Gordon J. Hilsman on love-life pain

Seven Love-Life Spiritual Needs and Hoped-for Outcomes

“Love-life pain” has recently been included on the list of chaplain functions being studied in the Franciscan Health System’s (Tacoma WA) Department of Pastoral Care. It refers to a person’s hurting inside due to the natural inclination to achieve a lasting, pleasure-sharing partnership. Its place on the list acknowledges that a person’s romantic love life, gay or straight, is a spiritual arena all its own.

Love-Life Spiritual Needs

The traumatic relational events that occur in this arena–rape, incest, pedophilia, and domestic violence– are well recognized. Treatment for them may be expected to include spiritual wound components that can be assisted by skilled spiritual caregivers as treatment team members.

In addition however, lesser love-life pains need recognition and care from chaplains. If spiritual care is colloquially described as assistance with whatever eats at spirit and soul powerfully enough to affect one’s life happiness and healing, then a host of other situations of spiritual need deserve notice and care from ministers in general, and institutional chaplains in particular. Some less tragic, and yet painful spiritual needs frequently recognized as part of a spiritual assessment, including staff care, include:

1. Crisis Care – Listening to, notifying and facilitating connection of a crisis patient with his/her lover.
First on the mind of people on the “bad day” of a crisis event, is the whereabouts, condition and availability of spouse or “significant other.” The positive difference an available current lover can have on a crisis patient is enormous.

2. Partner Care – Support needs of a patient’s love partner. Not only do lovers contribute to the support of patients, but the lovers themselves benefit from spiritual care.

3. Prior Grief Work – Facilitating reminiscence of a widow (male or female) or bereft lover. Whether weeks, months or years after the loss, the grief experience of “lover-loss” requires a particular chaplaincy skill that helps heal the wound.

4. “Broken Heart” – Feeling the spiritual/emotional hurt of relationship breakup. Beginning to manifest the heart wrenching deterioration of a relationship to an available empathetic ear can be the beginning of addressing it more profitably in individual or marriage counseling. Adolescent suicide attempts following romantic breakups are well documented.

5. Guidance – Advice for finding success and overcoming obstacles to the flourishing of romantic love.
The vulnerability of hospitalization for any reason can precipitate openness to, and seeking of, advice from a chaplain as a person perceived to have wisdom in the romantic loving aspect of life.

6. Romantic Loneliness – Yearning for soul connection with a cherished lover one has yet to meet.
Whether a person is actively seeking romantic involvement, passively yearning for it to come along, regretting mistakes in romantic failures, or simply keeping an openness to romance if it arrives, their unwanted aloneness can be deadly in depressive moods and suicidal inclinations.

7. Bliss Sharing – Talking with energy about the wonders of being in love. When love is really “clicking” the excitement craves some sharing that enhances the enjoyment and confirms the expanding self-esteem that is commonly promoted by sumptuously being loved.

Chaplain-Defined Outcomes

In the Tacoma system, an attempt at defining outcomes for spiritual care functions addressing love life pain have made use of “brainstorming” by experienced chaplains on what they hope to see happen in such caring attempts. Four outcomes thus far identified for care of the spiritual need of “love-life pain” include that a person:

1. Mentions love relationship displeasure or delight – Verbalizing about the primary relationship in expressive negative, or even positive terms, gives indication of trust quickly building in the pastoral relationship.

2. Expresses emotion – Some level of emotional expression of the pain, anger, regret, and/or worry relative to the state of the relationship, indicates the beginning of sharing at some healing depth.

3. Shares stories – Relating pieces of stories about the ups and downs of the loving relationship is presumed to “double the joy and halve the pain.”

4. Considers referral – When it fits the situation, observing the person considering counseling assistance gives indication that the “help getting” process is proceeding.