when love is absent

Most deeply, when we are unseen and unloved for who we are, we experience emotional abandonment, neglect, and isolation, and ultimately face the possibility of personal nonexistence itself. Threatened with personal annihilation, we are not led to embrace and synthesize our unfolding potential, but are instead forced to truncate and distort this potential - largely unconsciously and automatically - in order to survive within the non-empathic environment. In this way we are dominated by environmental demands and inwardly enter a state of profound and often hidden alienation from self and other.

Living under the threat of annihilation and alienated from the powerful unfoldment of our natural potential, we may find ourselves struggling with any number of psychological disturbances: painful patterns of thought and action, addiction to drugs and alcohol, obsessions with work or play, compulsivity in sex or relationships, the torment of anxiety and depression, a lack of meaning and purpose in life, or perhaps a numbing immersion in daily routines. This painful inner turmoil may cause major disruptions in our lives such that we seek professional help, or it may exist quietly and insidiously as a hidden substrate of our seemingly normal lives, causing us in Thoreau's words to "lead lives of quiet desperation."

- John Firman and Ann Gila, from their book, "A Psychotherapy of Love"