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? 

For Failing Love: Avoid, or Convert, or Escape?

Mini-Love-Lesson #191

Synopsis: Briefly introduced here are three approaches for dealing with the enormously destructive issue of failing love and how to choose and then get started on each.

Three Strategies for a Huge Problem

Love relationships that fail are a monumentally tragic life-harming and life-destroying problem for countless millions all over the world!  Agonizing breakups, anxiety filled separations, divorce resulting depression, loveless ongoing mutual-misery marriages, addiction relapses, relationship suicides and murders, wounded children, relational related abuse, loneliness, empty life problems and much more – all common outcomes of failing love.
What to do about failing love baffles and confounds so many people.  Perhaps you are one of them or someone dear to you struggles with this issue.

To help cut through the enormous confusion about failing love here are three basic strategies or approaches known to help people think more clearly to get past failing love and then go on to successful, healthy love.

Avoid

If you are not now in a heart–mate type love relationship, or if you think you are in love and do not want it to turn into a failing love, or if you have couple troubles and do not wish to go further into failure here are some things you can do.  Learn to identify and avoid what leads into failure.  Do not just study what goes wrong but discover what leads up to and precedes failure.  You can do this both in small-scale and large-scale ways as well as for short-term and long-term patterns and situations.  Do not forget to look at your own preceding contributions to triggering or causing failure events.  Major love failures are often built out of a series of mini-love-failures which possibly could have been avoided.

I am biased but I heartily recommend you and your loved ones study the dozen, big, false love patterns found in our book, Real Love False Love , so you can be sure to avoid them.  As you are right now, you can keep studying the free mini-love-lessons that have to do with identifying and avoiding the traps and tragedies of love gone wrong found at this site.  We especially recommend working on identifying and avoiding anti-love, pseudo-love and non-love communications and behaviors.

Who to avoid and why also is an important area of study and learning that is an act of healthy self-love.  Sadly, some people subconsciously are programmed to be attracted to, and to fall in false love with only those who will hurt, harm and destroy them.  Sharpening your own personal love knowledge of who you might be vulnerable to and how to avoid dangerous, self-sabotaging situations can be love-protective and life-protective.  Lots of people get into bad-for-them relationships and have repeating love failures because they don’t do this.

Probably most major love failures, traps and tragedies could have been and can be avoided by those who learn how to identify and avoid.  So work on your failure avoidance skills and free yourself to go on to the wonders, marvels and happiness of healthy, real and successful love.

Convert

A great many people in failing love relationships find they can convert failure to success if they work at it in the right ways, hard enough and long enough.  Sadly, a great many other people do not do this.  That also is true for every type of love relationship: parent, child, friend, family, comrade, self, etc. –  all forms of love can improve with work.  By way of recent really good research, we finally are learning what truly works to make love success.  You can learn that too, and you are started or are progressing on that love learning path right now because you are reading this.

The feedback we get tells us many of our mini-love-lessons have helped a large number of individuals, couples, families and others convert failing love to successful love.  Also, I am proud to say our book, Recovering Love,  is about converting failing love to successful love and for years has been helping couples, and also especially couples facing addiction issues.  Furthermore, the third major section of Real Love False Love contains some powerful how to’s for converting false love to real love.

Lots of other books, classes, retreats, workshops, couple’s counseling groups, and support groups, couple’s counselors and family therapists are very beneficial in helping people discover what it takes to convert failing love to successful love.  Consider availing yourself of any and all of that.
Lots of people give up too soon or they just do not go about the work of learning and practicing what works for healthy, real, love relating.

Ovid, the great Roman poet and teacher of love, in the year 01 taught two things that apply here.  First “if you would be loved – be lovable” and second “lasting love requires skill”.  So, if you would convert love failure to love success, get busy developing your love skills and do not ever quit.

Escape

If you are in a failing love relationship that keeps failing in spite of you and your spouse’s or heart mate’s best efforts over time, if the relationship is physically and/or psychologically increasingly debilitating and/or dangerous and destructive, healthy self-love demands that you consider escaping.  Trying endlessly in a deteriorating, destructive situation probably will just harm or destroy you, wound kids if they are involved, hurt or harm some others and likely enable your spouse’s dysfunction and decline.

Escape allows recovery and repair, followed by doing yourself and others more good than if you had remained in a destructive trap.  You might even go back to him or her some day, but don’t unless you and hopefully your ex are far stronger and more powerfully love skilled.

Escaping a failing love relationship almost always is hard, painful conflicted and confusing but, if it means survival and not wasting your life, it could be the only healthy thing to do.  It also often can be the only way to help children, family, friends and even the other person in the relationship.

At this site, there is lots of totally free information that can help in making a healthful for all concerned escape.  Furthermore, in the last third of Real Love False Love there is a very helpful, strong section on healthful escape.

After escape from a destructive and failing love relationship, you may do best to engage in a lot of healthy, self-love, recovery work.  Do not just stay wounded forever like some do.  We humans are meant to heal and go on to more and better living.  After escape, study how to avoid love failures in the future.  If you escape from a seriously failing love relationship do you really want to go through getting into another similar situation from which you need to escape again?

I hope you will go on to a love-successful life enriched by all that love can bring.  So, do your homework, study love and make that more likely.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Exactly what will you do next for learning more about how to avoid failing love, convert failing love to successful love, or escape toxic, destructive, failing and false love?

Related posts:

1. Can Love Overcome Incompatibility?
2. Destroyers of Love – the 7 Big D’s Most Likely to Ruin Your Love Relationships
3. Heartbreak Mending and The Deep, Multi-Love Remedy
4. Can Love the Second Time Around Be Better Than the First?
5. Repairing Damaged Love, Best Guidelines

Can Love at First Sight Be Real Love?

People often ask me “Dr. Cookerly, can love at first sight be the real thing”?  The answer according to most of the research I’m aware of and the knowledgeable thinking on this question is “No, love at first sight probably does not and can not involve real love”.  “What is it then?” is usually the next question.  Love at first sight most often is a case of Imprint Mating.  Here is how Imprint Mating and the whole love at first sight thing is thought to usually work.

It seems that in early childhood we go through critical periods where we are naturally open to things having really strong effects upon us.  In some of these critical periods we become highly susceptible to certain images that have to do with love sources being powerfully imprinted into our deep non-conscious brain.  These images are of people who give us love or from whom we want our love to come during those critical periods.

Much later we encounter people who look, act, smell and perhaps sound like those images we imprinted.  When that happens we automatically project onto these people a false recognition response.  We subconsciously sense we are encountering someone to love, and to be loved by and to whom we already are love connected.  This often causes excitement and positive feelings similar to reconnecting with a long-lost, very important loved one.

Most commonly it is thought our imprinted images come from how we perceived and experienced our mother, or father (or an integration of both parents) before our fifth birthday.  Usually that means in our subconscious we are seeing a person similar to how one or both parents looked, sounded, acted, etc. when they were younger adults.  Sometimes it is not our parents but an aunt or uncle, or someone else who was a possible source of love which we imprinted at a highly impressionable critical period.

Once we project onto another person and ‘see’ in them our imprinted image, it triggers our deep built in ‘mating drive’ which makes us want to ‘mate’ with that person we feel ‘love at first sight’ with.  It’s kind of like, at that moment, that person is a screen onto whom we are putting our projected image.  Therefore, we are falsely seeing who we want to see, and are basically blind to who is really there, at least for awhile.  Mating, by the way, means much more than just having sex.  Our built in mating drive frequently pushes us to much more totally ‘mate’ with that person usually for at least several months.

Another fact quite vital to understanding the love at first sight phenomenon is to know that attraction and love are two very different things.  We can be attracted strongly and quite quickly to people we will never love.  We also can deeply and powerfully love people we do not find necessarily attractive.

Most love at first sight relationships don’t last very long.  Unfortunately some people who strongly rely on first sight love discover those relationships sometimes end in life damaging disappointment and heartbreak.  Others keep missing out on real love because they continue looking for the love at first sight false thing mistakenly thinking it is the real thing. Still others just give up on romantic love entirely.

Does all this mean that ‘love at first sight’ never leads to a lasting, healthy, real mate-type love relationship?  No, not at all.  There are those who grow a real love relationship after getting their relationship started with Imprint Mating.  That’s probably what keeps people believing in love at first sight; there are just enough people succeeding with a love at first sight start-up to keep people believing in it.  Also, it is a very pretty romantic myth, even though it probably causes more hurt and harm than it causes good.  Thus, love at first sight is best regarded as a form of false love which, nonetheless, could (but probably won’t) lead to a lasting, good love relationship.

What is the best thing to do if you feel like you have a love at first sight experience?   I like to suggest that the best thing to do is to operate from the Apostle Paul’s declaration, “love is patient”.  Therefore, taking lots of time to get to know who is really there usually works best.  Look long and hard for what is behind your projections and beneath your first impressions.  If real love is going to happen and grow, it will show itself to be real in time.  So, give it enough time.  Most forms of false love die out within a year.  Some can last a lot longer but usually don’t.  Proceed cautiously but also enjoy all the adventure and excitement of a first sight love experience, while getting to know the real person who is there over time.

Real love may develop but it will take exploration, experience and time to know if that is what’s happening.  If and when a first sight relationship ends you may know that you have had a good, and hopefully growthful love related experience.  Now, with this forewarning and knowledge you will know not to count on it too much, and hopefully you will avoid most of the hurt and all of the harm potential in a love at first sight experience.  Good luck!

As always – Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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Image credits: “The Binocular Bunch” by Flickr user Supagroova.
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Related posts:

1. False Forms of Love – Imprint Mating Syndrome
2. Is “I Can’t Live without You” Real Love?
3. False Forms of Love: Unresolved Conflict Attraction Syndrome
4. Getting Healthy, Real Love in Your Life
5. False Forms of Love: Shadow Side Attachments 

Isolated and Doing Love Anyway

               

Mini-Love-Lesson  #268

Synopsis: Here we first are helped to realize the extent of how love needs are increasingly going unmet, and the dangers that brings to us due to worldwide safety needs and resulting isolation caused by the pandemic.  Then we are showed the different, counterbalancing and creative ways we can diminish the dangers and do our love anyway.

Isolated Alone or Together

In this time of pandemic dangers, our ways of doing our love often are being severely challenged.  This especially is so for the millions of people living isolated, sheltering in place and living physically disconnected for safety’s sake.  Not only that, but around the world hundreds of thousands of people are losing those who have been both major sources and recipients of their love.  That has greatly adding to the problems of isolation.

Millions are quarantined from having direct contact with those most dear to them. Furthermore, they also are isolated from the others with which they share friendships and other caring relationships . Worldwide our safety needs are blocking us from our love needs being met and from fully meeting the love needs of others.  Children are going without being lovingly kissed, hugged and tucked in at night by their parents who serve on the front lines of the fight against this deadly disease.  Grandparents are not being blessed with the joys of grandchildren, the spouses of healthcare workers are living largely disconnected and apart from their most beloved, and dearest friends are not receiving comforting and reassuring hugs from one another.  Some who have violated the stay apart guidelines are now alone, grieving and guilty for having possibly infected a loved one who is now gone due to the virus.

For all those cut off from love sources, the danger is growing. Having less love interaction can mean becoming increasingly stressed, depressed and susceptible to depression and eventually even suicidal episodes, substance abuse and/or relapse, hypertension, heart attacks and strokes.  In so many places, love is being enacted less and needed more.  So, what are we to do?  Can we change to new ways of showing our love enough, in time and with sufficient potency?  Yes, I think we can! (See “Could You Be a LAT Lover and Succeed at It?”).

How To Love Well in the Time of Pandemic Isolation

To meet the love challenges of our time, here are some suggestions.  First of all, please follow the scientific and medical people as your best guides for safety and not risking the spreading of this highly infectious and deadly disease.

Next, admit to yourself that you have psychological needs including love needs which may need your attention along with some changed and new behaviors.  Any uncomfortable or bad feelings you are having may be trying to tell you that.  If you are living more isolated from those you love and those you have been befriended by, you are or will be negatively effected.  How much and how well you respond is up to you.  Do know that when love is reduced or absent from a person’s life it affects brain and body health negatively.  For those you love and for healthy self-love, you can search out and practice more taking care of your own love needs along with doing what you can about other’s love needs in this time of isolation.  Here are some “how to’s”.

Increase your in-person phone contacts, even if you are more comfortable with texting.  You see, it is not just the words spoken, it is the tones of voice and other vocal variables that get love nurturing, love care and love connecting done.  In fact, in personal communication research the data shows the words can be as little as 7% of the meaning communicated.  In personal auditory communication, vocal variables carried the majority of the message impact received.

Use video connecting a lot.  Skype, Zoom and other e-video services make it possible to see and hear your loved ones in real-time.  Video interaction can increase the personal/emotional meaningfulness of a personal communication event by over 50% according to some communication researchers.

Make contact efforts with everybody you care about, even a little.  You even can include almost everyone you ever cared about in the past.  If you are worried about what to say before you phone or video contact someone, try this.  Think of three or so questions to ask and three or so bits of information about your own life to share.  Remember, it is not important to say important things, it is important just to personally connect. Saying just about anything, sounding friendly and/or caring, along with listening well is what makes valuable connecting happen (see “Communicating Better with Love: Mini-Lessons”  and “Listening With Love”).   

Surprise connecting calls are great. “I thought about you and just decided I would call to connect and see how you are” is all you need to say as a reason for calling.  Reconnecting with those you haven’t talked to in ages usually works for old friends and old acquaintances who might become current friends.  Remember to ask about their feelings concerning the pandemic and how they are handling it, as well as relating some of your own feelings.

Connect with strangers.  You sometimes can make new friends by talking to strangers in Internet chat rooms, call-in shows, and on podcasts and other network services.  If you are depressed or otherwise distressed help lines are available and often do wonders.  It is an act of healthy self-love to make contact, and people to do that with are available, welcoming and usually interesting as well as interested.  Know that by making the effort to contact them, you may do them as much, or more, good as they do you.  Enjoy that!

You also could make contact the old-fashioned way by writing letters.  Handwritten letters especially are becoming rather rare but increasingly precious and cherished.  Texting is good too but usually lacks having deeper emotional impact which is, of course, why some people prefer it.

The Importance of Healthy, Self-Love Actions

You can be your own source of love if you learn the “how-to’s of healthy self-love and practice them.  In our current isolation and safe distancing life situations, healthy real self-love actions may be more important than ever.  That also is true for people you may be isolated with (see “Loving Others “As” You Love Yourself???”  and “Self-Love – What Is It?”).

Take charge of keeping your mind active and interested.  You can do this by learning new things, relearning old ones, exploring strange topics, engaging in hobbies further than you have before, getting involved or more involved with simple arts and crafts, doing new and different things with food and delving into all sorts of subjects you don’t know much about.

Take charge of your body and making it healthier and more fit.  Look for fun new ways to exercise, dance and play one person athletic games with yourself.  If you are the least bit ambidextrous you can play right-hand versus left-hand games.  If you are isolated with others play wrestling, arm wrestling and even thumb wrestling, compete with throw or bounce ball, play hop-scotch and many other games are some of the options open to you.

Do more love and play with dog(s) or other pets if you have a good, loving, playful dog or two.  There is an old legend that says dogs were put in the world to teach us love.  They probably are better at it than humans sometimes, so let us learn from our betters. Cats, parrots, horses, ferrets and lots of other animals might be available for play too.

Go outside even if it is only on a balcony or in a tiny backyard.  It is better if it is a park, a woods, a field or whatever’s available (follow safety guidelines).  Go there and look until you really see and perhaps even feel your love connecting with nature.  The studies are conclusive.  A loving, appreciative involvement with nature is nurturing and surprisingly healthful.  Let nature love you and love it back, and love life at the same time. 

Schedule your life.  Without a schedule, lots of people just do not do what they hoped to do or planned to do.  You can schedule just about everything, even your efforts at love and love connecting.  It also helps to reward yourself in various ways for keeping to your schedule but it does not work if you skimp or cheat.

Projects are another way to do your love.  Make something for a loved one. With and for self-love, make something for yourself.  You could write a love note to everyone you love.  You might put together a special recording of favored music or create a scrapbook of all those unorganized photos stored away someplace.  For a loved child, you might make up a story and even illustrate it with sketched or cut out pictures.  For family, you could do some family history collection and record it.  For your most intimate loved one(s), creating the first half of a romantic sexy story for them to finish is a titillating yet loving possibility.  Painting pictures, making collages, pottery and sculpting also are gifts of love you might now have time for.

Here is a special project for you to consider.  Short messages and sayings about love rendered in artful calligraphy, modernized printing or in rustic form on special paper or canvas, or on boards and/or perhaps framed can make precious and cherished love gifts for presentation after we are all done with isolation.

Counterbalance the negatives coming your way.  Paying too much attention to the world’s negatives and not enough attention to the positive can be toxic.  It is important to stay current on what is bad, wrong, dangerous and depressing for lots of reasons.  It also is important not to overdose on it.  So for healthy living, counterbalancing the negatives by paying attention to and searching out and experiencing positives can be very important to your mental health.  That also applies to the more negative people in your life.  Too much experiencing of nay-sayers, constant complainers and the doom-and-gloom folks can be unhealthy.  However, totally excluding them can have its drawbacks too.  So, search out and often contact positive people, especially happy loving people.

Here are a few suggestions for how to start counterbalancing.  Google the Good News Network and/or pick from the other positive information services under the good news entry which contains lots of today’s upbeat, positive stories, events, etc.  Then for your more in-depth factual reading I suggest looking into the newer behavioral science field of positive psychology.  Positive psychology has some pretty interesting, well-written books which have come out of this factual, uplifting, research science.  If you would like to know and be amazed by how far we have come in human progress, let me turn your attention to Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature.  It is a book well-written, rich in facts, and it includes a great deal of the “good stuff”, often left out of standard history lessons.

Learn More about Love

Whether you are quarantined all alone or with a spouse, family members or a another loved one, you can use this time of isolation for making a big, life improvement.  In the process you also can reduce your growing cabin fever, listlessness, feelings of aggravation, annoyance, irritability, boredom, purposelessness or whatever other feelings you might want to reduce.  You can do this by learning more about the amazing knowledge of healthy, real love newly available.  As you do this, you then may get happy and excited working on how to make ever improving use that knowledge in your own life.

One way to do this you already are working on by reading this mini-love-lesson.  You can continue that by studying more of our mini-love-lessons on love found at this site which, of course, we encourage.  You also can send for and read books about the new findings, new thinking, old re-discovered findings and thinking, research discoveries, efforts and trends – all having to do with love and love related topics.  Most of those reveal the subject of love to be more immense, amazing, incredible, learnable and healthfully usable, not to mention empirically discoverable than anyone ever guessed.

You also can look up a lot of love topics on the Internet but be careful there.  There is a lot of misleading and mistaken, along with just out-and-out wrong, harmful and absurd things written as the truth about love on the Internet.  Some books also are pretty poor or just not really about love though love is in the title.

Everything you learn about love can be talked about with those you connect with via phone, video or however.  Isolated alone or together, you can find ways to take care of your love needs, your love relationships and your ways of doing your love.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Who have you not yet learned much from concerning love – ancient sages, philosophers, theologians and great religious teachers of more than one major faith, psychoanalysts, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, animal experimental psychologists, social psychologists, linguistic psychologists, neuropsychologists, marriage and family researchers and counselors, psychotherapists, various brain scientists, physicians and medical researchers, other behavioral and social scientists, or ???   All these have a lot of worthwhile things to say about love you might be intrigued with and enriched by.

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?

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 

Lies And Love

Synopsis: This mini love lesson covers Lying for Us-ness; Lies and Breakups; How to Get Yourself Lied to A Lot (A Baker’s Dozen Ways); Sabotaging Truth-Sharing Sabotages Love; How Lies Limit Love; When Love with Truth Is Not Allowed; and What to Do.

Lying For “Us-ness”

“I lie to save my marriage.  I’m pretty sure sooner or later I will get caught and our marriage will be over.  Until then, lies are the only way to keep my marriage going.”  So said Benson who was working hard at trying to learn how to live authentically.

He freely admitted that his career and personal life was saturated with falsehood but he vehemently testified that, nevertheless, he did love his wife.

Jolene stated, “I lie a lot to my husband just like my mother and grandmother did to their husbands and so taught me.  I really don’t know any other way that could possibly have a chance of working with my husband. Truth be told, I don’t know how any spouse can not lie a lot if they want to make their marriage work.”  Ginny and Josh in couples counseling were trying to figure out if their relationship could survive if both of them told each other several difficult truths. They had confessed that to keep their marriage going smoothly there had been a lot of deceit, both by the commission of out-and-out lies and even more by omissions of the full truth about a lot of things.

What is to be done about the lies, deceptions, half-truths, distortions, concoctions, perjury, beguilements, exaggerations, misrepresentations, evasions and out-and-out fraudulent deceit which occurs in a great many love relationships.  Some answer “nothing can be done” because all the lies are protective, softening, palliative and in one way or another useful in keeping a love relationship going.  Others say love needs the truth and without the truth real love will die.  Still others recommended that it’s okay to lie about some smaller things but not the big stuff.  However, people can vary on what they call ‘big stuff’.

There are those who comment that our culture and our love mythology especially teaches everybody to tell a lot of lies in love relationships.  “Don’t risk your relationships by telling the truth about anything that would hurt someone’s feelings” is something I once over heard an aging, Southern Bell tell her granddaughter. Of course there are those who want to know all the truth from others but they aren’t about to give anyone their own full truth.

Then there are the people who lie about love itself.  Tatiana said, “I admit I live a very two-faced life.  One face is for my husband and that face lies to him that I love him.  Another face is for my lover and that face tells the same lie but in different ways.  Since I don’t really believe love exists everything I say about love to men is a lie.  But they say it too.  They tell you they love you but all they want is sex.  But men are easily fooled.  They want to believe women are all about love.  I’m about wealthy pleasure and men are very useful for attaining that”.

So, what do you think?  How do you operate when it comes to telling lies, small, medium and large lies in a love relationship?  Do you want the truth no matter what it is?  Can you handle the truth no matter what it might be?  Before you decide for sure let’s look at some different things.

Lies And Breakups

“If he just hadn’t lied to me we might have made it”.  “She was just too deceitful. I never knew what to believe.”  “I thought I didn’t want to know the truth but in the end it was all the deceptions that destroyed us.” “Now I know I really did lie by what I didn’t tell and that is definitely what sank our ship.  I kept telling myself a lie, that omitting the truth wasn’t really lying.  If only I had admitted to myself that that was complete bullshit then I might not have lost the love of my life.”  “I really did not expect she would stop seeing me or even talking to me just because I told another lie”.  “We lied to each other a lot and in doing so we never faced our real issues.”

Every week I hear things like the above quotes when doing post-divorce and breakup recovery counseling.  The truth, at least as I see it, is that lying usually is more dangerous, or just as dangerous, to love relationships as is telling difficult truths.  At least for the strong of heart, truth (even very tough truth) is likely to give you the healthiest, long-range outcome.

It is true that some people cannot or will not work with certain truths that may arise in a love relationship.  It also is true that some love relationships are not strong enough and the love not healthy enough to enable the people to deal with certain truths.  In those cases breaking up or divorce may be painful but best in the long run.

These things not only are true for couples but also are true for all other kinds of love relationship also.  Time and again I have heard someone scream at a family member in family counseling “you lied to me”.  Often the “because” of why the lie was told doesn’t seem to matter.  Usually the wound caused by the lie and whatever the lie is about can be healed with enough love, and with the guidance of good family therapy.  Friendships, even deep and long-lasting friendships, may be killed by the telling of lies.  It seems that every type of love relationship can be endangered by lies.

How to Get Yourself Lied to A Lot

How do you help get yourself lied to?  Notice in this question I did not use the word cause’ but instead the word ‘help’.  As I see it, the person who tells the lie causes it.  However, we all can set things up so people will frequently choose to avoid telling us the truth if they can.  Here are a ‘baker’s dozen’ ways you can be pretty sure to assist yourself not getting told the truth or certainly not told the whole truth.  Each of these ways also can be quite destructive to the development of a healthy, real, love relationship.

1.  Be very condemning and judgmental when you hear a truth you don’t like, so people learn that telling you the truth is far too costly emotionally, and in energy and time consumed.

2.  Be so sure you’re right that no other view could possibly have validity, so your loved ones learn there is no use in even trying to tell you there truth.

3.  Come across very weak, fragile and delicate, so no one dares telling you a tough truth for fear you will break or be crushed.

4.  Play ‘overt victim /covert persecutor’ by showing that you feel supremely agonized at being blamed, or full of suffering martyr guilt, or you feel excessively at fault every time there’s a possibility of an unpleasant truth to be dealt with, so everyone will either dodge dealing with you or do anything to placate you, instead of just working at dealing with unpleasant truths.

5.  Become quickly and strongly upset, hysterical, incoherent, irrational and emotionally overwhelmed, so loved ones are busy trying to sooth you and their truth telling gets postponed, perhaps indefinitely.

6.  Demand and then deny evidence, insist your version of historical events is the only accurate one, and try to overwhelm with logic and oratory much like an aggressive lawyer in court, so that unpleasant truths get bulldozed and lost in the fray.

7.  Lash out with rage, personal attacks, putdowns, criticisms and personal negations of loved ones without mercy, and as you do so clutter the discussion with angrily stated irrelevant, unconnected to the original topic accusations, and miscellaneous material, so there isn’t a chance for a person’s truth to get a real hearing.

8.  Subtly, or overtly by your behavior, threaten loved ones who tell you uncomfortable truths, helping them fear that your vengeance will fall upon them and consequently cause them to protect themselves by hiding truth from you.

9.  Become unlovingly cold, distant and uncaring with elements of silent dismissal and attitudinal demeaning or condescension which is covertly obvious and, thereby, making yourself be seen as pretty much unapproachable.  If that doesn’t work withdraw and go into mysteriously hiding, so truth can not reach you.

10.  ‘Awfulize’ (make it far worse than it is) everything a loved one says, jump to all sorts of awful conclusions, and prove that telling you the truth blows everything out of proportion, so truth telling will always be a long ordeal to be avoided.

11.  Act indifferent by not listening carefully or showing any emotional care or concern, and project that you regard what you’re being told as irrelevant and unimportant. (This is particularly good for getting deceptions of omission to come your way).

12.  Use the truth a loved one shares with you against them later on, thus, punishing them for sharing their truth with you, and teaching them to avoid the risk from now on.

13. Ignoring the truth being shared and firing back or countering with something negative about the person telling you their truth, thus, devaluing their truth and deflecting dealing with it.

Sabotaging Truth-Sharing Sabotages Love

Each of the above 13 ways and a number of others act to sabotage both the telling of truth and the growth of love.  Lots of people do not realize that they get lied to partly because they make telling the truth have really bad outcomes.  Yes, it’s true we all should have the courage to tell the truth anyway, but that often is not the case.  Yes, we all should have sufficient love to be dedicated to giving our loved ones nothing but the truth, but that too is often not the case.

If you can lovingly hear the truth people are ever so much more likely to tell you there truth.  That often takes a good amount of healthy, self-love and the ability to do what is called ‘owning your okayness’ and ‘not giving away your power’.  See the entry “Healthy Self-Love and Not Giving Your Power Away”.

How Lies Limit Love

If I lie to you I do not present you with the real me.  If you send love to that false me it does not reach the real me.  I either know or doubt you would send your love if you knew the truth I am withholding.  Therefore, I am not reached and I’m not nourished by your love.  My lie may help me, or you, or both of us escape a painful conflict but by lying I also escape the chance of the real me being loved by the real you.  Thus, I cause us to elude the chance of sharing and experiencing intimate, real and perhaps healing love together.

When Love with Truth Is Not Allowed

She said, “If I ever find out you even think of having sex with another woman I will divorce you!”  He secretly and silently interpreted this as “I can never share with you the truth of my real sexuality. Therefore, I had best begin to look for someone else I can be real with”.

He said, “You know I’m right and I refuse to hear you say another word about this subject!  So, eventually she was in the arms of another who could and would listen to anything and everything she had to say.

If you cannot accept my truth how can I feel you accept me?  If you cannot accept me, flaws and all, how can I believe you truly can love the real me?  Please do not condemn or deny my messages of myself, and do not falsely agree with me either.  Please be willing to hear the real me as best as I can present it today.  Then tomorrow I may grow to have a better message and certainly a greater love for you!

What To Do

If you lie a lot, or perhaps you help yourself get lied to a lot, or if you are living some big lie, I like to suggest this.  By small, exact steps you can get to where you live authentically, without lies, or without being much lied to, and in the process you do no harm to anyone.

I like to suggest that for your own health and well-being, as well as for those you care about, cautiously working your way into a life of truth almost always is achievable and by far is preferable.  One reason for that is lies usually cause a lot of psycho-physiological stress, not to mention relational diminishment and danger.  Coaching by a good counselor often is just about invaluable whenever love is being sabotaged by lies.  Finally consider an old teaching question.  Can you build something real out of something false?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Is your self-love sometimes too-weak for you to be able to hear the truth?

Related posts:

1. False Forms of Love: Limerence and Its Alluring Lies 

Farmer vs. Mechanic Love Fixing

Synopsis: The clashing and conflict of Farmer Frank versus Michelle the Mechanic, the yea’s and nay’s of our two contradictory approaches, what Michelle did not want to hear and was glad to learn, timeouts, help from the deep inner mind, making choices versus growing solutions, some practical guidelines, and the beautiful interweave of what Frank and Michelle do now.

“Dammit!  Stay here and talk it out with me!  Don’t you dare walk away!  We need to work this out right now, Frank, no matter how long it takes, how upset we get or how tired we get!”  These demands were blasted out by Michelle in loud, angry tones accompanied with ugly looks and defiant gestures.

Frank much more firmly announced “No, I don’t believe that’s true.  We need to take a break, give each other time to calm down and think things through, figure out what we really feel and then work on this problem one little part at a time”.  Who’s right?  Whose approach is better?  Which way of trying to fix a love relationship problem gets the best results, Michelle’s or Frank’s?  And while we’re examining this, think about which of these two ways is more like your usual approach to a love relationship difficulty?

In one way of looking at it there are just two main approaches to fixing love related difficulties.  One is the ‘mechanic’s’ approach and the other is the ‘farmer’s’ approach.  Michelle is using the mechanic’s and Frank the farmer’s.  The mechanic just gets in there and works on the problem until it is fixed, provided he or she has the know-how, the parts and the tools to fix the problem.  The farmer has to work on the problem then back off and let nature do its thing for awhile, then do some more, and then back off again letting Mother Nature do more of her share until the problem is fixed and the goal achieved.  If the farmer digs up the freshly planted seeds to see if there is anything more to be done with them, or to make sure they have started to grow, it’s likely that will destroy the developing roots and stop the growth process.  If the farmer hastens the harvest too soon the crops will be ruined.

The farmer must work with natural processes which require doing some start up actions, backing off, doing some additional tending actions, backing off again and finally harvesting the results.  This is the usual way of working with those things that live and grow or are in need of healing, like crops or people.  The mechanic can take apart and put back together whatever he or she is working on endless times, but for the farmer that could be a very destructive way of going about things.  Some of the farmer’s approach is very mechanic-like and some of it requires leaving nature alone to ‘do its thing’ and being patient.

Here is what Michelle with her mechanic’s approach didn’t want to hear.  Whenever you’re working with things that live the farmer’s approach (with a possible exception) works best.  In fact, it may be the only way many of the difficulties living things experience can be handled successfully.  With inanimate objects the mechanic’s approach works fine.  Perhaps you’re thinking, “What about emergency medicine and surgery; don’t they work by way of the mechanic’s approach”?  No, because after surgery or emergency room procedures the patient is sent to the recovery room where nature’s healing ways take over to do the rest of the job, just like happens on the farm.  The one partial exception is where there is a true emergency and you have to do all you can, as fast as you can.  Even then quite often afterwards there has to be recovery done in the farmer’s or nature’s way.

With the love problems of couples, families, friendships and with self love we usually have to work on the difficulty in the farmer’s fashion.  We have to work on it consciously, and then back off and let our subconscious and other natural health and healing processes work on things without external interruption or too much of our conscious mind’s interference.  Then we can come back and do some more direct, conscious work, and if needed back off again.  That’s why once a week counseling and therapy sessions are the usual frequency standard, whereas ‘intensives’ (extended, uninterrupted therapeutic work lasting many hours, a weekend or a whole week) to work on a relationship or psychological problems are the occasionally useful exception.

Couples and families need to be able to take time out and let everyone’s inner systems process what the conscious mind has taken in.  When facing difficult issues, after a certain amount of direct external work, we need restorative breaks, distraction and relief time, and time to allow our marvelous, deeper mind’s amazing sorting and creative inner systems do their work on our problems.  We need to have time for all our various inner parts or ‘sub-personalities’ to meet with each other and synthesize our often conflicting and uncoordinated thoughts and feelings.  Usually we must do all that internal work to get our best results before we next consciously deal with problems externally.

Another set of problems can arise in our ‘living’ system when we are pressured to use the mechanic’s approach too much or too long.  When we are pressured or rushed, especially at length, our brain begins to make too many stress hormones.  When stress hormones begin to flood our brain and body we tend to grow agitated, irritated, less able to think clearly, we grow angry and more prone to any quick, destructive action which will bring an end to the increasing production of stress hormones. 

Some people are more easily ‘flooded’ than others (which seems to result from how well they were securely loved as children) but everyone can reach their limit.  In addition to that, when we are rushed and pressured into using a mechanic’s approach we are faced with ‘making choices’ instead of ‘growing solutions’.  In love relationships interactively, mutually growing solutions tends to work far better than being forced into quick choice fixes.  This is true in many parts of life but it is especially true in issues of the heart and love relationships.

There are a few practical Guidelines for using the farmer’s approach.  First, agree to use and cooperate with anyone asking for a timeout.  Whenever a timeout is called for schedule how long it’s going to be and when the participants are going to meet next to work on whatever issues are being faced.  Timeouts can be extended if needed but always with a determined time to get back together agreed upon.  Otherwise, dodging the problem for too long or never getting back to it may occur. 

Another guideline is don’t let problem talk invade love or recreation time, and don’t do it late at night or when you’re also trying to handle other stressors.  Pick a start time and an end time to conduct problem talk and stick to that.  With lots of difficulties it’s good for people to ‘sleep on it’ for a night which allows our deep, inner subconscious mind time to ‘do its thing’ which sometimes is quite miraculous.

With some reluctance Michelle conceded the problem she wanted addressed wasn’t a true emergency and so she backed off her mechanic’s approach.  She learned to use Frank’s farmer’s approach more often, then he learned that he could use Michelle’s mechanic’s approach for some of the things they were contending with.  Once in awhile there was a true emergency in their lives and, much more cooperatively, they both went at it like good mechanics can.  They also learned to identify whether a problem they were facing needed a mechanic’s or farmer’s approach and in teamwork they learned to apply that knowledge which eliminated a tremendous amount of conflict they had previously experienced.  Perhaps you can do the same.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Are you more prone to the farmer’s or the mechanic’s approach when you are dealing with love relationship difficulties?

Related posts:

1. Anger and Love
2. Difficult Topics: A Love-Centered Way to Approach and Broach Them All
3. Can Love the Second Time Around Be Better Than the First?
4. Trust and Mistrust in Love
5. Conflict, Power and Love Success 

Compassionate Love, A Big Sign of True Love?

Synopsis: A vital question starts this mini-love-lesson; followed by discussions of empathy, compassion, their mix, what science says, low compassionate relationships, the question of too much compassion; and ends with what can help and “the answer”.

A Vital Question?

Can you have real love without it being empathetically compassionate? Some of those who look mostly at romantic love, passion-filled love, young love and sexual love tend to exclude empathy and compassion as essential for authentic love. Others think all forms of healthy, real love have strong elements of empathetic compassion. They also tend to think that if empathetic compassionate love is missing, it is evidence the love is false and will fail. So let’s take a look at what is empathetic compassion.

The Nature of Empathy

Empathy usually is defined as feeling another person’s feelings. This can mean experiencing the same kind of emotions another is experiencing and even the same kind of physical feelings. These can be both good and bad feelings, but more frequently the word empathy is used to describe feeling another’s pain. More exactly, empathy commonly refers to when you perceive another in distress or in a state of hurting, you rather automatically feel a corresponding, similar sort of distress and/or pain.

Many think this especially happens in true love relationships but it may happen when viewing any other in any strong state of feeling. Examples include, one seeing a child suffering and you start to similarly suffer, or walking into a group of people laughing you might start to laugh too, although you don’t know what they are laughing about, thus, you are experiencing empathetic humor. Expressing empathy especially to someone in a state of emotional hurt frequently assists love bonding to occur and grow.

Sometimes empathy causes people to distance themselves from others who are hurting so as to escape the hurting they experience seeing others in pain. However, it is thought that when there is love it causes a person to go toward, not away, from the one who is hurting.

The Nature of Compassion

Compassion is usually defined as having deep emotional feelings and emotional understanding of another’s distress and the concomitant desire for the alleviation of that distress, and usually a strong desire to assist in that alleviation. Compassion also is thought to involve heightened perception, caring and responding to another’s suffering. Some think that love relationships tend to wither and die when there is a lack of sufficiently felt and expressed compassion.

Compassion often is seen as a key factor in both the healing of the psychologically wounded and many damaged relationships. Compassion opens doors to giving needed care, offering forgiveness and unselfish, altruistic action. Many very helpful and healing behaviors begin with compassion. Well expressed and received, compassion also precedes improvements in relational closeness, cooperation and collaboration.

Empathy and Compassion Together

If in the middle of a difficulty, someone has and shows empathetic compassion for whoever is in agony or distress, amazing improvements often can start to occur. To accomplish this sort of thing, empathy begins the process. Someone feels the feelings of a suffering other, and then has compassion, resulting in actions that show and give care. From that improvements begin. Some may feel empathy but for various reasons may not have compassion and, therefore, actions of care can be weak or absent. Others may act out of duty, guilt, obligation and other sentiments in ways that may seem to be compassionate love, but without the empathy the acts, in various ways, are less.

Science and Empathetic Compassion

Recently the brain and behavioral sciences professionals have been researching empathy and compassion and coming up with very important findings. Did you know that when you feel empathetic compassion you trigger your brain into more healthfully adjusting your own heart rate. You also cause your brain to make better and more healthful, neurochemical changes which result in feeling better both physically and emotionally. Feeling empathetic compassion also produces hormones involved in the brain’s motivating and processing interpersonal interactions. That in turn makes for better interpersonal harmony and love bonding.

Loving feelings become more common and stronger while stress reduces. Care giving actions increase and are felt as more rewarding after empathetic compassion starts to be felt and expressed. Another interesting fact is that empathetic compassion in loving relationships causes people to live longer and spend less time in medical care. Love relationships with low empathetic compassion are seen as having the opposite of these effects.

Can Low Compassionate Love Relationships Be Helped?

It is thought, and the data suggests, that those relationships where there is low expressed, empathetic compassion, tend to fail or at best function far more poorly than they might. Questions arise like, what can be done, can compassion be learned and increased, or are low compassionate relationships doomed? Are the people who lack sufficient empathy and compassion condemned to live sicker, shorter and more loveless lives while repeatedly having more love failing relationships?

About such questions there’s good, bad and indifferent news. Some of the good news is that according to Stanford Medical School’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research, compassionate training can significantly assist people in learning to have and show compassion, receive compassion from others, and get good at self compassion. All of that improves the activation of the brain’s regions most associated with love, kindness, general positiveness, stress reduction and it results in improvements in general health and positive affiliation and connectedness with others. In other words, compassion training improves people, relationships and the love in love relationships.

The bad news is that people low in empathetic compassion usually don’t know how bad that is for their love relationships and for their own health. Sadly there are quite a few people who see empathy and compassionate love as weak and useless, or worse. Many of them have been taught that being tough, unfeeling and compassion-free is a virtue of the powerful and the successful. It goes along with being tough-minded, efficient, practical and this is needed for survival in a tough world. The research on love and health, especially couples, family and comradeship love, would suggest just the opposite is true.

The indifferent news is that a lot more research is needed about all of this.

Can There Be Too Much Empathetic Compassion?

Like most things, empathetic compassion probably needs to be balanced with good sense and other factors like the ‘love that challenges’ (see the mini-love-lesson titled Are You a Challenge Lover?). There seem to be people who are made dysfunctional by their overwhelming compassion or empathy, but they are quite rare. If empathetic compassion is effecting your physical and/or psychological well being it may be too much. Or it may be that you might need to learn how to be compassionate and self-caring at the same time.

Are Some Totally Lacking in the Ability to Be Empathetic or Compassionate?

There are those in the clinical fields who think that, for all practical purposes, the answer to this question is “yes”. Psychotherapists, clinical psychologists and psychiatrists tend to diagnose such people as either sociopaths or psychopaths. They also tend to say that they are likely to be both incapable of love and of being cured, though they frequently can fake love and mental health rather well. This especially is true if it is to their own advantage and to other’s disadvantage to do so. Others think that with long term, quality, therapeutic help even the sociopathic and psychopathic can learn to have empathetic compassion and, therefore, can learn to do healthy, real love. In some Family Studies and Family Therapy professional groups the inability to have empathetic compassion is seen as evidence of the inability to have genuine love.

What can help?

Education, training, counseling, psychotherapy, relational therapy, self-examination and friendship all can be of considerable assistance in helping individuals and relationships grow and benefit from increases in empathetic compassion. Especially useful is the kind of training pioneered at Stanford called Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT). Research in applying CCT in counseling and therapy is occurring and looking quite promising. Joint couples and family members education concerning empathetic compassion also may be quite helpful. Asking yourself and loved ones about how you might work together to increase and better express your empathetic compassionate love might also be a good way to go.

The Answer

The original question was “Is empathetic compassion a big sign of true love? Here’s the answer, as I see it. Healthy, real love does indeed require an element of empathetic compassion, and if it does not exist in a love relationship then healthy, real love probably doesn’t exist in that relationship either. We must acknowledge that others disagree. So, what do you think?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Can you think of two ways you could improve your expression of empathetic compassion to your loved ones?

Related posts:

1. Anti-Love Myth # 1: True Love Means You’ll Know What to Do
2. Destroyers of Love – The 7 Big “Ds” Most Likely to Ruin Your Love Relationships
3. Catharsis Empathy – A Love Skill
4. Repairing Damaged Love, Best Guidelines