Emotional Intercourse

“What do women want?” is supposed to be a question that has baffled the wise for centuries.  Even Sigmund Freud said he didn’t figure it out.  Let me suggest that perhaps the answer is – emotional intercourse.  Time and time again when I use this term in couple’s counseling the women smile and nod while the men look quite puzzled.

Frequently a woman will say something like, “Of course” or “How true” or “That sums it up”.  The men will usually remark, “What the heck is emotional intercourse?”.  I think the truth is that males also want emotional intercourse at a deep instinctive level but are not so likely to be consciously aware of having this natural and needed desire.  When both men and women get, and know they have gotten, good emotional intercourse they express that it has enriched their relationship as well as their lives in general.

Emotional intercourse is an extremely important part of intimate, romantic, real love.  It seems emotional intercourse is one of the main things that keeps intimate love fueled and running.  To keep a healthy romantic-type love alive and growing emotional intercourse is probably a very vital, necessary requirement.

What is emotional intercourse?  Emotional intercourse is the frequently satisfying and often passionate giving and receiving of each other’s many and varied emotions.  Much like sexual intercourse it is best done naked – that is, emotionally naked.  Going emotionally naked engenders very real, without disguise or deception communication.  Emotional intercourse also is best done up-close and quite personal, and it’s best when it involves the whole person (facial expressions, voice tones, body postures, etc.) of each of the participants.

How is positive emotional intercourse done?  Emotional intercourse is accomplished by the speaking and showing of emotions, and by closely attending to the emotional expressions of another person while having and showing corresponding, empathetic feelings.  If your lover is sad be sad for their sadness and show it.  If your lover is glad be glad for their gladness and show it.  With each feeling your lover has you can harmonize with that feeling, and feel it and then show you feel it.

Emotional intercourse also can be accomplished by showing corresponding, empathetic caring when your lover hurts, empathetic anger when your lover is angry about something in their life, and empathetic concern when your lover is afraid.  These empathetic feelings are to be felt and shown whether or not you cognitively believe the feeling they are having is justified, rational, or right.  Remember, emotions are facts.  When you have one it is a reality, whether it makes sense to anyone or not.  Emotional intercourse involves intimately being with your lover’s psychological heart, gut and genitals as they feel the feelings that emanate from each of those symbolic centers.

To be good at emotional intercourse takes showing your own emotions.  That is done with varying facial expressions, tones of voice, gestures, posture changes and touch.  Of course, the more you can identify, label  and give voice to your emotions with words the better.

In order to enhance the speaking of your emotions here is a little learning exercise.  Make a list of emotions.  Come up with one or more names for emotions which start with each letter of the alphabet.  Yes, there are words that label emotions starting with each letter of the alphabet.  Aim for your list to have more pleasurable emotions than dis-pleasurable ones.  After you make your list think about when you have felt each of these emotions.  Pick out several and share these feelings, and the events that went with them, with someone you love.

After that ask your loved one when they have had the same emotions.  Pay really close, loving attention to what they say and how they say it.  Then show that you are doing this.  Usually making good eye contact, being able to elucidate on the emotion you think they are experiencing, and being able to empathetically reflect back to  them what they just said usually accomplishes this.  In doing this exercise perhaps you will start toward experiencing deeply satisfying emotional intercourse in a somewhat new and different way.

Sexual intercourse has a strong relationship with emotional intercourse in lasting relationships.  To have ongoing, healthy sexual intercourse with someone it almost always requires good, ongoing emotional intercourse.  Yes, people can have short-term, enjoyable sex without having much emotional intercourse with a sex partner.  However, to have a lasting and good sex life with a particular person, good and repeated emotional intercourse seems to be necessary.  If you get really good at emotional intercourse you probably will be getting good at one of the most important skills for growing lasting and highly satisfying, intimate, romantic love.

As always – Grow in love.

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly


♥ Love Success Question
What are three emotions you have felt so far today?  Who might you share them with and, thereby, probably feel a little closer to?

Related posts:

1. Intercourse Absent Lovemaking – a Love Skill
2. Listening with Love
3. Are You Talking About Love Enough?
4. Lasting Sex and Lasting Love
5. Sexual Love Laces

Scam Love

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson begins by talking about vulnerability to scam love; how it is different from Spouse Acquirement Syndrome; and ends with ideas about how you can protect yourself from scam love; more.

Vulnerability

“I was incredibly hungry to feel loved, valued, wanted and not alone in a relationship.  That hunger blinded me to all the warning signs I should have paid attention to.  Consequently, I easily got seduced into thinking I had a new, real love.  Then I got conned out of a ton of money and in return all I got was broken hearted and ashamed of what a fool I was!”

Could that be you?  Unfortunately it is the sentiment of a great many people who have been scammed into thinking and feeling they were being loved, when actually they were being conned, used and manipulated by those who use affectionate, romantic, erotic and other love connected behaviors to fool you and harm you for their own personal gain.

Scam love occurs for a variety of reasons besides money.  Almost everyone is familiar with the people who say “I love you” to help others convince themselves it is okay to have sex with them.  To give themselves permission to have sex with someone, a lot of people ‘scam themselves’ temporarily thinking they love and are loved when at a deeper level they know better.  Sometimes the reasons are not entirely selfish.  Listen to Eric who said, “I just had to have a mother for my infant son.  My wife had abandoned both of us and there wasn’t any way I could make my life work trying to raise him by myself.  So, I convinced the first acceptable girl that came along that I really loved her so she would marry me and pick up where my former wife left off.  That worked for a while but now I’m trapped in this marriage I don’t want and I’m having affairs I don’t really want either.”

Then there’s Pauline who commented, “My family would have disowned me if I hadn’t hooked up with a guy.  They were on the verge of deciding I was a lesbian, which I am, so I did what it took to convince a guy I was in love with him.  I know it was wrong and when he finds out it’s going to break his heart.  He’s such a nice guy but I have to hold onto him until my sick and fragile father passes away.  So, I guess I’m going to be living this lie a while longer because it would destroy my ailing father to know I can only fall in love with girls.  If I hurt my father, at the last of his life, my family will hate me forever”.

Many a child molester has scammed many a child or adolescent into being convinced the child molester really loved them.  Sometimes the child molester convinces the child or adolescent’s parents that they have a pure, filial love for their targeted youth.  Sometimes children and other youth are love-scammed as part of a larger scam directed at gaining status, security, wealth, etc. from the parents of the love-scammed youth.

Some people do scam-love to attain status, social position and more luxurious living. Some people do scam-love to attain stability, safety and security.  Some people do scam-love because they don’t believe in real love or its value but also see the advantages it might bring.  Some people do scam-love to escape misery, abuse, poverty and sometimes just a boring, ordinary life.  Others do scam love in order to attain power and various other advantages over others.  Cults do scam-love to obtain control over members.

Scam-Love Explained

Scam-love occurs when a person sets out to purposefully deceive another into thinking that they are loved by the scammer.  It usually involves deceitful manipulation of the target person into believing that they love the scammer also.  Once this is achieved the scammer then sets out to obtain some hidden agenda goal from the target person.  Often this ends up being very harmful to the targeted person.

Here are two brief examples.  Jessica said she followed her mother’s training and examples by marrying the richest man she could find, artificially giving him everything he wanted in a woman and then divorcing him for a considerable amount of money, and then going on to an even richer man to do the same thing.  Bernard targeted Beatrice because she came from a high status, old money family and he was from a low, blue-collar background; Bernard very much wanted entry into the elite and exclusive levels of society.  As soon as he was established there by way of his wife, Beatrice, and her family he took a mistress and later divorced Beatrice.

An All Ages Phenomenon

It isn’t just the young and immature who get love-scammed.  Older people are a particular target of love-scammers.  They know that retired people who have lost their spouse are often particularly easy targets for love-scam manipulation.  Some older, retired couples also are easily conned into thinking they had just made a new loving, and ever so helpful friend who just happens later to suddenly and desperately need a bunch of money quickly.  AARP, the American Association of Retired Persons, has a fraud fighter hotline (800-646-2283) which provides counseling, education and victim advocacy for cases of their members who have been love-scammed and for other more senior citizens.

Love-Scams and Spouse Acquirement Syndrome

Romantic love-scams are similar to the false love pattern called Spouse Acquirement Syndrome, but are also different in some ways.  (See the mini-love-lesson, Spouse Acquirement Syndrome, at this site)  Usually in an acquirement syndrome a person either unconsciously or semiconsciously talks themselves into believing they really are in love with who they are marrying.  Sometimes they see this as the way marriage is done, by deceptive acquirement rather than truthful love.  In that case they may have been culturally programmed for this acquirement behavior.  In the scam-love situation there is premeditated, purposeful and planned, selfish deception with a hidden agenda and goal.  The love scammer is fully aware they do not love the person they are scamming.  Their actions demonstrating love are all false and manipulative and will cease once their hidden agenda goal is attained.

How Can You Protect Yourself?

To protect yourself ask yourself these questions.  What do you have that someone might want other than love?  How are you useful to someone who is supposedly professing love for you?  Does it seem like you are being rushed toward a committed relationship or anything else by a person who supposedly is a love source?  What do you really know about this person and their previous love involvements that didn’t come from them?  Do you know others that can tell you things about this person?  Are you going to be patient enough in this relationship to be sure that things really are as they seem?  Are you finding that some of the things your supposed lover tells you do not seem to quite be true?  Are you prone to be a rescuer, helper, fixer, etc. in relationships?

If you are getting answers you don’t really like it doesn’t mean that you’re being scammed but it does mean you might be.  Take more time, look deeper, don’t be afraid ask probing questions, and check up on answers you get.  Remember, protecting yourself is part of good, healthy self-love.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
How questioning and honest are you with yourself about what’s really going on when you are in a romantic love situation?

Gratitude - As a Love Skill

Synopsis: This mini-love-skill lesson starts with important questions about thankfulness; goes on to gratitude awareness, gratitude confusion, gratitude insensitivity, the self enrichment of gratitude, gratitude expression and ends with a thankfulness and gratitude challenge.

Thankful?

Are you good at being thankful?  Are you good at noticing what you have to be thankful for?  Are you good at identifying who you have to be thankful to?  Are you good at experiencing a sense of gratitude?  Are you good at showing your thankfulness and gratitude to those you love and those you would or might come to love?  Are you good at finding different ways to state your gratitude?  Being sincerely thankful and finding ways to convey your thankfulness or gratitude can be a very useful and constructive part of doing ‘affirmation love’, see entry “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love”.  Are you aware that without gratitude sufficiently felt and thankfulness sufficiently expressed love relationships are likely to be diminished and often seriously damaged.

Gratitude Awareness

Do you agree with this statement?  Every positive and pleasurable experience of your life, and everything you achieve or accomplish, and every one of your victories, comforts and acquirements are things you have been helped to have and did not achieve all on your own.  Someone else did a lot of work with almost everything you eat before you eat it.  Someone else built the roads you travel on and the domiciles you live in as well as the structures you function in.

Someone else researched and developed the medicines you take and the tools you work with.  Most of your learning opportunities come from the endeavors of others.  Perhaps most important of all, someone loved you enough to keep you sufficiently thriving in infancy and childhood so that you stayed alive and are now able to be reading this mini-love-lesson about gratitude.  So, are you grateful for all that?

Perhaps today someone will smile at you.  Perhaps today someone will treat you nicely.  Perhaps today someone will do you a favor.  Perhaps today someone will give you a loving touch.  Perhaps today someone will make your life just a bit easier.  Perhaps today someone will say words indicating that you are loved.  Will you experience the pleasure of gratitude as these things happen?  Hopefully your gratitude awareness will be keen.  If not, work on it and be grateful to yourself for doing so.

Gratitude Confusion

Gratitude is not to be confused with guilt, obligation, sense of duty, owing somebody something in return, or anything else that might be felt as a negative.  Sadly, many people have been trained, or in essence subconsciously programmed, to cancel the joy of gratitude with one negative set of feelings or another.  Gratitude as an emotion just means you get to feel good that something good has come your way and you can have a sense of being grateful about that.  By itself gratitude does not mean that you have to, or should, or ought to do anything except have the positive experience gratitude provides.

Gratitude Insensitivity

Lots of people take for granted so many of the positive things they might otherwise be grateful for.  Many others take for granted not only the actions of, but also the people who are providing love and other strong positives in their life.  Many of the people I have dealt with in therapy stopped taking things and people for granted and became grateful only after they lost or were in danger of losing the most important people in their lives.  So many people are focused on some other aspect of life that they are blind to the things and people they could be grateful for.  Many others are insufficiently aware and grateful for the bundle of miracles they themselves are.  Did you know you are a bundle of miracles?  Everything about you and all your natural processes (biologically, psychologically and socially) can be seen as wondrous.  Dare you be grateful?

The Self Enrichment of Gratitude

Do you know that it does you good to be grateful?  First, gratefulness starts with awareness of something you appreciate and appreciation is a form of pleasure, therefore, you pleasure yourself when you experience being in a state of appreciating.  Second, gratefulness for something or someone puts you in a state of sensing a positive connection with that something or someone.  Third, both the pleasuring and the connecting senses tend to stimulate several healthful neurochemical events in your brain which are rather good for you biologically and psychologically.  Gratitude also frequently can give you something to enjoyably share with another person.

Gratitude Expressed

Gratitude shared with someone you love often increases the love and the occurrence of ‘love giving actions’ going back and forth between people who have a love relationship with each another.  Because of gratitude’s positive nature, gratitude shared can help you have or make a positive interaction and strengthen a bond with another person.  Telling someone you love that you are thankful they are in your life and that various actions that they do to express their love toward you is appreciated is best done as a free gift without any expectation of a return.  If there is an expectation of return when expressing gratitude that can be a disguised, selfish manipulation instead of just a true gift of love.  Saying thank you, if done in a perfunctory way without a true sense of gratitude behind it, may make the expression weak and nearly meaningless.

Overdoing it also has its problems.  Going on and on about something you are grateful for may produce embarrassment, awkwardness, suspicion and annoyance.  Usually the best verbal expressions of loving gratefulness are delivered clearly, strongly and shortly.  However, in intimate situations longer and more detailed, love-filled statements can work quite well.  Gifts, cards, notes and special experience gifts which express thankfulness to someone you love often are excellent ways to demonstrate love.  One of the best things about expressing your thanks to a loved one is that it can be fun.  It can be done as a surprise, a special, intimate event or as a social, laudatory and celebratory occurrence.

The gratitude challenge

Let me dare you to be grateful and from that actively thankful for things small, medium and large which others do for you, do on your behalf or do in your direction.  Let me dare you to express your thankfulness with a little more intensity than perhaps you usually do.  Let me dare you to express your thankfulness a little more frequently than is usual for you, and let me dare you to start today!

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Right this minute, what will you be thankful for about yourself ?

Related posts:

1. Gratitude As a Love Skill
2. Dining with Heart – A Love Skill
3. Checking It Out – As a Love Skill
4. Intimacy Creation – A Love Skill
5. Non-Defensiveness – A Love Skill 

Love Against Bigotry

Mini-Love-Lesson  #233

Synopsis: The dangers of bigotry for its targets, practitioners and those who fight it; personal questions to face; bigotry more deeply defined with a deeper psychological understanding of its dynamics and causes; Adamant Love as bigotry’s best enemy; the survival necessity of fighting bigotry and three major ways to fight bigotry with love are well and succinctly presented in this mini-love-lesson.

Tough Love May Be Required

Bigotry is dangerous!  Not only does bigotry cause harm to others but eventually it becomes self-destructive to those who obsessively practice it.  It works much like a dangerous, contagious disease often subtly spreading and becoming more virulent and resistant to cure as it infects more and more of the vulnerable.  That is when the hate and fear-based core of toxic bigotry can come to dominate the entire life of the bigot destroying everything even connection to other bigots which is thought to be the last thing to go.  Family life, social life, physical and mental health, self-care and everything constructive usually eventually suffers due to bigotry’s pathological effects.  Physical disease susceptibility tends to grow and bring about a final demise of the profoundly bigoted.  That is part of what research into bigotry is revealing.  Research also gives evidence to bigotry being a serious and dangerous, pathological psychodynamic for all concerned (Check out The Violence of Hate, 3ed. by Jack Levine and Jim Nolan).

Of course, in many people bigotry appears in milder and more restricted forms.  Even there, research suggests it has a corrosive effect on its practitioners, on their healthier relationships and on the people they effect.  Even in its milder forms, bigotry retards progress and advancement by merit, and thus, it works to limit societal improvement.

There is one good thing about bigotry.  Paradoxically throughout history, bigotry has been a great help to the countries who welcome the refugees of bigotry.  Many countries’s best and highest achievers in countless fields were once escapees from persecutory bigotry.

Combating bigotry can also can be quite dangerous at times.  Done unwisely and without sufficient self-care, bigotry can get you and yours hurt, harmed and, although rarely, may even get you or yours killed.  However, not fighting bigotry can arrive at very similar results, but perhaps for different victims.  Often it is the innocent, uninformed and the unaware who fall victim to bigotry’s most dangerous acting-out manifestations.

Love (not reason or facts) is bigotry’s most successful enemy.  But because of bigotry’s considerable danger, opposition is best accomplished through tough love, or more accurately, love’s strongest most powerful form known as Adamant Love (see “Adamant Love – and How It Wins for Us All”).  Softer forms of love, such as compassionate love, usually are treated by bigots as only contemptible weakness.  Reason and facts have their place but they only treat, if at all, the surface symptoms of bigotry (fallacious thinking) not even touching the profound hate-undergirding fear and bigotry’s deep roots in personal love deprivation.

Know Your Enemy

What exactly is bigotry?  What causes bigotry?  Who becomes a bigot?  Are you or those you care about perhaps unknowingly infected with the seeds of pathological bigotry?  Most importantly what can be done that works to prevent and defeat bigotry?  To effectively go against bigotry, it helps to have good answers to these and similar questions.  For all that, here is a bit of assistance.

Bigotry More Deeply Defined

Overtly and at the surface symptom level, bigotry simply can be defined as stubborn and intense intolerance of any opinion, belief, creed, policy, tenant or lifestyle differing from one’s own.  More completely, bigotry is also obstinate intolerant, blind devotion to one’s own opinions, prejudice, viewpoints, lifestyle and one’s own identity tribe’s myths, mores, customs, values, hatreds, conceptualized enemies and hierarchies done to the defensive exclusion of the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of outside other identity groups or tribes.

A Psychological Understanding of Bigotry

A deeper more psychological understanding suggests that bigotry is a deep-seated, unconscious fear and insecurity about being replaced and reduced in importance, and not having the qualities and attributes necessary to maintain one’s level of importance, status and general sense of okayness.  Hate-filled bigotry seems to be most strongly activated when the bigoted perceive or sense they are in danger of having their own inadequacies exposed and social standing reduced.  This is especially onerous to bigots when it involves being compared to what they consider to be lower status identity groups which might gain higher status over their own.

Such inadequacy fears activate the brain’s defensive emergency power systems of anger, hatred, rejection and tendencies for exclusionary and/or destructive action taking.  Cognitively, the resulting symptomatic thought process is one of self-justifying rationalization rather than real reasoning, dodging, denial and distortion of facts coupled with irrational protective blaming.

This is well revealed in the white nationalist’s marching chant, “Jews will not take our jobs”.  Exposed in this chant is the secret, underlying fear that jews have what it takes to take their jobs away from them.  Furthermore, the secret fear is the white nationalists do not have sufficient adequacy to hold on to their jobs in the face of the  Jewish competition which is seen as unfair and perverse.

What Causes Bigotry

“You have to teach them to hate before they are six, or seven or eight” so goes, the once banned, line from the musical South Pacific.  This expresses the simple truth that in many families children are raised to be hate-filled and secretly fear-filled offspring of their likewise-minded parents and relatives.  Add exclusionary hate-filled religion, authoritarian sociopolitical thinking, autocratic charismatic leaders and a simple lack of education delineating the superior advantages of healthy, real love and democracy and you have the social milieu ethos that breeds bigotry.

Another cause seems to have to do with erratic and inefficient love in infancy and childhood.  Research indicates certain patterns of erratic and inconsistent love behaviors occurring in the raising of infants and children cause long-lasting insecurities as well as certain deficiencies in normal physical growth.  Both human children and laboratory animals raised with these love deprivation behavioral patterns develop larger fear-based reactions to new and different things and others entering their environment.  In children, this sometimes takes the form of obvious bigotry type reactions.  In laboratory animals especially monkeys, more primitive withdrawal, fear and angry attack behaviors toward the new and different occur.  Behaviorally, consistently well loved lab animals show mostly friendly curiosity toward the new and different.

Some developmental researchers suspect that in the above situation of inconsistent, reassuring love which occurs during certain critical periods of brain development, the amygdala (a brain part having to do with processing fear) may be damaged and become lifelong prone to producing stronger and more frequent fear feelings, interpretations and resulting fear-based behaviors.  Such children are suspected of becoming more highly susceptible to developing bigotry-filled outlooks on life and especially toward anything or anyone new and different.

Similarly, certain research results in the neurosciences and genetics suggests some people inherit amygdalas that easily overproduce, and too frequently produce, strong fear and resulting defensive anger reactions when encountering new and different others.  Other brains, especially those of children securely loved in their infancy, tend to produce happy curiosity on encountering the same new and different others.  The genetic neuroscience results posit that between 10% and 40% of bigotry may be attributable to genetics.

The highly healthfully, self loving and those who live in happy, healthful, love-interactive, inclusive and not isolationistic networks tend to be those least prone to developing bigotry.

Likewise, those who have the most frequent personal contact with people of varying identity groups tend to be the most comfortable and appreciative of people differing from themselves.  Those who have the least contact with people of identity groups different than their own tend to exhibit the most fear of differing others.  Basically, more contact equals more comfort and less bigotry.

Adamant Love Can Defeat Bigotry

Love naturally opposes bigotry.  Healthy, real love is kind, compassionate, not easily threatened, inclusive not exclusive, prone to seek the well-being of all, brave and much more – just as Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Rumi and the Scriptures of the major religions of the world have taught us.  Bigotry is fear-based, hate empowered, exclusionary, unkind, easily threatened, defensively aggressive and prone to seek only the well-being of the similarly bigoted.

Adamant love is the type of love which is strong, determined, steadfast, powerful in face of adversity and in the service of the well-being of the loved (see “Adamant Love – and How It Wins for Us All”).  It, therefore, is likely the form of love best able to powerfully combat the fear and hate of militant bigotry.  Other forms of love such as compassionate love and serene love also have a roles to play.

Working and Fighting for Love Victories Is the Best Option!
Let me suggest, it is good but not enough to be against bigotry, hate, prejudice, inequality, etc.  It works better to also be for what needs to go in place of those things, or in other words, fill the vacuum that defeating bigotry leaves.  Otherwise, like weeds, they return.  Growing evidence points to humanitarian, altruistic and inclusive, healthy, real love being the best, strongest and most positive vacuum filler.

Wherever love loses, and bigotry, hate and/or indifference wins, history shows disintegration, destruction and demise become the eventual outcome.  This proves true for couples, families, societies, nations, cultures and even empires.  You can read all about that in A New Reality by Drs Jonas and Jonathan Salk and in several of Jonas Salk’s previous works.  This is also well backed by the work of Dr. Reuben Fine in The Meaning of Love in Human Experience and also in Love and Survival by Dr. Dean Ornish.

Three Ways to Fight Bigotry with Love!

First arm yourself with knowledge about the behaviors that convey healthy, real love.  That knowledge and those behaviors become your primary tools or, if you prefer, weapons by which you can fight for and with love and against bigotry (see “Behaviors that Give Love – The Basic Core Four” and Link “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love”).

Now for a little personal example.  At an interfaith conference, I once had the privilege of seeing the theologian, Nels Ferre, lovingly handle being confronted by two very angry and accusatory Palestinian graduate students.  Through the sincere use of love listening techniques, friendly facial expressions, kind tones of voice, open arm gestures and non-combative questions, he literally loved them into receptiveness.  The next day they were all walking to breakfast together laughing and acting like long-standing comrades.  Best of all, the Palestinians were now very interested in listening to Dr. Ferre’s input, where before, interruptive attack statements were all they seemed capable of.

You might want to review what your own religious tradition teaches about love.  Most major religions have very important, healthy, positive things to say about how we are to love one another – which turns out to be in surprising agreement with each other.

If and when you encounter anyone talking or acting in bigoted ways, think about not arguing with them or being silent but rather with kind, expressional love (see “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love”) asking them a few questions and perhaps later getting around to a short, positive, personal testimony, laudatory statement about the people they seem to be against.  Imagine saying something like “what you’re saying about them could be true, I suppose, but my own personal experience with them has been mostly quite positive.  Why do you suppose that is?”  In this way you use some of your behaviors of love tools, usually avoid the wasted energy of combativeness, and just possibly get your positive message actually heard a bit.

Second, Live Social Diversity!  The research is clear.  The more people personally experience those of other identity groups the more bigotry, negative bias and prejudice diminish and feelings of fraternity grow.  There are exceptions but not nearly as many as researchers once thought likely.  Those people who have the least contact with any outside identity group tend to exhibit the most fear, disapproval, intolerance, and bigotry toward that group.  It has long been noted that, for the most part, it is not the people who live along a peaceful border who are intolerant of those on the other side but those who live further in-land away from that border, and out of contact with those people across the border.

So, though it is sometimes complicated and difficult work to seek contact with those who are different and diverse from yourself and your own identity group, I bet it will prove well worth it.  In your own environment, ponder who are the most likely targets of bigotry, exclusionary treatment, negative bias and derogatory opinions.  Seek some of them out.  Start with the concept that if you get to know some of them you probably will be considerably enriched by interacting with them.  And you probably have a lot to learn from them that will be ever so good for you to learn.  Not only that, you will increasingly enjoy it and, who knows, you may make a truly loving friendship or two.

Almost everywhere there are both informal and organized groups of people made up of those who interact with and/or support people who are more different from you but who are open to your inclusion.  It takes a little social bravery and doing a bit of homework but you can find and start befriending some of them.  They may be a little protectively standoffish at first but keep being friendly and you can put them in your life and be better for it and likely so will they.

Third, join and become active in one or more groups that actively fight for or work for positive social diversity interaction and democratic equality/inclusiveness.  You also can join and be active in groups that fight against hate, bigotry and various forms of destructive prejudice and authoritarian anti-democratic movements (Check out the prevention programs of the International Network for Hate Studies and the Counter Bigotry Action Report of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee).

You can do these things both locally and in much wider ways.  For instance, both globally and locally and also for an easy start you might want to join up with Friendship Force International where you get to fairly inexpensively travel to and live briefly with people in other countries all over the world.  Then you get to host some of them in your home if you wish.  Remember, Mark Twain told us “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow mindedness”.

So, the challenge is be a part of those who fight for the ways of healthy, real love and against the anti-love forces of bigotry, hatred, prejudice, etc.  Part of that challenge is to not live inactive or indifferent about love.  Both inaction and indifference assist the anti-love forces which would and could destroy us all.

One More Little Thing.  How about talking all this over with somebody and in the process tell them about our FREE mini-love-lessons and our FREE subscriptions.  We would appreciate that.

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

♥ Quotable Question:  Could the human race lose the race for human survival because enough humans didn’t fight hard enough for treating one another with the ways of love?

The Huge, Hidden Reason So Many Fail at Love?

FREE Love Lesson #175

Synopsis: Rediscovering a ‘becoming invisible’ cause of our huge number of love relationship failures starts this mini love lesson. It then is followed by a listing of 12 major love failure syndromes; the best source for learning about all this; more.

What Used to Be Understood

Did you know that 50 and more years ago there was a widely accepted but mostly now forgotten reason for failing at love.  This reason was commonly understood and very helpful in protecting people from many of the traumas and tragedies which now beleaguer masses of those struggling to make their love relationships work.

What was that reason and its accompanying solution?  Before we get to that, let’s give a couple of clues to see if you can figure it out.  Clue 1. Are you aware that once upon a time the most popular magazines list included titles like “True Love”, “Real Love”, “True Romance” and “Real Romance”?  Clue 2. Have you heard these terms: twitterpatted, smitten, having a crush, amentia, bewitched, gaga over, enamored, beguiled, stupefied, calf love, puppy love, spellbound, infatuated, gone dottie over, and love crazy.

Clue number 1 helps us see there was a widely accepted implication that untrue love, unreal love and/or false love really and frequently existed.  The words and phrases of Clue 2, and others like them, were all terms used to indicate various versions of that same thing – false love.  They also were widely used to help a person not jump to the possibly, disastrously, mistaken conclusion that one was entering into a state of true or real love.  In other words, false love was seen to be a reality of perhaps multiple types, and everyone had best beware of false love because some of its forms might be highly misleading, very painful and quite destructive.  It would seem, that was the common mindset.

Somehow, strangely, the subject of real versus false love is not much looked at these days.  For many that means the protection this concept gives is no longer acting as a safeguard.  Typically now, too many people quickly conclude if “it feels like love, it must be love” and in fact it must be real, true and therefore, highly desirable and dependable, healthy love that will last.  More times than not, this conclusion can be flat out wrong.  So what is happening and what can be done about it?

The Secret That Is Re-Revealed

Perhaps the reasons for a 50% or higher divorce rate and an estimated 75% love relationship breakup rate in many countries may be due to false love.  The solution to false love, of course, is real love, learning how to tell the difference and how to stay away from the false thing, and instead, do the real thing.

Couples whose relationship is based in a false rather than a healthy, real love are bound to experience one kind of love failure or another.  It seems this used to be well understood and broadly recognized.  It also seems those who worked with this conceptualization better protected themselves from the many failures inherent to false love.  It likely is that such couples who do this now can be much more successful in finding, developing, creating and growing real love and, thereby, attaining its many healthful and more lasting benefits.

With this thinking, would it not be wise for those who teach and write about love to once again contemplate, do research and put forth information and ideas about false versus real love?  Isn’t it time that once again we shed light on that which has slipped into the shadows and has become again a sort of secret.  It seems like a mysterious truth is being kept from the vast number of people who dearly need to avoid or escape from the living disasters of love going wrong.  Shouldn’t it be proclaimed that there is healthy, real love but there also are toxic forms of false love that can harm and even destroy your life?  Isn’t it also true that the more we look at love relationship problems in this light, and the more we learn how to recognize the differences between real and false love, the better off we all will be?

Below is a list of a dozen forms of destructive, false love patterns or syndromes thought to exist by investigators, researchers therapists and others of notable expertise.  It was compiled from work done in a broad array of fields by a wide variety of those who give serious thought and effort to these issues.  Each is accompanied by a very brief hint about what some of these false love forms have to tell us.

12  MAJOR  FORMS  of  FALSE  LOVE

1. The IFD Syndrome
    (Hurts and harms most people at least a little and many a whole lot)

2. Spouse Acquirement Syndrome
    (Peaks as graduations approach)

3. Thrill and Threat Bonding
    (Rescuers, victims and excitement junkies beware)

4. Unresolved Conflict Attraction
(Why we marry our abusers – again and again)

5. Limerence
(No matter how great it feels, it’s over in 2 to 4 years)

6. Love And Lust Confusion
    (Great sex/romance and then more great sex and then “see ya”)

7. Imprint Mating
(How odd that I should desire who I desire and so strongly)

8. Relational Dependency & Codependency
(Take care of me so I don’t have to grow up and do it myself)

9. Meta-Lust
(I want you totally so I can discover all of me and then – we’re done)

10. Shadow Side Attachment
    (Why we fall for ‘bad’ boys and ‘bad’ girls)

11. Nympholepsia
    (Can you really fall in love with a ghost and what about a sprite?)

12. Fatal Attraction Syndrome
    (This one actually can get you killed – really!)

The Best Source

In my long practice as a relationship focused therapist, I discovered that hundreds of individuals, couples and families benefited greatly by working with the concepts involved in the real love versus false love issues.  My international work showed me the real love versus false love factors were applicable worldwide.  From my extensive experience, every kind of love relationship problem bears at least some examination viewed from the perspective of real love versus false love issues.  Especially is this true for every individual and couple wanting a romantic relationship or involved in one, as well as those recovering from a failed love relationship.

It is with that background and the reasons involved, that my ‘40+ years, love mate/partner, Kathleen McClaren, RN’ and I wrote the e-book REAL LOVE, FALSE LOVE: Answers and Solutions (currently exclusively available at this website).  This book covers the above named and listed 12 Syndromes, complete with amazing and inspiring case histories and the how to’s of avoiding, escaping and recovering from false love, along with, and when possible, how to change false love into real love.  Yes, of course, that is a plug.  But it really is a fine book presenting highly engrossing and useful information you will not find all together anywhere else.  And from the feedback we are getting, REAL LOVE, FALSE LOVE is doing lots of deep good for its readers.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Do you know and can you tell the differences between healthy, real and toxic, false love?

Related posts:

1. Love Against Blame And It’s Hidden Harm
2. Removing Your Hidden Blocks to Receiving Love Fully
3. False Love Awareness
4. False Forms of Love: Limerence and Its Alluring Lies
5. Unselfish Self-Love