Thursday, June 10, 2010

Oil spills and Ego Boundaries..


I'm spending my days watching endless gallons of oil spill into the sea of blue, creating a marble swirl of thick brown encapsulating parts of untouched waters. They merge together in a meeting iconic of greed and beauty, of simple and complex. Sad looking Pelicans wonder onto the shore, and I'm beginning to think that I never want to drive my car again. It's been happening for weeks, but slowly, even though the gasoline geyser isn't fixed, news have shifted into other directions. Obama doesn't want any more blame for the actions of how the situation is being handled, Joran Van der Sloot killed another innocent woman, and Lindsey Lohan's alcohol monitoring ankle bracelet alarmed yesterday. The world continues to turn, as does the pages of our newspapers.

I have my NCLEX study book open, recalling lab values and answering questions like:
"The nurse knows that the physician is most likely to order which of the following laboratory tests to evaluate a client for hypoxia?"
1) Hematocrit
2) Sputum analysis
3) Arterial Blood gas (ABG) analysis
4) Total hemoglobin.
(the answer is 3, in case you were wondering!)

But instead of being interested as I should be in these matters, I have been ready a book called "The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth" by M. Scott Peck M.D. "New" is relative, being that the book was written in 1978. I'm not usually a fan of self help type literature, but maybe it's just the new stuff that is all marshmallow-y. This guy tells it straight up.
He defines love as "The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth". He incorporates dependency, cathexis, self-sacrifice and the giving of attention in attributing to love. But he got me with the "falling in love" chapter: It starts with such a good opener, "No matter whom we fall in love with, we sooner or later fall out of love if the relationship continues long enough", the honeymoon always ends, the bloom of romance always fades..
To understand the phenomenon of falling in love and the inevitability of its ending, it is necessary to examine the nature of what psychiatrists call ego boundaries. From what we can ascertain by indirect evidence, it appears that newborn infants during the first few months of its life does not distinguish between itself and the rest of the universe. As the infant recognizes its will to be on its own and not that of the universe, it begins to make other distinctions between itself and the world.
The essence of the phenomenon of falling in love is a sudden collapse of a section of an individual's ego boundaries, permitting one to merge his or her identity with that of another person. The sudden release of oneself from oneself, the explosive pouring out of oneself into the beloved, and the dramatic surcease of loneliness accompanying this collapse of ego boundaries is experienced by most of us is ecstatic. We and our beloved are one! Loneliness no more!
But then..
"they begin to come to the sickening realization that they are not one with the beloved, that the beloved has and will continue to have their own desires, tastes, prejudices, and timing different than the other's. One by one, gradually, or suddenly, the ego boundaries snap back into place, gradually or suddenly, they fall out of love".
It's not to say that you can't still love that person, but that feeling of being in love for the first time, fades. It's easy to pretend, given what the media perpetuates of love, that it is easy, romantic and free-flowing and will stand by us until death. To those who have lost love, been trampled on by someone that "loved" us, been cheated on, etc. The feeling of falling in love might have been there, but true love was not, or if it was the elements to make it last were not. Love takes dedication, extension of one's self, sacrifice. It's a choice.

Check out M.Scott Peck's other books, "A World Waiting to be Born: Civility Rediscovered" and "The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace"