From our teleseminar series for upgraded members, which we had again last night, I wanted to share this installment. Those of you with upgraded membership and, therefore, access to Romantipedia.com will find direct links in this article to explore more there. You can upgrade to access all the coursework as well as Romantipedia.com by becoming an upgraded member, here: For a potential lasting couple to navigate friendship and love together in this, the Act Two of our love story called human courtship - emotional attraction - we must master the two prime negative emotions – anger and fear, which are the roots of all unhappiness– or else risk the failure of our friendship, and therefore our romance. Othello and Hamlet teach us how we can transcend depression, revenge, and jealousy to discover assertiveness as the only way out of anger. Lady Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and Julius Caesar show us how to transcend addiction, fear, masochism, and worry through courage to emerge as an emotionally powerful couple. Science and the Two Killers of Friendship ➳ Right in the middle of the nine steps of courtship, and this, step 5, we have entered the world of friendship and love, and the main energy that it runs on, which is the happiness of self-esteem. This is where we know what to look for in love and friendship, but now we must guard that self-esteem against all the things that may bring it down, impair, limit, or extinguish it. The one word for the most threatening force that may kill love and friendship is, "Stress." Since there are two kinds of stress - hurt and loss - then there are two major "killers" of love, friendship and happiness, and we must learn to deal with them both. If the stress called, "hurt," gets into us, then it is OURS, and we now call that, "anger." If the stress called, "loss," gets into us, then it too, is OURS, and we now call it, "anxiety." We need to be able to recognize and label these two killers of love when they appear in our lives, as stress. The Drama of Anger and Fear ➳ Stress comes at us from the outside, and is negative emotional energy. Our personal boundary is actually the first line of defense against stress, blocking it at the door of our psychology. However, once these two types of stress - hurt and loss - get into us, they are now our anger and anxiety. These two opposite emotions are on a spectrum that explains nearly every negative experience we have, and they are behind much of the drama of the human condition. The variety of ways that our dramas in our relationships may play out is myriad, as many as there are unique people in the world. However, the psychology does take on certain patterns across the bell curve of people, and for seeing the dynamics of stress with clarity, as sets of averages of behaviors, we will need to employ what we call the Anger Map to guide us in processing anger, and the Anxiety Map, to guide us in the dynamics of our fears. In the end, the stories about our dramatic emotions also take certain patterns that one may find as themes of major pieces of folklore and literature. The works of Shakespeare for example contain such a rich diversity of human emotional situations that one might nearly see Shakespeare not just as the canon, or compendium of dramatic stories, but as a glossary of all the dramatic behaviors that people are capable of in their psychology. And so we will make use of various Shakespearean stories in our exploration of stressand other impediments to love. Othello and Desdemona ➳ Anger is often the first stressful emotion that men and women encounter as new couples. It indicates that there is some lack of a resource, that someone needs something and is not getting it, or that some social, financial, romantic or interpersonal damage has been done to a person. The stress called, "hurt," leads to the internal feelings in someone who has been hurt, of getting angry. The story of Othello and Desdemona teaches us about many of the pathways that angerin us can take, including the path of revenge, with all its permutations, and among them, the "green-eyed monster," jealousy, which has its way with our impulsive, irrational behavior, taking it over as it is powered by anger and the scarcity of well-being, peace and comfort that we suffer of. Our first foray into Shakespeare has us looking to the interpersonal strife between two men over one woman, and all the inaccurate meanings to be made in that, between the men and between Othello and his wife, Desdemona. It is an appropriate story to lead us deeper into the emotions, since we have completed the step 3 of courtship - where men compete to win the heart of a woman, and step 4 of courtship, where we have seen a man and woman come together to form the beginnings of a friendship. The Treasure Map of Anger ➳ In getting this far through the Romantic Dynamics material, you likely have learned enough about psychology to see how emotions work, how they are on a spectrum, how our instincts and to a degree, how our decisions have an impact on the emotions. We will first take on the challenge of a comprehensive look at that first of two killers of love, "hurt," and the anger which it becomes if it breaks through our personal boundary, or if we let it in through a weakness or gap in our boundary. Central in understanding both anger, and any algorithmic map of it to explain its dynamics, is the notion that we, as humans, are living things. To biologists, a living thing at the least, responds to its environment, and this behavior requires that the response vary on a spectrum from being more unconscious and automatic (which we call an instinct), all the way over to a response that is actually conscious and purposeful, possibly with some logic and reasoning involved (which we call a decision.) Since the response to the environment, varying from an instinct to a decision, can only have one of two outcomes - destructive (wrong) responses or outcomes, constructive(right) responses of outcomes, or there was no decision at all, then we have three possible pathways for anger that is in us, or gets into us, to be processed to its completion. We will soon learn that these three options for anger will lead us down a path to the reptilian brain, the mammalian brain, or the higher brain, the latter of which is the conscious mind, and the center of character maturity. In the end, we are seeking out the very things we lack in life. These are our treasures, and they represent sources of well-being, or mothering, in our lives - the ultimate treasure, and a spiritual one. Depression is Unloving ➳ If anger and anxiety suffered of hurt and loss are the two great "killers of love" and of friendship, then depression as one of the three pathways for anger is perhaps the most well-known and common. Depression is "anger turned inward," which is to say that it is anger that we store up and then make no decision about. In fact, one of the terrible things that sends the depressed down a drain of desolation is that depression itself causes indecision and passiveness, which then works against the "response to the environment" as defining life, and reflecting the passion that makes us feel alive, which then cycles back to passiveness and even more depression. Depression feels less than being alive. In terms of where in the mind depression is operating, we could say that it is a feature of the mammalian brain, the emotional centers of the brain that are also so critical to running our emotional bonding in friendship and love. Depression is therefore also the enemy of love and friendship, and a depressed person may feel both unlovable and also come across as not friendly and loving, which certainly hurts romance. The Sadness of Ophelia ➳ The story of Ophelia is one of the best in Shakespeare for explaining the dramatic nature of depression and its risks, the symbolism and language inherent in it and the hurt and anger underlying it in its Romantic Dynamics. Ophelia was to marry Hamlet, when his grief-stricken antics got in the way, and she became so profoundly depressed as to actually get psychotic too, and commit suicide. This kind of tragic event is the natural course of what depression does to our romances. We are hurt, or not getting our need for love met, which then makes us angry on some level. If, like Ophelia, we find ourselves not being able to express our anger at the one who hurt us do to troubles of their own (like Hamlet's), then it has nowhere to go but to send us into depression. From there, it can store up and store up, and when the lid if going to blow off, it very well may emerge as aggression. In the case of Ophelia and Hamlet, and her love for him amidst his grief, she could not find it in herself to violently attack him, and instead, attacked herself, to take her own life. The origin of the quote, "Depression is angerturned inward" was originally from Karl Menninger, MD, who had actually said, "Suicide is anger turned inward." The Aggression of Hamlet ➳ In the character of Hamlet, we might be tempted to describe depression, for all his brooding and grief over the loss of his father. Yet his psychology vis a vis his loverOphelia, was one of emotional aggression with his anger. In our Anger Map, you might say that the greatest need of all needs in a boy is for his father, and in this case, the traumatic murder of his father was also a loss at the same time - the worst of that which causes both anger and anxiety, and the ultimate stress composed of that which both hurts, and suffers a loss. The nature of aggression - doing harm to others with our anger - is seen in his cruel treatment of Ophelia - an emotional violence passed onto her from his reaction to the murder of his father. That aggressive nature is both angry, but also draws a feature out of the anxiety of his loss, which is impulsiveness. The reactionary impulsiveness in aggression makes it a pathway for venting anger that we could term,
