This is a personal message on love excerpted from the preface to my book, 8 Steps to Love.

Love? Freud called it “the only socially acceptable psychosis.” To Plato it was “divine madness,” and to Saint John love was nothing less than God, the ultimate power of the universe. Unfortunately, it was only after my spiritual awakening had turned my life upside down that I began to understand love. Up until then, I had been a serial monogamist searching for love by attempting to rescue the women I had fallen in love with by marrying them. I began each marriage as Sir Lancelot by trying to be their hero/savior only to end up leaving like Rhett Butler feeling unloved and unappreciated by Scarlett. Each time I left, I felt justified because I felt loved only for what I could provide and not for myself.

After my awakening, I finally saw my dilemma clearly. Deep down, I did not love myself and I had been looking for someone to give me the love I needed to give to myself. I had no sense of worth apart from what I did or had. My search for the magic of lasting love had been doomed from the start as I could not trust nor believe that I was loved for myself.

In all my intimate relationships, I had failed to understand how we are never separated from love. Even during the most heated conflict, when anger rules, or even when we feel bereft of love as when we are scared or grieving, love is ever present. For love is the underlying energy fueling all of our emotions. This book demonstrates something I wish I had known much sooner in my life, namely, how to return to love when we need it the most—the moment stress and conflict begin.

Forged in the fire of my own healing journey as well as in the trenches of my previous work as a psychologist, this book can change your life! In this revised edition I also draw upon my recent work as a stress expert on national television and as a stress coach on radio. The time pressure on television and radio forced me to hone and refine my ideas.

The shows I was on to help people following the tragedy of September 11, 2001 really put my ideas to the test. I’ll never forget the tearful thank you I received from a young man I spoke to on a nationally televised talk show. It was just days after the disaster and he had just lost his father. I had helped him feel better by showing him the steps for shifting his grief and anger back to his love for his father.

... No one is spared from the hidden hurts of the past—not even the best and the brightest.

Even with all my training and even with my having been through two different forms of psychoanalysis, I was not immune to the grip of the hidden hurts of the past. It took my spiritual awakening followed by faithfully practicing the 8 steps to love and the techniques I developed in this book to heal my life and relationships.

Sincerely,
Stephen Royal Jackson, Ph.D.