Disclaimer: This comment contains a personal story.
I feel like I can weigh in on this since I’ve recently used Gendlin’s Litany to cope with a rough event in my life. Without it, I think I would have been considerably worse-prepared and consequently would have had a very strongly negative emotional response for far longer than I did.
In October of 2011, my partner of six years broke up with me. The main reason she wanted to break up was because she had decided that she was a lesbian, and wasn’t interested in having a romantic or sexual relationship with me (a man) any more.
It was incredibly tempting to discount her statements. There are plenty of rationalizations (which any LWer should know are ways of bludgeoning reality into your broken hypothesis) out there for why a lesbian woman of our age group isn’t actually lesbian. I actually did this for a few weeks to a month.
When I started being able to want to get back in touch with reality (to even use these litanies, one has to want to use them; I learned during this time of my life that this is a non-trivial precondition), I started thinking of Gendlin’s Litany. By remembering it, I was able to realize that: 1.) my ex-partner is indeed gay, 2.) not beliving that doesn’t make her any less gay, and 3.) she has always been gay and I had, in fact, been enduring it.
Owning up to it did not make it worse. My partner remained exactly as gay as she was before I updated. Owning up to it did change my strategy to one I think is much better in the long term. I am fairly certain I became more happy after I successfully updated, if anything.
I know this is an old post, but I hope you see this comment. For what it’s worth, I think you’re fairly correct in your analysis, but maybe you should question the source of this particular cached thought.
Disclaimer: This comment contains a personal story.
I feel like I can weigh in on this since I’ve recently used Gendlin’s Litany to cope with a rough event in my life. Without it, I think I would have been considerably worse-prepared and consequently would have had a very strongly negative emotional response for far longer than I did.
In October of 2011, my partner of six years broke up with me. The main reason she wanted to break up was because she had decided that she was a lesbian, and wasn’t interested in having a romantic or sexual relationship with me (a man) any more.
It was incredibly tempting to discount her statements. There are plenty of rationalizations (which any LWer should know are ways of bludgeoning reality into your broken hypothesis) out there for why a lesbian woman of our age group isn’t actually lesbian. I actually did this for a few weeks to a month.
When I started being able to want to get back in touch with reality (to even use these litanies, one has to want to use them; I learned during this time of my life that this is a non-trivial precondition), I started thinking of Gendlin’s Litany. By remembering it, I was able to realize that: 1.) my ex-partner is indeed gay, 2.) not beliving that doesn’t make her any less gay, and 3.) she has always been gay and I had, in fact, been enduring it.
Owning up to it did not make it worse. My partner remained exactly as gay as she was before I updated. Owning up to it did change my strategy to one I think is much better in the long term. I am fairly certain I became more happy after I successfully updated, if anything.
I know this is an old post, but I hope you see this comment. For what it’s worth, I think you’re fairly correct in your analysis, but maybe you should question the source of this particular cached thought.