When I finished the book-interview for the “Psychology and Personality” series, I shook hands with the editor, delivered the final pages to the publisher, and accepted an invitation to lead several seminar meetings outside Italy.

On my return, I replayed those weeks in my mind: long conversations with a bright, friendly woman; her questions, her curiosity, her doubts; my effort to respond simply, to clarify, to reassure, to name what often stays unnamed. Something in that exchange stayed with me. It left me with a strong desire to write again – not an interview this time, but a text that carries the atmosphere of those meetings: concrete, lived, and close to the heart.

Let me begin with a confession. Watching some of my own reactions, I suspect I am getting old. I find myself thinking more often about what it will be like after my death. And, unexpectedly, it brings me a quiet joy to sit across from someone who genuinely wants to know what I have seen, heard, and loved . . . someone willing to become a witness to those experiences rather than a mere consumer of stories.

Perhaps this is what fatherhood feels like when it ripens: the urge to pass on what has been received. I feel within me an urgent need to leave something behind – not “my ideas,” but a testimony, not a performance, but a path. To fulfil, more deeply than before, the mission that has marked my years: to be a witness, a traveller of the spirit, a seeker of meaning on this planet.

More and more, I even consider founding an association or a small foundation – something that could gather the most devoted readers, the most faithful ones, and give them a place to read, reflect, and help carry these texts into life: to promote what is good in them, to testify to it, to live it. Who knows. We will see.

Here I want to say thank you to my publisher, the Daughters of Saint Paul. They invited me to write the series “Psychology for Every Day,” under the subtitle “Books by Valerio Albisetti,” and they gave me room to speak without restraint – to put on the page my most intimate feelings, my vision of psycho-spirituality, and my search for meaning. God bless them.

This book – unlike the previous one, shaped as an interview and written in three places (in a hermitage, by the lake, and by the sea) – was written entirely in my psycho-spirituality house in the Tuscan countryside, where I have spent every Spring for many years.

The themes you will find here are not theories. They are specific values, real ones – lived by me with love, with awareness, and in freedom. Thanks to them I can say, without drama and without boasting, that I truly lived. I was alive, and I am still alive . . . even while living in a civilization that often feels like a civilization of death: thin love, distracted minds, and little desire to grow.

Only later did I understand that these values were the foundation of my existence. When I lacked them, when I rejected them, I slipped into boredom and greyness, into apathy and easy conformity. I was merely surviving, secretly waiting for the end, experiencing life as something that overwhelms and wounds, something senseless – from which only physical death seemed able to free me.

I was wrong. And I will tell you why.

I wrote these pages so that my readers may find hope, strength, and energy, as they have in my other books. So that, through what they read, they can recover colour, refuse boredom, choose a more intense life, and move – step by step – from vanity to divinity.

This is the only way worth living.

Chapter One: Return to the hermit

I had to collect my guest from the station. Above the hermitage and the surrounding forests, heavy black clouds – swollen with moisture – gathered quickly, sealing the valley under a dark lid. I told myself I still had time. If I drove without delay, perhaps I could reach our meeting point before the heavens finally opened.

I hadn’t brought any extra clothing to defend myself from the weather. Still, the road to the station went smoothly. I found my friend, hugged him, lifted his luggage into my SUV, and we set off at once toward the spiritual development centre.

The moment I left the asphalt and turned onto the ordinary road that cuts through the forest around the hermitage, the rain began in earnest. Large drops struck the windscreen and spread under the wipers, leaving brief, icy trails. Then, as if the sky had changed its mind mid-sentence, the first snowflakes joined the rain.

I glanced at my young guest. His face mirrored my own – surprise first, then amusement. By the time we arrived and stepped out of the car, snow was already swirling between the chestnut and oak trees, turning the forest into a moving veil of white.

Inside, I helped him settle his things in the room prepared for him. I lit a fire in the fireplace and put on a CD of classical music. It’s my habit: the moment I enter the house, I start the music. I love how it travels through the rooms, as if the walls themselves are learning to breathe.

Then I began preparing a meal.

When we finally sat down at the table, the darkness outside had thickened, but the glow of the fire and the candles in the house seemed to echo the pale shimmer of the snowflakes dancing beyond the windows.

The snowfall grew heavier. Within a few hours, a ten–centimetre layer had settled on the ground. A deep, welcoming silence wrapped the house, the forest, the valley . . . a wonderful spectacle. It felt like a brief hour borrowed from an enchanted world.

Later, I lay in bed unable to sleep, already imagining the days ahead: closed in by snow, faithful to the fireplace, given over to writing – companioned by winter’s quiet presence.

Chapter Two: A Search That Never Lets Go

All my books come from one, stubborn fact: my life has been a real search, and it still is. Always. I don’t write to decorate ideas. I write because I’ve been forced – by events, by pain, by wonder – to ask what human existence is for.

I draw from firsthand experience. I write especially for people like me: travellers in spirit, men and women who one day hit a wall, lose hope, and suddenly realise that the old answers no longer hold. A crisis arrives, quiet or violent, and with it the simplest, most frightening question: what is the meaning of my life?

My pages are for everyone, but they are truly aimed at those who don’t confuse a spiritual – or better, psycho–spiritual – journey with the role they play in society. They are for those who don’t feel at home in groups that present ready-made conclusions, where belonging counts more than truth, and where someone always claims to already know the answer to every question.

I write for people who stay open: open to learning, open to changing, open to conversion. Somewhere past the halfway point of my earthly life, I noticed something that should have been obvious: I have always tried to know myself, and to know the people I loved, as deeply as I could.

That choice has a cost. When you refuse to live on the surface, misunderstandings multiply. Frustrations become almost inevitable. You pay for sincerity with tension, and you pay for the desire to see clearly with the discomfort of those who prefer not to look.

And yet – behind the ordinary drama of human life – I kept finding something steady: meaning. Not the kind of meaning that flattens everything into a slogan, but a meaning that appears like a thread, sometimes only visible after tears, after failure, after waiting. Today I try to describe that thread with the only tools I have: words and images.

Some years ago, I left the country where I had lived for forty years. I began to travel, to move through other cultures and civilisations, to listen more than I spoke. The road taught me, again and again, how much I rely on the vast tradition of myths, symbols, legends, and images. It also taught me something simpler: spirituality is not a separate compartment of life. It is hidden in every encounter, in every conversation, in every surprise, in every wound.

I do not experience God as someone distant from people, like an observer standing outside the human story. For me, God is not the cold alternative to life; God is the depth of life. That is why I can say, without pretending that suffering is easy, that everything can make sense. There are no dead ends, no useless lives, no “wrong” meetings, no wasted time. The world is still mysterious, still enchanted, still capable of speaking – if we are willing to listen.

The real search, if it is real, is not a hobby for calm afternoons. It is the labour of learning how God speaks through what we would rather avoid: failures, misfortunes, violence, and also joy; through encounters and sexuality; through what we cannot see, and what hides in the shadows. It is a journey from the lowlands to the mountains, and anyone who has climbed knows that the view costs breath.

When I began writing, I had one wish: that what I offered would carry energy – power, depth, even a prophetic edge – and that it would also heal. Not by giving cheap comfort, but by helping the reader to name what hurts, to recognise what matters, and to choose a direction.

I would like my books to disturb the false peace that comes from asking only simple, superficial questions. I would like them to help readers ask the questions worthy of a true search, and to make decisions that fit their real life, not their public mask. If I’m honest, I want to tell my stories to many seekers of meaning, travellers of the spirit, and pour hope back into their hearts. I want to keep telling timeless stories – because the human heart keeps repeating the same essential battles.

For twenty years my books have travelled more than I have. They have been translated into many languages, and yet in Italian media they are often barely mentioned. Nemo propheta in patria: no one is a prophet in his own country. Writing about spiritual life from a Christian perspective is not always considered “interesting,” not always judged worthy of attention. And still, I see the irony: some public figures, even people tied to television, borrow my ideas, my words, even my slogans – as if they appeared from nowhere.

When I was younger, this invisibility hurt. Ten television programmes were made with my participation, and then, without explanation, it was as if I had never existed. Over time I stopped demanding applause, but I did not stop observing.

Today I am convinced that I live in a country where many people do not want to ask questions about meaning. You can see it clearly if you watch what is celebrated on television, what is repeated, what is sold as entertainment and “reality.” Perhaps that is why I spend only part of the year in Italy, in my hermitage, and the rest of the time lecturing abroad and travelling outside Europe.

In Latin America, for example, I am repeatedly struck by the love, joy, warmth, and closeness people show me, even when daily life is heavy with serious problems. Then I return to Italy – or I move through other European countries – and I feel a different air, thick with discouragement. A depressing atmosphere of hopelessness.

I have come to see how many “Western people” live surrounded by fear, suspicion, and loneliness, deprived of human warmth, of true closeness, of heart. And in Italy, one topic seems to swallow all others: sex. It is discussed everywhere, as if it could substitute for meaning, as if a noisy obsession could cover a silent emptiness.

But human existence has a deeper centre. If we discover it, it becomes wealth – real wealth. And that, quietly and persistently, is what my search keeps asking for: not distraction, not noise, but a truth strong enough to live by.

Chapter Three: From Fear to Love

I’m becoming increasingly convinced of something simple and unsettling: as long as we live in isolation – cut off from others and from the universe around us, convinced (even secretly) of our own omnipotence – we won’t feel the meaning of life. I wrote this book, in large part, to make that case. Not as a private confession, not as an escape, and certainly not as a business plan, but as a sharing: a creative encounter with other souls, fellow travellers on the same road.

I hesitate to generalize about “the West,” because I don’t want a cultural boxing match. I can only report what I repeatedly meet when I return to Italy. Almost everyone I run into – many of them young – approach me with questions that, at least as I hear them, are not worth answering. Not because the people are unimportant, but because the questions are built on a foundation that collapses as soon as you touch it.

Success. Career. Prestige. Power. Money. Sexual conquest. The list changes its outfit, but not its obsession. As long as these concerns are crowned the most important, we remain isolated from others. As long as, deep in our hearts, we are closed in on ourselves and convinced we stand alone at the centre of the world, we stop seeing that we co-create a diverse universe with others. And then questions about true love start to sound unnecessary – childish, sentimental, naïve. Yet those are precisely the questions that matter for psycho-spiritual growth.

Travel did not make me wiser in a dramatic, cinematic way. It simply exposed me. In other cultures, in other rhythms of life, I began to notice the programming I had received: the concerns I was trained to carry, the problems I was taught to treat as urgent. Slowly, painfully, I recognized how inauthentic and irrelevant many of them were.

Where did they come from? I began to see fear and depression underneath them – an atmosphere that can be manufactured and maintained. Over the years, I watched how influential voices, those in power in one era after another, learn to guide people by tightening that atmosphere. Fear is efficient. It organizes crowds. It sells. It controls.

Then I rebelled.

I don’t mean a rebellion of slogans. I mean an interior refusal: the decision to make a transition from fear to love. To confront the fears that were poured into my life during my upbringing. To live with sincerity in my heart, even when sincerity costs me comfort.

When I look back, what surprises me is how little closeness and community I actually had, even when life looked “normal.” I’m not speaking about what the eye can measure. I know people who appear to live well in marriage and family life. Yet when I meet them, I often sense a subtle fear – an almost imperceptible depression – and, beneath the social competence, an endless loneliness. It’s not easy to explain. It’s something you feel in the room, something hard to describe and even harder to talk about without sounding insulting.

The fear I’m talking about does not allow real closeness, real love. And here a common confusion appears: today closeness is often identified – sometimes unconsciously – with a certain dependence on another person. We call it intimacy, but it can be attachment, need, or the quiet panic of not wanting to be alone.

Paradoxically, the capacity for authentic closeness – for true love – is directly proportional to inner freedom. The freer someone is internally, the more they can love. I learned this in the gritty laboratory of relationships, where we often play a game without admitting it: we keep someone at a distance, or we let them approach, and we pretend it’s all “chemistry” or “fate.” So often the determining factor is simply the lack of closeness to oneself.

None of this has much to do with reducing sexuality to a genital performance, and it has nothing to do with confusing “purity” with sterility or frigidity. Love, as I see it, is a privileged way of growing together. It is not a technique, not a self-improvement project, and not a clever arrangement between two anxious egos.

Modern psychology says a lot about love, but much of it is not love as I understand it. Too often psychology confuses love with sexuality and then offers endless explanations for everything. Turn on the television and you’ll see the familiar procession: experts talking and talking and talking – teaching us how to love, how to live in marriage, how to be happy. They hand out recipes, rules, advice, as if the human heart were a machine that just needs the correct instruction manual.

But no one can tell you how to act in love if you do not listen to your own heart and pray to the Lord. Closeness – love, as I perceive it – is more than being near another person. And it is not an attempt to make the world better by sheer human effort, as if people were sufficient to heal people. In these matters, you can’t rely only on people.

A long time ago – through wounds and suffering endured, through pain inflicted on me and pain I inflicted – I understood something that I once resisted: if relationships are to be lasting, full, and happy, they must focus on God. Our hurts and needs are too deep to be fully healed and met by another person. If we demand that another human being save us, we will crush them with our hunger and then call it “love.”

Love, in my opinion, is the love of the heart: access into one’s own heart, into that tiny hidden place where silence exists – the silence full of wonder. It is there that God exists: the One who loves each of us, even the worst of us, since forever. He loved us before we came into this world.

Only in this way can we live with others without making claims, without turning affection into a lawsuit. Only in this way can we accept each other’s weakness and practice what is both ordinary and heroic: mutual forgiveness.

In the next chapter, I want to speak about what happens when this “silence full of wonder” is no longer an idea, but a daily place I return to.

Chapter Four: Learning The Language Of Love

The love I am talking about is not somewhere outside, waiting to be found. It is already within us, quietly present, like a small flame that never really goes out. The decisive moment is when we choose to bring that love out into the open, to give it a voice, a gesture, a concrete form. Love becomes real when it is expressed.

In my experience of psycho-spirituality, the body and the soul are never enemies. I have always felt that nothing is more damaging than opposing the mortal, physical part of us to what we call the soul or the spirit, as if only one of them were worthy. We are not angels trapped in a body, nor bodies accidentally carrying a soul. We are a unity. My body and my soul, with all their limits and possibilities, form one whole story: mine.

When I look at the human person, I do not see someone made to live only for himself, bending everything and everyone to the needs of his own “I.” Man, as I see him, is created to be oriented towards the spirit, towards consciousness, towards something – and Someone – greater. A person who lives only for himself gradually shrinks. A person who lives turned toward others and toward God grows.

For me, love became, over time, less of a feeling and more of a decision. I was born with a certain openness to others, a spontaneous kindness. But passing from this natural friendliness to a clear, conscious choice to love every living being around me was a long journey. It did not happen overnight. It was slow, demanding maturation.

When I think of my life as a journey, I see that nothing along the way has been meaningless. In people I meet, in events both joyful and painful, I can now recognise signs and clues. They are like small road markers helping me find direction, grow, and read more deeply the call that God whispers through everyday life.If I accept that I am here on earth to become better – not in a perfectionist sense, but in a deeply human and spiritual sense – then other people become a mirror. Thanks to them, I am constantly confronted with my egoism, my ambitions, my fears. And it is precisely through this confrontation that I slowly learn to transform what is negative in me into something more luminous, more generous, more Christ-like.

Today, when someone awakens negative emotions in me, I try to resist the first impulse to judge. Instead, I look inside and ask: which fragile part of me has been touched? Which wound, which insecurity, which pride has reacted? Only in this way can I become truly responsible for my feelings and emotions. Blaming others is easy. Owning my inner reactions is the real work of the soul.

To reach such a level of awareness and love, it is essential to give up the illusion of our own omnipotence. Others are not an extension of our “I.” They are not here to obey our expectations or to play the roles we have written for them. Each person is autonomous, unique, unrepeatable. Their life is sacred. Their presence cannot be reduced to satisfying our unspoken needs and desires; our desires must instead be brought into a sincere relationship, shared with their world, their history, their freedom.

To live, as I like to say, in the most intelligent way means very concrete things: to open ourselves to others, even when it feels risky, to live in the world as in a gift entrusted to us, not a possession to exploit, to cultivate a deep, simple satisfaction with life as it is, to give thanks for each day, for each face we meet on our path, to inhabit the present moment, without being imprisoned by past regrets or swallowed by future fantasies.

For this to happen, we must radically change our mentality, our way of being and relating. I had to do it myself, and it was not easy.

Looking back, I realise that I spent about forty years trying to be right at all costs. I am, by temperament, a fighter. Many times, I engaged in exhausting battles, determined to defend my ideas, my sense of justice, my honour. And often, after long arguments and much suffering, I “won”: someone admitted I was right. Today I ask myself, with a little irony and a little sadness: what was all that for?

Those victories were supposed to build my dignity, to reassure me that I was just and honourable. Yet now, halfway through my life, having looked more deeply into the mystery of human relationships and my faith, I have come to another conviction: winning does not matter so much. Being right is less important than learning how to truly love. The gospel does not ask me to be right; it asks me to be merciful.

I am convinced of one thing: we are, in the end, what we have given to others. If we train ourselves to give continuously – time, attention, forgiveness, a listening ear, a smile, our skills – this way of giving slowly becomes our second nature. It becomes the right way to live.

Let us not fool ourselves: we need others in order to be alive. Without others we cannot exist, cannot grow, cannot discover who we really are. This is true even for those who loudly claim they do not need anyone and reject their neighbour. Each of us is unique and ultimately alone before God, yes, but we only grow by standing in relationship, in dialogue, sometimes even in conflict, with others.

Perhaps this is why the word “love” is so often used to hide other, less noble realities: interest, calculation, emotional sickness, violence, perversion. For many, love becomes a tool to manipulate another person, to secure comfort or power, to justify illusions. Authentic, free, selfless relationships – a love that gives itself without expecting to possess – are rarer than we dare admit.

As I often repeat in my books, we, people of Western culture, struggle both to laugh and to love with our whole being. We rarely laugh with a free, childlike, wholehearted joy. And just as rarely do we establish a deep bond with our body, with our sensations, our feelings, our emotions, our soul, or with the people we say we love. Too often we are satisfied with living inside our selfishness and subjectivity, cut off from the fullness of life that God offers.

Living like this, we block our own potential. We cannot express our creativity fully; we remain closed in a narrow version of ourselves. Our society does not make it easy for us to learn real, sincere love. On the contrary, it often teaches us competition, efficiency, appearance, and haste, not tenderness, patience, listening, or humility.

Every time I return to the rhythms of Western life, another thing saddens me: the loss of interest in authentic, clean, honest feelings – what I call purity of heart. We talk about emotions, analyse them, label them, but sometimes we seem afraid to feel them in a simple, direct, vulnerable way.

My readers know this well: I do not trust words, especially big words about love. My heart sides with those who really live love, not those who endlessly discuss it. We organise conferences, seminars, debates on friendship, family, relationships. We produce television shows about love. And yet love, in its deepest truth, remains a mystery, a sacred reality. It cannot be fully explained. It can only be experienced, received, given.

I have noticed something: when a person constantly returns to the same topic, insisting on talking about it, it often means that he is missing it, or perhaps fearing it. In my opinion, Western culture no longer truly knows love; that is why it talks about it so obsessively. But talking about love is not the same as living it. In the same way, few people today undertake real journeys toward the spirit. They travel for work, for tourism, for distraction – rarely for inner conversion.

We have lost, as a culture, our sense of limitation and mystery. And when mystery disappears, love soon follows. A society that believes it can control everything, explain everything, measure everything, no longer knows how to receive love as a gift, as grace.

Much of our world is simply trying to survive, without realising it is letting itself be shaped by economic pressures and modern idols. Our communication, instead of springing from sincerity and depth, often remains on the surface. Many relationships are reduced to use: the other is not respected but consumed, like a product.

To change this state of affairs, to purify and restore the meaning of the words we say and hear every day – “friendship,” “fidelity,” “commitment,” “God,” “love” – we need courage and hard work. We must be willing to let ourselves be questioned by the gospel, by silence, by prayer. Above all, we need a pure heart. Without inner purification, even the most beautiful words remain hollow.

Another great illusion of Western culture is the belief in self-sufficiency. We like to imagine that we are enough for ourselves, that we are masters of our destiny, independent, sovereign individuals. But in truth, we are part of a larger whole, a world that has been given to us free of charge and is for everyone. In this world we are guests, not owners. As a believer, I would add: we are guests of God.

Many Western men and women find it difficult to live true love because they separate it arrogantly from the wider universe, and ultimately from God. As if love were just a private emotion, unrelated to creation, to others, to the mystery that surrounds us.

For me, God speaks constantly, in everything: in nature, in encounters, in fatigue, in joy, even in my resistances. But to hear His voice, I must learn the language of the soul. And the deepest language of the soul is precisely the language of love. It is a language that makes us creative, that goes beyond the limits of logic and calculation, which is capable of understanding everything – even the body, even suffering.

If a person does not know how to listen honestly to his own body – its needs, its limits, its wisdom – it is difficult for him to listen to his soul. Perhaps that is why so many discussions about spirituality and transcendence leave us cold: they lack real energy. They remain in the head, not in the heart, not in the flesh of daily life.

A spirituality that does not touch life, that does not warm the heart, which does not move the body to concrete gestures of love, is not convincing. It becomes ideology or moralism. But what I am talking about here is something different: it is psycho-spirituality, the deep integration of body, psyche, and spirit. Not a list of moral rules.

I sometimes smile – and confess, a little sadly – when I see certain colleagues, along with their favourite television gurus, confusedly equating being Christian with being a mere moralist. Christianity is not, first of all, about rules; it is about a relationship of love, a living encounter with Christ that slowly transforms everything, including morality.

That is why I would like to invite these people – and perhaps you as well – to spend some time in a hermitage like the one where I have lived. To taste a simpler life: close to nature, in prayer, in silence, in manual work. To walk among the trees, to sow, to care for the earth, to let the seasons teach us patience and hope. There, stripped of noise and masks, one begins again to hear the language of the soul. And in that language, gently but clearly, God says only one thing: love.

Chapter Five: The Body That Remembers God

For a long time, I thought I was simply “lucky” with my body. I have always been cheerful, outgoing, quick to laugh. I never suffered from psychosomatic illnesses, never felt at war with my own skin. While others spoke about anxiety that sat in their stomach or tension that knotted their shoulders, I listened almost as an outsider. My body did what I asked of it; I hardly gave it a second thought.

Only in recent years have I realized how naïve that attitude was, and how central the body is to our psycho–spiritual life. I began to see that treating the body merely as a tool, or as a neutral container for the soul, blinds us to one of the deepest truths of Christian faith: God chose to enter history in a human body.

The mystery of the Incarnation is not an abstract dogma for theologians. It is God’s daring declaration that flesh and spirit belong together. “The Word became flesh” is not poetry; it is the scandalous claim that the Infinite accepted a heartbeat, fatigue, hunger, skin that could be wounded. Our faith believes not only in the immortality of the soul, but in the resurrection of the body. How, then, could I continue to live as if my own body were a second–rate accessory to my spiritual life?

Looking back, I see how I reduced my body to sensations: hunger, pleasure, tiredness, health. I used it, dressed it, sometimes pushed it too hard, but I never considered it an object of holiness. I did not treat it as a living sacrament of my person, a visible epiphany of my invisible soul. How many mistakes grew out of that blindness – moments when I treated my own body, or that of another, like an object to be exploited or displayed, rather than a mystery to be reverenced.

Our culture reinforces this separation. We speak of “using” the body almost as we would speak of using a tool. We train it, expose it, market it. We forget that the human person is not a soul who happens to have a body, but a living unity of body and spirit. My body is not “something I possess;” it is me, in visible form.

This is why the body is such a sharp truth–teller. I have learned, in listening to people, to watch how they sit, how they breathe, how their hands move when they speak. A forced smile, folded arms, a bent back, eyes that cannot hold a gaze – these reveal a history. You can lie with words, but the body hesitates to lie; it carries memories like scars under the skin.

Everything we have lived passes, in some way, through the body: tenderness and violence, safety and fear, the warmth of being held and the cold of being ignored. Abuse, neglect, ridicule, the absence of simple affection – they leave marks as real as bruises, only more enduring. Sometimes a person tells me, “Nothing special happened in my childhood,” but their body whispers another story.

Here I must clarify something that our culture has almost forgotten. When I speak of “contact” and “love,” I do not mean sex. We have become so obsessed with sexuality that many people can hardly imagine a caress, a hug, a resting of a hand on a shoulder, without immediately suspecting a sexual intention. We have confused the deepest human need for love with the powerful, but partial, reality of sexual desire.

Love is much wider, much deeper, than sex. It is not a passing emotion, but an attitude of the soul, a decision to seek the good of the other. Love is what shapes the way parents touch their children, how brothers and sisters comfort each other, how friends sit in silence at a hospital bed. It is present when we help a stranger without expecting applause. Love is not one “part” of the personality; it is the whole person, gradually learning to give itself.

When love matures in us, the body no longer “speaks alone,” detached from the heart. A gesture, a look, a touch, become transparent to a deeper intention: to bless, to protect, to console. Without this inner unity, however, sex easily becomes what I once called the sad totem of our age – a powerful idol around which we dance, hoping it will give meaning to our loneliness.

Sometimes I ask myself: why do so many live trapped in this narrow vision? I suspect that behind the obsession with eroticism lies a crisis of hope. If we do not truly trust that God is knowable, that there is a love larger than our hunger, then we cling desperately to whatever intensity we can produce here and now. We try to wrap every relationship in feelings and heat, as if affection without erotic tension were not “real enough.” Are we serious? Or are we, collectively, playing a tragic joke on ourselves?

Turn on the television and you will see it clearly. Whole series revolve around nothing more than flirtation between men and women, or now, between any and all combinations. Flirtation in itself is not evil; it can even be playful and innocent. What troubles me is the superficiality, the scripted falsehood paraded as “authentic experience.” And when everything degenerates, they call it entertainment, a “social experiment” carefully watched over by a resident psychologist. We consume it as if it were harmless fun, yet it quietly reshapes our expectations of love.

When I reflect on love, I see cracks that run through every human being. Much begins before we are even born, in the mysterious relationship with our mother while we are still in her womb. There we experience an original unity: we are nourished without asking, warmed without earning it. That primal harmony is never completely erased. All our life, consciously or not, we search for it again.

At times we taste something of it – in friendship, in marriage, in deep companionship. But nothing fully satisfies the ancient longing. We seek the “other person” who will finally complete us, yet every human being remains limited, fragile, marked by their own wounds. Our restless search, if we are honest, can end only in God. He is the Other in an absolute sense – the One in whom we are perfectly known and perfectly loved.

This conviction shapes how I speak to engaged couples. When I prepare them for marriage, I tell them quite plainly: your love will endure only as long as you allow God to stand between you. Not as a policeman or a judge, but as the living source of the love you want to give each other. When God disappears from the space between two people, that space quickly fills with demands, disappointments, unspoken accusations.

We are born desperately needing love. As children, we can only receive; we cry out for it, demand it, sometimes manipulate to obtain it. Spiritual and emotional maturity begins the day we discover that we are not only made to receive love but called to give it. The logic of the Gospel stands in stark contrast to the consumer logic that governs so many relationships: “I have a right to be loved.” True love quietly asks another question: “How am I called to love here and now?”

This does not mean closing our eyes to the dark side of human relationships. Under the beautiful word “love” there can hide neuroses, perversions, violence, subtle or brutal forms of domination. For generations, much of this ugliness was buried behind the four walls of the home, protected by silence, fear, and shame. Today more is spoken about it, and that is good, but the danger remains: love can always be manipulated, turned into a tool for control.

That is why I cannot understand a so–called love that does not respect the uniqueness of the other. If my life with you is built solely on satisfying my needs, then I do not truly love you; I love the comfort you offer me. I remain imprisoned in my own “I,” circling endlessly around myself.

The body, with its memories and its fragility, keeps reminding me of another call. In its joys and its limits, in its capacity to embrace and its certainty of death, it whispers the same truth: you were created not just to be loved, but to become love. And only when I dare to believe that – body and soul together – do I begin to live as a whole person before the face of God.

Chapter Six: Exclusivity and “Forever”

The words “exclusivity” and “sex for ever” stayed with me for days, like a refrain I couldn’t shake. Not because I was trying to sound provocative, but because I had stumbled onto something that finally made sense: if love is real, intimacy takes on a particular character – exclusive, and oriented toward forever.

This didn’t begin as a theory. It began as prayer.

I was reflecting on the way God loves: attentively, personally, without distraction. Who would want to worship a god who can’t think about his people with steady devotion? My God is not vague. Scripture tells me He knows the number of hairs on my head. He loved me before I had a name, before anyone expected anything of me. And He will love me beyond my physical death.

Yet none of this is ownership. God’s love doesn’t reduce me; it enlarges me.

That distinction helped me understand exclusivity in a more human way. Exclusivity is not control. It is a mutual, free choice – chosen among real options, renewed over time. In a healthy love, the “yes” matters precisely because there could have been other “yeses,” and yet there is this one. Not by force. By freedom.

Our culture struggles with that. Anyone who doesn’t follow the majority script can be pushed to the margins. And in the area of relationships, there is pressure to treat frequent change as normal, even as inevitable – almost as if lasting love were naïve. I have met people who truly cannot live with one person, and I don’t say that with contempt. But I have also watched the way some try to convince everyone else that restlessness is maturity, that commitment is a trap.

My experience has been the opposite. There is a kind of intimacy – spiritual and bodily – that deepens with one chosen person until it becomes a wholeness. Not a boredom. A fullness. The astonishing thing is that this fullness can quiet the hunger for novelty. You don’t stop noticing others; you stop needing them to complete you.

I often write about spirituality that is concrete – experienced in real life, not in slogans. That is why I call it psycho-spirituality. I believe in an incarnate God: not a distant idea floating above the body, but the Creator of heaven and earth, and all things – including our human, vulnerable, complicated selves.

That belief also shapes my distrust of “spirituality” that never risks anything. I am not convinced by people who present themselves as exceptionally spiritual while avoiding the ordinary costs of being human: the risks, the exposure, the possibility of mistakes. Sometimes kindness can be a mask. Sometimes “peace” is just the careful avoidance of pain. I don’t say this to accuse, only to name what I have seen.

Love, by definition, is a step beyond one’s own “I.” It involves risk. It can involve pain. It can feel like a kind of dying – the surrender of self-protection, the end of illusions, the loss of control. Among the worst sufferings we endure, some of the greatest are the sufferings of love. And still, I continue to testify: without love there is no real life. And without real life, God feels absent – not because He has left, but because we have closed the door where He meets us.

I have come to believe that life, at its essence, is a dance: forward and back, inward, and outward. That may sound strange, but it is what I have learned halfway through my earthly life, and not gently – through years marked by suffering. Experiences like these, however, give you the right to say: I lived. Not perfectly. But truly.

#These reflections became something more than private notes. They turned into spiritual conversations – sometimes even disputes – at times mystical in their intensity. I do not understand spirituality as infantile, regressive, or crystallised, but as mature, conscious, and alive. Paradoxically, to become conscious you often have to pass through what is messy in you: neuroses, emotional disorders, dependencies. You learn autonomy by first tasting dependence. You learn freedom by first learning how to love.

I am speaking here about the love of two people, but also about a whole way of living. You don’t have to be part of a couple to live in the dimension of love. Love is a lifestyle; it gives existence its direction. When people live only for money, career, power, influence, they often reduce relationships to performance and appetite. In my books I repeat this because I have seen it: money, success, and power can become death traps. No matter how much you hold, they remain things – just things.

Possessiveness is especially dangerous. At the psycho-spiritual level it can bring a person close to death: to the collapse of consciousness, to the inability to encounter God. You cannot take possession of people. They are not objects. They are not merely carnal. Every person has dignity and limitless value, and that value comes from God.

God is love. God is consciousness. Even in the love of two people, He belongs in the journey – because He is the One who teaches us the difference between holding someone tightly and holding someone rightly.

Chapter Seven: Responsibility, Freedom, and the Quiet Loneliness We All Carry

There was a season in my life when I made decisions by instinctively looking for someone to blame. Someone to explain my sadness. Someone to hold responsible for the storm inside me. It felt natural, almost justified. But the more I worked on myself, the more I understood a hard truth: I was living on projections, not on reality. A conscious person does something different. He confronts himself. He stops outsourcing his interior life. He takes responsibility for his emotions. And the moment we accept full responsibility for ourselves, we stop being victims. That is the real farewell to childhood illusions – the stories we clung to just to survive, to feel alive, to feel seen.

The price of maturity: inner loneliness. To become responsible for yourself, you have to accept something most people spend years running from: inner loneliness. Not isolation. Not bitterness. Just the simple fact that each human being ultimately stands alone before his own heart and before God. If we refuse that loneliness, we usually pay for it with fear – especially the fear of abandonment. And when fear governs us, we don’t live consciously in love. We live under the dictates of others, trying to please them, trying to buy reassurance with obedience, performance, or charm. To gain someone’s sympathy, we quietly hand them power over our emotions.

I learned that freedom begins at a humiliating doorway: recognizing my weaknesses. Not the polished version of myself I wanted to present, but the worse, negative, weak side – the part I would rather not see. Only by noticing it can I stop being driven by it. This is why relationships are so revealing. When we are close to another person, we should try to notice the dimensions of our personality that we would prefer to hide. We must learn not to reject any aspect of ourselves if we want to learn not to reject – but to accept – others. The mechanisms of immaturity: Not recognizing. Not noticing. Not listening. Projecting. Accusing. These are classic mechanisms of juvenile, immature, unconscious people. And I do not say that to condemn anyone. I say it because I have watched these mechanisms at work in my own life, quietly shaping my reactions while I still believed I was being “reasonable.”

Without realizing it, we often begin to accept the point of view of our parents again – even when we are adults. And then we become unable to love the part of us that was not accepted in childhood: the sensitive part, the bold part, the needy part, the creative part, the awkward part. We remember that when we were children, that part was rejected by parents, relatives, or friends – and we learned a painful lesson: if you want love, hide what is unwanted. Over time this becomes a pattern, often an infantile one, approved by the family system. We circle the same fears, the same roles, the same reactions. And because it is familiar, it feels inevitable. We call it “my character” or “my fate.” In darker moments it feels like a demonic circle: hopeless, closed, without exit. When we cannot deal with this inner knot, it can harden into complexes, blockages, and tensions that limit our existence. It interferes with the relationship with the person closest to us. And it steals peace from the soul and heart.

The parts of our personality that we reject do not disappear. Over time they begin to rebel. They become our demons – not in the theatrical sense, but in the daily sense: compulsions, jealousies, panic, anger, shame, or a cold numbness that suddenly takes over.

Here is a surprising diagnosis I have found reliable: what we feel as a threat on an affective level is often a part of us that wants to be recognized. A part that wants to be loved. What I mean by “responsibility.” When I say, “take responsibility for your emotions,” I do not mean forcing yourself to behave well. I mean awareness of what you feel, what you experience internally – not what you do or intend to do. Most of us were trained to take responsibility for actions only: for work, for duties, for performance. But we were not trained to take responsibility for what we feel. We were trained instead to justify it, deny it, or assign it to others.

Becoming responsible for your emotions is becoming free. Free above all not to feel what others would like you to feel. Free to name what is truly in your heart. Recognizing that no one can force you to feel something that is not your own is a quiet liberation. Unfortunately, many people feel what others have taught them to feel. Media, family, and the borrowed life. Of course we should be considerate of others. But we must not forget something basic: we are children of God. It is to Him that we respond. And we pay attention to our neighbours because they also carry divinity within themselves. And yet God gives freedom. He does not force us to feel what we do not want to feel. That is why I have grown cautious about the invisible pressures that shape the modern heart. Many people assume their emotions are authentic, while in fact they are imposed – often subliminally – through television, media messages, and the emotional choreography of public life. It is possible to “instil” emotions in viewers in ways that degrade them, exploiting neuroses, complexes, and psychological wounds.

But media is only part of the story. Many of our feelings are the result of family experiences. Only careful, in-depth analysis allows us to discover whether the emotions we feel are truly ours or simply copied from what we observed in our mother or father. How often is our behaviour toward another person – especially in an intimate relationship – a repetition, completely unconscious, of the behaviour of our parents? Sometimes I tell people something that sounds dramatic but is painfully common: many of us do not know our real name – even if we have reached forty. What I mean is that we know what we are called by others, but we do not know who we are. Finding my true identity. The work in front of us is the search for true identity. And true identity is not a fashionable slogan. It is the real meaning of our lives.

For many years I suffered because of things and matters that – as I later discovered after carefully working on myself – didn’t belong to me. They were not mine. They did not belong to my true nature. Not to me, not to Valerio. After enough unpleasant situations I finally understood: we must remove unnecessary psychological burden from ourselves. We must reject needs that others arouse in us just to control us or keep us close. We must get rid of negative habits and infantile patterns. Each of us has enormous strength – an almost divine core. And I believe God will not ask me whether I adapted successfully to the rules of the society in which I lived. He will ask whether I fulfilled what He placed in me at the moment of my birth. And this is where so many lives quietly bleed away: we waste a huge part of our existence fulfilling tasks that were not entrusted to us at all. One of the most practical disciplines is this: do not identify yourself with what others think and say about you. If after careful consideration you notice that you suffer because of what is said about you, and at the same time you know it does not truly concern you – reject it. Do not identify with it. Do not worry about it. Even the wound of childhood rejection must be placed in truth. Why should someone suffer for life just because his mother rejected him or didn’t love him when he was a child? It is his mother’s problem, not his. The suffering continues only when the person believes he lives solely by identifying with whatever “good” his mother gave him. But we live because God gave us life, and He is our true Father. Love, gratitude, and the fear of dying when someone leaves. I return to this point often because it causes enormous confusion in adult relationships: we confuse love with gratitude. We think we love someone when in fact we are grateful that they showed us kindness. And because we confuse the two, we believe that when they are gone, we also die. We also fall into another trap: we fall in love because the other person is in love with us. But have we asked ourselves whether we love them too? We have to live and fulfil our lives regardless of whether someone loves us or not. Or to put it more clearly: we have to learn to understand what we really feel, who we really are, and not exist in subordination to someone or something. It still amazes me how widespread this is: most of us were not loved in the right way as children – we were loved too much or not at all. And this imbalance has consequences in our future relationships with those we most want to love. (I explored this more fully in my book Parents and Children).

We should not believe that we exist only when we are alone or only when we are in a relationship. The right way is to live close to yourself, to feel good in your own company, and also to be able to share moments of life with another person. God at the centre changes the distance. I know it is not easy. But when we focus our lives on God, everything becomes clearer. God is in you, and you look for Him and find Him also thanks to the other person. This belief helps us keep the right distance – from ourselves and from other people. It helps us live without fear of abandonment. It helps us live without trying to please someone at all costs or trying to keep them close, for example by offering them sex.

In the vision of psycho-spirituality, life leads us to give up the desire to control another person and to maintain a discreet distance from their personal problems. Being responsible for ourselves also means we do not have to take responsibility for another person – not for our husband, not for our wife, not even for our children in the sense of living their interior life for them. In such cases, we pray. We offer the person to God. We ask for help for them. Otherwise, we begin to believe we are omnipotent. We develop the “saviour syndrome.” We try to save others at all costs. And I have come to say this plainly: that is not love. The saviour role I learned too early. Many of us were forced as children – because of family situations – to take on a role that did not belong to us. This usually happens when parents are not mature and thus force children to give up a real childhood. This syndrome affected me too, and I suffered greatly because of it, as I wrote in my autobiographical book From Freud to God.

One memory still speaks with painful clarity. One day my mother asked me to hold my tiny, several-month-old sister while she went to talk to a friend. When she returned five hours later, she found me in the same position she had left me in. I sat still the entire time so as not to disturb my sister, exactly as my mother told me. I was thirteen years old. To become a psychotherapist, I first had to work on myself for a long time. And I realized how common the desire to please is in adult relationships too. We repeat childhood survival strategies and call them “love.” Realistic love and the courage to change, experiencing love in line with psycho–spirituality helps us distinguish between expectations that can be met and expectations that cannot. Many times, I have met people who call themselves romantics in order to hide unrealistic fantasies. They live in constant dissatisfaction and unfulfillment because they refuse to change their current partner – someone they describe as boring or characterless – yet they also refuse to change themselves.

When we start taking care of ourselves, we step onto the true path of psycho–spirituality. “Love your neighbour as yourself” – this is the Gospel message. It does not say the opposite: love yourself as you love others. Everything starts with us. If we are depressive in nature, we infect others with bad mood; if we are joyful, we give joy. It is inevitable. Hidden inside us is the child we were. And uncertainty, personality disorders, and lack of self-respect experienced in childhood will weigh on our adult lives if we do not act according to psycho-spirituality. Therefore, if we had a parent who punished us, we should be close to the Parent who loves absolutely: God, our true Father. And if our mother was strict with us, we should be close to Our Lady: our Mother who is good in the full sense of the word. Only in this way will we feel truly loved, accepted, desired, and self-confident. As long as our security and love come only from another person’s acceptance, we will not be free – free to love. We will remain dependent on approval, weak and changeable, as humans can be.

In my books I have always emphasized that a person must never allow himself to be dominated by another person. It would be death. So, I return to the beginning: responsibility is not a cold moral demand. It is the doorway to freedom. It is the end of projection, the end of living borrowed emotions, the end of confusing attachment with love. And it is the beginning of a calmer life – one that stands honestly before God, able to say: This is what I feel. This is who I am. And with Your help, I will live it.

Chapter Eight: Learning To Love From A Wounded Heart

The older I get, the more I see that the ability to love is never just about techniques, advice columns, or even good intentions. It is a question of identity: who I believe I am when I stand in front of another person and dare to say, “I love you.”

I did not grow up in a family where this came naturally. In my home, children had to feel what the adults felt. We were expected to take on our parents’ moods, hopes, and fears like an extra layer of clothing. There was no room for our own emotions. Anger, sadness, joy, confusion – if they did not fit the family’s script, they had to be silenced. I learned early that to be loved I had to disappear a little. As an adult, I paid the price for that lesson.

When you grow up this way, the boundaries between yourself and others are blurred. You do not know what distance is healthy, what closeness is safe. I noticed in myself two opposite tendencies: either I tried to “blend in” completely with the other person, almost dissolving my own desires, or I rejected the person out of fear of being swallowed up again. In both cases, my own identity slipped through my fingers. I did not know what I really felt, what I truly wanted, what I honestly thought.

I remember moments in relationships when I stood in front of someone I loved and felt lost. I could not decode what they were trying to tell me. I did not know what I longed to hear from them, because I was unable to listen to myself. I did not feel who I was. Everything in me was louder than love – fear of abandonment, compulsive adaptation, hidden anger. Love was there, but buried under a mountain of confusion.

Over time, the Lord led me to what I now call a psycho-spiritual vision: a way of looking at the human heart that takes psychology seriously but always roots identity in God. This path showed me that my first task was not to fix my relationships, but to discover who I am in God and to strengthen that identity in Him. Only a person who is slowly becoming whole can truly love. Someone who, as a child, gave up parts of himself to win parental love will, as an adult, be tempted to do the same in every relationship: to sacrifice pieces of his personality just to avoid being left.

If, as children, we were too involved in our parents’ lives, as if we existed to keep them afloat, then as adults we tend to believe a lie: that we cannot be fully happy or fulfilled unless someone else is there to complete us. Solitude becomes frightening, almost unbearable. Yet the gospel tells us that only God completes us. Other people are a gift, not a replacement for God.

Through prayer and reflection, I understood something crucial: I had stopped seeing myself as a complete person, worthy of trust and respect, because as a child I was often neither trusted nor respected. Psycho-spirituality, grounded in God, began healing this wound. It taught me that to truly love another, I must first return to myself and patiently reclaim everything I have lost or hidden over the years.

In earlier books I wrote about this process: the need to recover those parts of ourselves we hid because they seemed ugly, weak, or twisted. As children we buried them, thinking they were unlovable. Today I know that God wants us whole. He created our humanity with its vast possibilities in His image. What is wounded in us is not meant to be denied but brought to Him for healing.

There comes a moment when we must turn and speak to everything we rejected in ourselves: the fearful child, the angry adolescent, the adult who does not trust anyone. These are not enemies but parts of our story waiting to be understood. This work does not require extraordinary willpower or heroic self-discipline. It is not primarily a matter of will. It is a matter of grace.

You have to pray. How many times have I heard – and said – “I can’t do it, I’m not strong enough, I don’t have the will.” We imagine an inner battle we are doomed to lose. But the gospel tells us something different: there is no need for this lonely struggle. We must entrust ourselves to the Lord. When I finally dared to place my fragility in His hands, slowly the fear of my own weakness began to loosen its grip.

In every book I write, I repeat the same conviction: we should not resist God or be afraid of Him. Scripture says that precisely when we feel lonely and abandoned, He is closest. The challenge is to believe it not only with our minds but with our wounds. When we do not trust God, we start believing that we can fix everything on our own – our marriages, our friendships, our families. We try desperately not to make mistakes. We work to be perfect for him or her. And in the process, we abandon ourselves. Everything in that approach is upside down.

There is a simpler path, though not always an easier one: surrender to God, to Jesus. Every human relationship carries the possibility of loss. A spouse can leave, children can walk away, parents die. One day we will all have to say goodbye. Only He does not leave. He is always present, always listening. When we lean on Him, we lean on limitless power, immeasurable love, unfathomable wisdom.

Love, then, is not a product to be bought, not something found casually like a bargain on a supermarket shelf. Love is the fruit of a journey. If we stay close to God on that road, everything that truly matters becomes possible. We pass through suffering to reach joy. We live, and by living consciously, we awaken.

That is why I once wrote a book called The Journey of Life. I wanted to show that half of life is about this very journey: about surrender, about entering the whirlwind of our daily tasks, being fully present in each moment, and still knowing when to let go, when not to remain trapped by fear or habit.

To live in the dimension of psycho-spirituality is to dare to live fully, with all the suffering, penalties, and pains life brings – and to give them meaning in the light of Christ. It is to risk, even to risk death, in order to follow more closely the message of Jesus, who is our model and our point of reference. We cannot honestly call ourselves Christians if we remain passive and let life flow past us like a river we refuse to enter.

This path requires time and patience. Healing does not happen overnight. But slowly, almost imperceptibly, something changes. One day you look back and see that it was worth it – that by walking with God through confusion, failure, and suffering, you have become more real. It turns out that you did not merely survive your life. You truly loved it.

Chapter Nine: Learning To Live Love, Not Just Think It

First of all, love, as I have slowly learned, is not a theory. It is not an abstract concept to be analysed like a thesis. Love is practice. It is the way you speak to the cashier when you are tired. It is the patience you show in traffic. It is the decision to listen when you would rather scroll your phone. Love is the way you look at your own life and choose to say “yes” to it, even when it feels small or hidden. In short: it is love of life. Everyday.

For years I tried to understand love only with my intellect. I read books, underlined passages, collected quotations from saints and philosophers. My head was full, but my days were not necessarily more loving. Slowly, God led me to see that love is not just an idea for the mind but a reality for the whole person: heart, body and soul. It is how I use my hands, how I manage my time, how I spend my money, how I look at the person in front of me. Love is very concrete.

Secondly, love itself does not bring suffering. This sounded scandalous to me at first. “How can love not hurt?” I would think, remembering breakups, betrayals, misunderstandings. But in prayer I began to notice something uncomfortable: most of the pain I associated with love was not caused by love at all, but by my desire to possess, to control, to secure myself through another person. I was not suffering because I loved, but because I clung.

When love becomes possession, when the other person is turned into “my” project, “my” certainty, “my” source of recognition, then suffering is inevitable. That is not love, it is a hypertrophic “I” in religious disguise. Real love seeks the good of the other, even when my own plans are not fulfilled. Real love is free enough to let go. The more I tried, with God’s grace, to love this way, the lighter I felt. The drama did not disappear from life, but its centre of gravity shifted from “me and my needs” to “Lord, how can I be a gift here?”

Thirdly, and this changed everything for me: by loving another person, I am loving God. For a long time, I thought loving God meant mostly praying a lot, going to church, reading spiritual books. These are precious and necessary, but the Gospel insists on something more concrete: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it to Me.” Every time I make coffee for a tired coworker, call a lonely relative, forgive a harsh word, I am touching God’s heart. This realization transformed my ordinary days into a place of encounter with Him.

On this road I stumbled over a big obstacle: my tendency to judge. I discovered how easily I could see what was “wrong” in others, and how blind I could be to my own shadows. Jesus’ words in the Gospel pierced me: “Judge not, that you be not judged… Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own?” I started to realize that so often my harsh judgments were only projections – I condemned in others what I secretly feared or disliked in myself.

I remember one particular Sunday after Mass. I was criticizing, in my thoughts, a man who often arrived late and stood in the back. “He never takes anything seriously,” I said silently. In that moment it was as if God gently held up a mirror: how often do I “arrive late” internally, distracted, half-present, more worried about appearances than about prayer? The log in my own eye suddenly became visible. From that day I began a simple practice: every time I feel the urge to judge someone, I ask, “Lord, show me where this same weakness lives in me.” It is humbling, but it has made me more compassionate.

To summarize my entire journey with love, I often return to a passage from the Gospel of Matthew that has followed me like a refrain. Jesus invites us: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth… but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven… For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” For years, my treasures were recognition, security, plans that made me feel in control. My heart lived wherever my fears pointed. No wonder I was anxious.

Jesus goes on to speak about the eye as the lamp of the body. If my inner gaze is healthy, the whole of me is filled with light; if my way of looking at reality is darkened by fear, envy, or comparison, then darkness spreads inside. Learning to love, for me, has meant letting Christ heal my way of looking: at myself, at others, at my past, at the future. When He becomes the measure, the light slowly returns.

Then comes one of the most liberating calls of the Gospel: “You cannot serve God and mammon.” I used to think this was only about money, but it is also about what I allow to rule my heart: success, comfort, image, control. When any of these become my master, love suffocates. When God is at the centre, everything else can find its proper place, and love can breathe.

Jesus’ words about anxiety became, and still are, a daily examination for me: “Do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or drink… Look at the birds of the air… Consider the lilies of the field…” I often worry about tomorrow, about work, about health, about the future of those I love. Yet again and again the Lord repeats: your Father knows what you need. Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and the rest will be given to you. Learning to love also means learning to trust – to believe that I do not need to grasp and accumulate to be safe.

This is, to me, what makes Christianity so astonishing. At its core, it is not a system of rules or a ladder of spiritual achievements. It is a love story. It is God giving Himself, even to the point of death on the cross. The centre of our faith is not our love for God, but God’s love for us. Our entire religion stands on this foundation: “God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.” When I contemplate Christ crucified, I see love that holds nothing back, love that refuses to answer violence with violence, love that says, “Father, forgive,” even in agony.

The First Letter of John puts it with disarming clarity: “Beloved, let us love one another, because love comes from God… Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” These words no longer feel abstract to me. When I love, however imperfectly, I am participating in God’s own life. When I refuse to love, I am stepping away from the deepest truth of who I am.

John continues: “In this God’s love for us was revealed, that He sent His only Son into the world, so that we might have life through Him… Not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” My prayer life changed the day I truly believed that sentence: God loved me first. I do not have to earn His attention, prove my worth or negotiate my forgiveness. I am already loved, and from that love I am sent to love others.

“If we love one another,” John writes, “God abides in us and His love is perfected in us.” I often feel my love is weak, mixed with fears and limits. Yet God chooses to dwell precisely there, in my small heart, and slowly perfect what I offer Him. In the end, the spiritual life is not a climb to reach God, but a long consent to let His love reach every corner of my life.

This is why, in this ninth chapter of my story, I want to end with a simple confession: I find in the Gospel everything I need to know about love. Whenever I am confused or tired, I return to those pages and let them read me. I recommend the same to you: read a little of the Bible every day. Not as a duty, but as a conversation. There, in those ancient words, the living God waits to teach us, again and again, what it really means to love.

Chapter Ten: The Journey Beyond Romance

Looking back at my career as a writer, I’m grateful that my work has reached so many hearts. Among my books – Feeling Good Together: Marital Love Therapy and About Love – the latter became something I never quite expected: a bestseller that crossed borders and languages, finding homes in Latin America and throughout Eastern Europe. What touches me most is learning that religious teachers and clergy have made it part of their conversations about love. This tells me something important: people are hungry for a deeper understanding of what love truly means.

Throughout my years of writing and reflection, I’ve come to believe something fundamental: the bond between two people must be more than physical. Yes, our bodies draw us together, but the real foundation – the lasting one – is psycho-spiritual. When we talk about love, we’re really talking about a dimension of existence, an entire vision of how we want to live our lives.

Here’s something that might surprise you: the problem isn’t finding the “right” person. There are no wrong men or women out there waiting to ruin your life. The real question is how we interpret ourselves, how we understand what surrounds us, and what meaning we choose to give it all. We like to think everyone knows how to love, but that’s not quite accurate. Sure, we all have the potential to love – it’s built into our humanity – but in practice, genuinely experiencing love? That’s rare.

True love, after that initial magical period of discovery, becomes a constant process of getting to know each other. This journey lasts a lifetime. It’s not a destination you reach and then relax; it’s the foundation itself, always being built, always deepening.

I know this might sound paradoxical, but in a true love relationship, there’s no separation precisely because it’s already full of separation. Let me explain: the crises and difficulties everyone talks about aren’t aberrations or signs that something’s gone wrong. They’re inherent in relationships between people who are, by nature, so wonderfully different from each other.

The relationship I’m describing isn’t about two people who’ve melted into one identity, who project their fantasies onto each other, or who’ve decided – consciously or not – to compete, to race, to play at love while drowning in delusion and falsehood. No, I’m talking about something braver: a relationship where two people prepare to walk the same path toward truth, ready to expose each other’s falsehoods and face their mutual fears together.

Imagine discovering your partner has been unfaithful. You’ll feel disappointed, certainly. That sinking sadness in your heart is real and valid. But desperation? That’s different. Because ultimately, betrayal is the betrayer’s problem. Most likely, they haven’t solved their own internal struggles yet. And here’s the thing: those problems don’t disappear when they meet someone new. They only dissolve when that person goes deeper into themselves.

I believe the goal of every human being is to achieve full consciousness. And the relationship of true love? It’s the privileged path to get there.

This is where true love relationships diverge from ordinary ones. The first is a vehicle for achieving full consciousness, for increasing your psycho-spiritual awareness, for drawing closer to God. The second stops at itself, content with its own boundaries. An ordinary relationship might be wonderful – filled with beautiful gestures and genuine feelings – but it focuses only on the other person and stays there, circling. It doesn’t serve the mutual journey toward psycho-spiritual consciousness.

In my view, each person should begin their growth journey alone. Only after achieving a certain degree of self-awareness should they enter into a relationship. When two people join in marriage, they should continue their mutual journey of growth together. The relationship should expand this journey, not narrow it. It should amplify awareness, not diminish it.

Unfortunately, some relationships become arithmetic problems where one person’s issues are simply added to another’s. The energy needed to face life’s difficulties together gets lost in managing the relationship itself. True love, I must emphasize again, is never born from need.

Too many people experience relationships as a convenient way to satisfy their needs, especially their need to feel loved. They’re in love with the idea of love itself! They’re sick with a sentimentality that has nothing to do with genuine sentiment.

Think about it: how many women and men believe they love because they’re available, sensitive, emotional, and caring – but they’re really just in love with an idea, with their own self-image? Do they truly know their partner?

True love demands hard work and discipline. It’s not built on sweet or sentimental notions mistakenly labelled as romantic. It revolves around the search for meaning and the cultivation of psycho-spiritual growth. If phrases like “my darling,” “my love,” “my beauty” – words everyone knows – were sufficient, relationship crises wouldn’t exist.

What does this tell us? Simply this: even the most beautiful scenes mean nothing without consciousness behind them.

This might seem impossible, but true love actually grows even without constant external demonstrations of affection. When we walk the path of growth together daily, what’s unnecessary – the prejudices, the banalities – naturally falls away.

Sadly, many people confuse love with mythical images: wonderful, abstract visions that are sweet and romantic but ultimately empty and false. These people struggle to find true independence, autonomy, and uniqueness within themselves. They’re driven by the desire to be the centre of attention, to feel loved. This, unfortunately, is neurotic behaviour.

But here’s the path humanity must take to reach truth, salvation, and true love: reduce personal neurosis to its minimum, learn to manage emotions, and embrace the difficult, beautiful work of becoming conscious. This is the only way forward.

Chapter Eleven: Learning to Tell Love from Its Imitations

Whenever I speak publicly about love, I can almost feel the room tighten. People lean in, not because the topic is new, but because it is confusing. We use one word to describe everything from a passing crush to a lifelong covenant. We call it love when we feel butterflies, when we admire someone, when we crave touch, when we simply don’t want to be alone. And then we wonder why so many relationships collapse under the weight of expectations that were never realistic to begin with.

For years I watched the same misunderstanding repeat itself: many of us assume we can speak about love the moment we feel warmth inside, good vibrations, a kind of ease. We allow ourselves a little forgetfulness, as if comfort were proof. Meanwhile, the slow work of psycho-spiritual growth – the work that actually forms a person – doesn’t even enter the conversation.

I used to fall into that illusion too. It is a seductive one, because it demands so little. But it is still an illusion. Pipe dreams, as blunt as that sounds.

We live in a civilization of image and appearance. In this world, love is marketed as an extraordinary state: the thrill of being desired, the rush of being noticed, the feeling that someone “wants me.” To reach it, we polish the body, endlessly: gyms, diets, filters, carefully rehearsed confidence. Some even treat seduction as a technique – one more skill to master with the help of psychology. I am not against caring for the body. I am against the lie that a body, however perfected, can replace the heart.

Many people no longer know what it means to love. They believe love is an easy pastime: pleasant experiences, light conversation, shared weekends. The only difficulty, they think, is finding someone we like. But if that is our definition, then love ends the moment life becomes hard – when grief arrives, when illness interrupts the routine, the hidden corners of character come into view.

The same confusion shows up in the way modern societies approach sex. We do not speak of it as a language of communion; we treat it as a product, an identity, a performance, an obsession. Erotic stimuli reach us from every direction. Desire is continually activated, and then we are surprised by how quickly we become restless.

Today sex is like a drug. And like any drug, it can be addictive. Not because sex is evil, but because the human person is easily reduced. When we forget that man is created as body and soul, we start to treat people as objects: things to have, things to consume, things to possess. Once the spiritual component is removed, the human being becomes a tool for my appetite. And appetite is never satisfied for long.

This is also why many people no longer believe love can last. They do not believe in themselves as an autonomous being, as a child of God. If I don’t know who I am before the Lord, how will I be faithful when my feelings fluctuate? If my identity is built only on emotion and approval, then the relationship becomes a fragile shelter, and every storm threatens it.

Here is the paradox I learned slowly, and it still surprises people when I say it out loud: only those who achieve psycho-spiritual intimacy can reach true sexual depth and fullness. It sounds almost impossible in a culture that separates body from soul. Yet the couples who have been together for a long time – who have grown together – are precisely the ones who can enter an extraordinary understanding that naturally leads to genuine unity.

In a relationship, sharing deep and intimate feelings is not a luxury. It is the foundation. When pain and suffering cut the thread of understanding, and when wounds are ignored, opening up becomes harder. Trust collapses. A sense of freedom disappears. We begin to speak less and less about what we truly feel. In that kind of atmosphere, there is no real chance for sincere unity. The heart stays empty, even if the body is busy.

That emptiness is one reason I began speaking about psycho-spirituality twenty years ago. I had watched too many people try to solve spiritual problems with purely external solutions. And I had watched faith itself be presented in ways that felt distant from everyday life: too abstract, too concerned with power, too detached from what people experience inside. When faith is offered as a set of slogans rather than a living path, it fails to answer the questions people carry into ordinary mornings: How do I survive this grief? How do I forgive? How do I choose well? How do I rebuild after failure?

What I call Christian psycho-spirituality is the dimension of faith that dares to enter the human interior. It is religion close to the ground: guidance for personal crises, sorrows, joys, and the daily choices that shape us on the journey of searching and growth. Psycho-spirituality belongs to the heart. It points to the intimate depth of a person – the region of consciousness and subconsciousness where motives, memories, fears, and desires quietly influence everything.

God speaks to us mainly through the Bible. But He does not speak only to a “spiritual” part of us, as if the rest were irrelevant. He remembers our problems, thoughts, bodies, needs, wounds, and passions. When I learned to go deeper inside myself – to look honestly into my own soul – I began to know the Lord more closely. Not as an idea, but as a Presence who meets me where I actually live.

Over time my work became a synthesis of the formations I had received: psychotherapeutic, theological, and spiritual. Christian. The more I listened to people – and to my own story – the more I realized growth is rarely a straight line. I wrote about this in my book Journey of Life: the path takes a spiral shape. Two steps forward, three steps back. What looks like failure is often a lesson. What feels like regression can become a new opportunity. The key word is humility.

Humility is not humiliation. It is truth. It is the courageous acceptance of weakness, fragility, powerlessness, suffering. These are precisely the places where meaning hides and where prayer is most easily born. When I stopped treating my limitations as scandals and started bringing them to God honestly, conversation with Him became simpler and more real.

I have long believed that deep and authentic knowledge of oneself – the kind of work we associate with psychological investigation – can be one of the best roads to finding the Lord. To live this vision requires courage. It requires the desire to know yourself without excuses. No alibi. Honestly. In truth.

I often meet people with low self-esteem. I understand them. I have suffered from it too, as I admitted in my books. But one day a sober thought arrived: if I want a higher level of development, I have to enter my interior and face what is there, especially what I would rather not see – my inhibitions, my fears, my habitual defences. The things I hid while inventing justifications. Not everything can be radically changed, but much can be understood. And what is understood can be offered to God.

It helps to look carefully at the past and then at the present: What am I like now? How do I behave? What do I run from? What do I demand from others that I refuse to give myself? This is not self-accusation. It is clarity. And clarity opens a door.

To focus on ourselves in this way also means setting aside the mentality imposed on us by the environment – by the culture we grew up in and the stories we inherited. We must try to find our true nature. And in Christian terms, true nature includes our distinctiveness, our sensitivity, our emotions, our bodies, our souls – and the divine imprint within us.

From this perspective, relationships cannot be manufactured compulsorily, out of fear, or as a defence against loneliness. If love is to be real, it must be free. It must be blessed by the Holy Spirit. It must be spontaneous in the sense of being truthful, not forced.

Here is the hard step: to overcome my own “I.” To open the heart wide. To entrust myself – body and soul – to God. If I remain closed inside my own ego, how can I experience love? Real love asks me to surrender my obsession with control. It asks me to reject domination. It teaches me to stay calm enough to listen.

I have met many people who pretend – sometimes without realizing it – that they are happy in a relationship. They wear a mask of success. Then, if they are lucky, they stop. They let the mask fall. They analyse what is happening. They start again – more consciously, more truly. This, too, is part of the spiral. It is not glamorous. It is grace at work.

I am convinced the society of the third millennium should not focus only on economic development and expanding power. We must confront the loneliness and resentment that permeate women and men alike. It is time to understand love and its limitless power – not as a feeling we chase, but as a way of life we learn.

Jesus Christ constantly tells us to distance ourselves from worldly things if we do not want to lose our souls. I do not hear that as a threat. I hear it as a rescue. He invites us back to what is real: the heart, the truth, the patient work of communion. And that is where love begins to look less like a dream and more like a decision – one we can live, day after day, with God.

Chapter Twelve: Love Without a Hook

I used to call some meetings “destiny,” when they were really just hunger wearing perfume. I recognize it now: the encounters that change a life are born of pure love – without hypocrisy, manipulation, tactics, or that foggy mystification that makes ordinary need sound like holiness.

When a relationship begins as a bargain – spoken or unspoken – the invoice always arrives. At first, we lean on each other with relief, and it feels like closeness. Then we begin to disappear inside the other person. Expectations swell beyond what any human can carry. Irritation follows. Then aggression. Then the quiet, irrevocable ending that leaves both people confused about where love went.

With time, I learned a hard sentence: I cannot look for what I lack in another person. When I hear someone say, “I can’t live without you… you are everything to me… you are my life,” my heart doesn’t congratulate the romance anymore. It trembles. Because that isn’t the language of love; it is the language of death – of a self that is handing over its own responsibility, its own interior life, its own freedom.

And here is the trap: we often confuse sentimentality with weakness. I did. I thought intensity meant sincerity, and that dependence was devotion. But when I perceive another person as the one who will solve my problems, free me from my limitations, save me from my fears – then I am not standing in love. I am standing in weakness that can quickly harden into control, resentment, and even violence. The “saviour” I demanded becomes the “culprit” I accuse.

The turning point for me was admitting something almost embarrassing: I had to learn how to live alone. Not isolated, not self-sufficient in a proud way, but autonomous – able to breathe without requiring that another person exist only for me. Only then did I begin to taste the proper dimension of my existence: I am not a project to be completed by romance, and another human being is not a remedy sent to patch my interior cracks.

I started repeating a line in my prayer like a small act of realism: the second person is not a god, but a limited expression of God’s love. That sentence rearranged my expectations. It did not make love smaller; it made love truer. It placed the beloved back where they belong: not on an altar, not under a microscope, but beside me – neighbour, companion, mystery.

To feel fully human is to admit my limits. I cannot meet all my needs, and I cannot meet all the needs of another person. That admission sounds bleak until you notice what it contains: humility, and therefore peace. It means recognizing my powerlessness while also recognizing the real importance of the other person. Not as a tool, not as a trophy, not as a medicine, but as someone entrusted to me – never possessed by me.

Goodness and sweetness, I found, do not come from trying harder. They come from acceptance: accepting that some good can come from another person and that they can give it to me. When this good is selfless and spontaneous – when it arrives without a hook – it feels authentic and credible. It doesn’t bind; it blesses.

Living with another person – really living, not merely sharing space – became a daily education in escaping egoism. It expanded my perspective, because it forced me to stop treating people as roles or functions: the one who comforts, the one who fixes, the one who entertains, the one who validates. A human being cannot be reduced to “someone who meets my needs.” A person is not a thing to be possessed, an object, a means. A person is an independent being, carrying a loneliness I cannot erase and a dignity I must honour.

Love is freedom. Only a person who is free from within can love.

That freedom doesn’t mean I have no needs. It means my needs do not become my master. It means I can keep a certain distance from what I feel, so I do not confuse emotion with truth, or desire with vocation. I can say, “I feel this strongly,” without concluding, “Therefore I must demand,” or “Therefore you must comply.”

The paradox I didn’t expect was this: the more I got to know the real human being – his or her inevitable loneliness – and the more I accepted it, the more I became capable of closeness. It is precisely when I stop trying to fill loneliness with another person’s presence that I begin to understand the presence of God. Human love can accompany loneliness; it cannot abolish it. Only God meets the depth that no embrace reaches.

I wish I could say I learned all this from books. Some of it, yes. But the deepest lessons came in prayer, where my limitations became undeniable. In no other area do I feel so strongly that everything around me is gift: creation, nature, other human beings. Prayer corrected my eyesight. It taught me to see others less as objects of manipulation, fulfilment of dreams, or idealization, and more as gifts from God. If we learned to see people this way, so much would change. We would stop seeing only physicality and begin to discover essence.

And then something quietly revolutionary happens: I stop judging people primarily through their social role, their appearance, their power, their charm, or their wealth. I begin to see them simply as neighbours. Not “useful” or “impressive,” not “dangerous” or “inconvenient” – just human, therefore worthy of attention and tenderness.

That is how relationships deepen: not by tightening the grip, but by widening the heart. We begin to understand true value. We stop being guided only by earthly logic – the logic that chooses closeness based on attraction, similarity, culture, sensitivity – and we start looking through a spiritual lens. Christian love moves toward the other not because they match me, but because they are entrusted to me.

And yes, the Gospel pushes this to the edge of what I can manage: even the enemy is worthy of my love. I have often tried to negotiate with that teaching, to water it down into politeness. But the Lord does not ask for mere manners. He asks for a heart.

Forgiving enemies, I have discovered, is the litmus test of love. Not a sentimental love, not a love that feels warm, but a love that participates in God’s freedom.

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.” (John 15:12) “Love your enemies… do good… bless… pray… expecting nothing in return.” (Luke 6:27–35)

I am still learning. Some days I still reach for people the way a drowning person reaches for air. But now I can catch myself sooner, return to prayer sooner, and choose again: not to use love as a crutch, but to live love as freedom – strength without domination, tenderness without weakness, closeness without possession.

In my notebook I wrote one final line tonight: “God does not replace human love; He purifies it.” And for the first time, that sounded less like theory and more like news.

Introduction