Am I Loved? The Most Asked Question Of All Time by John D. Bieber is available now in hardback and ebook in all good bookshops and online. www.johndbieber.co.uk @JohnBieberBooks
Aspirations of love and of being loved are the constant waking schemes and sleeping dreams of all Humankind. Indeed, acting like a barometer for our mental health, the satisfaction or otherwise of our need to be loved is paramount for our wellbeing. In my new book, Am I Loved? The Most Asked Question Of All Time (Umbria Press, hardback and ebook available in all good bookshops and online), explores the undeniable fact that as the world’s only emotional beings, it is truly astonishing that we function through emotions that we do not remotely understand or control. Our emotions exist not to benefit us but to safeguard our genes, protecting the life within us. We spend our lives intent on surviving when fulfilment comes from loving and being loved. Nature’s Protections serve to liberate us yet we allow them to inhibit our lives without realising that the majority of our many emotional problems are solvable simply by a proper understanding of the human condition. The most asked question of all time is: Am I Loved?
Emotions are feelings that come to us fully formed; hitting us straight between the eyes. They drive all human intercourse and influence all thoughts and action, but, and this is a huge but, they are things which we can neither understand nor control.
We may well ask: how can we function as sophisticated human beings when this is the case?
Are we made so imperfectly?
Is this the way we are meant to be?
Thankfully, the short answer to both questions is “No” but it took me 15 years studying and considering this issue to be able to explain why in my book Am I Loved? The Most Asked Question of All Time.
The story begins for me as a lawyer handling a good deal of divorce, witnessing my clients so paralysed by their emotions that they were in no state to take the life changing decisions expected of them. Succumbing to their emotions, common sense and judgement deserted them.
In consequence, too often, a bad divorce followed a bad marriage. For the marital knot was cut when it could so easily have been untied.
This deeply concerned me as there was no need for divorce to be like this. The fundamental importance of the emotional side of divorce seemed to have been overlooked and so I wrote a book on the subject entitled If Divorce is The Only Way. An Emotional Guide to the Dos and Don’ts of Divorce and Marital Breakdown ( Penguin ).
Thus began a long preoccupation with emotions eventually leading to Am I Loved? which defines the Human Condition. Because I wanted to bring understanding to things we plainly do not understand. I wanted to offer the chance to enhance the quality of our lives. My conclusions shed light on all human experience. Suddenly, our previous understandings seemed plainly misconceived.
For my book explains how we have been engineered and why. How we are intended to function and, crucially, how we have previously got everything wrong.
The purpose of our emotions and their unrecognised interaction with love are the key to that new understanding. As part of Nature’s Protections of the life that we bear, everything ultimately revolves around their interaction which, if we could only have seen, makes full sense of life and how we are intended to live it for the very first time.
How could we have lived without understanding how we function? But we no longer need to live that way, meekly accepting our ignorance as part of how life is meant to be. Because emphatically it is not.
And so to our Mental Health. The greatest of all our needs is the need to be loved, which once fulfilled provides another pair of eyes and ears to look after us. It is the most powerful influence in all human contact. Feeling loved is all we aspire to, the ultimate prize of human existence. It is a personal validation in any relationship, the thing of most value that one person may give to another.
Yet, when love goes wrong, when people no longer feel themselves loved, the resultant feelings of sadness, emptiness, anger and despair are the most profound and immediate source of unhappiness and misery. I hope my book will help them begin to find and love themselves.
The pandemic provides a good example of this. Locked away in loneliness or in the company of flat mates they would rather not be with, cut off from family and lovers, possibly made redundant, victims of overwhelming negative feelings, it is no wonder so many people in this unfortunate position have succumbed to ill health.
They feel cut off from love. They are the victims of their emotions and, having forfeited their control over it, have understandably lost their perspective on life.
Compared to how life used to be their lot is akin to a form of incarceration and torture. It is a trauma (compared to which my not being able to meet my six-month-old grandson in Australia before he is a toddler pales into insignificance).
In Nature there are neither rewards nor punishments – there are consequences. A direct consequence of our ignorance of the Human Condition, of not being able to understand or control our emotions, the very essence of our being human, means not being able to understand or control ourselves. And a direct consequence of this is that too many people find themselves victims of feelings of helplessness, suffering, insecurity and, sadly, ultimately Mental Disorder.
Can we help avoid such consequences? Quite possibly. Whilst we did not come into this world with a manual, I very much hope Am I Loved? will be the next best thing; helping people to navigate their troubles in an informed way.
For defining the Human Condition provides context, perspective and understanding to those afflicted with mental health and wellbeing issues. It provides tools to understand our make-up and how we are intended to function, explaining where and how the vast majority of Human kind have got things wrong.
Whilst the insights and conclusions that emerge will help to solve many problems, obviously this will not necessarily include all Mental Health issues.
For Am I Loved? is written to explain our complicated make-up, helping us in life and putting us at ease, providing both a new expectation and understanding of our needs and wants and the reasons for our insecurities, offering the prospect of a more fulfilling existence, enabling readers to understand themselves for the very first time.
It shows us how to read and manage our emotions (which serve a purpose quite different from what everyone has hitherto believed) in the context of our new understanding of the Human Condition.
Whilst my book will not fix all problems it will certainly provide a new knowledge to enable the reader to take comfort, to try to deal with their gremlins, to feel no longer alone, that there is an answer to all our problems.
Everything turns on explaining our emotions, our huge need to be loved (the greatest of all our needs) and the consequence of feeling ourselves unloved, which is the root cause of so much suffering.
And so let us conclude with a look at grief, the emotion we feel when we lose a source of love. Grief is a perfectly legitimate emotion. Books are written about it, how it involves passing through seven stages. But grief is not some kind of disposition that falls on the bereaved. It is far less complicated than that, having as its cause the tragic and much regretted loss of a source of love.
As I have stated, everybody aspires to be loved and being loved is our very greatest need. So, on losing a source of committed love, or despairing of never having found one, is not grief a perfectly understandable reaction to that loss, the resultant hole in our personal make-up one that only the passing of time will assuage?
Now apply this to psychoanalysis and, indeed, to all psychotherapies and you will find at the root of all distress, or, in Freud’s immortal words ‘hysterical misery’ a feeling in the patient akin to grief, of a loss of love. Somewhere, somehow, something – an event, an exchange, a happening – will have caused the patient to register that she is not surviving. The love that the patient had counted on and felt was theirs has not been given them or has been taken away.
They do not feel themselves loved, therefore they are not surviving. Hence their feelings of being depressed, diminished, angry, insecure, undermined, shamed, grief struck, overwhelmed by despair, confused, humiliated, insulted, let down, for which they sensibly seek help.
Practically all human problems are the consequence of a loss of love, which is very similar to the concept of grief. I hope that such understanding will help us to see life in a more accessible perspective and speed up both the identification of our problems and, most importantly, their eventual solution.
-Ends-
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