Scientific evidence strongly suggests that to maintain emotional and physical health we have to know how to relate to each other in a caring way. The undeniable evidence is that anger, anxiety and depression, on one hand, and love and intimacy on the other, affect health and recovery from illness. This findings have been elaborated by Dean Ornish MD in Love and Survival. The Scientific Basis for the Healing Power of Intimacy. (1997) He writes:
“…love and intimacy are at the root of what makes us sick and what makes us well... I am not aware of any factor in medicine -- not diet, not smoking, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery—that has greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness and premature death from all causes.”
Yet, caring (love to be blunt,) which is presumed to be based on a mammalian instinct, strongly allied with survival is fraught with difficulties and is becoming increasingly difficult to exercise in our culture. Hoping to counteract these trends, I endeavor to teach people the simple, basic transactions that constitute the loving experience. This practice is based on three concepts: Strokes, The Stroke Economy and Opening the Heart.
Puzzled by the difficulties that people have when exchanging strokes I came upon Wilhelm Reich’s concept of the "sex economy," which he defined as the intentional squelching of sexual exchanges among German youth for the purpose of promoting conformity. I saw a similar inhibiting trend in our culture, applied to simple affection and love, and called it the "stroke economy."
The stroke economy creates a scarcity of love and affection by imposing a set of rules that govern the exchange of strokes.
- The rules of the stroke economy are:
- Don’t give strokes you would like to give.
- Don’t ask for strokes you would like to get.
- Don’t accept strokes you would like to accept.
- Don’t reject strokes you don’t want.
- Don’t give yourself strokes.
These rules are enforced internally and externally. Internally, by what we, in transactional analysis, call the inner Critical Parent. The Critical Parent is an ego state and as such it represents a network of ideas, acquired in childhood which deeply affect love of ourselves and others. These ideas can be seen as ingrained neural networks; "limbic attractors" that shape every emotional experience according to an archaic blueprint.
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.