Metaphysical Love

Mini-Love-Lesson # 289

Synopsis: Here we work to understand and make practical sense of metaphysical/spiritual love and how it may work along with how it can productively be used.  What science is discovering, modern and ancient religious suppositions, philosophical offerings and what people all over the world are doing with metaphysical/spiritual love actions are included in clear, straight forward language.

Is love itself metaphysical?  Is love the greatest of all things, as spiritual masters have proclaimed down through the ages?  Does spiritual love rely on the existence of a mind-spirit connection?  Scientific evidence supports that love heals, love connects, love protects, love nurtures, love reinforces and rewards us.  And how does it do all those things – energy forces, bio-electrically, psychically, deity intercession, … ?  It has been suspected that the collective unconscious, group intelligence, spontaneous mood emergence, superorganism cooperation and metaphysical mass influences might have something to do with metaphysical love.  The mysteries abound.    

Do We All Love - Metaphysically?

When it comes to love, almost everyone, sooner or later, behaves metaphysically.  If a loved one is critically ill and we call on a mystical source to heal them, we are behaving from love - metaphysically.  If we pray for spiritual guidance when we are in the throes of despair - we are acting metaphysically.  If we go to the grave of a loved one and talk to the loved one’s spirit - we are love-relating metaphysically.  If we send our children off to school and imagine protective love energy surrounding them - we are acting metaphysically to safeguard them.  If we fantasize sending our love energy to a distant loved one - we are projecting metaphysical love.  If we are alone and feel a love-filled presence - we may be experiencing a metaphysical love event.  It seems there are many ways metaphysical love may manifest itself and be experienced.

We need not believe in metaphysical love to do it, or at least to attempt it.  We only need to have real love in our hearts and a willingness to experiment with metaphysical love behaviors.  Exploring these manifestations of metaphysical love may lead to surprising experiences and astonishing outcomes.  

When there is nothing more we are able to do in a difficult situation, we might attempt a metaphysical love behavior.  Behaving with and from metaphysical love often can be considerably beneficial to us and to those we love.  Metaphysical love can lead to a sense of spiritual serenity and heart-filled awe.  It also might guide us to appreciate the many apparent cosmic miracles that surround and fill our existence.  Psycho-physiologically, metaphysical love participation in rituals and ceremonies can bring stress reduction, metabolic balance and feelings of energized empowerment.

Research into the healing effectiveness of metaphysical love behaviors, shows intriguing results.  When metaphysical-related actions were taken on patients’ behalf, they tended to get better more often and faster even if they were not consciously aware of the action or even if they did not believe in it.  The experimental, matched, control groups did not get metaphysical treatment and did not show similar improvement.  Some of the experiments included praying for the patient, lighting candles, doing ceremonial actions and repeating ritual words.  It was found that the mindset and emotion demeanor (serene, loving, focused) of the person carrying out a metaphysical treatment influenced the results to some degree.  It also was found that benefit accrued to the doer as well as the receiver of metaphysical actions.

Interestingly, other patients also showed significant improvements even though they were not aware of volunteers, at a considerable distance, spiritually and metaphysically acting on their behalf,.  Unrevealed, distance healing is hard to explain in other than metaphysical ways.  

Some may not want to call what we are talking about metaphysical, but rather call it by some other term like spiritual or transcendental. That’s fine! The point we want to make is that whatever it is termed, this is a class or type of love behavior which is very common worldwide. Furthermore, archaeological and anthropological evidence shows this kind of behavior presumably has been going on since very early in the development of our human species.

Right now, this very moment, out of love, millions of people are doing metaphysical, or if you prefer, spiritual practices designed to have a positive influence on the well-being of those they love. Such actions are demonstrations of real, compassionate and caring love and they deserve respect and honoring for being so.  Respect also is due for those who rigorously and methodically are searching into the many complexities and conundrums of metaphysics within the realm of love.

What Is Metaphysical Love?

Metaphysical love may seems magical, mystical, mysterious, perhaps mythical and often quite hard to fathom. This kind of love is what many people turn to in times of love troubles. Metaphysical love also is known as the love that is spiritual, transcendental, supernatural, ethereal, celestial and preternatural.

We put metaphysical and spiritual together for several reasons. One is that, behaviorally, metaphysical and spiritual love are accomplished by similar actions. Another is that both seem to operate in much the same way and obtain rather similar results. There are those who study metaphysical and spiritual phenomena and suspect they are two views of the same thing. There also are those who vehemently oppose that concept. 

We operationally define metaphysical love as a love which people attempt to access, express and communicate through the behaviors associated with the metaphysical. To love metaphysically, means to have and feel a love that seems beyond this world’s reality. It also means to transcendentally or spiritually feel a connection with who and what we love.  For example, when long-distance lovers plan to gaze at the moon on the same night at the same hour; just by knowing they are sharing the same experience, they can feel metaphysically connected.  To metaphysically love means to try to transmit our love in a way that connects with another and beneficially effects them. Metaphysical love sometimes is explained as a special form of energy that exists in and travels through the ether of the universe.  

Doing metaphysical/spiritual love is enormously popular, common and esteemed all over the world. It does have its skeptics, disbelievers and naysayers, and conversely its ardent practitioners, promoters and believers   Metaphysical and spiritual love are the focus of a great deal of research, much of which supports that it is a useful and rewarding way to do love.

Framed in this world’s reality, metaphysical love sometimes is thought of as a bioelectrical or neuro-electrical phenomenon.  It is suspected to exist in and be transmitted from the brain’s limbic system components which are associated with love. Sometimes that love transmission is conveyed through touch and sometimes may be broadcast across space much like a radio wave transmission. Some research data has been analyzed as supporting this understanding.  A great deal more investigating is required to enlighten our understanding of these suppositions.

An ecumenical, somewhat theologically grounded and spiritually focused explanation exists and roughly goes like this. There is a deity force in the universe.  This metaphysical energy is pure love. This love energy can be accessed through spiritual and religious practices and, thereby, brought to bear on the living creatures and conditions of this world. Thus, metaphysical love is the spiritual love of the deity force which can be tapped into and channeled through us to our loved ones. Probably, clerics of every religion would want to alter this explanation, one way or another. In no way is it to be considered doctrinaire.

Philosophically, metaphysical love might be said to be the love that comes through “Meta-Ta-Physika”, Greek for the reality beyond the reach of objective study but able to be, at least partially, comprehended with the help of ontology, cosmology and epistemology. Did we say metaphysical love is complicated and hard to fathom?

Hopefully, these concepts have given our readers some sense of what metaphysical love is and may be, as well as how it might be done.

A couple other mini-love-lessons to explore at this site: “Transcendental Love: Mysteries and Wonders for Your Future” and “To Win at Love, Study Love”.   

One other thing - We think this mini-love-lesson is a practical, good one to discuss with others who like to talk ideas and use them and grow with.  See if you agree.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: If, right now or before day’s end, you were going to do a set of metaphysical/spiritual actions on behalf of someone you love, what actual behaviors might you do?

Friendship Love’s New Significance

Mini-Love-Lesson  #235

Synopsis: Good and better friendship and its new importance for how you identify yourself, feel about yourself, attain better happiness, health and longevity, along with the love guidance of your own answers to important questions are intriguingly presented here.

What You Do and Personal Importance?

Who are you and what do you do?  Isn’t that what everybody asks about when they first meet someone new?  Well, not everyone but those are the questions many people try to answer first just about everywhere in the modern. middle class, Western world.  This is especially true for males and for those whose occupation is their primary identity.  It is a bit less true for those who hold lesser status jobs and those who travel in old wealth circles.  For many millions their occupation is there foremost identifying factor.  Usually tied to that is a sense of their identity, personal worth, societal value and peer group importance.

So, if your occupation is abolished and that work is accomplished using algorithms and creating machines to do your job, who are you and what will you become?  Will you have importance, purpose, worth and significance or will you be and feel useless and without value?  This actually is what is beginning to happen to more and more people as high-tech improvements continue to replace people in all kinds of work.  With a sense of uselessness often comes anxiety, depression, addictions, suicide and other forms of life failure.

However, this does not happen to everyone who loses their work life identity.  Some have been raised to feel important and of worth because of being born into or married into a higher status family, class, caste, race or otherwise more advantaged group.  Then there are a good number who feel good about themselves so long as enough people feel good about them, but if their popularity wanes they may crash.  In the modern Western world, some few others are lucky enough to have been raised in families that understood and taught having a sense of intrinsic worth and healthy self-love (or they learned this on their own through reading, attending courses or being around people who project a love of self and love of others).  Those who have intrinsic self worth have little need of external self valuing factors to feel good about themselves.  Unfortunately, they are a minority.  Some cultures do better at helping people develop a sense of self worth and self love, as do some therapists and counselors.

In many parts of the modern world, the majority of people seem to need an external way of sufficiently feeling good about themselves.  Vast numbers primarily have accomplished this via their work identity.  Take that away and what’s left?

Will Occupational Identity and Its Personal Significance Fade?

Some studies in behavioral economics predict that about 47% of all current occupations are expected to become human free by mid century.

This could grow to 92% by the end of the century according to some experts.  Humans already are increasingly being replaced by smart machines, algorithms, high-tech advances and the like.

So, if this happens to you what is going to happen to your sense of significance, self-esteem, and most importantly how will it affect your healthy self-love (see “Self-Love and 12 Reasons to Develop It”)?  A future looking historian pessimistically warns we are going to have a lot of occupationally useless people around and a great many social and political problems occurring because of that.  So, what is to be done?

Significance Through Love

Can you guess who the people are who suffer least when their occupational or professional identity and its personal validation importance goes away?  The research shows it is the people who have healthy, strong and deep love relationships.  Mainly that means strong, ongoing friendships where healthy, real, sibling-like love exists.  Healthy, loving families and love mates count too.  Perhaps that is because their ways of doing love are very similar to the ways of real, friendship love (see “Understanding Friendship: From Mild Geniality to Profound Love”).  Note: If somebody says “My spouse is my best friend” a healthful mix of love-mate love and friendship love may be occurring. 

Now, let us suppose you met someone new and asked them what they did?  Further suppose that the answer you got was something like this.  “I’m a really good friend and that’s my chief significance”.  Even further suppose that this sort of answer became common and it indicated a primary way to feel good about your own purpose and significance in life.  Suppose also that it became common knowledge that having deep, real, love friendships lengthens life, reduces susceptibility to illness, magnifies general happiness and improves quality living just about every way one can measure it.  All of which is true.  Most of all suppose that nearly everybody’s primary sense of self worth was largely linked to how well they did love relationships and especially friendship love.  Suspect that more friendship love in the world might lead to more altruistic love, family love, healthy self-love and, of course, mate-love along with all the other healthful forms of love (see “Friendship Love and Its Extraordinary Importance”).

What to Do with This?

With the above ideas in mind, let’s look at some very important wide-ranging questions.  If your occupation was abolished and you were replaced by a machine, would your self-concept and self-esteem suffer?  What about your sense of life purpose?  Do you work at improving your friendship skills?  Are you doing things to improve the friendships you have?  How much could pride of being good at friendship love skills help you with your sense of being a person of worth and significance?  By way of healthy self-love, do you give yourself the gift of good friendships?  Do you need to learn more about the how to’s of good friendship and friendship love?  Do you think it might be good for you to make your sense of self worth less work-dependent?  Are you aware that having a few high-quality friends is much more important and healthful than having a high number of acquaintance-level friends?  Are you someone’s good friend?  If so, are you positive about yourself for being a good friend?  Are you in fact your own really good friend?  In healthy self-love could you be your own better friend?

With each of those questions, think of the answers you gave yourself and turn them into guidance messages.  Then, of course, seriously consider following the guidance you presenting to yourself.

One More Little Thing

How about talking all this over with a friend, or potential friend.  If you do that, please mention this website.  By doing so, you will do us and them a friendly, good turn.  Thanks.

As always – Go and Grow with Love
Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: Who loves you best – a friend that tells you what you want to hear, one who tells you what you don’t want to hear but need to, one who tells you both or one who tells you little but very lovingly really listens to you?

In Depth Affirmational Love

Mini-Love-Lesson  #281

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson covers what affirmational love is and can sometimes do; how to go deeper with affirmational love; and the need for attending to both intrinsic and productive valuing of our loved ones through affirmations. 

Affirmational love sends the intimate message that we have focused attention on a loved one and discovered worth and wonder.  Often that propels us to share our appreciation.  If well received, our affirmation can strengthen, energize and trigger happiness in those we love (see “In the Garden of Love”).

Affirmational love is expressed by words and actions that convey and affirm our high valuing and appreciation of a loved one for either, or both, their intrinsic and their productive qualities.

A sense of safety and security can be a superb consequence of first-rate, affirmational loving.  When we show our valuing of a loved one with an affirmation, they are likely to feel they are cherished by us.  As a consequence, their belief in the strength of our shared relationship can be elevated and they may feel more secure and safe in the relationship.  When we know we are valued, our anxieties reduce and our trust increases.  Well-affirmed relationships tend to be long lasting.

Affirmational love can be rendered with both words and actions.  Whether it is a statement of praise or a pat on the back, both can convey loving affirmation.  An elaborately planned experience gift or a subtle wink, both can send a message of affirmational love.  Even the simple may have a deep effect.  It is a best practice when we remember to sprinkle affirmations into our messages to friends, children, parents, family and all those we deeply love.  Link “Is Your Affirmational Love Enough?”

Jane and Sue excitedly reviewed their plans for a weekend together on the coast.  George, Sue’s fiancée, called asking Sue for a weekend date.  Overhearing that, Jane looked despondent until she heard Sue say, “Thanks I’d really like to, but Jane and I already have made plans for a beach getaway, so let’s do it the next weekend”.  George did a beautiful job of affirmation loving by saying, “I understand, I know she’s your best friend, have a wonderful time”.  There are two affirmational examples in this vignette.  The first is affirmation of the importance of a friendship.  The second is affirmation through understanding and acceptance (see “Yourself As a Great Source of Love Gifts”).

Too many people notice mostly the negatives in others.  Attending only to the negative, frequently results in destructive criticism or complaints which is neither good for individuals nor relationships.   We want people to put much more effort into noticing the positives and into forming a habit of searching for the good.  Especially is that important with loved ones.  

Do you notice what is good, admirable, precious, unique, praiseworthy, honorable or any other positive characteristics in those you care about?  If you do, do you, in words and actions, affirm these deserving traits?  

It is not enough to only feel appreciation, it must be turned into affirmational statements or acts in order to benefit the one you have appreciated.  To achieve deep results requires skill and intimacy.  How well we deliver affirmational love and how deeply it benefits, depends on our mastery of imparting affirmational love and on our knowledge of a loved one.

Appreciation and affirmations can focus on intrinsic qualities or the more superficial.  Superficial aspects spot-light things such as popularity, looks, status, wealth or incidental characteristics.  They tend to be less consequential, less significant and more temporary than intrinsic attributes.  If we want to have deep, meaningful love in our affirmations we need to look deeper and attend to the intrinsic nature of those we love.  We use the term intrinsic here, to represent what a person is and has become at a core level.  Honest, caring, loyal, courageous, kind or cooperative can speak to the intrinsic makeup of someone’s inner nature.  That is not to say that the not-so-deep factors are undeserving of affirmation.  It feels good to hear “you make that shirt you’re wearing look good”.  It feels even better to hear “I admire your honesty”.  Affirmation is an excellent way of loving. Maybe you’ll want to do some more of it with your loved ones (see “Self-Affirmation for Healthy Self-Love”).

As always – Grow and Go with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question:  Ask yourself,  “Am I deeply appreciating and affirming those I love –  sufficiently?”

Loneliness and Love

Synopsis: First this mini-love-lesson covers the surprising ways loneliness harms us; then the issues of ignore, fight, escape, just get used to loneliness, or what?; doing what loneliness wants you to do; a cautionary note; Ricardo’s example and Ricardo’s results, (can they be yours?).

Surprising Ways Loneliness Harms Us

Recent research shows loneliness is especially bad for your brain.  What is bad for your brain can be bad for many of your body’s health processes and systems because the brain influences and regulates them.  Loneliness also is bad for your psychological health and that can influence everything else in your life.  One study of over 8000 men and women showed the lonely have up to a 20% faster rate of decline in mental abilities.

Those who have prolonged loneliness are seen to have more stress illnesses and a greater likelihood of having brain inflammation problems.  Loneliness can be seen as a component of love malnutrition or love starvation, which is understood to have a very negative impact on our immunity mechanisms, cancer resistance, blood pressure and a host of other physical problems.

Ignore, Fight, Escape, Just Get Used To It – or ???

Many people try to escape their loneliness by diving into their work, business or various other involvements.  Some try to escape into substance abuse or various behavioral addictions.  Others get some temporary help from antidepressants and other medications.  Another group of people try to fight loneliness seeing it as some kind of weakness or enemy.  Still others see it as just one more human emotion to be ignored.  Learning to live with it can dull the pain but the damage being done by prolonged loneliness  still can happen.  Usually none of these approaches prove to best serve our health or well-being. At best, they may provide some assistance in the short run but they can turn out to be quite bad for us in the long run, or at most, useless.

So what are we to do?  Wallow in our loneliness and just let it do all the harm it can?  Of course not, that won’t help but there is a way that will.

Doing What Loneliness Wants You to Do!

Like all emotions, loneliness was created in us to do us some good, even though it feels bad, sometimes extremely bad.  It may in fact get worse for not doing what the feeling of loneliness wants us to do.  When we follow the guidance message in loneliness, the bad feelings tend to subside.  Sometimes they begin to subside as soon as we get loneliness’s message, even before we have begun to follow that message with action.  So what is the healthful, constructive, guidance message in the feeling we call loneliness?

Basically loneliness can be seen as an emotional message telling us to go in search of love in any of its many forms.  If you can’t find love quickly, go in search of “like” or at least tolerable company first because that might be on the way to healthy, real love.

It also is important to know that it is not just about romantic love, as our culture and/or family training may have subconsciously programmed us to think.  We are a gregarious species, meant to connect with each other and especially to connect in love relationships with one another.  So, hear the guidance message of loneliness telling you to go in search of new or renewed love.

You may be de-energized from your loneliness, think searching for love is too much work, you don’t have what it takes, love is all a matter of luck anyway and your luck in love is bad, and 100 other self sabotaging negatives with which to block yourself from taking productive action.  Remember, your loneliness may just get worse if you do that.  And none of those blocking mechanisms get you to a new and better place though they might help you rest up a bit first.

A Cautionary Note

As I have emphasized before, all our emotions, even the most painful ones, were created in us to do us constructive, healthy good though they may overdo it, under do it, or mis-do it like all human systems.  If you get any kind of interpretation of an emotion’s guidance message that is destructive to yourself or to anyone, it may have cathartic value but that is all.  Acting destructively is almost always destructive to yourself and not the real guidance message of any emotion.  Unless your interpretation of an emotion’s guidance message goes toward health and well-being, probably for all concerned, it is likely not to be your best or most accurate interpretation.

Following Ricardo’s Example to Love

Ricardo was laying awake night after night, hurting badly with loneliness.  He tried various prescription medications, then alcohol and other substances but nothing seemed to help all that much.  Some people at work, including his boss, pressured and nagged him into going to a counselor, and he went along with that just to get them off his back.  He expected to have to dredge up a lot of his past which would just use up a lot of time and money, but he thought he could probably cut it short being able to say okay, he tried that and it didn’t work either.  He was surprised that his counselor didn’t want to talk much about his past but wanted him to do some immediate things that might be helpful.

After resisting and just a few sessions later, Ricardo got himself a pet dog and everything started changing for the better.  He learned that a good pet dog is perhaps the world’s quickest and surest way to get some good, healthy love.  Brain studies of canines show evidence that, in brain functioning, dogs really do love pretty much just like we do and it is not just because we feed and pet them.

In counseling Ricardo did have to do some work on his blocks and fears that had some causation from his past, but mostly it was about understanding and following the guidance messages in his emotions.  It wasn’t long before Ricardo tentatively went in search of new involvements and new acquaintances.  He went online and discovered some groups with similar interests to his own, and with reluctance got himself to some meetings.  The new acquaintances showed him that new friendships might develop and were even likely.  He then looked up some relatives that he had lost contact with and a renewed family love possibility came out of that.

Ricardo volunteered to help in a cause he believed was good, and surprise surprise, out of that came a new romantic interest.  He took a class in something he was intrigued by and that yielded some more very interesting new people in his life.  He got involved in a religious connected singles group and out of that came a sense of spiritual love that he had not known before, plus some other new friends.  In counseling Ricardo learned about healthy, self-love and that there is a lot of good that comes from that.

Ricardo’s Results

Today Ricardo has a small group of deep, close friends he feels very bonded with, a renewed family love connection, a wide network of medium and milder friends, a fine and growing romantic love relationship and a much improved, healthy self-love.  Ricardo is not lonely anymore.

Whether loneliness comes from months or years of aloneness, or the death of a mate, or from shyness or any other reason, the prescription is the same: overcome reluctance and connect with others, and grow a loving support network for your health and well being.

Can you follow Ricardo’s example if you are struggling with loneliness?  I suspect you can, and hopefully you will if you need to.  It would be a healthy act of self-love and self-care, if loneliness is pushing at you, to do something rather similar to what Ricardo did.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question

Are you willing to be a good friend so as to do your share of having a good, friendship love relationship?

Protective Love

Mini-Love-Lesson #287

Synopsis: The courage of those who love protectively; our species reliance on the protective love of the cooperative; the 4 cardinal points and formulas for understanding protective love and its psychology; the protective usefulness of fear, worry and anxiety; avoiding over-protective love, plus empowering your own protective love are all concerns of this mini-love-lesson.

Among the stories about us humans, there literally are hundreds of thousands of verified accounts which tell of mothers, fathers, other family, friends, comrades and even humanitarian strangers who bravely defended and tried to save loved ones and others. No one knows how many gave up their lives in these actions of courageous love.

Many nobly give their lives in other ways. Those who defend the downtrodden, the disadvantaged and the persecuted are great practitioners of protective love.  Included in this esteemed group are those who search for cures for illnesses, maybe out of love for a lost or suffering victim of that illness.  Also of note, are the many who watch over and give care to those unable to take care of themselves. Then there are the troops who stand guard, ready to defend and protect.  Many are the others who care about safety and protection and work on better safeguarding devices and procedures.  There are so many more who devote their lives to protective love in large and small ways to the betterment of us all.

Love, real love, is protective! False love seldom is heroically protective but only pretends to be so. Protective love is of cardinal importance to the survival of our species.  Not too long ago, humanity was viewed in a survival of the fittest framework which emphasized conflict and competition.  More recently, our existence has been seen as actually more dependent on cooperation, mutual protection and on love itself.

Protective Love is understood to be hardwired in our brains and has been evolving over millions of years.  There is anthropological evidence that this protective drive predates human existence.  A great many species exhibit protective behaviors (which look like love) not only for their young but for others of their own kind and even for other species.

Cooperative, group, protective behavior also has been observed by naturalists studying higher order animal families, tribes and pack’s defensive actions in the field. An example are the musk ox under wolf-pack attack, who form a circle around their calves; they face outward with their horns lowered ready to gore any wolves hungry or brave enough to attack their circled wall of horns. Another observed example was larger male apes that worked together by standing between predators and the smaller young and females, and even threw stones and tree limbs at predators driving them off. Then there is man’s best friend and the many authenticated stories of dogs saving their master’s lives by attacking threatening bears, lions and tigers. Sometimes these dogs, even when severely wounded, continued to defend their masters even to their death.

Protective Love Is a Cardinal Love

When we shine a light on the meaning of cardinal, we see it indicates immense importance, essential influence and the highest order of significance.  When we combine cardinal with love, we see it points to love’s most potent aspects.  Then, if we add the element of protection, we have a formula that leads to the survival of our species.  

Protective love has the high standing of being a cardinal love because of four major reasons: 

1.  Love motivated protection and rescue has ensured survival throughout the ages.  If it were not for protective love, none of us would be here.  If that is not a cardinal principle, we do not know what is.  Arguably, the survival importance of protective love is true for all higher order species as well.  Protective love is essential to our continuing existence and advancement – protecting self, others, nature, and all that makes life worthwhile is our challenge.  

2.  Another reason protective love is cardinal has to do with our brain.  Our brain is essential to life and our way of being human.  Our brain is built for processing protective love.  That is evidenced in our neurophysiology, neurochemistry and neuro-electrical functioning.  Thus, our brain is central to our behaviors of giving and receiving love.   

3.  Protective love is cardinal because it encompasses many of our grandest, human actions.  Protective love has been the chief, driving force motivating millions of life-saving actions, courageous rescues and heroic defenses.  Steadfast and enduring, safety-focused actions done on the behalf of those we love epitomize the cardinal nature of protective love.  The altruistic and humanitarian efforts which bring safety to the endangered, healing to the wounded or sick, along with relief to the beleaguered are other manifestations of the cardinal essence of protective love.

4.  The final reason protective love is considered cardinal involves how wide ranging and broadly influential it is. Every way love can be conveyed can be done for safety’s sake. Every love relationship, at times, can need some protective and safety-oriented help.  Every time there is an absence of protective love action, where it might be useful or needed, damage to a love relationship may occur.   However, every time protective love is expressed or enacted it is likely to make a love relationship better.  Every time we are doing protective love, we are doing love relating.

The psychology of protective love is fairly simple. Love involves the high valuing of who and what we love. Therefore, it is natural to want who and what we highly value to keep existing, to function well, and be present in our lives.  Furthermore because of love, we want for the well-being of who and what we love. So, we act to be protective of who and what we highly value.

Protective love not only is an inherently powerful force, it also is empowered by some of our other strong emotions. One of these potent influencers is fear and its cousins worry, anxiety, apprehension and sense of threat. Those emotions can guide us to be cautious, watchful, on guard and safeguarding in our actions so that we can see danger coming and do something about it before it reaches us. Wisely handled, our fears can be self-protective and help us be protective of our loved ones. It is only when fear becomes too big or goes on too long that it becomes a damaging stressor. Fear, worry and anxiety can be our friends providing us with warnings we need to keep us and our loved one’s safe.

Another source of empowerment for protective love is our desire for our loved ones to do well, advance, grow, prosper, actualize and be happy. Anything that might be a threat to those positives, we tend to protectively act against. In short, we want the best for who and what we love and we can be quite powerfully protective about that.

When protective love becomes our dominant guide for how we go about love, danger lurks there. Protective love, even as wonderful as it is, has a focus on the threatening negatives of life and love relating. It is about defending against what can go wrong and shielding us and those we love. Healthy, real love works best when it is dominated by a positive focus on what can go right.  Doing love well usually requires a positive focus.  Protective love, therefore, must be secondary and assistive and must only be the primary way to go about love in times of distinct threat, marked danger and eminent distress. When protective love takes up too much time, energy and effort, it can crowd out the great, positive joys of love. 

As always – Grow and Go with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: Do you know somebody you might like to tell about, or talk over with, these ideas?  If so, you probably will grow from doing that and so will they.  You also might tell them of our free, mini-love-lesson website.

♥ Love Success Question: Who could use some more of your protective love attention?

Nurturing Love

Mini-Love-Lesson # 286

Synopsis: The reparative and advancement benefits; the input for optimum healthy real love developing; the general aid to relationship wellbeing; the lack of nurturing in many false love syndromes; the sabotage of nurturing love that can occur; and the joys and necessity of the love that nurtures are all well introduced. 

The nurturing kind of love gets healthy growth to happen, helps find and develop all types of talents, spurs on achievement of goals and assists discovery and actualization of hidden potentials.  It also encourages the discouraged, revitalizes the worn down and helps the recovering to keep going.  Furthermore, nurturing love brings confidence to the unsure, gets the fearful to be courageous and the shy to go boldly forward. It is because of nurturing love that many people meet and surmount challenges, come to know and believe in themselves, make contributions to the greater good and become far more than they otherwise might have become.

With nurturing love, relationships of every type can become healthier, deeper, broader, climb higher, get closer, become richer and can be happier than they would be with an absence of nurturing love. Without nurturing love, many relationships would fail, would not reach their potential or would only exist in mundane mediocrity.  These are some of the reasons nurturing love is so important to relationship success. 

When we have nurturing love to give, we want for the well-being of who we love.  When we have nurturing love, we not only want for but also act for the benefit of those we love.  Sometimes nurturing love inspires us even to live for what we love like humanitarian causes, altruistic enterprises and other worthy endeavors.  The nature of nurturing love is to be helpful, constructive, caring and additive.   With nurturing love, we cannot help but care about and care for the ones we love.  Nurturing love is what moves families to function well, kids to get raised, spouses be sustained, friends to be supported, good causes to be worked for and important things to be cared about. Nurturing self-love keeps us healthy, makes our life richer and sustains us through hardships. In every way, nurturing love is broadly considered to be of great importance to the well-being of just about everybody and everything worthwhile.

A great sense of fulfillment and deep joy can be found in those people who live and love by nurturing the well-being of others.  Nurturing love virtuosos almost automatically seem to take pleasure in helping and watching their loved ones grow, mature, become successful, blossom, and find and develop their positive potentials.  They also take pleasure in seeing the continuance of what they have fostered.  An abiding sense of serene satisfaction often occurs when they observe those they have nurtured come to benefit and live well.  Their healthy pride tends to grow knowing that with nurturing love they have assisted the life and success of those they love.  When a nurtured loved one does well, achieves or advances, the most common statement is “I’m so proud of you”.  At the same time usually there is some pride knowing they played a part in that positive attainment.  In fact, seeing a loved one’s victories, happiness, good experiences, good fortune and goal attainment can bring as much, or more, joy than having won those victories themselves.

Interestingly, one of the ways false love syndromes seem to differ from real love is this joy factor in nurturing love (see our book Real Love, False Love: Which Is Yours? Answers & Solutions).  In most of the forms of false love there is an absence of happiness in seeing another’s advancement or betterment.  Rather, with false love quite often there is envy, jealousy, disappointment, resentment or indifference when a supposed loved one achieves or experiences something positive.  Instead of celebrating a life improvement, acts of sabotage, belittling, spoiling or even feelings of being threatened followed by anger and discouragement may occur.  Nurturing real love is constructive.

Increasing the pleasures of nurturing love can be achieved with mindfulness and purposeful effort.  Becoming happier when observing the growth and development of someone or something we love can be made a healthy, self-love goal.  Concentrating on purposefully lingering and mindfully enjoying another’s success can be achieved by this sort of self-training.  Gardeners who marvel and take joy in seeing the growth and blooming of what they have nurtured seem to do this rather automatically and quite well.  When we plant seeds and nurture their growth in others, we can nurture ourselves by enjoying the whole process.

Whether it is the small beginnings of new life like a child taking their first steps, a loved one earning a degree or a friend getting a promotion, if we encourage and support them, we can be enriched by purposefully enjoying what we nourished and helped to happen.  This applies to what we nurture in ourselves as well when we take joy in our own evolution and accomplishments.  These rewards, of course, will encourage us all to do more of this wonderful thing we call nurturing love.

As always – Grow and Go with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: Are you nourished by the independent and unique growth and development of those you love?

Self-Love and 12 Reasons to Develop It

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson covers what self-love means and does not mean; a list of 12 of the many things healthy self-love helps us do; and how to work and grow using this list.

What Self-Love Means

Healthy, real self-love means you highly value, honor and enjoying the unique bundle of miracles that you are, and that you have been since birth.

Self-love means because you highly honor your own essence and your individual shaping by life, you treat yourself well respecting the one-of-a-kind self you are.  Therefore, you are prone to act to safeguard and develop your gifts and appreciate your unique nature.  Self-love also can mean that you powerfully strive to thrive, live with vitality, delight in your natural self, and that you can be in awe of your own, miraculous, natural processes.

Self-love can mean you actively desire and work for your own well-being and strive to be your best self, not only for yourself but for those you love and care about.  You do that partially because the well-being of others, in a sense, selfishly means a great deal to you.  Self-love also can mean that you take healthful pleasure in the many ways you are built to experience pleasure and share pleasure.  Self-love also can mean that you work against anti-self-love teachings, programming, and influences that come into your life. Such factors can rob you of your strengths, restrict use of your talents, and deprive you of becoming the best self you can become.  Self-love also means that you act toward yourself, feel toward yourself and think about yourself in the ways that are in accord with the definition of love offered at this site.

What Healthy Self-Love Does Not Mean

Healthy self-love does not mean becoming uncaring, ungenerous, mean, stingy, greedy, egotistical, covetous, uncharitable, miserly, narcissistic, hedonistic, sociopathic or self-absorbed.  In fact it means quite the opposite of those things.  That’s because healthy self-love leads to more and better love of others.

You see, when you love yourself healthfully you have the selfish desire to see your loved ones do well, and that leads you to act for their benefit.  Their benefit is your benefit.  It is those who are poor in self-love that go ‘out of balance’ and become stingy, destructively selfish, mean-spirited, etc.  Healthy self-love helps you live by the ancient wisdom which says “Love Others As You Love Yourself”.

What Healthy Self-Love Helps You To:

1.    Believe that the love you have to offer others is good and, therefore, you offer it more

2.    Have a self generating source of energy and power to get through hard times when no one else is giving you their love

3.    Have greater self-confidence and, therefore, accomplish more

4.    Have greater self-reliance and, therefore, be less dependent

5.    Develop more adult maturity so you can emotionally take care of yourself rather than be like a ‘needy child’ who must be taken care of

6.    Be free to ‘want love’ instead of living in a state of ‘need love’ like a weak and needy person more susceptible to false love addiction

7.    Become more ‘inner self-directed’ than ‘outer other-directed’ and, therefore, live more true to yourself, rather than betraying yourself for the approval and acceptance of others, or rather than becoming dutifully or slavishly conformist

8.    Enjoy the praise, thanks and compliments that come from others, rather than automatically discounting them, or being suspicious of them, or becoming addicted to them

9.    Become motivated to take care of yourself so that you have more to offer both to yourself and others, instead of needlessly sacrificing and wasting yourself

10.    Be careful that the love that’s coming to you is of good quality, instead of taking       anything you can get (which includes phony love, contaminated love and love substitutes)

11.    Open yourself up to love chances, opportunities and adventures, instead of being overly protective or defensive about the love you have and, thereby, letting lots more love in

12.    Love life, love others and all that can be loved much more freely because you keep enough of your heart full through healthy self-loving to be able to give a lot

Working and Growing with This List

As a sort of homework to help grow your healthy self-love, you might consider doing these things.  Go back over the 12 items seeing which ones ‘grab’ your attention the most.  It is rather likely that those are the ones that it would be really good for you to examine closely and see if they point to areas you might want to make improvements in.  Are there any of the above items that cause you any level of discomfort or disturbance?  If so, that may represent some area you perhaps are vulnerable in and which needs some strengthening.

Do you find any of the above items more puzzling, confusing, confounding or curiosity generating?  Those, in particular, may (with study) yield clues pointing to areas you might want to and need to explore further.  When working on healthy self-love many people make really good gains by journaling about their learning and growing healthy self-love, and you might want to do the same.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Do you know the difference between when you are being healthfully self loving and when you are being destructively selfish, arrogant, conceited, haughty, contemptuous, scornful etc.?

Gender Diversity Love

Mini-Love-Lesson  #194

Synopsis: How a lot of people are a wide variety of something other than strictly male or female; the big problems that diversity presents; what that can have to do with several kinds of love and how those kinds of love can help are presented in this mini-love-lesson.

Whose What And What Difference Does It Make?

Transgender, transsexual, intersexual, gender dysphoric, omni-sexual, bisexual, homosexual, androgyny and other not strictly or primarily straight female or straight male gender variations have been scientifically identified as existing in the human race.  Both psychology and biology offer confirmation of these different gender diversity states being part of natural reality.  Neurophysiology, neurochemistry, neuropsychology and other brain sciences in particular yield evidence that gender is much more in the brain as well as much more diverse than previously thought.

What is not very different in all gender variations including heterosexuality is the natural need for love, the ways of giving love and the many beneficial effects of being healthfully well loved.  There are some larger differences in the area of love problems but even in that area there is not as much difference as you might at first think.

But for the gender diverse there are extra confounding complications, conflicts, confusions, stressors as well as some very puzzling romantic and heart-mate dilemmas.  Also there can be some hard to cope with biological concerns.

Perhaps worst of all for many are the very dangerous social and religious value clashes that occur in many cultures and subcultures around the world.  For all too long and for far too many, being gender different has been deadly.  To this day in many parts of the world having certain types of gender diversity can get you physically assaulted, jailed and even killed.

Especially dangerous has been the area of who you love and who loves you.  Romantic and spousal love, family love, friendship love, parent-child love, spiritual love and healthy self-love all have been fraught with stressors and serious problems for those whose gender is other than standard heterosexual.  Children, youth and young adults having gender diversity issues have suffered especially.  Embarrassment, shaming, bullying and religious guilt-tripping push many to suicide.  In pockets of the world, it is getting better but certainly not everywhere.

We suggest all this means the people of gender diversity can use extra acceptance, extra understanding and extra love.  So, let’s look at three very important, different kinds of love and what they can mean for the gender diverse.

Healthy, Real Self-Love

Healthy, real self-love is so often extremely important, hugely needed and so very often hard to come by for the people of prevalent and strong gender variation.  The problem is worse wherever there are prevailing anti-gender variation biases, fears, social norms, teachings and laws.  As perhaps you know, some societies, religious groups and families are much more loving and positive toward the gender variant.  Others are very condemning, anti-loving, rejecting, hateful and even murderous.

The gender diverse are so often confronted with overt and covert hate, rejection, exclusion and severe social disapproval.  Sometimes even worse is this.  Whether it is in a family or a whole culture, there frequently is a prevalent teaching something like “you should hate yourself for being anything but straight male or straight female”.  When that teaching becomes an internalized mindset in an individual, the results can be devastatingly self-destructive.

Doing the hard work of finding and growing enough healthy self-love to survive all that can be the best defense.  That is because healthy self-love is something you can carry with you and always have available.  Without sufficient self-love and its strengthen effects, it is very hard to stay okay when hearing “you’re wrong, you’re sinful, you’re sick, you’re not right, etc. for being the way you are”. 

Whether you hear that sort of message internally, externally or both it is destructive.  Depression, anxiety, self rejection, lonely isolation, escape into addiction, breakdowns and suicide all may result.  The good news is all that can be prevented, blocked and reversed with enough healthy self-love.  The bad news is self-love is taught against just as much as gender diversity is taught against and often by the same people.

Gender diverse youth especially are vulnerable to becoming victims of diversity negation coming from culture, society, family, religion, governments and elsewhere.  As gender identity and preference begins to emerge, insecurity and hormonal based confusions tend to mount.  Furthermore, the development of strong, healthy self-love frequently is quite tentative at best among the young.

If you are not strictly heterosexual, go to work on your self-love.  Learn, know and own the fact that you have a lot to offer and certainly are at least just as worthy as any other human being.  Then find out how your variance from standard is a blessing if you use it smartly, bravely and productively.  Most of all, learn and own the following: The core, real you is lovable just the way you are.  Also own that you have healthy, real love to give and that, all by itself, makes you of high value.
If you care about and/or love someone struggling with gender diversity issues, love them by assisting them toward healthy, real self-love.  See this site’s Subject Index concerning healthy self-love for more mini-love-lessons on how to do just that.

Family Love

Those families that offer accepting and affirming love to a gender diverse family member tend to have and keep better cohesiveness, be more resilient and generally function more healthfully and happily.  Those families who try to force or manipulate a family member into a conformist, gender role that the person is not comfortable with, tend to experience severe family disruption and family dysfunction.  Families that reject, shame, personally attack, expel, condemn, guilt trip and are judgmental against someone showing A gender diversity can and are so often ripped apart by these anti-love ways of behaving.

On the other hand, if family members have ongoing clashes about gender issues but they handle disagreements with loving tolerance and democratic acceptance of each other, they can be quite functional and successful.  Likewise, families wounded by gender issue disputes can be healed by activated family love, whether or not they come to agreement on the disputed issues.  Love focused family therapy can be wonderful for this healing process.

Best of all are the loving families that accept, expect and encourage their individual members to develop themselves in whatever way they want to, so long as it is sufficiently healthy.  Love is not dependent on conformity in such families but rather is given freely for whatever variations come about.  Then those variations become enrichments to the family bonded together by family love rather than restricted by compliance.

Friendship Love

Friendship love has been known to save the lives of those suffering conflicts concerning gender.  Friendship love also is known to greatly help lives to be lived well in spite of discrimination, misunderstanding, prejudice, bias, fact free opinions and the other negatives that commonly beset those who are a bit different in gender.  Friendship love also has been known to counterbalance the anti-love effects of hateful, abusive and indifferent families when they cease giving nurturing love to a family member of a diverse gender orientation.

Friendship love is so often a vital element in the development of healthy self-love among the more isolated individual struggling with gender issues.

A big problem arises when a person of gender variation fears peer rejection and, therefore, hides their gender differences, pretending to be someone they are not in regard to gender preference.  They tend not to do the required self-disclosure needed for the development of deep, real, friendship love.  If they do reveal their gender truth about themselves and they receive loving acceptance from a friend or friends, they then may blossom and their social whole world can change for the better.

If they meet with rejection it can be very dangerous unless they have sufficient self-love or other loving friends.  I do understand the fear and self-protectiveness and I suggest careful patience when deciding who might be a worthy friend to share your true self with.  Observe over time who appears open to differences and start with small revelations to test the water before jumping in the deep end.

Those who publicly show openness and acceptance to all gender variations do a great love-positive service.  They give to those struggling to figure out who and what they are gender-wise and to the self rejecting, the chance to know acceptance, inclusion and real friendship is possible for them.  From such demonstrations of open-heartedness, great and enduring friendships have been known to result.
In the next mini-love-lesson, “Gender Diversity – Romantic, Heart-mate Love” we will cover romantic and mated love issues among those of gender diversity.

Help spread love knowledge – tell some people about this site.

As always Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: How much do your ideas and feelings about gender influence who and how you love?

Related posts:

1. Other Genders Love
2. Age Differences and Romantic Love
3. Removing Your Hidden Blocks to Receiving Love Fully
4. Power or Love or Both
5. Does Sexual Preference Influence Love? 

Self-Love - What Is It?

Synopsis: This mini love lesson starts with the many contradictions and confusions concerning self-love; healthy, real self-love defined; the operational definition of self-love; and ends with the functional definition of self-love, plus a few important questions; more.

Contradictions and Confusions

“I’ve been told again and again I need to learn to love myself but I don’t know what that means.  I also have been told that before I can successfully love somebody else I first have to love myself, and until I love myself no one else will be able to love me enough or right.  Is all that true?  How can I figure all this out?

“As a kid I was told self-love was a bad thing.  It seemed to mean being selfish or self-centered and egotistical, conceited and even narcissistic.  Sometimes it seemed to mean doing something with myself that was sexual and bad but I never figured out what all was included there.  I knew I was supposed to put others first and myself last, and if I loved myself too much no one would like or love me.

“My religion taught me to love others and not myself, then the opposite by quoting Scripture at me telling me to love others as I love myself.  Isn’t that contradictory?  I don’t know what to think.  I’m so confused about ‘self-love’.  What am I to do?  I know I’m supposed figure all this out on my own but I don’t know how.”

This lament is echoed by a large number of people whose mental and emotional health, indeed, will greatly improve if they come to have greater, healthy, real love for themselves.  Not only that personal enrichment, but their relationship life, likewise, probably will show lots of improvement if they learn what healthy, real self-love is all about, how to do it, and practice what they learn.  But how are they to do that if they don’t know what it is?

Loving Those Who Don’t Love Themselves

There is another perplexing problem related to this confusing and contradictory self-love situation.  If you are trying to love someone who doesn’t know what healthy self-love is, who doesn’t know how to practice healthy self-love, and who even may practice anti-self-love, you possibly are going to have a very problem-filled love relationship.

If you’re trying to love someone whose healthy self-love is low, or someone who is indifferent to themselves, or who even hates themselves it is likely you are in big trouble and are going to need help.  Oh, loving these troubled people can be done and it can turn out well but it sure isn’t easy.  However, if you can encourage them to learn about healthy, real self-love, and to practice it, your love relationships with these un-self-loving people can get a lot easier and way more successful.

Getting A Sense of Healthy, Real Self-Love

You might be thinking, so Dr. Cookerly, are you going to tell us what self-love really is?  Yes I am and rather exactly, but first let’s try to get a sense of self-love before we more precisely define it.  Let’s examine several important ways to get a feel for what self-love is really all about.
First, understand that ‘self-love is healthy, real love’ going from the self to the self.  It’s sort of like feeding yourself healthy, tasty, nourishing food.  Next, be aware that loving yourself may involve some psychological actions you may not be used to.  For instance, it may involve your ‘adult self’ talking to your ‘inner child self’ in very loving ways.

The more scientific may prefer thinking of this as your neocortex sending composed messages to your brain’s limbic system in very loving ways.  Brain research shows that this positive internal dialogue accomplishes real neurochemical improvement, which you experience as feeling better and increasingly thinking more positively about yourself.  Some prefer to say it is your ‘cognitive, conscious mind’ choosing to speak lovingly to your subconscious mind.

Then there is a behavioral component.  Healthy self-love involves treating yourself well, taking good care of yourself, doing yourself favors, taking yourself into good experiences and enjoying them, being sure you surround yourself with good people, and a host of other actions which demonstrate you acting with love toward yourself.

People who do the actions of love toward themselves tend to experience the feelings of happy, healthy self-love which usually follow.  At the emotional level healthy self-love can mean feeling really good about yourself, glad to be you, feeling upbeat and positive about and toward yourself, highly honoring and highly valuing yourself without getting into the forms of false self-love like egotism, arrogance, overbearance, insolence, vanity, ostentation, conceit, self-pity, grandiosity, etc.

Awe and Joy

Healthy, real self-love can involve becoming awed, thankful and joyful about the one-of-a-kind, unique bundle of miracles that you are.  Deeply becoming aware that you are a product of a miraculous creation system that got you started, and keeps you going, and is all part of who you really are – and this, I suggest, is truly awesome.  Therefore, it is worth being joyous (occasionally or even often) about these aspects of yourself.

Regrettably, if you have been brought up only on ‘product’ valuing yourself instead of ‘essence’ valuing yourself, in response to these self-love messages you may think something like “But I didn’t do anything to earn that”.  You are much more than what you earn.  You are born with high-value and you maintain your essence-value as a part of your core whether you do anything productive with your essence or not.

Perhaps you have been trained to discount your value by thinking something like “But there are so many humans; I’m just one of the many millions.  There’s nothing special about me”.  Not true!  You are an individual work of art.  No one is exactly like you.  You are unique and, therefore,  special.  No one thinks exactly like you, has exactly the same emotions, or behaves exactly the same way as you do.  We all are just like our fingerprints –  totally one-of-a-kind, though somewhat similar to others.  So, you can value yourself, especially your essence and core self.  Consequently, the experience of awe and joy about yourself, your essence and your core can be part of healthy, real self-love.

Self  Delight

Do you delight in yourself when you figure something out?  Do you get a little spark of happiness when your wonderful, incredible memory system brings to you the memory you have been searching for?  When you appreciate anyone or anything do you appreciate yourself for a few seconds for having an appreciation system which brings you happiness?

When you fix something broken, or make something new, or cause someone to smile, or help someone in any way at all do you also take just a little bit of time to appreciate yourself for being able to accomplish what you just accomplished?  Do you ever look back on the best experiences of your life and think something like “Good for me, I got and let myself experience that, and it was good”.
Do you take joy into yourself when you see, or touch, or smell, or taste or hear something beautiful and then have a good feeling about being able to do that?  When you have a really good time with another person are you also glad about your own ability to have that good time?

All these things and much more are (and can be) part of healthy self-love.  Actually, when you were a young child you did all these sort of things naturally (baring some disabilities).  Young children around the world do ‘self delight’ unless and until they are taught anti-self-love.  Your own natural tendency to do this may be deeply buried but it’s there, and you can resurrect it.  If this ‘self delight’ mechanism is active in you, but a little rusty, you might polish it up with awareness and experience it more.

Self Care

Part of healthy self-love comes from valuing yourself enough to take good care of yourself.  Diet,  exercise,  good medical attention when useful or needed– developing a very positive, mental/emotional attitude about life and yourself with lots of healthy empathy for yourself so that you are really in touch with your inner messages – healthy, positive, strong relationships full of love of many different types (a couple relationship, friends, family, pets to name a few) – and keeping yourself psychologically growing and actualizing your potentials, all are part of the healthy self-love and the self-care picture which you can develop.

Self-Love and Other Love

Self-love involves a lot of ‘loving others’ and this is how it differs from what might be considered selfishness.  A great deal of research shows us that when you love others well you do yourself a lot of favors.  Those who are good at loving others tend to have lowered bad cholesterol, better brain functioning, stronger community connections, greater longevity, get treated better by others, and a host of other benefits.

Those who live by the great commandment “love others as you love yourself’, in fact, do the best at succeeding and being benefited in life.  Those who don’t love themselves, or don’t love others, or don’t love both themselves and others are much less happy and much less benefited in life.

Healthy, Real Self-love Defined

With all the above in mind, I hope you have a sense of what healthy, real self-love actually is.  So, let’s now define it more accurately.  We will use this site’s working definition of love, found in the left column as “The Definition of Love”.

Healthy self-love is defined as:

Healthy, real self-love is a powerful, vital, natural process of highly valuing, desiring for, often acting for, and taking pleasure in the well-being of the self.

I will now, with healthy self-love, brag that this site’s definition of love recently has been acclaimed in places as diverse as Egypt and China and the US.

Let’s take a look at the elements in this definition. Powerful, yes, healthy self-love is powerful.  It is something you can greatly change your life with, for the better and it can make you much more powerful in beneficially influencing the lives of others.  Vital, means it is important to life and for enhancing life functioning, and that’s exactly what healthy self-love can do.

Natural, demonstrates that it is part of nature and essential existence biologically, psychologically and relationally.  Process, refers to healthy self-love being an active succession of systemic changing operations, all aimed at natural well-being.  High valuing yourself in a deep, emotional sense is the key factor which leads to desiring for and acting for your own well-being and taking pleasure in your own well-being.  It is by this that healthy self-love brings you to thriving wholeness and joy.

The Operational Definition of Self-Love

One of psychology’s ways to define something psychological is to describe its operations.  This usually means to detail the observable actions or behaviors which bring it about, or which occur when the phenomenon being discussed is occurring.  For example, smiling, laughing, animated movement and other such behaviors are acting in ways called happy.

This gives us the operations or behaviors that occur with happiness.  Therefore, those actions give the operational definition of happiness.  Healthy, real self-love can be operationally defined as doing ‘to or for’ yourself ‘one or more’ of the eight major groups of behavior which operationally define healthy, real love.

These behaviors can include things like talking to yourself out loud or silently with loving words, using loving tones of voice and feeling yourself smile as you do this; lovingly caressing or holding yourself; affirming yourself with praise and compliments and accolades; exploring and, with ‘insight’, self disclosing yourself to yourself with appreciation and acceptance; tolerating your shortcomings, failures, etc.; receiving deeply inside yourself praise, compliments, thanks, etc. from others; giving yourself both ‘object gifts’ and ‘experience gifts’; and a host of similar actions.  To learn more about the operational definition of love consult the “Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love” in the left column on this site.

The Functional Definition of Self-love

Another way to define something is to give its functions, or describe what it does or what it accomplishes.  There are five major functions accomplished by healthy, real love.  There also are the same functions found in healthy, real self-love.

Healthy, real self-love functions to:

1. Connect you to yourself and, thereby, harmonize all your parts
2. Safeguard yourself

3. Works to improve yourself in many different ways

4. Causes you to act and be self-healing if you become physically, or emotionally, or relationally damaged or ill

5. Rewards you for doing any or all of the above with joy and other highly pleasurable feelings.
To learn more about the major functions of healthy, real love study “A Functional Definition of Love” found in the left column of this site and in “Self-love and Its Five Healthy Functions”.
Some questions for you to consider: Are you highly valuing yourself in a deep, emotional way?  Are you acting with the behaviors of love toward yourself?  Are you living by the functions of good, healthy self-love?  If not, are you going to learn these things and practice what you learn?  Are you going to inform and maybe teach those you love about healthy self-love?

Special Note: There are many other kinds of definitions of love and self love including poetic, biological, psycho-neurological, phenomenological, recursive, nominal, mathematical, linguistic and a great many more.  Interestingly, the word ‘definition’ in a good dictionary has a very long entry!

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Have you been trained in anti-self-love thinking and acting and, if so, are you practicing those actions and thoughts more than practicing the actions and thoughts that go with healthy, real self-love?

Related posts:

1. A More ‘Ample’ Definition of Love
2. The Definition of Love
3. A Functional Definition Of Love
4. An Introduction: What is Love Dr. Cookerly? 

Exes And Love

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson explores exes who continue to love each other after a breakup or divorce; sibling type exes’ love; new loves and ex loves; what to do about your love mate’s love of an ex; divorcing marriage but not each other; enemies of exes love; and ends with a discussion of a basic law of love which may apply to exes.

Exes Who Continue Loving Each Other

What do you think about exes (ex-spouse, ex-mate, etc.) who actively love one another after they have divorced or broken up?  Here are a few quotes to consider.  “My ex and her new guy are going on a double date with me and my new wife”.  Can that double date go well?  “I’m inviting both of my former husbands to my family Christmas dinner.  It just wouldn’t seem right not to.”   What might be the best and worst of that dinner, as you see it?  Now, think about this one, “my ex-wife and I still date each other but also date others.  We have sex, we also go on short trips together, sometimes with the kids.  We love each other a lot but we know we cannot be married to one another.  We tried that twice. This works far better.”  The people who said these things live in the belief that post-divorce love can be quite real, successful and ongoing.  So, what do you suppose it takes to accomplish that?  Here are some things to look at.

Sibling Exes’ Love

Some who married discover they have grown to have a love for each other more like close siblings or cousins, instead of like spouses.  When this happens they may compatibly end the legal marriage, and revamp their relationship into looking a lot like adult brothers and sisters who go through life lovingly, being a part of each other’s life.  They usually see and treat their exes as part of their ongoing established family.  This, of course, is especially good if children are involved.  This is not such an unusual outcome for couples who have conjoint, well counseled divorces.  If their ex gets married they usually gladly attend the marriage and get to know their exe’s new spouse, just like a sibling might.

New Loves and Ex Loves ?

What’s the best thing for you to do with a new love and an ex?  New love partners, of course, may feel very threatened by an ex.  That can be especially true if a new love partner has low, healthy self-love, or if they have a habit of seeing others as their enemy or rival.  In that case giving lots of reassurance can be very helpful.  If there is really bad jealousy, resentfulness, etc., going to good couples counseling together can help fix the problem.  There is a general rule to consider.  Usually it’s a good idea for two people in a new love relationship to try to love, or at least like, each other’s loved and liked family and friends.  That can include exes. Certainly, that is especially useful when there are children involved.

What About Your Wife/Husband/Love Mate’s Love Of An Ex?

Hear Larry’s lament.  “My wife told me she still loves her ex, though she loves me more and in a very different way than she loves him.  What am I to do with that?  Should I insist she never see or talk to him again?  Should I threaten to break up with my wife and destroy our family?  Should I hate him and try to drive him off; or tell him to never have anything to do with her?  Or should I accept him and try to make friends with him?  If I do that I’ll probably need a lot of reassurance from my wife that she will not go back to him?  And we will need to work to make sure my wife and I have such a strong, good love that there’s no chance of there being any real threat?  Or should I just ignore the whole thing?”

All these reactions are what some people do when faced with this kind of issue.  Generally the more loving and inclusive the response, the better the results.  It is true that some exes do indeed try to get a former love mate back.  Openly talking about that with your love mate, and jointly deciding on how to handle it can be very important.  With a joint couples approach to what is perceived as a threat by one, usually gets the best results for all.

Divorcing Marriage, But Not Each Other

There are a surprising number of people who discover they have an incompatibility with marriage itself.  Joni and Johnny put it this way, “We lived together for three years doing great, and then we got legally married and everything went off the cliff and we crashed.  It’s like both of us stepped on a landmine together the day we got married and it blew us apart.” On examination, both discovered that because of the way they saw their parents do marriage with anger, frustration, depression, constant conflict, agony and much suffering, getting legally married triggered subconscious programs in both their heads causing them to do marriage just like their parents did.  Legal divorce cured that, and made successfully living together possible again.

For most couples with this kind of problem it is not nearly as dramatic and clear-cut as it was for Joni and Johnny.  A lot of couples slowly drift into a destructive pattern, triggered by getting married or living married.  Some, with the help of good couples counselors, manage to re-program their way of reacting to marriage itself and do much better.  For others divorce seems to be necessary.

Then there are those people who just do not do well living a married lifestyle, but they don’t want to lose the person they have strong, spouse-type love for.  Some of these couples have been known to remarry each other several times trying to make standard marriage work. Others arrive at a ‘custom tailored, alternate lifestyle’ allowing them to keep relating to one another in an ongoing, love-filled way but it doesn’t look like standard marriage.  This often involves a divorce and at least a portion of their life being lived more like a single person.

Enemies of Exes Love

In a healthy divorce workshop I once led, I asked the participants who they thought were the biggest enemies of healthy post-divorce relating between exes.  The overwhelming response was, “lawyers”, or more exactly “divorce lawyers”.  In our adversarial-oriented justice system, the focus is often on ‘win’ and ‘defeat the other side’, no matter what.  If that is the mindset, it can mean lifelong psychological and relational damage to all concerned, except of course for the lawyers.  Divorce lawyers don’t have to live with the after effects of embattled divorce.  There are a growing number of family practice attorneys who work for cooperative, mutually healthy outcomes.  They often assist  mediation and collaborative processes in order to avoid the all-too-common destructiveness which can occur in the best of adversarial divorce processes.

For a long time our culture has seemed to teach that divorce means you have to become enemies, or at least strangers to someone you may still have love for.  A common advice given to the divorcing goes something like this: “When you divorce you have to divorce your spouse’s family, and then divide your friends, and cut off contact with all those more connected to your ex spouse.”  However, there are a great many people who rebel against that teaching.  More and more of them are succeeding in keeping alive their love relationship with all family and friends, as well as their ex-spouse.

Do you think this idea might be true?  There are those that say it is mostly the people who don’t have real love for each other who have bad divorces.  It does seem to be true that if you want good post-divorce relating with your ex, try to start with a compatible divorce.  However, if you have a terrible divorce that does not mean you can’t work to ‘mend bridges’ and heal wounds after the divorce.  Post-divorce counseling, especially when children are involved, and co-parent guidance counseling can be especially helpful.

Be wary of friends and family, acquaintances too, who want to see divorced people at war with each other.  Some people are very against exes getting along, perhaps because they don’t get along well with their own ex, or they fear people succeeding at divorced living, so they  subtly play a sort of ‘divide and conquer’ game.

A Basic Law of Love?

Do you think that when you have strong, real love for someone, you can shut it off because there is a breakup or divorce?  Do you think that because of the conflicts and agony that lead up to a breakup or divorce, you can really come to hate, or act to harm the ex you were so sure you really loved?  Or can you become truly indifferent about a person you had real love for?  Can the love that you have for someone which motivated you to aid, nurture and protect them change, motivating you to want to harm, deprive and destroy them?  Can healthy, real love work that way?  Some think it can, but most of those who study love deeply disagree. What do you think?

Sometimes we have to become inactive or separate to a person we have love for.  However, that does not mean that ‘way down to the depths of our heart’ we don’t still have love for them.   If it becomes dangerous, destructive or otherwise unworkable to actively relate with an ex, your love may best become dormant but still present in your heart. You may occasionally meditatively tap into that love but not let it lead to any overt action.  Inwardly, you may hope and pray for their well-being but that’s about all.

The Scriptures of several religions which proclaim and promote love, teach that real love is forever.  They put forward the concept that once you truly love someone you will have love for them throughout your life, and perhaps beyond.  That ‘love never ceases’ is a law of love according to many great, spiritual teachers.  What do you think?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
If you felt seriously rejected or betrayed by someone you love, could you (with healthy self-love) protect yourself from further destructive hurt, but still have love for that person?