to step away from exercising power and reconnect with her emotions.

I believe this is fundamentally important for her children.

I think this also appears symbolically in fairy tales.

Sleeping Beauty falls asleep. Snow White dies.

To me, these represent a weakening of the connection with one's own emotions.

Today, many people have become disconnected from their emotions simply to be able to live their lives.

So now I have explained why I think a man can save a woman, and why such a man needs to be mature rather than merely a young man.

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## Why These Ideas Have Been So Painful to Defend

You know, it cost me an enormous amount of energy and years of work to arrive at these ideas.

And people have been very aggressive toward me because of them.

Yet I never insulted anyone.

Some people assumed that I was calling women witches and therefore that I was a bad person.

But I have never called a woman a witch. I was talking about psychological processes.

Others attacked me because the relationship involved a significant age difference of approximately twenty-five years, and people today have learned to hate such relationships.

Part of that reaction may be connected to actual cases of abuse.

But another part, I believe, is simply hatred without a valid reason.

I have never advocated abuse, nor have I ever said that women are inferior.

Just because someone learns something from another person does not make them inferior.

It simply means that in one particular situation, one person has less knowledge.

In another situation, that same person may have far more knowledge.

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## One Important Clarification

Perhaps this is what I should publish on my website.

It does not attack anyone, and it offers a glimpse into how I arrived at these ideas.

There is one more thing.

**I never said that a woman is incapable of personal development.**

What I said was that a man may help a woman break free from power games, from maintaining appearances, and from creating an image of herself for others.

That is the process I am trying to describe.

It is not about a woman's inferiority. It is about my hypothesis that emotional security within a relationship may make a particular kind of psychological transformation possible.