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 When the sculptor Michelangelo Bounarroti
looked at a block of marble, he could envision what shapes would
emerge from the stone. "In every block of marble I see a statue as
plain as though it stood before me ... I have only to hew away the
rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the
other eyes as mine see it," he was quoted as saying. The idea of the
true self, trapped until someone carves it into a shape, is the idea
behind what social psychologists call the Michelangelo phenomenon.
The Michelangelo phenomenon explains how a person's
perceptions and behavior sculpt his partner's vision of herself and
vice versa. The relationship between caregiver and care recipient
can be understood in this way, and new research is looking at how
the effect may actually promote healing in patients with chronic
illness.
"They're shaping the self of the other in the shape
of their relationship," said Kevin Reimer, a professor of marriage
and family at the Mennonite Brethren Biblical Seminary in Fresno,
Calif. "I'm looking at how there might be co-sculpting between the
disabled person and the assistant."
Reimer is one of several
researchers studying the relationship between caregivers and care
recipients in L'Arche, an international, nondenominational
organization that provides care for developmentally disabled people.
Reimer analyzed interviews with caregivers who have been
working with disabled members for several years and those who are
novices in the program.
"People who are morally and
altruistically outstanding are motivated by different factors and
the researcher can't apprehend the reasons for those motivations
during the interview," Reimer said.
By using a computational
technique called Latent Semantic Analysis, however, Reimer thought
he could discover why some people continue to chip away at a
difficult relationship and found what he called a "striking
difference" between the two groups.
"The bulk of the novice
folk in L'Arche - those who will leave L'Arche after a year - are
unable to see the kind of altruistic care and compassion that's
mutual - that it's an exchange between the core member and the assistant," he said.
"When the chips
are down, [novice participants] don't have that kind of ideological
foundation on which to stand and say that there's something larger
than the tedium of what [they're] doing and have the grit to stick
it out," continued Reimer.
"It's pretty clear in the
experienced group there's an ideological framework that's beyond
that kind of exchange. It's more than a matter of what I get or pure
empathy."
What the analysis also shows is that "spirituality
is significantly implicated in longevity in L'Arche," Reimer said.
"The ones that aren't burning out or dying on the vine are
incorporating some spiritual or transcendent spirituality into their
lives."
What happens when spirituality is incorporated into
the caregiver's role is the basis for the research Dr. Ellen Levine
is conducting at the California Pacific Medical Center in San
Francisco.
"So much has been done for the patient to cope
and very little has been done for the partner, and the partner has
felt really helpless," said Levine of her research into the
relationship between cancer patients and their partners.
Levine collected data on couples in two groups; one group
was taught to practice basic Buddhist meditation techniques with
their partners for three months, while the other group was taught
the technique only before they arrived for evaluation at the medical
center.
"It's a meditation practice that's common to all
religions ... in terms of accepting yourself," Levine said. "It's
accepting yourself and to feel compassionate with yourself and focus
it onto the partner. So you're sending these impressions of loving
compassionate thoughts and feelings."
Partners in both of
Levine's groups were monitored in separate rooms for changes in
brain activity and heart rate as they focused their meditation
energy on the patient.
"This is building on the literature
in distant healing - using prayer and other forms of healing
traditions to heal people from a distance," said Levine, citing the
1999 landmark study on remote intercessory prayer by researchers in
the coronary care unit at Saint Luke's Hospital, Missouri.
 Although the data is still preliminary, Levine
said she is hoping to find several things: "One is that the partners
themselves feel more calm, more at ease, more accepting of
themselves; the patient has improved quality of life and improved
mood; and that their partner relationship stays the same or gets
better."
Even if Levine does not find what she expects, she
is confident that teaching compassionate, goal-directed techniques
can only help the relationship. "With most spiritual traditions,
there's an emphasis in healing yourself and healing the world and
some people ... won't really practice that faithfully," she said.
"We're giving them something that's really goal-directed and someone
that they're really motivated to help."
According to Sally
Zierler, a professor in the Department of Community Health at Brown
University, it is precisely this understanding of compassion that
contributes to the health of patients.
Zierler interviewed
more than 100 HIV-positive people and their partners to study the
effects of compassionate love on mental health.
"We
specifically asked, 'How often do you feel a selfless caring for
others?' and it was really quite a threshold," said Zierler. "Once
we had love in the model, it overwhelmed everything."
Controlling for factors associated with depression,
including diagnosis of the disease, prognosis and function of the
immune system, Zierler found "a protective effect of caring for
others" when she interviewed patients.
The protective effect
included high levels of CD4, a protein found in white blood cells
that help combat the virus' spread in the body and delay the
necessity for treatment.
"Compassionate love, altruistic
love - we see this associated with above-threshold CD4 levels, so
that we don't need to start meds," Zierler said. "What always stood
out was this construct of compassionate love."
For Zierler,
the results are not surprising. "There's nothing counterintuitive
touching on the kinds of results that we found," she said. "There's
real biologic plausibility to the outcomes we're talking about."
The outcome she is talking about is a direct link between
love and health, with the phenomenon of caring for others and being
cared for oneself providing a kind of resilience to outside stress,
like complications from HIV.
"Physiological resilience can
come from this way of living in which one is so 'others-centered'
that the kinds of ... stressors that you and I might see are not the
focus of the mind of someone who is out there to love in the world,"
Zierler said.
Continued research into compassionate love is
still needed to tease apart the different aspects of the
Michelangelo effect on the relationship between the caregiver and
care recipient. But researchers like Levine want to stress that
techniques of compassionate love that could positively affect the
caregiver relationship should be implemented as they are developed.
"It would be wonderful just in general if a person goes to a
doctor and they say ... 'This is something you can do,'" she said,
"'and here is something your partner can do, as well.'"
Julia C. Keller is aquisitions editor of
Science & Theology News |
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