Gabriel Cartañá, psychologist from Bendita TV: “In love, celebrities have the same doubts as the neighbor’s son”

In the first chapter of his last book, psychologist Gabriel Cartañá reviews the sum of the conscious and unconscious decisions that led him to write about love. Unconscious: the brochure of the University of Flores found 25 years ago by the mother of Lidia, his second wife, and his insistence that he study there; the movement that led him ten years ago to work as a teacher for one of the sons of Beto Casella and that was the start of their friendship and their media adventure. Aware: accept the proposal of his friend eight years ago, go to his program and analyze the psychological side of reality; write your first one man show, When therapy isn’t enoughand visit theaters across the country with the play.

“Our present is the result of all the decisions we make without imagining their implications. And there are no bad decisions: that’s what’s great ”, Cartañá says to Infobae, on a halt between the radio, the patients and the television. Hand in hand with Casella, start the morning with Well-mannered, by Continental, and the nights as a panelist of Blessed Television, by Channel 9. The pandemic forced him to suspend theatrical performances, but gave him time to move forward with his book, which is named after his third solo show. What do I say when I say that I love you?, a natural consequence of the interaction with the audience: “The last half hour of my previous show answered questions, on any subject. And most of the questions always came from the side of love. “

The dilemma is as inexhaustible as it is human, so much so that the psychologist is already focusing on another book in which he is dedicated exclusively to responding to people’s requests: “He will be called The thousand questions you’ve always asked yourself about love. Is it for the last chapter of What do I say when I say I love you? I asked in my networks to ask me questions about love, thinking that there would be at most 200 people, and I received 6700 requests “, account.

–In your book there are also questions from famous people, like Alejandra Maglietti, Leo Montero, Fernando Bravo and Casella himself.

-Yes, I did it partly so that people understand that the well-known person, popular people, famous people ask exactly the same questions as the neighbor’s son. When it comes to love, we all have the same doubts, the same difficulties and the same drawbacks.

– How do the psychologist who speaks of love in the theater coexist with his patients, with whom he watches reality with irony on Bendita TV?

-There is not much difference. Me with Beto, in addition to being on TV, I am on the radio. And even though I’m unprepared, or whatever, I like the humor. So sometimes I pretend to say something funny, and Beto challenges me, he says to me: “Stop making humor, you do not devote yourself to humor, devote yourself to yours!”. In Bendita I try to give a different look, because in short it is a program which undresses the behavior of famous people, sometimes funny, sometimes repudiable, sometimes controversial … So, as it is about human behavior, it is my soup culture, which I can talk about. I always say I’m not talking about people I don’t know, what I’m analyzing is a role model.

– Among some famous people, the law of attraction is now all the rage, which says if we want something very much, we will get it. You disarm this illusion in your book.

– It is a monumental absurdity! The other day, my daughter Athina, who is 17, said to me: “I have the sentence, dad: ‘If you believe it, you believe it’”. And of course, when I told him it was stupid, that he didn’t like it, he asked me why I said that. Well, because that’s not true! I’ve been asking the Universe to marry Jennifer Lawrence for 10 years, and that’s not going to happen! It won’t happen this year, it won’t happen next year, it won’t happen in this lifetime! I understand that one of the necessary factors to achieve something is to believe it, because if I don’t believe it, I am already programming myself so that it does not happen, but it is not enough. If I wanted to be President of the Republic, I have to train myself, I have to be a politician, I have to devote my life to it, and maybe I will succeed … By sitting at home and saying: “I am going to be president ”, that will not happen. But they sell this package: “Ask the planets”. The planets are not so concerned with satisfying my desires! They’re in orbit, they don’t care about my life. If I don’t take care of my life, no one will take care of it.

– At one point in the book, you talk about a conversation with Athina where you tell her that the price of being conscious in love is paid very high: it can be loneliness.

–Of course, being aware is often painful. Aristotle said that the process of being aware is that of philosophizing, of opening the eyes. He saw a slave and said: “This slave dreams of being free. What do we do, do we awaken him to his reality as a slave that cannot change, or do we let him dream? “The philosopher always asks to be awakened, but sometimes it means awakening to realities that are not as pleasant as a dream. In love, to be aware is to love with your eyes open, because to do it with your eyes closed is very easy. I close my eyes and imagine my wife is perfect, she is ideal and I don’t see her flaws. Stopping loving with my eyes closed is also easy: the difficult thing is to love the defect – as long as the defect is not that the other is toxic. But if I’m looking to love an ideal, when that person isn’t up to what I’ve built, I’m going to get angry because they don’t live up to my expectations.

– We left behind the structures that said that love should be monogamous, heterosexual and eternal, but infidelity always hurts, why?

– (laughs) Because what hurts us in infidelity is that we are not the builders of each other’s happiness. Because romantic love, which we haven’t yet tossed despite all the structures we leave behind, is selfish and possessive. So when you find out that the other is unfaithful in sex, you assume that at that point he enjoyed it, had a good time, and that at that point you didn’t exist: him and the other person existed and you were not a builder of that other person’s happy moment. And you want to be part of all the happy moments of the person you love; that’s what bothers and hurts. Because of this, many times what the deceived person tries to find out later is how the other person romantically and sexually spent them.

– You also suggest that rejection hurts us because it makes us lose this version of ourselves that we were with each other. Is love therefore always selfish?

– I’ll tell you with an anecdote: when Facundo Cabral was 38, he was in Colombia, he had finished a tour and he was going to meet his wife and his four-year-old daughter. Yes at the airport, he learns that the plane they were traveling in had crashed and the two were dead. Entonces cae de rodillas con un profundo dolor entered y lo que se llama un mutismo selectivo, que es una afección psiquiátrica, emocional, que hace que no puedas hablar aunque quieras: no le salían las palabras siendo un hombre para el que su vida era speak. He was silent for six months. It was a friend of Mother Teresa from Calcutta, who sent for her, and then he went to India to see her and spoke to her for the first time, and said to her: “I have so much pain, because that I had a wife and a daughter, and all the love they gave me, I don’t have anymore and now I feel weak ”. And Mother Teresa said to her: “No, your problem is not that. Your problem is not that you no longer receive love from them, but that you have a lot of love: you have nowhere to put the love you gave them “. Because love has to do with what I give, but in order to give I need someone else. If there isn’t another, I have no one to give that love to, and when I don’t, it burns me. It is still a, but it is a gift. Healthy love is giving, never receiving. A reception is childish love. Do you have children?

-Yes.

–I am going to tell you a sentence and I want you to apply it to your son and you will see that it fits perfectly, then I will ask you to apply it to a romantic love: “The love that you feel for him your joy for his happiness even if you are not in his life ”. Employment?

-Yes of course.

– Now apply it to your husband or your boyfriend … It doesn’t touch that much anymore, does it? It is because we are not so sublime in romantic love. We must learn to be.

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