Cristina Galafate
Updated Thursday, February 15, 2024-02:30
Laura Rojas-Marcos The psychologist who parachuted to overcome the fear of flying: "Optimism is an attitude of life"
With more than twenty published titles and 12,000 patients,
Enrique Rojas
(Granada, February 24, 1949) is considered
one of the best psychiatrists in Spain
. "My daughter Marian, also a psychiatrist, my daughter Isabel, a psychologist and journalist, and I are going to give a course on April 20, Saturday, at La Estación Gran Teatro CaixaBank Príncipe Pío, on emotional intelligence and we have 1,500 people. Tickets are They sold in two hours," he says in his office, flooded with books and presided over by a huge table full of perfectly arranged oil paintings.
"It relaxes me a lot to make abstract paintings,
it's my therapy
," he reveals, showing the ceiling of the room, painted by a French woman, and leading a synthetic conversation, where the complex becomes easy. It occurs on a Monday, her only "free" day. He quotes Ramón y Cajal: "We can all, if we set our minds to it, be sculptors of our own brain." But, with what he is falling, how can he be moderately reasonable? "You have to learn to have a long view of the play."
His desire is to influence society and
promote culture
that, from his point of view, makes us more free, instead of entertainment based on football and the lives of celebrities. "I'm sick with optimism," he defines, encouraging us not to ask for pears from the elm tree.
Enrique Rojas is a professor of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology and Director of the Rojas Estapé Institute of Psychiatry.A. HEREDIA
The title of his latest book is
Understand your emotions
(Ed. Espasa). What can it help us to identify and understand them? Understanding means grasping what happens inside one. It is the first degree of self-knowledge. Can that lead us to react better, for example, to anger? Indeed. It helps us learn to manage our emotions, knowing how they occur, what triggers them and how to govern them. It was said that we would come out of the pandemic better. However, people feel bad. What do you perceive in consultation? I would say that we are in a neo-romanticism. A return to the 19th century: of the exaltations, of the sentimental world... Can you specify with an example? The enormous importance of gossip magazines, the great resonance of emotional intelligence and everything that refers to the emotional world has today a great importance. The Urgent Spanish Foundation (FundéuRAE), promoted by the Royal Spanish Academy and the EFE Agency, has chosen polarization as its word of the year 2023. What does it suggest? I see that almost all emotions are bipolar, the two sides of a coin . Love and heartbreak, joy and sadness, peace and anxiety, happiness and misfortune, empathy and a toxic person. What is the difference between what you call "normal" sadness and depressive sadness? For psychiatrists, normal sadness is reactive sadness. Melancholy as a consequence of something negative that has happened. Depressive sadness has an enormously longer duration and intensity. The first helps you grow as a person and the second sinks you. In much of Europe there is talk of the increase in youth suicides. Why? Because there are masses of young people lost. Without direction. Without criteria. Without a personal project. In his book he puts the crisis of the person above the crisis of the family. What is the reason for this lack of identity? There is no crisis of the family without a crisis of the person. It is due, among other things, to a bombardment of negative information and news that arrives and leaves the person very flat and low-key. How do you build a life project? It is a program that you design in your style and that has five major ingredients: love, work, culture, friendship and hobbies
.
. Traditionally, happiness has been the great life aspiration. However, there is increasing criticism against this commercialization and well-being is put first. What do you think? In the times we live in, happiness has become quite material. That means well-being and standard of living. Happiness consists of doing something worthwhile with your own life and that aims to help others. In short, living in harmony with yourself. Your happiness equation always includes culture. Why do you consider it essential? Culture consists of knowing, knowing, being curious to learn, nourishing yourself with things that do not go out of fashion. That is why culture is freedom. In the chapter dedicated to love and lack of love, it says that women look for deeper relationships and men look for more superficial ones. Why? Today, men pretend to love and what they are looking for is sex. The woman fakes sex and what she is really looking for is love. This has occurred due to the sexual revolution. There are three milestones: May 68 in Paris with the motto 'Forbidden to prohibit'; Beijing 1995, when the concept of sex is replaced by gender, and the first is nature and the second is what I make according to my preferences, and the year 2000, in which you can do whatever you want with your body because you are free and There is neither sender nor referent. All this without feeling guilty. How does it influence the current situation of 2024? Women are used as if they were a thing and throwaway relationships appear. This is seen in young people who say: "Yesterday I made love to a girl whose name I don't remember." I call this fluid exchange. What advice would you give to a couple in crisis or with difficulties? Avoid unnecessary arguments, do not bring up the list of past reproaches and learn not to turn a problem into a drama. Is it heartbreak? the greatest cause of suffering? As a psychiatrist, the greatest causes of suffering that I encounter are depressive illnesses, anxiety, panic attacks and obsessive disorders... but heartbreak also plays a fundamental part. How would you define it? It means that a romantic relationship has been evaporating. Those two people distance themselves. And what can be done about this cooling? In the culture of immediacy, the quickest thing to do is to break it off and look for another partner. In the culture that I defend, that of effort, it means forgiving the person, forgiving oneself and starting over. That produces enormous joy in the medium and long term. But it will depend on the case, right? Divorce is the first adult epidemic in the West. Do you think you can tolerate it less than before? We live in a very hedonistic society, which seeks pleasure. above all. The love of the couple has a high percentage of craftsmanship and renunciation. What is Simón syndrome? It only occurs in men in their thirties and older, who are single and have these variables: emotionally immature, materialistic, obsessed with work and narcissistic.And what's underneath those characteristics? Commitment panic. It is very rare to find a young guy in his thirties who wants to get married. I have wonderful, single students of mine who can't find a man. It has been very common for 15 years. Are those men afraid of commitment afraid of losing an enormous number of options in the love market at the click of a button? It is fear of losing freedom with a small letter and, at the same time, having to give up other options and see the epidemic of broken couples and de facto couples prepared to break up. Is pornography a frequent problem in your practice? It always comes up. Porn is harmful and negatively affects behavior. Apps and easy sex make you live vibrant experiences but they make you feel terrible. Is the initial dopamine that awakens love lost over the years? The first moments of falling in love effectively awaken dopamine, which is the hormone of pleasure, and oxytocin, which is the hug. Logically, they dilute with the passage of time. Falling in love is finding yourself outside of yourself. Discover someone with whom you want to share life and have a common project. Is it essential to admire the person? The first manifestation of falling in love is admiration, especially in women. In man it is beauty. And how does a couple stay in love over time then? By maintaining admiration, with a common project, there is a homogeneous growth of the couple and a spiritual base. By spiritual basis do you mean sharing the same values? There must be an answer to the main questions of life that stem from three spiritualities: the Jewish, Christian and Muslim world. There are three fundamental books for Westerners: the Torah, the Gospel and the Koran. And all the Eastern books are also very important, but they do not have that body of doctrine. Why do you relate good mental health to the ability to stay in the present moment? Forgetting negative things is mental health. I always say that happiness consists of having good health and bad memory. Why should we forget? Past grievances and traumas that are not diluted lead a person to resentment, and resentment has two notes: feeling hurt and not forgetting. Hence, a person becomes neurotic. Are we getting used to living with anxiety? Anxiety is a negative emotion that is experienced as fears, fears, anticipation of the worst and with a procession of important physical symptoms. An anxiety crisis is a very brief episode of emotion, which can last just a few minutes, and produces tachycardia, sweating, tremors, respiratory distress... And three threatening spectrums: fear of death, madness and losing control. Can it be remedied? We live in a stressed society, it moves too fast, we want it all and we want it now. It can be healed on a personal level, learning to renounce,to not lose calm and know that happiness is based on not asking life for what it cannot give us. That's where inner peace comes. When you are young, life is about great adventures and emotions. At 50, peace, serenity and calm are valued. Is success overrated and failure undervalued? What helps you grow as a person are defeats, if you are able to learn the lessons they teach you. Like which ones? Defeat teaches what success hides and reveals our weaknesses and limitations. Accepting them is wisdom. How is good emotional stability achieved? It is the conjunction of having a good balance between the instruments of reason and the tools of emotionality. Why is emotional intelligence so fashionable? A mix of heart, head and culture. What languages does emotional intelligence have? The verbal, the non-verbal, the subliminal, the one of celebrations, the one of unexpected surprise and the care of the small details of coexistence. Is education the most important thing? Educating is turning someone into a person and seducing them with values that never go out of style. Discipline and exemplarity. How does the use of technology affect today's children? It is positive but you have to know how to control it and that is where parents come in, who must be great educators. What is happening with addictions to screens? Apps like Instagram and TikTok are designed to get stuck into because they're easy, enjoyable, and don't demand anything from you. They present you with an ideal world. Does that make them obsessed with their body? This is where anorexia appears, the obsession with not gaining weight and deformities in the appreciation of one's own body, facial dysmorphia... The two doctors who have grown the most In recent years in the Western world they are the cosmetic surgeon and the psychiatrist. The first was until recently the one who performed reconstructive surgery in a traffic accident. Until 20 years ago, the psychiatrist was the doctor for those who were mentally ill, but today he is the family doctor. What is the difference between going to a psychologist and a psychiatrist? We, psychiatrists, have learned a lot from psychologists to quantify the emotional world. We are doctors and we use pharmacotherapy, while the psychologist is a behavioral expert who uses psychotherapy. Why do you think that Spain is among the countries that consume the most anxiolytics? In the European Union, the five countries that consume the most psychotropic drugs, In this order, they are the United Kingdom first, Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. With nuances of course, because here we have a very good climate. We are in winter and there is sun and we have 15 degrees, unlike Germany, for example. But can depression be cured? There are two types of depression: endogenous, hereditary and biochemical, and exogenous, which come from external events. The latter have a more uncertain prognosis, while endogenous ones are cured around 90%.And bipolarity? Today there is a very rich pharmacopoeia that cures them in a very high percentage through mood stabilizers. What are these mood stabilizers? Drugs, mostly metals, that stop relapse and are sodium, lithium, rubidium and a long etcetera. Is there a depressive profile that relapses again? There is a depressive personality, which consists in a way of being pessimistic, negative, melancholic... It has educated the eye to see more the bad than the good. Why do you praise simplicity? Simplicity is the virtue of maturity. It means fighting for a good relationship between what one says and what one does. Be consistent. This is called integrity, a great aspiration of conduct.
Understand your emotions
, by Enrique Rojas, is published by Espasa and you can buy it here