Synopsis: Your hidden blocks, need to unblock; love block defined; an example; many kinds of reception blocking; where the blocks come from; and what to do about it are all covered here.
Your Hidden Blocks
You have love blocks! They get in the way of receiving love when love comes your way.They once did you some good but now they are just preventing you from feeling the energizing, warm, safe joy of feeling well loved. Your love blocks also probably are sabotaging your chances for experiencing love more fully. Why do we think this is true? Because having blocks to receiving love is almost inevitable and universal in most of the world’s cultures and most of the world’s families. No one starting life as an infant and experiencing childhood is thought to escape developing some hidden, subconscious blocks to receiving love.
Actually you might not have survived without them protecting you in your early life. Now they are in the way. The good news is you can get them out of the way and go on to a much greater, empowering and more abundant love. Furthermore, remember that receiving love well is extremely important for giving love well. It also is very important for doing your share of ‘cycling love’ in a love relationship which is what keeps a love relationship going. (See the mini-love-lessons on Receiving Love at this site)
Why You Need to Unblock
We now have an abundance of scientific research pointing to a great fact. If you don’t have healthy, real love in your life, your biological and psychological health systems start to malfunction. Quite commonly after that, your life may malfunction in one major way or another. It therefore, is to everyone’s benefit that you discover and remove your major blocks to receiving love fully.What Is a Love Block?
A love block is anything that repeatedly gets in the way of getting love, when it there to get. Here we are most concerned with your own, internal blocks to receiving love well and fully, which thereby interferes with you doing healthy, Receptional Love. Your love blocks likely are too deeply ingrained, non-conscious habit patterns preventing you from being able to perceive or experience yourself as loved and valued, when love conveying behaviors are being sent to you. There is research which suggests as much as 75% of the love conveying actions that comes to an average person is missed and, therefore, not received. A large part of what does get received is not received fully or well. Could it be that if we all got good at love reception, and got our blocks out of the way, the world would be 75% more love nourished?An All Too Common Example
After making love, Cato with a big smile, sincerely said to Lacey “I really enjoy the looks you have when you’re in ecstasy, and the sounds you make are a big turn-on too”. He meant it as a loving affirmation and hoped it would help her feel intimately good, as well as it was sharing of his own, intimate, good feelings. However, his statement ran into Lacey’s love blocks. She took it as he was trying to embarrass her by making fun of her, and that he was actually being critical of her in a sort of sarcastic way. That is how she was taught to interpret straight-forward, complimentary statements in the neighborhood and family she grew up in.She also learned to react with self-defensive, pulling away while steeling herself with cold indifference. She further acted to get out of that situation as fast as possible because it had become so negative to her. Cato took her defensiveness as rejection, which activated his own love blocks. He was sure he once again had failed with a woman, probably because he was an inadequate lover although he didn’t know how he had failed. He also once again was thinking he probably was unlovable and would never find the love he really longed for, so he concluded, why try. He certainly would not call Lacey or try to see her again. Lacey also decided she would not try again with Cato either because once again she thought she had run into a real, unloving jerk.
It could have turned out much better had either Cato or Lacey, or both of them, been brought up in such a way as to instead regularly think something like this. Compliments were just compliments, and they themselves were lovable and valued. So sincere compliments would naturally come their way, and were to be enjoyed. It also would have helped for them not to quickly think with blame, and consider themselves okay, lovable people who can continue working together on a probable glitch in communication, or mis-perception. But no, their conditioning and programming made sure their first conclusion was that something negative was coming toward them, and blame and guilt had to be part of it. Therefore, they should fight or flee from the person sending the perceived negative.
So long as Cato subconsciously and secretly believes women will find him sexually inadequate and basically unlovable, he will view something that goes a bit awry in a relationship as proof that he is failing. He will then defend himself with counterattack or withdrawal, cutting off his chances to receive love or start a love relationship. So long as Lacey has a habit of perceiving compliments, praises, thank you’s, and affirmations as not being real or containing some hidden negative meaning, she will effectively block genuine affection, respect and the love she so desperately wants.
The Many Faces of Love Reception Blocking
Blocking love coming your way usually occurs without you consciously
knowing it, and in a great variety of different ways. Here are clues to
some of them. If you think things like the following, you may be
blocking your own reception of love.“If I have to ask him for what I want, that spoils it because if he loves me he is supposed to know and then give me what I want”.
“I’m really not important or special in any way, so no one could really want me.”
“If anybody is nice to you, nine chances out of 10 they are after something, and you’re going to get hurt in the long run if you get taken-in by them”.
“I’m too (fat, skinny, ugly, poor, dumb, etc. etc.) for anyone to ever love me”.
“I’m such a bad person I don’t deserve love”.
“I don’t know how to know or share what I’m feeling and I don’t want to”.
“Love just makes me vulnerable and gets in the way of my success”.
“I missed my one great chance at love and I know I’ll never get another.”
“Whoever I get close to, ends up hurting me”.
“It’s a lot more important to me to be powerful. Love just makes you weak”.
“It’s too late for me”.
“Love is just a pretty word for sex”.
“When they say they love you, it’s just a manipulation”.
“If you don’t love me just the way I want you to, you don’t really love me”.
“Love means you put yourself last and everybody else first”.
“Aren’t we supposed to be humble, and self effacing, and doesn’t enjoying getting love get in the way of that”.
There are lots more, but maybe this helps you understand the basic ideas about how love blocks get you to think and act against your own best interests.
Where Do Your Love Blocks Come From?
The culture you grew up in, and also whatever subculture you are a
part of, can have a lot to do with where your love blocks come from.
For instance, if you were taught that anything having to do with love
may have something sexual in it, and everything sexual is bad, you may
subconsciously dodge anything loving so as not to be bad. Many girls,
on having their first period, stopped being hugged and kissed by her
father, and all other males in the family or neighborhood. So, ever
after, she dodges love with males because she is subconsciously sure it
will end in very painful rejection. Many boys gets teased, laughed at, shamed and embarrassed by their peers for doing something loving. In many subculture groups, boys get criticized when they do something loving and chastised for not being strong, cruel and tough; then they never gets over it. In other cultural groups many girls and boys learn that loving actions are used as a phony mask to manipulate others, and so they never trust or learn to do anything real concerning love.
Families and parenting are where, accidentally, lots of mistakes are made and malfunctioning ways are unknowingly passed on, generation to generation. In some families they still believe in the, now much disproved, concept that parents who are too loving to their children turn them into weaklings. Back before real research taught us better, the US and other governments sent out pamphlets to new mothers saying just that, and advising mothers not to cuddle, hug or lovingly touch their children, especially when they cry. Tough soldiers for the future seemed to be the goal. Lots of families around the world treat children with cruelty, indifference and neglect when they need love, and so subconsciously program them to be afraid of love and its many manifestations.
Addictions are especially a big problem. For the child growing up with an alcoholic parent, half the time they do something nice to the sober parent and get a loving response. The same thing done to the drunk parent brings agony. This actively, but unknowingly, trains a child to connect love with frustration, confusion, anger, resentment, guilt, pain, contradiction and failure. Then in their later relationships, all this gets in the way when they attempt relating in love.
What Can Be Done To Unblock and Go On To Good Receptional Love?
I like to suggest that the first thing to do is start learning and
practicing the behaviors of healthy, receptional love. It is amazing
how well the “fake it, till you make it” approach works for many things,
and this may be a key to one them for you. You do not have to wait
until you have discovered and countered your love blocks. The very act
of trying to accomplish good, receptional love will, in fact, do some of
that for you. As is taught in some forms of Buddhism, right action will lead you to right feeling and right-thinking and thereafter more right action.
However, that might not get the whole job done. To learn the behaviors
and thinking of receiving love well, I recommend you start with the
mini-love-lessons at this site that have to do with receiving love or
Receptional Love and then get busy.Then it’s usually good to add more learning about your blocks. To do that I like to recommend an older, but great, book by Dr. William Ryan and Mary Ellen Donovan called Love Blocks. It is super for raising into consciousness what your blocks to receiving love may be. Another ‘red flag’ may be when you experience dysfunction in a relationship. You might ask yourself, “Might this be caused by one of my love reception blocks”?
Working on improving your healthy, self-love often proves crucial and intricately interwoven with developing good receptional love ability. Again start with the healthy self-love mini-love-lessons at this site and go from there.
Getting more knowledge about receiving love and the processes that may be involved for you, also can be facilitated by reading Receiving Love by doctors Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt. My book, Recovering Love, also has very practical sections helpful to this issue.
As always – Go and Grow with Love
Dr. J. Richard Cookerly
The next time somebody says a loving statement to you, or gives you a loving touch or look, how do you want to see yourself respond internally and externally?
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