Compassionate Love in Intimate Relationships

The Integration Process of Sexual Mass Trauma, Racism, and Resilience

Josiane M. Apollon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000529258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Drawing on interviews conducted with Black couples in the United States, this book explores relational resilience and identifies unique adaptation strategies that enable couples to overcome the multigenerational effects of violence and sexual mass trauma from slavery and activates compassionate love in flourishing relationships.

By applying Appreciative Inquiry (AI) methodology and family systems theory, the book captures the spiritual, emotional, and sexual dimensions in Black couple systems that gives meaning to their resilient relationships in the context of contemporary America. Within the framework of compassionate love, the book highlights the need for researchers and clinicians to include the broader cultural contexts in their sexual trauma-informed studies and interventions. Using genetic studies and empirical evidence, the volume contributes significantly to discussion around Black relationships and historical trauma and to the broader challenges within race relations in the United States.

This book will benefit researchers, academicians, and clinicians with an interest in sexual trauma, marriage, and family therapy, and couples counseling more broadly. Readers will also find this book useful when designing research in Black studies, intergenerational issues, or sexual intimacy.

1 Historical Context of the American Slavery System of Mass Rape

DOI: 10.4324/9781003155041-2

This chapter will start with compassionate love (CL) at the uncommon collective and historical contexts, sexual mass trauma, for a full integration of who we are as humans. Then, I will track the root causes of the strengths of our humanity to the first humans, the Africans; then describe some of their descendants, the African Americans; introduce the construct of sexual mass trauma based on the human-made mass traumas; and end with a summary.

At the collective level, CL is the universal high vibration that humans can activate in our hearts for the greater good of our relationships and highest preservation of humanity. As American novelist James Baldwin (1993) wisely pointed out “We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we have not loved each other none of us would have survived” (p. 7). CL is that survival skill of human goodness in action, while our goodness is the unique human strength and defense against ill will and darkness. CL flows freely in our positive core, both in nurturing and challenging environments. Our individual and collective mission is to remind ourselves to use CL in our relationships at times of tribulation and chaos. In a state of imbalance, the human dilemma lies in making the choice between increased suffering through disconnection and separation or through connection and unity (Fehr & Sprecher, 2013; Sinclair et al., 2016). The founder of the Universal Healing Tao System and Qigong Master, Mantak Chia, saw this human dilemma as a lack of focus on what works—love—and a costly energetic waste on what does not—anger, hate, and fear. CL is the most complex union of vital forces in our relationships that liberates our essence with goodness on the path to wholeness.

Scientifically speaking, CL is a hybrid word linking the two hardest human virtues to achieve: unconditional love and compassion. But who wants to compassionately love anyone else but the self and suffer with others, as the Latin root of compassion indicates? Very few people in the West think that suffering is a necessary and even divine part of life or that being a good person is a guarantee to their best self-interests. In our technological world of extreme stimulations, people tap into this gentle and naturally positive emergent repertoire of strengths at times of extremes when they have nothing left but their true selves. Automatically and collectively, humans’ CL flows outward to harmonize and balance out the negative forces from natural disasters or human-made atrocities. Suddenly, people remember how to be humane and follow their spirit of CL to help total strangers miles away. In daily life, some people revert by habit to a state of deep disconnection from their true nature, governed by emotional alienation, a deep fear of intimacy, and an aversion for what makes us human: our capacity to care for and foster the well-being of others (Underwood, 2009).

In 1999, during a World Health Organization (WHO) meeting convened to heal the world from the upsurge in human-made disasters bred from confusion, hatred, and violence, a group of concerned scientists, economists, and spiritual and political leaders came together with the intention to bring forth more unconditional love or altruistic love in humanity (Fehr et al., 2009). That type of love “feels so good to be on the receiving end of—good in a lasting way, one that sticks to the ribs and doesn’t give indigestion” (Underwood, 2009, p. 3). Poorly investigated and relegated to other love constructs (i.e., romantic love, passionate love, companionate love) or confounded with other prosocial behaviors (i.e., altruism, empathy, self-compassion), CL has been buried under a multitude of operational definitions to describe the ideal mutual lens to adopt with close relationships, strangers, or humanity. Beyond the simplicity of loving, the giver and the receiver, akin to my mother and I, come into the most advanced and complex human system of resonance and coherence heart to heart and soul to soul.

At an intimate level, CL unifies spirit, mind, and body by connecting “all of life with the sacred energy of love and compassion” (Choudhary & Madnawat, 2017, p. 888). As such, CL decreases both individual and collective distress. Anthropological and genetic studies have revealed that the history of humankind originated with interbreeding, migration, and some form of altruistic love (S. Klein, 2014; Overing & Passes, 2000; Post, 2007; Post et al., 2002; Ryan & Jetha, 2011). In early human communities, “everyone’s survival was tied to the group” (Ritvo, 2017, p. 4). Within intimate sexual or non-sexual closeness life, an intrinsic “caregiving behavioral system” has evolved in human beings to protect, support, and nurture others, especially in times of suffering (Bowlby, 1982; Madanes, 2009; Mikulincer et al., 2009). Further, CL has been identified as a more encompassing mechanism that mediates between relationship maintenance and relationship satisfaction in married couples (Neff & Karney, 2009; Neto & Wilks, 2017; Sabey et al., 2014). This may occur naturally, involving affect and cognition and a notion of sacrifice for the well-being of the other and the relationship that occurs whether under good or bad conditions (Underwood, 2009). These emergent properties of CL have been described as sacred qualities that help coregulate partners within their relationships without necessarily requiring partners to think of themselves as religious/spiritual or sexual beings (Sabey et al., 2014). In couples and closed relationships, CL reduces stress from one person to the other through selfless caregiving (Fehr & Sprecher, 2009; Giesbrecht, 2009; M. Klein, 2018; Sprecher & Fehr, 2005; Underwood, 2009). In communities, CL reduces societal prejudices and discrimination between in-groups (a social group with which a person identifies) and out-groups (a social group with which a person does not identify) across nations (Choudhary & Madnawat, 2017; Hofstede, 1984, 2018; M. Klein, 2018; Post, 2007; Post et al., 2002; Sinclair et al., 2016).

Current trends, within and outside relationship research, have shifted toward CL, or “a love that centers on the good of the other” (Underwood, 2009, p. 3; see also Berscheid, 2010; Choudhary & Madnawat, 2017; Fehr et al., 2014; Oman, 2011; Rauer et al., 2014; Sinclair et al., 2016; Sprecher & Fehr, 2005). Sprecher and Fehr (2005) defined CL as follows:

Compassionate love is an attitude toward other(s), either close others or strangers or all of humanity; containing feelings, cognitions, and behaviors that are focused on caring, concern, tenderness, and an orientation toward supporting, helping, and understanding the other(s), particularly when the other(s) is (are) perceived to be suffering or in need.

(p. 630)

Some social scientists have suggested that CL is a positive human dimension for intergroup relationships (Sinclair et al., 2016; T. W. Smith, 2009), within marriages (Fehr & Sprecher, 2009), and within the helping and caregiving professions (Choudhary & Madnawat, 2017; Graber & Mitcham, 2009; L. J. Roberts et al., 2009). In addition, researchers have used CL to disseminate prosocial behavior in the media (J. A. Smith et al., 2009) and enhance the biopsychosocial systems or the spirit-mind-body dimensions for human development (Marks & Song, 2009).

According to scholar and feminist critic bell hooks, most people want love, yet most experience confusion about how to practice love in daily life (hooks, 2018). Between us, science is partly responsible for this confusion, with so many operational definitions and tentative constructs about love, researchers are exacerbating public confusion and scientific indecision on what exactly love is. The other part is that people are losing hope in the science of love and rather figuring it out by themselves, which technically is the best place to start. In our time of pandemic lockdowns, love becomes of essence. Relationships rush into more extremes than in pre-COVID times, with divorce rates snowballing for older people realizing that they’re going to die without true love, and the millennials marrying more than ever realizing that they’re ready to live for true love. The statistics are there: My 30-year-old son will attend 11 weddings of his college classmates before the end of the year and one divorce party. In a mass of data, we have not connected the dots yet to explain how COVID-19 influences these various patterns of intimate relationships and is giving us the time and space to pause. With that time and space, we can draw the distinction between our essence and our survival patterns and choose to feel and act differently when loving. CL is the missing link that gives humans a chance to reevaluate the unfolding of our unabashed positive regard for the other(s) for harmony and perseverance within our long-term relationship journey. In harmonizing humans’ opposing forces of sex, mind, and spirit within ourselves, our relationships’ behavioral, emotional, spiritual, and sexual body systems might find balance in the space between us, which is sacred (Buber, 1923/1958). At least, the confusion on love might subside with more clarity in research on how these different human dimensions interplay together at times of extremes. As researchers, we need to stop hesitating looking at CL within historical contexts and have the courage to delve into the root causes of the nature of our current relationships. Nothing is random within our world, within our humanity. With a conscience, we can no longer skip the past to grasp the present for a better future for future relationships. We can embrace our collective past with new eyes on what we all know were tragic times of extremes in American history for the integration of slavery’s legacy of mass rape and multigenerational mass sexual trauma impacting Black relationships, and all relationships.

In a “post-racial” era, the oppressive and racist American system of anti-Blackness and the multigenerational transmission of sexual mass trauma from slavery and current racism have been increasingly exposed. Given the increase of sexual and violent attacks against Black women and men, sexual mass trauma was the norm in the United States long before the #MeToo Movement. In addition, the disparate health outcomes for Americans of color during the COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the economic injustice rampant throughout the country, even as the many instances of state violence against Black Americans have occasioned global scrutiny of the U.S. criminal justice system. Overt public and institutionalized White racist ideology and outcomes against people of color, especially Black people (e.g., public lynchings, hate speech and crimes, mass incarceration, and the daily barrage of racist aggression), persist in today’s segregated nation (DiAngelo, 2018; Kollmann et al., 2018; Noah et al., 2018). As part of the American system, these racial conflicts trickle down into all relationships inside the United States, creating racial stress in Black relationships. Black American couples contemplate their geographical, sociopolitical, sociohistorical, and cultural standing within a hostile system while trying to integrate their American identities with their African essence. According to the human linking systems perspective (Landau, 2012), reconnecting stories of African ancestors with the future of African Americans may help the latter heal from the multigenerational transmission of mass trauma effects and help Black couples draw strength and resilience to thrive in the present.

African Ancestry

World Historical Context

Africa is the cradle of humanity, the home of the first modern humans and first...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Introduction: A Path to Human Integration
• 1 Historical Context of the American Slavery System of Mass Rape
• 2 Cultural Context of the American Slavery System’s Impacts on Black Relationships
• 3 AI Methodology and Systems Theory Application
• 4 Results and Implications of Findings for Researchers and Clinicians
• 5 Implications for Future Couple Research and Clinical Practice
• Index