Receptional Love

Mini-Love-Lesson # 285

Synopsis: The often overlooked way of giving love via receiving love well is presented along with 7 ways to carry it out; plus how to internalize, enjoy and benefit more from the love that comes your way.

Receiving love well is an act of giving love well!  Receptional love behaviors are those which, by act or word, demonstrate a positive reception of any of the other major ways of directly communicating love.

Integrating Receptional Love into the seven, major ways of giving love is the key to cycling love.  Without reception, love behaviors do not do the good that they might.  What a waste!  

Suppose a simple, sincere statement like “I love you” comes your way.  What is your Expressional Love receiving-response?  Does your face light up in a great big smile or a cute little grin?  Are your tones of voice upbeat and appreciative.  Does your body language communicate elation and pleasure?  What is your Touch Love receiving-response?  Do you tenderly hold their hand or give them a big bear hug, or a sweet kiss on the forehead, or two-handed handshake?  How about a Verbal Love receiving-response?  Do you say something like, “That touches my heart”, or do you proclaim, “Yes, you do and I’m super glad you do” or do you whisper “I feel a little thrill of joy hearing that”?  What about a Gifting Love receiving-response?  “Saying you love me just the way you did, makes me want to give you a massage”.  What might be your Affirmational Love receiving-response?  “I hear a lot of feeling in the way you said that and reaches me deeply”, or simply, “You’re wonderful”.  Consider a Tolerational Love receiving-response.  When hearing a perfunctory “I love you”, you might say, “Could I hear that again with a little more oomph?”  Think about a Self-Disclosure Love receiving-response.  “Secretly, I’ve been longing to hear you say that”.  

If we become proficient with our receiving-responses to the seven, major, behavioral ways we directly show love, our love cycling will be strengthened and enhanced.

Using our personal knowledge of a loved one, combined with The Seven Love Behaviors, can lead to custom tailored, love receiving-responses.  For example, Delilah was a dolphin aficionado so, in appreciation for each of the special things she did, Raul would get her a card featuring dolphins or a dolphin figurine or a dolphin book, or such.  Delilah called it her “I’m Swimming in Love” collection.  Personalizing receptional love responses makes them extra special.

To receive a dose of love well, first you have to notice it.  Then sharply focus on what just happened.  Give it some concentrated attention.  When you do that, it naturally flows into the third phase of good reception – soaking it up.  If you experience feelings like “I feel loved”, “this hug feels so good”, “an unexpected gift – what a delight” you are reaping the enrichment of love reception .  To feel these feelings more intently, it may help to say to yourself “I’m being loved and I’m going to let myself really feel it”, “this is special and I’m going to cherish it” or “I’m not going to let this moment pass, I’m going to experience it deeply”.  Lingering and savoring love coming your way can help your sense of appreciation grow.  Appreciation is another part of good love reception.  Sometimes all this may happen almost instantaneously and sometimes it can be more lengthy.  It is our job to really get what is sent, to fully experience it internally.

Externally, our job is to let the sender know we have received their act of love, we like it and we are better because of it.  A thank you is a simple, polite response but even better may be showing or telling them about the effect their love message has had on us.  Even before making an automatic “I love you too” statement or a quick gratitude response, we might say something more personal and laudatory.  This is a splendid way to vitalize love cycling.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question:  Do you know that belated thank you’s can be made into better actions of Receptional Love than immediate ones – if you put enough into them?  So, who might you surprise with a totally unexpected , special, appreciation message today or tomorrow?

Self-Disclosure Love

 

Mini-Love-Lesson  #282

Synopsis: How emotional intimacy is achieved and closeness improved through self-disclosure of our inner and most private self; the importance of verbal and behavioral self-revealing for going psychologically naked together; the heartmate satisfaction that can result from sharing our deepest feelings; the best of our selves and the worst of our secret selves are required for profound and close love to grow.

A major pathway to intimate love is disclosing to another who we really are.  Self-disclosure may involve letting another honestly know our thoughts, our emotions, our body and our behavior.  It also can entail relating our private and personal history as well as who we are in the existential now.  

If we do not disclose our true self to our loved ones, they deal with a phony us.  If our phony self is given love, our true self can go love-malnourished or even love-starved.  In some manner, we probably sense the love coming toward us is for our act and not for our essence.

A best practice to getting really close to one another is to become naked.  To become physically or psychologically naked one must take off one’s wraps.  We also must be willing to deal with another’s nakedness.  The psychologically naked may be seen with warts, scars or unhealed wounds.  To show these elements of oneself, is a vulnerable and brave act.  To accept such elements without personal negation, rejection or attack, is a fine act of love.  To uninhibitedly show one’s emotions through expressions, words and touch, are potent ways to self-disclose.  To reveal our true thoughts, our moods, our fears, hang-ups, shame, joy, self-worth, or childlike qualities often are what is hungered for in intimate love relationships.  

Loving Self-Disclosure As A Key To Relationship Fulfillment

Research reveals that self-disclosure is a major key in forming strong relationships, in increasing cooperation and in the growth of mutual emotional intimacy.  When we self-disclose, we often cultivate a sense of bonded closeness.  An imperative for long-lasting and enduring relationships appears to be the inclusion of honest, loving self-disclosures.    

The lack of self-disclosure has been found to highly contribute to agony-filled breakups.  Infrequent self-disclose can impede relational growth.  Relational stagnation, consequently, is too likely a consequence.  Deterioration of a relationship when self-disclosures are absent, or too few and far between, may produce loneliness, isolation and a sense of futility. 

Self-disclosure tends to correlate with high couple and heartmate satisfaction and relational health and functioning. Because self-disclosure helps us know each other more fully and more accurately, trust is enhanced and teamwork is smoother and more effective.  Through self-disclosure, those who love each other often experience a greater sense of unity and contentment (see “Catharsis Empathy - A Love Skill”).

Behavioral Self-Disclosure

In ongoing love relationships, behaviorally showing how you are and who you are is a fundamental necessity.  Revealing your private and personal behaviors may be more important than what you tell about yourself. For instance, the behavior of crying at a sad story may garner more empathetic intimacy and closeness than merely telling about feeling sad for a story’s protagonist. Likewise, actually dancing for joy over something is more potently revealing and sharing of yourself than just announcing that you are happy about the same thing.

In intimate, sexual loving and relating, sharing your body behaviorally usually is vastly, emotionally more important than just talking about it.  Behaviorally demonstrating your love shows a great deal about you that words may never be able to express.  The look on your face, the kindness in your caress, the tender tones of your voice, your playful movements all can give disclosure to the special ways you do love (see “Difficult Topics: A Love-Centered Way To Approach and Broach Them All”).

Positive Feelings and Self-Disclosing Love 

Relational research is beginning to shine a light on the positive feelings involved in emotional relating, especially those having to do with love.  Recently Positive Psychology has contributed a focus on positive feelings like joy, ecstasy, serenity, awe, tenderness and the like. When positive feelings like those are divulged, love relationships tend to be strengthened and deepened.  If I say, “I feel so safe with you” or “Wow, I feel our connection just went up a notch”, or “When we cuddle, I feel truly cherished”, I potently act to reinforce our bonds.  Sharing our significant feelings often can be the glue that holds relationships together (see “Say It With Love”).

As always – Grow and Go with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: What might you not bear to share or bear to hear shared and what if you could?

Love Hugs for Health and Happiness

Mini-love lesson #182

Synopsis: This mini-love lesson, both seriously and lightly, gets the reader into some the many surprising health and happiness benefits of becoming skilled at love hugs, doing more for your loved ones, yourself and your love relationships.

Love Hugs and Their Surprising Goodies

A good love hug may surprise you with how many broad-ranging benefits it offers.  But first let’s be sure what were talking about.  Not all hugs are love hugs.  A real love hug starts with a person having and then wanting to give a gift of some sincere, heartfelt, real love.  It frequently contains a fair amount of empathy and a bit of evaluation of what the recipient will find beneficial and/or enjoyable.  Then, of course, it takes behavioral action.  It seldom contains elements of being sexual, perfunctory, manipulative or anything other than a behavioral connection gift.

The Many Types of Love Hugs

Love hugs are for everybody – friends, family, young, old, mates, kids, etc.  Hugs can be of a great many different types: tender, sweet, comforting, zestful, bold, intimate, lively, and a lot more.  Most love hugs include a lot of body contact.  Standing and laying down love hugs are often full-bodied and can go from cheek to cheek contact all the way down to the knees or even the feet.  Sitting, they usually in essence are sort of like cuddling and physically encompassing.  Love hugging frequently last a bit longer than other kinds of hugs and, therefore, can be savored better.  Love hugs can be considered a sort of pick me up behavioral vitamin.  Have at least one a day.

Most genuine love hugs benefit both the initiator and the receiver.  This group of benefits is increased when the receiver hugs back. Even without this hug back response, both people benefit.  There also are multiple person or clump love hugs with groups of close friends and family, sometimes even including pets.

The following are a dozen of the many, frequent benefits research has discovered having to do with love hugging.

A love hug:
•    triggers an invigorating, energizing, biological effect
•    sets off natural anti-depressive neurochemistry
•    starts a cascade of automatic, tension reduction responses
•    increases a sense of support and safety
•    improves blood circulation
∙    normalizes blood pressure
•    improves auto-immune functioning
∙    decreases anxiety
•    generates increases in self-confidence
•    improves digestive functioning
•    tends to increase the feeling of love connection with others
•    has a soothing effect on emotional disturbance and disruption

Two Way Benefit

Remember that both the person giving and the one getting an initiated love hug may receive the above listed benefits.  There are quite a few other benefits research has discovered but the ones listed above are some of the main ones.  Love hugs are part of the broader spectrum of tactile love which brain research increasingly shows loving touch to be very healthful and in some cases vitally necessary.

On the Lighter Side

Here is another list of love hug benefits:
Love hugs are:
•    non-fattening
•    non-taxable
•    non-polluting
•    don’t require monthly payments
•    are theft proof
•    don’t have to be insured
•    are inflation proof
•    don’t require batteries
•    don’t require refrigeration but can assist thawing
•    and the supply doesn’t run out no matter how many you give away

Give and Therefore Get More Love Hugs

Right this minute whatever amount of love hugging you already do, consider love hugging a little more often and a bit longer.  Also, when you could use a love hug and you realize it, consider directly, quickly and clearly asking for it, not hinting or silently hoping someone will sense your want and act.  With good, healthy, self love, don’t expect anybody to read your mind, just ask for what you want – you are worth it.  You also can specify whether you want a big bear hug or a sweet soft bunny type love hug or whatever else you might really want.

Anti-hug Issues?

Do you have anti-touch or anti-hug training or fears from previous life experiences?  If so, consider doing some work on that because health research is all very pro-love hug and love touch except in the case of some very rare and deplorable conditions.

Develop Your Love Hugging Skills

You can become very artful in delivering love through hugs of various types and sorts.  Think about custom tailoring your love hugs to the intended hug recipient and their current needs, wishes and wants.  Then give them what they likely want.  Don’t forget they may just want to see you greatly enjoying having a love hug, so as you give or get one show your joy.

It is okay to be a little selfish in lots of love hugs.  You also may improve the hugs you get by thinking and asking for little experiments in changing what you are getting in the way of a hug.  Maybe you want the arms a little tighter, or held differently or some other change but have you asked for it?  That can be part of healthy self-love.  You can learn more about how loving touch is important and how you can develop those skills of loving touch by going to the index at this site and looking up mini-love lessons on loving touch.  You also can get this mini-love lesson deeper inside yourself by talking about it to someone else.  So, who are you going to do that with?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Concerning the people you love, do you know for sure just exactly how they want to be hugged– more tenderly, more strongly, more softly, with or without caressing, differing hand placement, open or closed eyes, etc.?

Related posts:

1. 50 Varieties of Love Touch
2. Religion, Love and Mental-Health
3. Touching Back – A Surprisingly Important Love Skill
4. Brains and Love Behavior: Oxytocin and Other Healthful Neurochemistry
5. Here And Now Love 

Other Ways to Say I Love You

Synopsis: Why say “I love you” in different ways; a dozen other ways to say the “I love you” message; creating and improving your own love expressions.

Why say “I love you” different ways?

The simple words “I love you” are wonderful and in love relationships it’s great if they get said quite often, even daily.

However, variety can be the spice of both love and life.  Having some different ways to get this basic love message across can add that bit of spice or variation that makes expressing your love a bit more artistic and impactful.  Verbally conveying love well is a good skill to develop and having variations helps that.  Having lots of different ways to say “I love you” can help those you love feel extra special and better loved.  It can show that you have given them extra thought and when it comes to love skills you may have more interesting things to offer.  So, I suggest you study the following list and add your own special ways of conveying the “ I love you” message.

A Dozen Other Ways to Say the “I Love You” Message

    1.   I love you sooooooooooo much!
2.   Every day I love you more!
3.   I could not, not love you!
4.   Loving you is the most joyous thing I do!
5.   My whole being loves your whole being!
6.   I love you is my grandest and most glorious truth!
7.   The very core of my being loves you so incredibly much!
8.   I know I will love you even more tomorrow than I do today!
9.   Loving you is such a fabulous blessing!
10. I am in amazing, fantastic, marvelous love with you!
11. Every time I see you I love you bigger!
12. I can’t find big enough words to tell you how much I love you!

Creating and Improving Your Own Love Expressions

With a little work you can create your own, improved “I love you” messages.  One way to do this is to use the name of the person you’re talking or writing to.  Another is to use terms of endearment like sweetheart, darling, honey, beloved, dearest, etc..  Still another way is to use special nicknames.  One caution here, be sure that nicknames don’t have any negative or put-down quality to the person you’re saying them to.  Some couples go through the meditation exercise of discovering what is known as their special, spirit names and using them with each other, which is said to add great power to one’s “I love you” messages.

Alliteration is sometimes helpful. “ Loving you, Barbara, is beautiful” and “I am crazy in love with you Carol” are examples.  Of course if you can be poetic that helps too.  In any case why not see if you can vary the way you get your “I love you” messages across and, thereby, make your love expressions a little more interesting and able to have a little more impact.

As always –Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Have  you given thought to and expressed to your loved ones how they might best tell you of their love or you?

Related posts:

1. How to Talk Love Without Words 

Escaped Love Truths ???

 

Mini-Love-Lesson  #230

Synopsis: Explore the concept that simple but profoundly important truths about love escape vast numbers of people leading to repeated love mistakes and relational disasters.  Learn how we are made blind to these hidden in plain sight truths and how to unlearn misleading myths to see these truths is also explored.  Learn a highly significant, often missed love truth is given as an example and, finally, what to unlearn to see it and 3 things to learn in its place are given.

Important Simple Truths That Escape So Many

The earth was flat and that was that.  Then somebody noticed that when person comes over a hill, you see their head before their feet because they are coming up over a rounded surface.  Then somebody noticed you see the top of a ship’s mast coming over the horizon before you see its hull.  Then it was noticed that this works in reverse too.  The hull of a ship disappears first as the ship sails over the horizon and you see the top of the tallest mast disappear last.  OMG, the earth must be round like a ball!

Some of the most important truths about love seem to work just this way.  They go unnoticed and not understood even though they are right there pervasively obvious once they have been identified but not until then.  Even many of the smartest surgeons did not believe the germ theory at first, then years later the microscope was invented and germs were seen for the first time.  How many lives could have been saved?

In the world of love, many make disastrous mistakes over and over because they see only what they have been taught to see and are blind to what they have been taught to be blind to -- just like with the flat earth believers.  Some people do not see love truths because they have been taught to be afraid that knowing about love would somehow spoil it.  They do not know that the more truth you know about love the more fantastic and wonderful love turns out to be.  Love truths also turn out to be far more useful than are the magical myths and fantasies about love, but surprisingly in agreement with some of them. (See “Conclusions, Confounding and Corrupting Your Love?”)

There are those who can not see simple truths about love because they have bought-into the fallacy that love is too complicated to ever be even a little bit knowable.  Then there also are the followers of US Senator Proxmire who worked to defund love research because he was sure the American people did not want to know what love was or how it worked.  This, despite a 50 percent divorce rate, high spouse murder rates in every state, high severe parental abuse of children and a lot of other evidence of love relationships going tragically wrong.  Can knowledge about love be put into practice curing and preventing most of those love relating disasters?  More and more evidence points to the answer being a resounding – YES!  (See “Above Normal Love”).  However, there also must be some unlearning.

What Must Be Unlearned?

If you have anything in your head that says don’t, or you can’t, or it’s wrong to learn about love, you will do well to discover what that’s about and explore going against it.  You also will do well to search out and discover the mistakes, wrong training, incorrect connections, blind spots, destructive conditioning, misunderstandings and contradictions about love put into your head by family, culture, religion, etc.  Those will be specific to you but similar to others.  A common contradiction example is “love is not jealous and jealousy proves love is real.  Resolving that contradiction in some people’s heads has caused their relationships and even their lives to either be saved or lost. (See “Ever Think Seriously about Real and False Love?” and link “Does Jealousy Prove Love?”)

So, how about you?  Do you suppose some important truths about love may have escaped your awareness?  Could it be that you might come to have a realization concerning love that could vastly improve your life?  Back in my relational therapy practice days, it was wonderful, time and time again, to see people come to a new realization about love and change their lives with it and, even in some cases, save their lives with it.  The trick is you have to search for it and be open to it, no matter how scary or weird it might seem to be. (See “Contemplating Love”).  So, let’s examine one of the truths that a lot of people don’t seem to quite get.

A very ramifications-filled, complicated, multifaceted, tangled, simple truth about love is this, at least as I see it.

LOVE  FEELING  IS  NATURAL, LOVE  RELATING  IS  LEARNED!

So many people have been led to believe that falling in love and having love feelings will be enough to take care of their love relating issues.  Sure, there may be a little work on communications, or something like that, needed along with that love.  However, it’s your love feelings that will magically or automatically lead you to the solutions, answers, fixes or whatever else you need.  After all, love conquers all, doesn’t it?

One of my postgraduate interns did a pilot study asking a little over 100 divorce clients questions about what they believed would make their marriage work, before they got married.  92% agreed that essentially all they really needed to make it work was love and the rest would take care of itself (i.e. they didn’t need any special learning about relating).  Post-divorce, 97% believed they could use all the special learning about love relating they could get.  2% still thought true love alone would suffice and 1% were not sure.  There were some problems with this pilot study’s methodology so it did not go further but all-in-all I think it hits on a huge love truth.


The huge truth is Love is the most important factor but, by itself, it does not take care of the learning required to make love-relating work.  That you have to work at.  The knowledge and skill of how to relate in and with love is not going to get into your head or your habits automatically or by love’s magic just because there is love in your heart.  The love in your heart can motivate you to learn what you need to know, but that is not magic – it is time, effort and struggling to really get it and then do it in thousands of different ways.  The struggle is enriching, surprising, mysterious, captivating, often joyous, awesome and super worth it.

There are people lucky enough to grow up in very loving homes and they learn by a sort of osmosis.  So many others, who make love-relating work well, first had a very painful failure.  That failure motivated them to go looking for better ways which started them on the path of learning and practicing things that work better.

What Has To Be Learned?

Here is my understanding of major things to focus on to make love-relating work well.  It is important to see what other people, who think somewhat differently than I do, say about this and form your own ideas and then invent what you will practice.  (See “Thinking about Love to Improve Love”).

1. Developing a Love-Oriented Mindset  - This usually involves acquiring an increasing amount of knowledge about love to think with; practicing learning to think about love in a variety of ways, times and situations; growing a habit of pondering how to practically apply what you are thinking about love to your life.  Then making those thoughts lead to new love actions and finally analyzing the results of those actions so as to make future improvements.  It also involves enjoyably pondering the great wonders of love, its mysteries, puzzles, possibilities and even its imponderables.  Also important is growing the habit of thinking with a love-orientation whenever confronted with life issues, challenges, difficulties, opportunities and puzzlements.  Perhaps most of all, is having fun with your growing love-oriented mindset.

2. Developing a love-oriented way to deal with love’s many emotions  - Comprehending that love is not an emotion but rather a natural life process that produces many different emotions, including those of feeling loving, lovable, loved and love empowered.  Learning how to find the guidance message in every emotion and what to do with that guidance, especially working with love’s connectedness, empathy, compassion and awe.

3. Developing the ability and habit to behave with, from and through love toward all including yourself  - Technically, as I see it, this means learning and practicing the identified 12 groups of behavior for giving and getting healthy, real love.  Also learning to operate via the 5 flowing forms of love identified as Adamant Love, Compassionate Love, Ebuliant love, Passionate Love and Serene Love while enriching others with each and being enriched by each.  And learning actions to take in the fulfillment of the 5 functions of healthy real love, to connect, to nurture, to protect, to heal and to be enriched and rewarded with joy.

There Is so Much More

The above are the big three to get started on but there is a great deal more.  Happily you can go on a joyous love learning journey for the rest of your life because real love is an immense, oceanic, yea, even cosmic topic.  These are just some of my accumulated ideas, discoveries and understandings about love (arguably well-grounded in much experience and broad ranging research).  It is important that you learn there are many more which may do you as much or more good than mine.  So, look for them.  Also know more are being developed as we speak because more and more love research is being conducted in so very many fields.  It can all be so very exciting and worthwhile once you get into it, if you haven’t already. Let me further say, I lovingly hope none of the great truths about love will escape you.

One More Little Thing. How about sharing this mini-love-lesson with somebody and seeing if it turns into a loving cross-enrichment event?

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

Quotable Question: If love is supposed to be so mysteriously unknowable, why did major religions of the world spend so much effort telling us about it?