Inability to Love & Avoiding God's Love

           
                             

Do You Know Yourself? Psychological Problems and the Spiritual Life by Archimandrite Symeon Kragiopoulos is a wonderful book.

Fr. Symeon's main thesis is that many people are not making spiritual progress because they are stuck in psychological ruts.

Fr. Symeon uses the work of the psychologist Karen Horney. She posited that neurosis is comprised of three flawed "movements" that people make in relation to each other are: moving toward people, moving against people, and moving away from people.

The solution is to detach from a false image of yourself.

I’ll concentrate on those who move away from others. In today’s psych jargon this type in the extreme might be labeled as having Dismissive Avoidant Attachment or being Love Avoidant. 

The following are excepts from the book on this type :

“We don't know what degree some people who remain unmarried fail to move toward marriage because God calls them to another life. It may be that they remain unmarried because they are afraid of marriage. They think they'll lose this freedom - this unhealthy freedom, however. They think they'll lose this independence - this unhealthy independence, of course. To be precise, they're afraid that someone else will enter the depths of their existence, and they don't want this at all. Certainly other needs exist that finally cause them to get married. For example, when a woman is looking for protection, affection, in the end she'll get married, but this shortcoming will exist. How is a communion of souls and persons possible in this marriage, then?

He doesn't want people to approach him, he doesn't want them to influence him, he doesn't want them to obligate him to do anything.

This type also has the tendency, among other things, to deaden his feelings, to suspend them, not to allow them to act, to operate. And he does this, as a rule, because every one of our feelings, this or that feeling, causes us to open up, to express ourselves, causes us to manifest ourselves. Precisely because this type of person is closed, however closed off even before his very self...

                     

This type, then, is the sort of person who can't open himself to God, who can't trust in God. He ends up being that Christian who is doing fine, just fine, but deep down - he feels it, he sees it, when he's paying attention - he still doesn't have communion with God, he still doesn't have contact with God. The light of God hasn't come into this secret darkness that exists inside him, into this double-locked shell of his.

....he wonders why he doesn't love other Christians, why he doesn't love other people. 

It's possible that the whole relationship between this "good" Christian and other people appears to be good, be ongoing, but at depth, however, his existence has no communion with other people, and this Christian doesn't feel that the other existences pass into him and his own existence passes into the other existences. That is, doesn't perceive his soul to be open so that the love of his brothers, his fellow Christians, and first and foremost the love of God passes inside him.

…a hyper-sensitivity is created in a certain way, like a defense mechanism, which is immediately set in motion, at work, in operation, as soon as something comes along and influences this soul at its depth, as soon as it comes along in some way to obligate this soul to do something (against its will) or as soon as it gives the appearance that it wants to oppress this soul.

For him it's a catastrophe to open up. We could say that this type knows one word - closed. Openness frightens him - and still more openness before God.

….[When] a person surrenders fully to God, this means that he accepts a visitor within him. He stops being fenced in and closed off. The unhealthy type, however, can't do this, because he seeks isolation, he has recourse to isolation in a compulsive way.

How is it possible for this person to receive grace? How is it possible for the light to come to such a soul? It isn't possible.

….it’s possible that we want away and we try to make it go away, and yet it doesn't go away.

Let me give you an example so that you understand,

It is difficult for granite to melt from an ordinary fire as for this situation to be resolved by ordinary efforts. In order for granite to melt, it requires a very high temperature. And in order for this situation to go away, for this wall to melt and the soul to open, it requires, to be sure, a great temperature of faith.

However, when this human being who has such an unhealthy condition understands how he himself is, deep down, and how he moves, and he can be given truly to Christ and truly be reborn in Christ, then he'll really be flooded with love, he'll become a true personality and will have a true, real relationship with other human beings."

Finally, from The Divine Ideas Tradition in Christian Mystical Theology :

                ".....the embodied historical struggle of every creature to discover and to be its true self, to communicate the vivacious idea at its core, is never left behind but is integral to its consummate realization, to its fullness of life. And as the creature fully lives into its self-communication, this true life surges past all false selves constructed by sin and prejudice and violence of every kind, and onwards into the inexhaustible self-sharing of its truth; for the truth at the heart of every creature is God's eternal and imperishable knowing and loving of it and this is the life from which it flows and which, Christians believe, God intends it to enjoy forever."

Robert Imbelli HERE comments,

"The death from which Christ saves us is far more than physical death. It is the very corroding of God’s image in us through fantasies of self-aggrandizement and hatred. These distortions of the generative divine ideas wreak havoc not only on individuals, but also on the whole human community and the rest of material creation. Sin falsifies divine communication and erects obstacles to the communion God desires. At its deepest, sin is refusal of Incarnation. For, in a sentence from Maximus the Confessor that McIntosh relishes, “the Word always and in all things desires to realize the mystery of his embodiment.”

With the resurrection of Christ, God’s life-giving Word stands fully revealed. Christians are those whose converted consciousness perceives the fulfillment of God’s plan in the risen Christ and whose conduct seeks to further the restoration of all things in him. Immersed in Christ’s paschal mystery in baptism and nourished by the Eucharist, Christians are led “into a new communion with the divine ideas…a new perception of all reality from within the eternal divine knowing and loving of all things.”