Entrancing Relationships
The Hypnotic Framework of Addictive Relationships
by
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There are many forces in the universe: gravity, electromagnetic, and nuclear just to name a few. Yet, in the course of human (and maybe not so human) events, there is none stronger or more powerful than the passion one lover feels for another. When grown men and women of wealth and power enter into chaotic encounters and risk everything for the love of another, we need to ask poignantly, "What’s really going on here?" "What’s the driving force?" Dysfunctional relationships are at the core of practically every mental health issue, life stress, and job impairment in this country. Sixty-five percent of all new marriages end in divorce and one-third of all babies are born out of wedlock (Martin and Bumpass, 1989). Bars are filling (as are churches) with new singles everyday. For the first time in modern history, single people outnumber married people (60 percent of the adult population is single). The paradox is that there are more marriages and divorces than ever before in modern times. Successfully married people are in the minority. U.S. Senator William Proxmire once said that love should not be researched, as it was the one quality that should be held sacred from analysis. Yet myths and illusions of love create untold misery. We need to realize that loving involves more than hormones. It involves more than romantic illusions, fantasies, and erotic escapism from everyday reality. Loving involves the healthy totality and alignment of spirit-mind-body, psychobiological synergy. The mind, the soul, the emotions, the senses, and body chemistry all are systems which need to be aligned and readied in launching that relationship into orbit. When we enter into a relationship, we do not even begin to understand the forces with which we are playing. The enormous amount of suffering needlessly encountered by naive (and not so naive) partners entering into potentially dangerous liaisons is almost pitiful. Loving relationships exert and elicit tremendously powerful and many times unknown forces deep within and between partners. These forces are felt and sensed but rarely accessed in a conscious and enlightened frame. The energizing field forces (erotic pull of entrancement) of loving invoke a matching and resonance of rapport between partners’ minds, emotions, senses, and chemistry. These field forces of rapport have a name: entrancement. Entrancement is an alignment of matching energies and expectations at one of the deepest levels of human experience, which constitute attraction, resonance, and union between thematically (thinking and believing) similar and congruent partners at many levels of their life experiences (images, feelings, characters, fantasies, chemistry, etc.). Entrancement involves suspension of critical faculties (meaning we lose our mind and surrender ourselves to some strange, new girl or guy, then lose sleep because we cannot stop thinking about them). It also involves selective attention (she or he is the only one for me in the entire world of billions of people). These and many other facets suggest that the power of entrancement is hypnotic in origin. Romantic addictive relationships can be comprehended in such a hypnotic framework. Thus, the essential premise of this book is that romantic, addictive enmeshment is the result of what is experienced as irresistible pulls from hypnotic entrancement. Entrancement involves a coming together or fusion of idealized images superimposed upon physical attributes of one partner by another. Each partner brings to the relationship ideals or images of his or her perfect mate. Partners merge their ideal images of love and beauty with the size, shape, and contour of their mates. Such fusion unleashes incredible forces far beyond each partner’s conscious comprehension. The scope of this book is to inspire and guide the reader’s heart, mind, and soul on a journey into and through the inner and outer storms. Through this turbulent journey, the hidden self is revealed as an anchor of sensory motifs.
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About the Book
Why do partners return to dysfunctional relationships forgiving, forgetting and forever repeating the same miserable scenario? Without awareness and mastery of entrancing hypnotic forces, relationships can be severely damaged or even destroyed. The essential premise is that addictive enmeshment is the result of what are experienced as irresistible pulls from hypnotic entrancement. Hypnotic entrancement is fantasy fixation of perfect love leading to eventual demise. Parallels are drawn to hypnotic phenomena. Entrancement involves a coming together or fusion of idealized images superimposed upon physical attributes of the partner. Each partner brings to the relationship ideals or images of their perfect mate. Partners merge their ideal images of love and beauty with the size, shape and contour symmetries of mates. The scope of the book is to guide the reader through the turbulence where the hidden self is revealed as an anchor of sensory motifs. Sensory motifs are inherent, self-organizing structures and characteristics that give partners their sense of uniqueness. Numerous case examples illustrate a four-stage parallel between addictive bonds and hypnosis (e.g.: idealization, disillusionment, obsession and reproachment). Reawakening is described as releasing entrancement through the emergence of innate artistic motifs.
About the Author
Don J. Feeney, Jr. is the founder and director of Consulting Psychological Services, P.C., in Downers Grove and Chicago, Illinois, where he functions as a licensed clinical psychologist. He earned his Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Loyola University of Chicago in 1979 and has been fascinated with the study of life purpose dynamics and motifs for more than twenty-nine years. He completed postdoctoral studies at the University of Chicago and attended the Adler Institute of Chicago. He is a certified alcohol and drug counselor and has published numerous articles on addictions. He has been on many national talk shows and recently completed Motifs: The Transformative Creation of Self and is currently working on new material related to the Psychology of Terrorism. He is a certified neurolinguistic programmer, using Ericksonian hypnosis in his therapy and publications. He has drawn extensively from many theoretical and clinical fields in formulating his particular brand of therapeutic intervention involving healing and sensory motifs.