Work With and Without Love

Synopsis: Intriguing concepts; Successful failure; Sacrifice and imbalance, Four factors most don’t know to think about; Healthy self-love; and Asking good questions for happy, healthy, work success via love.

How do these ideas strike you? 1.  Work is to serve life, not life to serve work.
2.  To love your work and work your love is to make much of life ‘play’.
3.  The best work is ‘love made manifest’.
4.  One of the healthiest acts of self-love is to find work that you would pay to do if someone wasn’t paying you to do it.
5.  With work, love and play in balance we succeed at life.  Without all three in balance we fail at life.

Harlan told me his story which, sad to say, I’d often heard before.  His version went like this.  “I did what my upbringing taught me to do.  I put almost all my time and effort into succeeding in business.  To accomplish this success I put my wife and kids ‘on the shelf’, so to speak.  I thought I would get back to them once I had climbed high enough on the ladder of success and made enough money.  I lied to myself saying I was doing it all for my loved ones.  The trouble was my loved ones did not stay on the shelf.  "My wife ran off with a guy who doesn’t even make half of what I do.  My kids treat me like the stranger I am to them, and I only have business friends or, in other words, no real friends at all.  I enjoyed my business success so much I neglected learning how to enjoy the rest of life.  Now I am rich in money and status but concerning love and joy I live in poverty.  Please help me.” 

Well of course, I and those who work with me went to work helping Harlan learn to help himself in all his neglected areas.  After some rather intense therapy and a lot of ‘practice work’ putting concepts and realizations into healthy actions I’m pleased to say Harlan now lives a much more balanced and far happier life.

Work is such an enormous part of most people’s life.  Work is also an enormously important factor influencing how well one does healthy self-love and healthy relational love.  Yet many people do not give these aspects of their work-life much thought.  There are those who sacrifice their emotional and their relational life for work.  There also are those who sacrifice their physical health for their work.  Some people actually do work themselves to death.  Like Harlan there are many people who, perhaps unknowingly, sacrifice their love relationships for success, money, status and other work related goals.  There also are work related problems that sabotage love which hardly anyone thinks about.

Here are just four:
*    Succeeding at the wrong thing Here are some examples:  Dean is a very well-off, successful, corporate attorney but he longs to be a camp director – he loved scouting as a boy.  He dreams of this almost nightly and his anti-depression medicine seems to be working less and less.  Janet just wants to raise her kids which is what she both loves and is super good at.  However, being a high dollar, traveling, medical equipment rep just has too many payoffs, even though it takes her away from her family for weeks at a time.  Next year John swears he’s going to stop selling real estate and start back to school to become a veterinarian, but will he?  This is the fourth year he has made this proclamation.

Sarah is a rising project manager in an upscale, big-city, healthcare company but her doodles and daydreams are all about being back on a Navajo reservation working with children where her life felt most fulfilled.  Each of these people do not love their work even though they are good at it.  Sadly, they are more likely than the average person to develop stress related illnesses, damaging alcohol or prescription drug abuse, love relationship deterioration, and an existential crisis resulting in what most people call a complete breakdown.  Hopefully none of those will happen.  Each of these people just may live unfulfilled, unhappy lives being successful at the wrong occupation.

*    Loving only work It’s wonderfully healthful to love your work, enjoy your labors, revel in succeeding, be passionate about the challenges and so forth but only if you balance it with other things to love like healthy self-love, healthy relationship love, healthy love of life, healthy spiritual love, etc..  There is much more to life than work, even highly meaningful work.  People working for important causes, people manifesting their talents in the arts, professions, etc., people doing fascinating research into the great mysteries, and people just enjoying doing a really good job at something they are good at — all can be in danger of imbalanced living because their work is so rewarding and enjoyable.

*    Only tolerating your work Do you ‘love’ your work?  If you don’t do you suspect you ever will?  Many people will leave a job or occupation they hate but will stay in a vocational situation they only can tolerate.  This often is referred to as being “stuck in a dead-end job”.  It is true that a great many people’s life situation does not provide for much more than a vocational situation which is merely tolerable.  However, as an act of healthy self-love searching for better than that and risking a change can mean you will have a longer and happier life, and everybody you love and care about probably will enjoy you more.

It’s always a joy when I get to help a person find the kind of work for which they can get decent pay and be passionate about.  It’s surprising how often this leads to improved financial success.  I once helped a couple who had been saving for years to change occupations from being well-paid engineers to metal sculptors but they just were not brave enough to make the transition.  Finally they worked up their courage to go ahead and become ‘starving artists’ devoted to their passion.  However, it didn’t pan out that way because in their second year they were making twice as much money with their art as they ever had in engineering.  Sometimes it works out like this and sometimes not, but usually the life happiness level is greatly improved.

*    Poor self-love makes for a lousy work life Let me suggest that people who are high in healthy self-love tend to manifest that self-love partly by going after work that actualizes their talents and in which they find enjoyment or even great enjoyment.  Conversely, people with poor self-love and its accompanying low self-esteem and low self-confidence often put up with low satisfaction types of work and less than desirable work settings.

People with high, healthy self-love know they are worthy of good treatment and they won’t tolerate for long people or conditions that are too negative for them.  Those who grow a healthier self love seem, almost invariably, to keep making work-life improvements of one kind or another.  People weak in self-love are seldom proud of the work they do even when they do a pretty good or better job at it and often they don’t go after promotions or improved placement.  At least that is my experience with the many people I have counseled concerning these issues.

Let’s look at some questions concerning love and work.  For you, are love and work two different things or are they integrated?  Do you put love into your work?  Do you love yourself through your work?  Do you love the people you work with?  Does the way you go about work influence the way you go about love away from work?  Does the way you go about love influence the way you go about work?

Now look at a bigger question.  Are you succeeding at the big three i.e. Work, Love and Play?    Are you keeping the big three in a fair amount of balance with each other?  Will it be good for you to give some thought to your work and its influence on your healthy self-love and on your love relationships?  Hopefully this will help you examine the enormous part of life we call work.

As always – Grow and Go in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Does the word ‘work’ elicit an emotion in you that you like to feel, or an emotion you don’t like to feel, or a neutral feeling, and what do you suppose that means about you?

Related posts:

1. Does “Cougar” Love Work? 

Do You Start and Part with Love?

How do you do ‘Hi’s’ and ‘Bye’s’ with those you love?   To keep a love relationship healthy it is best if every (yes every) ‘Hello’ and ‘Goodbye’ experience includes at least a brief love connecting and sharing experience.  Every “Hello, I’m home” event is best done with a hug, a pat, a caress, a nuzzle or a kiss.  Going past each other to whatever you want to get to next without any expression of connecting love can be detrimental to your love relationships.  Likewise, every “So long” is better done with similar brief expressions of love.

In some relationships the lack of such love when parting can lead to hours of vague anxiety, worrying “is anything wrong”.  Starting off time together with a little demonstration of love means that the following time is more likely to go well.  Ending a time together with expressed and received love actions makes your next encounter more likely to be a bit sooner, a bit better and a bit more wanted.  People who start and part with love are seen as having better attitudes, better cooperation likelihood, less stress and a host of other small but significant benefits.

Many couples and many families I see in counseling for reasons of deteriorating relationships have not been greeting each other or saying goodbye to each other with any love at all.  Sometimes there is no greeting or saying goodbye what so ever.  Often when I get them to experiment with a little ‘start and part’ love action improvement begins.  This is one of the simplest and quickest ways to start toward the repair, or enhancement, of a love relationship.  Notice that this is the way most pet dogs (who were put in the world to teach us love according to an old Indian legend) do it.  Actually many apparently love- connected mammals greet and part with what looks like shows of affection.  So maybe love starting and parting is natural.

It is not only failing love relationships that often lack this love expression ‘start and part’ behavior. ‘Blah’ and ‘in a rut’ stagnant, and semi-functional relationships frequently exhibit this lack of love ‘start and part’ way of doing things.  So, I would like to suggest you check out how well your love shows in ‘start and part’ situations.  Might you do well to greet your spouse, children, friends, and maybe even yourself with an improved, more love demonstrative ‘start and part’ set of actions?  Would you like to dedicate yourself to starting every encounter with a brief but sincere show of love?

Be sure to do that before you try to take care of anything else each time you encounter a loved one even if you have been away from them only for a brief amount of time.  When coming together after work, going to the store , visiting with others, etc. making some action to lovingly touch, saying words of love followed by asking “How are you feeling” delivered with a loving tone of voice and loving facial expressions are usual ways to create a pleasant and caring environment.

Coming in from outside while saying a term of endearment like “Hello, Sweetheart”, giving a good morning kiss upon waking, smiling at first sight of one another, and adding a caress or pat are also quite helpful.  Departing with similar sentiments and behaviors works in much the same way.  If you already do these sort of things ask yourself how can you improve?  If you don’t already do this sort of ‘start and part’ love might you want to dedicate yourself to making a plan to do so, and enacting it?

If when coming together you usually begin with some sort of practical ‘what’s to be done’ talk, or ‘what has been done’ inquiry a sense of low grade aggravation is likely to grow.  If the last thing said on departure is something like “Remember to mail the letter, pickup the cleaning, do your homework”, etc. that person’s return to you is less likely to be happy.

If the last thing said is a message of love the reverse is true.  Get the practical messages said but end with an expression of love.  If the first thing said upon coming together is “Did you remember to pay the bills, do your assignment, call so-and-so”, etc. a small dose of subconscious emotional abrasion may occur.  That abrasion experience could later lead to growing difficulty, or at least to fairly strong disappointment.  If instead a happy “Hello, darling, it’s so good to be with you”, or something like that, starts a new encounter with each other it is much more likely to go smoothly.  Usually it only takes 20 seconds or less to start or part lovingly.  The return on your loving effort can yield hours of happier time together.  Of course you can take longer than 20 seconds and do it even better if you want to.

If you are the recipient of loving ‘start and part’ behaviors do you soak them up, reciprocate in kind, and cycle the love being offered?  Ignoring, or quickly moving away from such tokens of love deprives yourself and your loved one from the healthy, positive effects of these small important actions.  Unfortunately, in our fast paced, often goal oriented and impersonal daily lives there is an insufficiency of loving behaviors, so savoring those love actions that do come your way can enrich your life.

A good love relationship takes good love teamwork.  Good teamwork love takes good sending and good receiving.  Being a good receiver and an equal participant when a loved one initiates a ‘start or part’ love action helps the process of good teamwork love quite a lot.  So, if a love ‘start or part’ action comes your way take it in and send some back.

People sometimes say to me things like, “Dr. Cookerly, doesn’t starting and parting with love get to be an empty habit or meaningless activity”?  It can if you let it but it doesn’t have to.  Be creative!  Also all around the world friendly, affectionate greeting and parting rituals make life work better.  It’s healthy for those in all loving relationships to develop their own, informal love rituals.  If you get a sense that your rituals are beginning to feel empty or meaningless that might be a message from your inner wisdom-filled subconscious to do them better.

So, here’s a simple challenge.  Make an experimental ‘start and part’ with more behaviors of love action plan, and carry it out.  Then see if you and those you care about like the results.

As always – grow in love!

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Related posts:

1. Listening with Love

Heartbreak Mending and the Deep, Multi-Love Remedy

Synopsis: Heartbreak and the fallacy of time mending; heartbreak defined; heartbreak’s secret benefits; heartbreak’s dangers, and five things you can do that are likely to help are all covered in this mini-love-lesson.

Heartbreak And the Fallacy of Time Mending

We all can become heartbroken from the loss of a loved one or the loss of love itself.  Loss can come from a breakup, divorce, a death, abandonment, betrayal, a severe lasting estrangement, a major defeat in life where someone or something you truly love is lost and also by experiencing a severe contradiction to your understanding of how love is to be carried out in your life.  Wherever there is love there is the potential for love loss and, therefore, heartbreak.

The good news is wherever there is heartbreak there is the potential for heart mending.  Without mending, heartbreak can destroy people’s lives or at least large segments of people’s lives.  Therefore, knowing how to assist and hurry the mending process is very important.  Some say time alone will cure heartbreak but that is not true.  More accurately it is that given enough time we slowly, eventually may stumble across some of the things that bring about mending.  It’s what happens ‘in the time’ that makes the difference and, while for many it’s very slow, the process can be hurried somewhat when you know certain actions to take.

There are people who get stuck in their brokenhearted living and stay there for the rest of their lives, not recovering at all.  You do not have to be one of them, nor do those you care about.

What Is Heartbreak

Heartbreak can be defined as intense, emotionally painful, overwhelming and seemingly crushing distress, grief and ongoing agony over the loss of a major, love involvement.  One of the major functions of love is that it brings us into deep, heartfelt connection with the loved.

Another major, love function is that love provides us with vital, psychological, life nourishment.  When our connection to life nourishing love is lost we become at risk. Depression, despair, fear, anxiety, grief, loss of will to live, loss of energy, loss of functionality, and a sense of profound agony and emptiness can result.  These are some aspects of what true heartbreak is.

Heartbreak is seen as a more severe form of heartache, heart sorrow, having an empty heart and other terms indicating hurt is occurring over the absence, or loss, or distancing of someone or something loved.

To be truly heartbroken is a serious and dangerous condition though the term heartbreak and heartbroken are often inaccurately used to indicate milder forms of disappointment and disillusionment, usually connected to romance.  Heartbreak also can be understood as a serious, pathological, neurochemical imbalance occurring in the brain following the loss or severance an important love relationship.

Heartbreak’s Secret Benefits

Having a broken heart may tell you a lot about what you need to know.  It may tell you that the way you are going about love needs an overhaul.  The agony of a broken heart may tell you that who you are choosing, or who you are letting choose you for love relating may need some drastic change.
Heartache and heartbreak from the loss of a love may tell you how important love is in your life, and to give love much more serious attention, and not take it for granted.

Heartbreak may persuade you to expand the number of sources and kinds of real, healthy love relationships in your life.  Heartbreak can tell you to get yourself repaired and then learn how not to be so vulnerable and susceptible, but instead be stronger and more able to cope with love gone wrong.  That usually points to the need for considerable, healthy, self-love improvements.

Heartbreak often is what it takes for a person to finally re-orient and re-direct their lives into more healthy and constructive pathways.  For many people without having experienced serious, broken heart problems they never would have given love enough thought to learn how to do it well.

Heartbreak’s Dangers

Heartbreak can be quite dangerous.  Love loss can and often does bring on serious, suicidal depression.  It also can trigger major abandonment feelings and fears, and a sense of being lost in life.  Heartbreak may result in a retreat from life and an overly defeated, self protective lifestyle.  It can lower your immunity system defenses and make you vulnerable to infectious diseases, and it can cause or exacerbate stress illnesses like heart attacks and strokes.

Heartbreak is known to cause people to turn to various addictions for escape from the pain of heartbreak, although the pain still is there undealt with.  Heartbreak also is thought to be a major cause of addiction relapses.  So, if you are suffering or if someone you care about is grieving with a ‘broken heart’ watch for these danger signs and get real help.

None of these need be your result.  Most people recover from heartbreak.  Most people who get help recover faster, and sooner, and also more thoroughly.

What Helps

One approach to recovering from heartbreak is to take a deep, multi-love approach.  This means purposefully developing your healthy, real love of life, others, self, spiritual love, possibly family love, friendship love, possibly the love of a cause or a worthy involvement, and then throwing yourself into those loves.  Later you can learn to give yourself a chance at a love, similar to the love you have missing from your life, but go about it in a more likely to succeed manner.

In my work with the families of murdered children, those recovering from divorces and breakups, widows and widowers striving to recover, sole survivors of family tragedies, and in my own former recovering from love loss I have found five things that particularly can help many people get started on a path to recovery.  It takes hard work, but it’s easier than living without healthy, real love in your life.

Here are five things that you, or those you care about, can do to help recover from heartbreak:
1.    Go to counseling with a very loving, love-centered counselor or therapist.

2.    Get yourself into daily psycho-educational experiences about love, and love relationships, and everything that’s related.  This means read about healthy real love, watch video presentations, listen to audio talks, journal, search the Internet, go to classes, workshops, seminars, retreats and anything else you can find that relates to learning the how to’s of healthy, real love.

3.    Immediately, but very slowly, and in small steps involve yourself in all sorts of other love and love potential relationships with pets, friends, positive family members, groups of people who are or may be positive and loving.

4.    Increasingly do anything and everything that is potentially distracting and which later may have the potential for being enjoyable.  Start with spectator events like going to happy movies, and then later get involved in things that move your muscles a lot because motion helps change emotion usually for the better.  Even the mildest and briefest of distractions from emotional pain are useful in helping you heal and are likely to help you grow stronger the longer you repeat them.

5.    Slowly and in small steps immediately get into increasingly healthful living.  Exercise, healthy diet (including some strictly pleasurable comfort foods, especially chocolate, a mood elevator, are okay in small amounts), affirmations work, meditation, prayer, yoga, art, sports, upbeat music, nature, etc. all can be part of a healthful lifestyle.  These things first can be first done alone if you prefer, and then later with others doing similar things.  Get a physician’s help, and other health professional’s assistance, and possibly a trainer who may help with motivation. All this can be part of your healthy, self-love program.

This outline is much too brief but is aimed at helping you to get going toward heartbreak recovery, or to help someone you care about who is suffering a broken heart.  It points the way toward a ‘path that many have traveled’ to full, heartbreak recovery and beyond.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
If you already have been a survivor of serious heartbreak, do you know how you did it so that you can do it again if need be?

How To Make Love Improvements Permanent

Synopsis: Decision to make a love improvement, The usual human pattern, 7 ways to enhance getting your love improvement to be permanent, A ‘Love Success Question’ to play with.

Suppose you decide to make an improvement in the way you show your love.  Or maybe you make a decision to respond to a loved one in a more loving way.  Possibly you vow to yourself that you’re going to respond better to your loved ones in situations that are difficult.  Then you forget, and don’t do what you decided you were going to do to make your love relationship improve.  That’s human!  Old habit patterns tend to overwhelm new decisions unless you add some other things to your decisions.  Don’t be discouraged.  There are ways to make your decisions for love improvements into lasting reality.

Let’s understand a few things about human improvement.  For making an important behavioral change it usually takes from three to six months to make any new behavior permanent according to some of the psychologists who research this sort of thing.  The usual pattern involves a decision to improve, some action to effect the improvement, forgetting to do that action, recommitment, forgetting again, recommitment again, getting it right some more, forgetting some more, then doing the improvement a lot more, forgetting less, then getting it right most of the time, then only rarely forgetting again and finally you’re doing the improvement automatically and consistently.  Even so, once in a great while you might slip.  That’s what’s involved in the way many humans go about making love relationship improvements.  This may seem a bit arduous but the improvements and the joys these improvements bring, and the troubles they bypass, make it definitely worthwhile.

Remember that in love, like so many other things, you’re either going up or you’re going down.  The wisdom of the love sages of the world tells us there is no standing still without stagnation as a result.  Stagnation leads to deterioration which leads to death.  So, the hard love message seems to be we are either working to improve and grow our love relationships upward or we are drifting downward toward love relationship dysfunction and perhaps ruin.  The good news is love improvements get great results and get to be a lot of fun.

Here are seven things you can do to make the process of creating lasting love improvements easier and quicker:
1.  When you fail to act in ‘the more loving way’ you had decided to act, don’t beat up on yourself or put yourself down.  That just works to discourage, de-energize and defeat yourself.  Instead just RECOMMIT.  Remember the sport’s adages “You can’t win them all, or win them all all of the time” and “Never play strike one, I’m out, and the game is over”.  Know that those who succeed are those who fail and don’t give up.  The old Scout law teaches “…defeat does not down him (or her)” the true victor.

2.  Don’t just try to ‘stop doing’ any negative, unloving, non-loving or anti-loving behavior.  Stopping an action is a whole lot harder than REPLACING AN ACTION WITH A NEW BEHAVIOR.  Old habits tend to prevail until you program in their replacement habit.  “I’m going to stop yelling” does not work as well as “I’m going to talk softly”.

3.  Make your new love improvements BEHAVIORALLY OBSERVABLE.  It does not work very well to decide to ‘be more affectionate’ unless you add the observable behaviors of “I’m going to hug three times a day, cuddle at night and hold hands when we go to the movies”.  These are observable, exact behaviors.  While affection is a good concept it’s too broad and abstract by itself to help most people actually change.

4.  Keep a DAILY CALENDAR record for at least a month, recording your efforts to improve.  Every day you act to demonstrate your love as you have decided to do, draw a ♥ or make a  on your calendar.  Every day you don’t do what you could have done draw some other symbol.  Keep working to get more hearts or :-)’s than marks indicating you ‘missed’.

5.  TELL ONE OR MORE PEOPLE who care about you what you’re doing to make a love improvement.  Ask them to ask you how you’re succeeding every so often.  Also ask them to celebrate your victories, and say supportive things when you miss your goals.  You, of course, can offer to do the same for them.

6.  REWARD YOURSELF the first, third, fifth, seventh and 10th times you accomplish your chosen love improvement action.  Then erratically keep rewarding yourself every so often.  Rewards can be anything from self praise, to buying yourself a present, or giving yourself a special experience.  Getting your loved ones to help you with rewards also is a good idea.  Rewarded behavior continues and establishes new habits far faster than unrewarded actions.  A rewarding approach often tends to be as much as seven times more effective than a punishment approach.

7.  Every so often REMIND YOURSELF that by improving your love actions you are likely acting to improve the health, happiness and all over well-being of not only those you love but also yourself.  Medical research has shown that giving love improves the biochemistry of the giver as well as the recipient in a surprising number of very important healthful ways.

There are lots of other ways to work on making love improvements ‘lasting’ or ‘permanent’ but these seven, if you apply yourself, are likely to help quite a bit.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question What will be your effect on your loved ones and on yourself if you DON’T work to improve your ways of demonstrating your love and interacting with love?

Related posts:

1. Do You Start and Part with Love?
2. Getting Healthy, Real Love in Your Life
3. Self-Love and Its Five Healthy Functions
4. Couples Love and Relationship Education Succeeds 

Is Love Winning?

Mini-Love Lesson  #265

Synopsis: Introduction to the unheralded and poorly heralded positive, world trends of adamant and compassionate love; criticism of the news media's imbalanced negativity and how you may be letting it affect you negatively; and benefiting yourself by joining those on the love causes bandwagon.

Take heart !

Has the news media convinced you that just about everything everywhere is getting worse and worse?  Have they gotten you used to thinking that the world's corruptions, crises and conflicts far outweigh and outnumber the advances, achievements and progress?  Have the naysayers and fear mongers got you wondering if humans largely may be a declining, mean, stupid, selfish and destructive lot with far too few exceptions?

Well take heart!  There is a preponderance of growing evidence that it is a lot better than the news media and the doom and gloom folk would have you believe.  Certainly, there are big problems and frightening challenges in abundance.  However, the good, the positive, the healthful and the improvement trends of the human condition all far outweigh the negative.  Let's glance at just some of the evidence that this is the accurate, reliable truth.

Proof positive!

A huge collection of scientific evidence gathered from the world's leading social scientists, contemporary historians, behavioral economists and behavioral neuroscientists shows most, but not all, of the bad stuff is in decline and the good stuff is on the rise.  All long-term measurements of the world’s violence, starvation, poverty, active warfare, major crime, illness and a host of other maladies and negatives are slowly and erratically reducing.  That has been true since World War II ended.  Actually some of the worldwide reduction in negatives trends goes back to at least the early 1700s.

Of course, there are major setbacks from time to time and the data graphs show serious peaks and valleys.  However, the trend lines are all in the desired direction with only a few rare exceptions.  The evidence is mounting that the human race culturally and perhaps even biologically slowly is becoming less cruel, more kind, more empathetic, less indifferent to other’s suffering, less conflict prone, more cooperative, less selfish and more compassionate.

Just a short 300 hundred years ago we still were burning witches at the stake, crucifying heretics, hanging minor crime offenders like pickpockets and starving bread thieves, and it was okay to beat your slave to death for just about any reason.  Much more recently, circa mid to late 1800s+, over 90% of the infants placed in orphanages died of absence of love behavior treatment/failure to thrive causes, hundreds more children suffered death or became maimed in mines and factories during six days a week 14+ hour work days, it was legal for husbands to beat and rape a wife regularly, you could spend years in jail for having not paid your debts, and offending a person of royal privilege might get you publicly flogged and deported to a colony.

It is with the rise of the humanitarian revolution and various subsequent rights movements that all that began to change for the better.  Still today because of corporate greed and anti-democratic politicians, people are made ill or die, poor children are breathing and drinking pollution, government-sponsored child separation trauma is causing brain damage, the elderly are being cheated out of retirement savings, pockets of starvation and abject poverty continue to exist, the mentally ill are imprisoned rather than treated, weaponized  violent acts are common, minorities are discriminated against -- and on and on goes the list of grievances that need the champions of humanitarian and altruistic adamant love.  Nevertheless, victories are being won, new and better trends established and the human condition in area after area made better, or at least, less bad (see “Adamant Love – And How It Wins For All of Us All”).

Search For Better Sources

While you can't much trust the regular media to cover the positive news very well or very much, there are a number of books, Internet sites and other sources giving more accurate and more balanced accounts on how the human race is really doing.  Steven Pinker’s book, The Better Angels of Our Nature is a great place to start.  It gives a massive array of research results, from a host of valid and reliable sources accompanied by some pretty fascinating reading.  It also can lead you to other good sources for the more positive side of things.

Don't Overdose on Negative News

Do you know that a number of counselors, therapists and personal improvement coaches advise against watching much TV news.  That is because so much of that news is so negatively focused.  After watching the news, clinical reports abound telling of people becoming more depressed, more anxiety ridden, more defeatist in attitude, more afraid of going out, traveling into new areas and even just going shopping locally.

Why is so much of the news media biased toward reporting mostly the negative?  Some suggest they mostly are largely mystified and muddled about how to report the positive.  Another reason seems to be that it always has been this way in journalism.  It is almost a religious doctrine that it is bad news that sells, draws interest and captivates while good news does not.  There also is the idea that news people lag far behind in the knowledge of how to even think about the positive let alone on how to report it and make it exciting.  Bad news focus has been practiced and perfected repeatedly so that is what reporters know how to do.  It follows that reporters want crises, conflicts, crime and disasters to report on.  Without those they might not  know what to do.  The thinking is all good news days are slow news days.  For good news to make it into the headlines, it has to be spectacular, not just good, or so it seems.

Another thing is to get to the top, in the news reporters and commentators world, you have to be lucky enough to get stories of the really awful stuff first.  They want to get a scoop of the breaking (the latest tragedy, crime, crisis or conflict).  Their training is to apply as many aggression and destruction descriptive adjectives as possible.  Have you ever noticed how news givers like to talk with words like fight, hostilities, battle, combat, attack, feud, punch, hit, strike, aggression, assault, etc.  This usage especially is common when reporting about politics.

Local news programs especially are bad about mostly reporting murders, auto accidents, burning houses and other news you really cannot use in your regular life except, perhaps for getting you used to staying home and being afraid or upset.

Now, to be an appropriately informed citizen, a certain amount of ongoing news is required.  Due to the growth of fake and biased, or one-sided news, it is important to listen to opposing sources.  Also, since the world at large increasingly influences everyone's local life, world news, good and bad, is important.  Actually, there usually are some pretty positive, funny and exciting things going  on out in the world you may want to seek out and enjoy if you do not already.

Warnings

If after watching or reading the news, you notice you feel vaguely or decidedly worse, cutback on the news and see if that helps.  If you notice family disagreements and all-over level of family positive interactions are diminishing, cutback on your news consumption.  If you notice a tendency to increasingly stay home and not go out into your outside world, cutback.  If you notice you more easily are angered, irritated, anxious, annoyed and frustrated, cutback.  Then as you make a news cutback, you might seek out some positive, funny and/or inspiring things on the Internet or you might talk more with upbeat friends and family.

Getting on the Love Victory Bandwagon

Love, healthy real love that is, is about highly valuing and when possible benefiting the health and well-being of the loved.  While the indicators of love winning in more and more places and ways, the enemies of love (hate, indifference, greed, bigotry, authoritarianism, cruelty, parochialism, destructive addictions, false love, proneness to violence, etc.) are all too active in our world today.  Those destructive forces work to defeat the valuing, the benefiting, the health and the well-being of the loved and potentially of the yet to be loved.  Only the perpetrators of those forces are benefiting.

Although the evidence is that love is more and more winning, the anti-love forces in the world still can win and destroy us all.  So, if you already are not, I urge you to join the forces of adamant and compassionate love.  The way you do that is to love everybody you love as well as you can and keep learning how to do that even more.  Then expand your range, if you already have not, by joining with those wonderful people involved in the many causes of love.  There are at least a 1000 of those, all with many marvelous people involved, all working to advance love-based goals, causes, efforts and movements all over the world.

That will very likely and perhaps profoundly benefit your own personal world of healthy, real love in both surprising and fulfilling ways.

One more thing:  Think about getting in a good, friendly argument with someone over whether or not love is winning in the world.  Be sure to keep it lovingly friendly and see where it leads.  If you do that, please be sure to mention this site and its many mini-love-lessons.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable questions:  If I only act with love toward those who already love me, am I not drastically limiting my life experience?  AND, If I only act with love toward those who are quite similar to me, might I not be drastically reducing my possibilities for life enrichment as well as my life’s adventures of love?