The pressing question becomes: "How do we recover our capacity to love and how do we develop our loving skills?"
In their cutting edge book The General Theory of Love, Thomas Lewis et all convincingly establish the limbic brain as the seat of the loving emotion. They write about the genetic basis for the development of love and how in a child's earliest days, when the capacity is developing, the child and the mother inhabit an open system in which their limbic connections affect each other profoundly. This mutual modification is most powerful for the child who is fully open to developing and setting down patterns of loving.
While loving patterns are set in childhood, later relationships in which the person establishes a limbic resonance with another are capable of restructuring the original design. Lewis et al conclude that permanent beneficial restructuring of a persons deeply ingrained limbic brain patterns is possible through long-term individual psychotherapy with a therapist who, for all intents and purposes, needs to be a paragon of limbic virtue.
I arrived at similar conclusions by a very different path based largely on intuition and trial and error as a teacher of "human potential" workshops about transactional analysis. As a part of my teaching I devised a set of transactional exercises which I initially called "Stroke City" and which I have refined over the years and renamed "Opening the Heart."
The exercise had the overt purpose of teaching transactional analysis while defeating the stroke economy, helping people satisfy their stroke hunger and teaching them how to obtain what they most want: to love and be loved. It turned out, however, that the exercise noticeably restructures people's experiences at a a far more profound level than expected; frequently workshops participants left the experience with a dramatically enhanced loving feeling akin to an oceanic experience. From my experience over the last twenty years I am convinced that positive lasting effects in limbic patterns can be produced with sharply focused group work that concentrates on loving transactional behavior and the emotional consequences of it.
Elsewhere (The Meming of Love) I have described the intense resistance that I have encountered in obtaining acceptance for the notion that love can be taught not only over long years of skilled psychotherapy, as proposed by Lewis et al but by intense, short term transactional exercises that can be undertaken in an everyday context.
Quite simply, I encourage people in a group to personally defy the stroke economy by:
Giving the strokes they want to give,
Asking for and accepting strokes they want,
Rejecting strokes they don’t want and
Giving themselves strokes.
These transactional exercises are practiced in an environment made scrupulously safe of hostility or coercion by establishing a set of cooperative agreements designed to produce a safe experience. A skilled trainer leads the exercises, sees to it that agreements are kept and helps the group to analyze the interactions, transaction by transaction. Lewis et al write of "three neural faces of love"--limbic resonance, limbic regulation and limbic restructuring-- which are the requirements for bringing about the rehabilitation of the emotional losses of early life. All three of these processes require a secure base provided in these training groups; an atmosphere of trust and openness allowing participants the opportunity to give and take love in a setting of limbic resonance which makes "opening the heart" possible.
Practiced over time, these exercises can actually transform people, making them more capable of giving and receiving love; they represent an advanced technique for building or rebuilding a person’s loving capacities. Like a highly sophisticated diet regime in which we learn what, when and how much to eat or not eat, this stroke regime aims for similar healthy goals in our emotional lives. In conjunction with a program of meditation or other therapeutic activity that is aimed at restructuring the feelings of unworthiness th