The Empty Self, Culture and I LOVE ME

As a first blog post it probably makes sense to give a small tidbit of background. Actually, rather than doing that, go to the vision page of MyOwnBiggestFan.com and you can read the history there. I am too eager to get into the thick of things. http://www.myownbiggestfan.com/vision.html

As a psychotherapy intern who is trying to balance my therapy work with a full time corporate job, I set aside Sundays to do psychology reading. Ever the skeptic about the "healing technologies" deployed in psychotherapy I am always fascinated by how culture shapes psychotherapy and even the "I LOVE ME" meditation.

And so this morning, my husband made the eggs while I made the coffee and I sat with my nose in the book, Constructing the Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy by Philip Cushman. While I like psychology and new age spirituality and all that it has brought to my life, I also have a beginner's mind, a questioning observer or even a Jungian archetypal curiosity when it comes to the field of psychology and the practice of the "I LOVE ME" meditation. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, psychotherapy and new age spirituality are part of the social fabric. Sure not everyone is into this stuff but most folks are aware of it.

Cushman's book (the sixty pages that I am into it) looks at the cultural history of America and the many healing technologies found in the most unexpected places over the course of our history. Our own racism was in a way, a healing technology. Ouch. So it seems a good thing to be aware of how culture impacts our practice of psychotherapy and any other healing modalities, “I LOVE ME” included. He says that psychotherapy can unknowingly be in support of the cultural status quo and wrote the book to not only bring this to light but challenge therapists to examine the macro view of psychology in a larger cultural context.

Cushman ultimately posits that staunch individualism rules the day supported by capitalism and its prerequisite for an empty self that psychotherapy often supports. "...Individualism is itself a Western tradition, a response to economic arrangements, moral understandings, and political constrictions of feudal life" (Cushman, 10). In order for capitalism to function we have to create a rampant consumerism and the best way to do that is support this notion of an empty-self that needs "filling up" and behold we have consumer marketing to help with the "empty self" project. The goal is to get us to spend money on food, alcohol, clothes, cars, expensive parties, etc. Boy am I a sucker!

Going deeper, I wonder how this notion of an empty self impacts how we relate to one another? There was a recent university research report, which studied the nature of friendship in America and the prevalence of lack of a confidant by 25% of Americans. I am really not interested in finding someone or some system to blame, like capitalism or anything else. I just wonder about all this staunch individualism, emptiness and now loneliness as part of our evolutionary process as Americans and how psychotherapy and perhaps "I LOVE ME" is functioning unconsciously in support of the very system that is creating our suffering.

I know for myself, I crave a greater sense of community but without losing my individuality. Perhaps our whole culture is at this watershed moment where we are trying to figure out how to be individuals and community members at the same time. I suspect it is all a largely unconscious movement and a difficult task to achieve holding what, right now, feels like a polarity of self and community, especially seeing as capitalism says that emptytiness=consumerism=money and the impact money has in segregating and splitting our community.

But what do all these pontifications have to do with "I LOVE ME"? The Rodan Foundation's "I LOVE ME" was communicated in trance from a different dimension to members of its church. Me always being the skeptic, I had to try it out before I was sold, and sometimes I am still skeptical. But the practice of the "I LOVE ME" meditation is not just blind spiritual bypassing. I suppose for some it is - they tell themselves "I LOVE ME" so they can feel superior or not have to see the homeless guy outside on the doorstep. In my experience it has given me the tools to explore myself with open curiosity and a sense of humor and slowly as I practice more I want to be open, curious and loving towards others. I want to know what stirs inside me when I see the homeless guy or how I relate to others.

So is "I LOVE ME" in support of this continued "empty self" stuff that keeps us shopping or is it something else? I think it is something else if we intend it to be so. The intention of "I LOVE ME" as I understand it is to change the vibrational frequency of our energy bodies from a fear vibration to a love vibration. That vibratory shift impacts the vibration of the community as a whole. But I also see that it has the potential to fill us up with our own self-love so that we can, if we choose, move out into the world from a place of fullness and make contact with people out of authenticity rather than from the needs of the empty self. This empty self notion not only fuels our consumption but it also fuels our using this message ONLY to spiritual bypass rather than really actively LOVE who we are. I wonder, who is the homeless guy inside of us that we don't want to see...I think "I LOVE ME" helps us be with our own inner “homeless guy” and create a home inside from which we can reach out into our community.

You know, I had a friend come to the launching of my t-shirt company at The Love Awakening Summer Festival this July and I was very curious about her response to the festival. This is a woman and therapist I deeply respect. She works with inner city kids living in the most unloving, abusive and impoverished environments ever. She said to me, " this I LOVE ME stuff is nice for rich white people to feel good about not seeing what is really going on but how does it reach others?" I guess I have taken her comments on as an inspiring challenge. Not out of guilt but again from this place of “I LOVE ME” where I can really explore and be with her question. How does “I LOVE ME” grow beyond the boundaries of my own skin, race and class as a real practice of “I LOVE ME" and "I LOVE MY COMMUNITY” because loving my community is loving me. I don’t totally know how but I have some ideas, some I am beginning to live and others I am just mustering the courage and vision to see.