The Intelligence Of Falling In Love.

I fall in love easily; the oxytocin then flows, life is easy, and my imagination picks up feelings and ideas, “bottom up” from my subconscious. The arrogance is lurking and exposes the equilibrium, in the everyday trivialities, to the test. However, the evolutionary intelligence, as always, has provided me with an excellent moderator. It is my young daughter, who often takes me out of my escapes from reality and shows how crazy my opinion, from another era, is when applied to the situation her generation is experiencing. My, as I rate them, democratic values, become quickly, in her eyes, dictatorial. She has exchanged three emails with different continents before I have formulated a sentence in a blog text. Our view, today, of the retiring and incoming king of Spain, showed very clearly how the different generations may manifest their sympathies.

A small minority of my relations have been long standing since they have been sufficiently answered / trusting. My mother, my childhood friend Eva, my boss  / mentor / pal Bert, my shrink and guide Art Janov and my daughter Isabel, fall into this category. Many other relationships, including my two first children, have been intense and relatively short-lived, often because mine and the other parties’s neuroses and / or valuations have been more Me-oriented than We-oriented. Most of these short-term love affairs have mostly  left great memories that sometimes pop up when the oxytocin production requires an injection.

A few days ago I wrote about a new “love”; “Conversational Intelligence”! In this case, it was the leitmotif of the book - a three-step unconditional development / collaboration model - and not the author, Judith E. Glaser, with who I fell in love. The model met a latent need I had for two - roughly parallel - 40-year careers as a manager (with changes / crisis as a speciality) and as a psychotherapeutic patient. The need, which Glaser intend to meet, can best be expressed in the potential of verbalizing / visualizing a new form of transparent cooperation / trust. What we can understand and verbalize, that can then be communicated into conversational intelligence.

Will Judith E. Glaser’s change- and collaboration-model survive in the long term? If I draw parallels with the therapy based on The Primal Principle, which Art Janov innovated, I believe that both the model and my delight are permanent. This belief I base in the fact that the model is built on Judith’s insights from a personally experienced need for change in a neurotic imprinted upbringing. It has many similarities with my primal therapeutic experiences. Furthermore, Judith’s model arrives in a generational transition between the new transparent and the old non-transparent democracy that permeates all sectors of all societies on every continent. Digital technology has taken democracy a step further, and an impatient growing proportion of the world is tired of the power struggle, corruption, lack of trust and fairness.

The risk with the Glaser-innovation, as I see it, is that many are quickly becoming carried away and see opportunities for a quick fix with something that by nature is very complex. That happened to Art Janov’s Primal Therapy, which, over time, proved to be a therapy / change / cure in the long run; from several years to a life-long treatment, all proportionate to the nature of the trauma / problem / crisis and how long they had lasted.

To show how important I think the “Conversational Intelligence” is, I have inspired my almost 20 year old daughter to read it and in her future career in business encourage its use. That will, in conjunction with Art Janovs information of the need to raise children with unconditional love, care and attention, give us hope for the future and less difficult traumas to cure, privately and in our jobs.

Jan Johnsson