Self-Help Review 3: How To Fall Out Of Love

Self-Help Review:
How To Fall Out Of Love
1978
By Dr. Debora Phillips
with Robert Judd.

Love. It's that big, thick prick of an emotion that slides into your most sensitive areas and gives you the most amazing pleasures imaginable. Take that same prick and ram it into your piss-hole, and you will know how badly it can hurt you, too. We have all felt some kind of love, or some approximation of it, and have also felt the pain of it being yanked away from us. Those moments after love disappears can be the most emotionally painful times you will experience. So what do you do?

Dr. Debora Phillips and Robert Judd appear to have an answer to that question. At 127 pages, "How To Fall Out Of Love" stands as one of the shortest books that I have read in recent years. It is based on behavior therapy, and treats love as something that is learned, and therefore can be un-learned. It teaches different tricks for fucking around with your thoughts of your loved one, from blocking those thoughts entirely to imagining this sexy creature with lumps of excrement tumbling out of their mouth. The most important idea is that once you take a thought and examine it, it immediately becomes less powerful, because once it's objectified it loses some of that emotional juice. Unfortunately, I am currently not madly in love with anybody, and I cannot test these ideas out to their full extent. But, there are a couple of people who I have wanted to slip it to, and I would like to get those thoughts out of my head, so I will be using the techniques for that.

This book is divided into two sections. The first is the "How To Fall Out Of Love" section, and the second is the "...And In Again" section. The second section describes interesting ways of becoming intimate with a new person, but most of this review will deal with the first half.

There are five techniques you can use to get over someone. They are:

Thought Stopping
Silent Ridicule
Techniques For Developing Strength To Stand Alone
Desensitization For Dealing With Jealousy And Rejection
Covert Sensitization (Repulsion)

Thought stopping takes the most common advice given after a break-up ("just stop thinking about her/him!"), and gives you a technique to actually do it. How this works is, you list the best, most positive scenes and pleasures that you can imagine that do not involve the person you are trying to get over. These can be either real or imagined, or both. Then, as soon as a thought about this person pops into your head, you yell "STOP" and immediately think of one of those things. This works because of an action/inhibition double link in our neurology. You can't laugh AND be sad at the same time, you can't tighten one muscle without another relaxing, and so forth. It may take a long ass time for this to work, but after a few weeks of yelling "STOP" and thinking of the good shit, you'll start thinking of the person less frequently.

Just so you know, here's my list of "good shit":

1. The moment when, while dancing at Par Avion, France Gall's "A Banda" starts and I grab Sofia and jump around, almost in a circle, with her.
2. Reading the last page of James Joyce's "Ulysses."
3. Singing English-language songs with a French band at a restaurant in Brittany.
4. Eating out and then giving a nice hard fucking to Cecilia Gallerani, aka the "Lady with an Ermine" in Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting.
5. Making a baby laugh.

The second technique I didn't find all that interesting. Silent Ridicule means you imagine your former lover looking like a jack-ass in some way. It's pretty goofy and meant to make you laugh. What you do is take a minor fault or habit of theirs, and either exaggerate it or make something else up. Like if they are dressed in suits, you imagine them in a tutu, or if they have a slightly large ass, you imagine that it's so big they can't fit through the door, etc. By the way, if any of you dickheads start thinking of MY ass in that way, I'll be sure to ram a baseball bat in yours. This technique is to see them as a regular person and not some faultless God, where even their shit-stains were once charming to you.

The strength building techniques were some basic things which seem to apply mainly to "the fairer sex." One thing is to list, every day, at least two positive things. They can be either your personality traits or positive things you've done.

Here's two of mine from yesterday:

Monday: Finished my book. Kicked three little bastards out of the library.

There's a lot of tips and tricks for building assertiveness and self-esteem, much of it boiling down to being independent, doing things on your own, finding ways to eliminate anxiety without another person, etc. Best advice? Buy something and return it, saying you don't want it anymore. Also of note...the Thought-Stopping technique can also be used for when you insult yourself, or think that you're worthless, or get hit with a depressing thought. You just yell "STOP" when the thought pops into your head and think of some good shit. For example, while shelving some videos yesterday I was filled suddenly with the overwhelming urge to weep. This is because I saw a No Doubt concert DVD and realized that some asshole would probably be checking it out later that day, and I wished that people didn't have such crap taste. So immediately I muttered "STOP" (I was in a library, so I can't just yell it) and heard the jumping girly beat of my favorite France Gall song in my head, and saw Sofia and I swirling around in a Carrie-esque manner. Dancing, I was never happier, and so there it is. I went back to the desk feeling great, until, of course, I had to deal with a yelling Chinese lady.

The Desensitization chapter appealed to me because of my fling with hypnosis. There's a Deep Muscle Relaxation technique which is pretty much self-hypnosis, but to get you to the point where every muscle in your body is completely relaxed. After you learn how to do this you make a list of things that get you jealous (your "Jealousy Hierarchy"), on a scale of zero to one hundred. Then, relax your ass and think of something that gets you slightly jealous. Keep that thought in your head while you're in the relaxed state until it no longer bothers you. You keep doing this over the span of weeks or months until the thought that got you the most jealous...I'm talking screaming and putting your fist through walls jealous...no longer bothers you. Apparently every time a low-jealousy thought gets destroyed, everything else moves down the ladder, so whatever registered at one hundred on your jealousy scare would drop to a ninety after some work, and so on until it went to ten, then zero.

Repulsion was my favorite. The author doesn't recommend this one unless the other techniques have not entirely wiped out your sexual attraction to this person. What you do is, you think of the most disgusting thing you can, then imagine you are about to kiss your former love. When you get close enough to kiss you see/smell this vile thing, then immediately turn away and see something pleasant. An example: There's a slightly chubby woman who I have long wanted to stick myself into. No one finds her attractive but me, and because her personality is extremely odious I want to stop lusting after her. So I imagined the following. I see her in front of me, and just stand there staring at her gigantic, beautiful breasts. I move towards her and go to kiss her, but my hands grab her dirty pillows first. Once they make contact and press in, I feel a thick, sticky fluid. I move back and see pus and guacamole leaking out of her nipples, and smell the distinct odor of eggs. She cocks her head back and starts laughing, and her laughter alternates between a penis-shriveling cackle and violent coughing. While coughing gobs of phlegm and shit shoot out, either flopping over and landing on her tits or flying in my direction. I turn away and immediately see a bright summer morning. I am in a room, and the warm rays of sunlight embrace my naked body. I look down, and both Anna Nicole Smith and the chick from Super Nanny are taking turns blowing me and licking my nuts. Two sparrows flutter down holding baskets of burgers and fries. I bite into my burger, and can taste the delicious hint of grilled onions. It goes on like this until both Anna Nicole and Super Nanny French kiss with my baby batter in their mouths, then spit it into a cup of coffee, then take turns sipping it while discussing the finer points of Modernist literature. Suddenly, I am no longer attracted to the other woman. It works!

The end of the book deals with how to love someone else. There are scores of pages telling you that masturbation is both healthy and normal, and the author seems to be on a mission to get everyone jerking and flicking themselves off. There are interesting bits here and there, such as the "Sensual Holiday," but the only one I will describe here is Orgasmic Reconditioning. This is for people who have a hard time imagining sex with someone other than their former lover. Before I go into this, I must describe an interesting thing this book points out about the male orgasm. For men, there is a "point of inevitability," which is around five seconds before you shoot your junk out. What this means is that when you reach that point, there is absolutely nothing that can prevent you from having an orgasm. A police officer smashing down your door, a baseball shattering your window, or a rottweiler jumping on you and biting your face...you will STILL get off. So, what a guy needs to do is jerk off to whatever turns him on until he reaches that point. When he gets to the point of inevitability, he needs to immediately think of his new lover until he has an orgasm. Then, next time, try to imagine the same person a few seconds before the point of inevitability. Gradually do this until you can jerk it while only thinking of your new lover.

For women, there is no point of inevitability. According to this book, a woman can be turned off even during an orgasm if something happens which is distracting. But anyhow, here's how a woman can be orgasmically reconditioned. Take notes:

Masturbate thinking of whatever gets you going.
Be sure to have your Myspace page on "Roland Saint-Laurent's" picture section, but KEEP YOUR EYES CLOSED.
The second you start having an orgasm, immediately open your eyes and stare at a picture of Roland. Keep looking at this until you are finished.
Next time you masturbate, open your eyes just before orgasm, then continue.
Each time you masturbate go back earlier and earlier, until you're able to flick yourselves off entirely to those pictures of Roland. You know, the way normal, SANE people do.

Overall this was a nice, short book. It was written in 1978 and references to the "swinging" scene do date the book, but there is still good advice inside. One thing to note is that the author makes it clear that these techniques will not work unless you have a legitimate desire to fall out of love with someone. You can't be a idiot and decide to use these just because the two of you are having a "spat" and you're mad at each other. Also, they are reversible, in the slim chance that the couple gets back together. What I like is that it hails from the behavioral school of psychology, which I tend to agree with. There is ample proof that every emotional response we have is learned to some extent, and if you want to fix yourself, you need to right tools. So in effect, this book is a love toolbox. I recommend it to anyone who has just come out of a disastrous relationship and is looking to move on, or anyone interested in the love process in general. While it may or may not work for you, it's at least better to try something different than to sit down and cry over "good times" that you're no longer experiencing. At the very least, objectifying your loneliness will take some of the sting out of it, even if it doesn't remove the pain entirely.