Tolerational Love

Mini-Love-Lesson # 283

Synopsis:
Tolerational love is full of benefits.  It can bring acceptance, leniency, the possibility of forgiveness, flexibility, the allowance for imperfection and the maintenance of connectedness in bonded, love relating.  Tolerational love is great for avoiding arguments and other conflicts over inconsequential and less than serious areas of dispute. Tolerational love also is responsible for keeping a great many couples, families and friendships together, for facilitating reconnecting of those disconnected and for getting past troubles which otherwise would split up relationships.  Tolerational love also clears the way for much more appreciation, enjoyment and the teamwork of constructive love relating. All the time and energy spent in stupid, little disputes, contention over minor factors, unimportant slights and all the other small stuff is freed up for happier and more constructive interaction when there is sufficient tolerational love.

Love adds a lot to tolerance.  Love motivates all the behaviors that show and demonstrate toleration.  By adding the kindness and empathy that is so representative of love itself, toleration is amplified.  When we love someone special, or some group like a family, or even when we love altruistically and for humanitarian reasons, toleration is empowered by that love. When we have healthy, real love for someone, we tolerate their less pleasant aspects -- unless that tolerance supports harmfulness, as in tolerating a physical or substance abuser.

Toleration without love, never-the-less, is a positive attribute.  Often it is more like putting up with something or enduring and just getting past a negative.  Tolerance by itself can be part of being fair and just, minus the feelings of kindness and empathy that love brings.  None the less, sympathy, empathy and pity sometimes may be present within tolerance.  Another difference between tolerance and tolerational love is tolerance, by itself, frequently is short range focused.   For example, we may tolerate loud music for a short time but not day in and day out.  Tolerational love tends to have a longer range focus.  For instance, tolerational love is exemplified by the forbearance given in the long term care of a loved one with a chronic illness.  In short, tolerance lacking love can be done without one’s heart being in it.  Tolerational love, in contrast, magnifies the quantity and quality of the benefits involved.

Intolerance is antithetical to love.  Intolerance sets the stage for disharmony and conflict, robbing us of peace and security.  Intolerance communicates rejection and exclusion.  Intolerance can be seen as narrow minded, prejudiced, biased, dictatorial and unforgiving (“Parenting Series: How To Love Your Child Better” see #6). Intolerant people often are lonely people because their actions tend to exclude and push away others, or they mostly associate with the like-minded and consequently have a narrow societal experience.  A concept to consider about intolerant people is that they may come across as egotistical and arrogant but, in fact, they may lack healthy, real self-love.  It is clinically thought that if intolerant people become healthfully loved, their ability to be more tolerant grows.

Walking in another’s shoes, seeing through another’s eyes or empathetically feeling what another is feeling all speak to understanding, both mentally and emotionally, where another person is coming from.  Having a tolerant, heart-felt approach to humankind, especially to our loved ones, is a best practice in love relating.  

If we can fend off taking things personally, wearing our heart on our sleeve or easily taking offence, we can avoid a great many interpersonal battles.  Tolerational love helps to keep the peace and grow our chances for mutual harmony.

There are some modern enemies of Tolerational Love to watch out for.  Feelings of entitlement can foster intolerance, so can any form of authoritarianism.  Cancel-culture mindsets and behaviors can be filled with intolerance.  That is where meanness and hypercritical blaming are filled with intolerance   Anything that inhibits or censors free speech may involve intolerance.  Intolerance can be seen as imposing one’s own values on another.  Tolerational love can require learning to lovingly listen to things you do not want to hear, at least for a while.  Too long can be detrimental if it is abusive.  Usually, this kind of listening gets easier with more self-love and really owning our own OKness (see “Listening With Love”).

The development of appreciation helps make toleration easier because the more things we appreciate about another the less we focus on the negative.  If we look for what to appreciate in the many ways we are different instead of looking for what to criticize or disdain, we can improve our lives and the lives of others.  An appreciative, love environment fosters everyone’s well-being and happiness.

One more thing

If you talk-over the ideas in this mini-love-lesson with another, it will help to implant them in your own head and maybe in their's which is a good thing, we think. If you do that, please mention our site as the source of a whole lot of ways love can be done and done better. Thank you.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love success question: Can you listen to intolerance long enough to try to lovingly affect it?

Cycling Love for Lasting Love

Synopsis: Here you learn the ‘why’ of love cycling; how thinking about love cycling takes a different kind of thinking; what love cycling really is; the benefits of love cycling; what can go wrong; and what to do next with this knowledge.

Why Love Cycling

Do you want your love relationships to last?  Couple’s love, parent-child love, family love, friendship love and even healthy self-love all become much more likely to be long lasting if you, and your love ones, become good at cycling love.  Not only that, but those who are good at love cycling are likely to enjoy more love, and get more of love’s many emotional and physical health making benefits.  Without love cycling, love relationships tend to be either puny, compared to what they might become, or they are more likely to wither and die.

Thinking about Love Cycling Takes a Different Kind of Thinking

Many people aren’t very good about thinking systemically.  They know how to think about individuals but have trouble wrapping their minds around the systems people operate in.  Here some examples to help you think this different way.  Five mediocre basketball players, who have a really good system of fine teamwork, often can defeat five star players whose teamwork system is poor.  It is the system of interacting that makes the better team, rather than individual ability.  This became abundantly clear to me when I was involved in some research that discovered psychologically healthy, okay individuals could have bad marriages, and people with certain kinds of mental health problems could have good marriages.

Coaches, of every kind of team, have to know how to think systemically about their teams, as a whole, and not just about its individuals, though that too is important.  People suffering from addictions, criminal pasts and certain kinds of mental health problems, who move back to old neighborhoods or their old family, often get sucked into the toxic system that continues to exist in those environments.   That, in turn, triggers their old problems to recur and again they become part of the old system.  Going to live in new and different living situations, with new and different interaction systems, often works far better.

Couples joint counseling and family therapy are much better at getting interaction systems to improve than is individual therapy.  Especially in couples therapy, those who cannot think and operate systemically may not improve.  Listen to Alexander.  “For the longest time I could only think, if my wife would just make a few improvements everything would become okay.  Then I decided it was only me who needed to make the changes.  But both ways of thinking, (she needs to change) (no, I need to change), never helped.  Then I learned that when one of us got unhappy it almost immediately triggered the other one into unhappiness.  It was simultaneously, therefore, both of us in a bad joint system”.

He continued with, “Our system started triggering each other’s frustration, upsetness, anger, fear and mutual defensive dysfunction.  We were, in unison, making an ever escalating, circular system which was destroying our relationship and spiraling us down into failure.

It wasn’t until we replaced that bad, old circular system with ‘love cycling’, that we together created a new system spiraling us up into the happy love we have now.  Whatever either one of us did individually to try to fix our relationship problems, did not work.  It wasn’t until both of us were trying, at the same time, and in the same way, that we worked as a cooperating team.  It wasn’t until we both jointly were using the same, better system, that things improved.  That’s what fixed us”.

Think of a football team and a ballet troupe.  If half the team are running one play and the other half is running some other play; or half a ballet troupe are dancing one dance and the other half a different dance, dysfunctional chaos and confusion will result.  In both, the team and the troupe, one half is likely to be telling the other half that they should be doing things their way, and arguing about it.  The members of the team and the troupe are all doing what they think is the right thing to do, and in fact they are right, from their own perspective.  None of them are doing anything really wrong or bad.

They can be running the play or dancing the dance they think they should be running or dancing quite well, but not in coordination with the other half of their own team or troupe.  That is what so often happens in couples and families when they are not all interacting in the same system.  No matter how well they do individually, until they are in a mutual successful system, the best they can do may not be good enough.

Now, let’s see if we can use this kind of systemic thinking to understand love cycling.

What Is Love Cycling?

In its simplest form, love cycling means this systemic process.  Person number one says or does something that conveys some love to person number two, who then sends love back to person number one.  Then they keep doing that, which forms a circular, feedback loop of giving and getting love actions.  But there’s more to it than that.  Person number two has to notice the incoming love action and actively take it in, and then let themselves feel at least somewhat loved.  Person number two must let, or choose to let, themselves feel loving back toward person number one.  Person number two then has to choose to do some action or words conveying love in return to person number one.

After that they actually have to do what they choose to do.  The two of them, together, have then created one complete turn of a love cycle.  If person number one and two repeatedly keep operating in this receiving and sending, circular fashion, they can be said to be ‘love cycling’.  If this becomes their common way of operating and interacting, they will have created their joint, love cycling, systemic pattern of interacting with mutual interacting love.


What Are the Benefits of Love Cycling?
The existence of that circulating pattern of loving interaction, tends to have a very bonding together influence on couples.  This then frequently results in a lasting love relationship.  Not only that, but the cycle tends to wonderfully generate increasing and more powerful, growing love.  Think of an electric motor going round and round, generating more and more power.

That is how love cycling often works.  Then if a couple adds occasional doses of pleasant surprises, playful variety, exciting sexuality, comforting tenderness and the many other ways of giving love, they are, in effect, feeding each other a rich, healthy diet of nurturing love in an ongoing cycling system.  That cycling pattern is likely to keep them healthfully functioning as a couple for a very long time in spite of whatever adversities may come their way.

What Can Go Wrong

All sorts of things can get in the way of cycling love.  Here are just a few of the major ‘monkey wrenches’ that can be thrown into the love cycling machinery.  If either one of a couple thinks, or has been brought up to subconsciously think, that it is the other one’s job to take care of the love in the relationship, failure is likely.  That is like half a team expecting the other half to do all the work.  Almost as bad, is one person thinking that they themselves must do all the work.  That means they never get around to the essential teamwork of couples love.  Both partners in a couples love relationship have to communicate what they want the next ‘play’ or ‘dance’ to be, and have a way of mutually choosing a joint course of action, and then carrying it out, with each doing their part.  When one, or both, just expect the other one to know what to do, according to how they themselves think, it is likely to go awry.

Some couples are like two performers attempting to sing a duet but they are singing different songs, so all they make is noise.  Until they are using the same song, i.e. system, it is not going to work.  There are hundreds of other things that can go wrong, and about those I suggest you are going to want to read the mini-love-lessons listed in the Subject Index under the “Pain and Problems” heading at this site.  I also, egotistically but truly, highly recommend our new e-book Real Love, False Love, exclusively available at this site, and our older, but still proving to be super useful to couples, book Recovering Love.  That one is especially useful for couples who face addiction issues and is available at www.amazon.com .

What to Do Next

The next thing to do probably is start thinking about how what you do, or say, may trigger someone you love into saying, or doing, what you don’t want them to do or say.  Then also think, how you let what they say, or do, trigger you into doing things, or saying things, they do not want you to say or do.  Add to that, thinking about what you do, or say, that also triggers them into doing saying things you do like, and vice versa.  By doing that, you will begin to have some ideas about your ‘joint system’ with that person you love.  Just about every couple has both negative and positive cycling going on, but they don’t know to think of it as a ‘joint interactive system’.

After that thinking exercise, it might be very good to talk to a beloved of yours about all this, and perhaps get them to read the same things you are reading.  Then start talking about how you want to work as a team in joint, coordinated action.  There is a mini-love-lesson at this site called ‘Competitive Niceness’.  I recently heard from the couple who invented that ‘game’ (or positive interactive system).  Going toward retirement, they moved both their offices into their home, which has accelerated their competitive niceness rivalry, and made for all kinds of new, happy, loving, competitive niceness events in their life together – to the point of each trying to sneak into the kitchen first to do the dishes, to surprise the other, and other hilarious and loving behaviors. Maybe you and yours can do the same.

Hopefully this will help you have a good, starter understanding of love cycling and how to use it in your life.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Do you ever think with the question “What am I doing, that triggers you into doing, what I do not want you to do”, or the question “What am I doing, that triggers you into doing, what I do want you to do”?

Related posts:

1. Listening With Love – Are You Good At It?
2. Listening with Love
3. Wall and Catapult Love Destruction & How To Avoid It
4. Learning About Love – Together
5. Anti-Love, Non-Love & Real Love 

Holding Hands with Love

Synopsis: This mini-love-lessons starts with questions you may not have thought of concerning holding hands; then works to help you examine your own inner programming concerning hand holding and love; and what you can do with this knowledge; and more.

Questions of Holding Hands

Have you ever given thought to how you hold hands with someone you love?  Do you know how you want your hand held by someone who loves you?  Do you, like many, want your hand held differently depending on how you feel at the time?  Are you good at conveying love via holding the hand of a loved one? Are you good at letting yourself feel loved when your hands are held by someone loving you?  Do you hold hands quite frequently, just every so often, or rarely?  Why?

Are there people, family members, dear friends, etc. you love that you would not hold hands with?  Why?  Did you grow up in a family, neighborhood or culture where there was a lot of the holding of hands going on, or the reverse?  Do you hold a loved one’s hands more or less for the same amount of time as what was going on around you when you were growing up, or do you know?  Would you, or the one you are most likely to hold hands with, desire more frequent or different holding hands experiences?

You might wonder, why ponder all these questions over such a simple thing as holding hands.  The reason is, holding hands is a major way to show and share love, and there is a lot more to it than you might think.

Hands: The Great Tools of Artful Love

Our hands are incredible!  Our hands have millions of nerve endings capable of receiving a vast array of stimulations, both physical and psychological.  Through the hands the emotion centers of the brain can be triggered into feeling a great many different things, including feeling loving and loved.  With touch, including the holding of hands, we are capable of giving messages of love that can vary from delicate and tender to strong and powerful.

Holding hands can convey comfort, support, security, connectedness, shared joy, playfulness, cherishing, enthusiasm, sensuality and, of course, with these emotions hands can convey love itself.  Holding hands, therefore, can be part of the way people come to experience the many emotions of love together.

The artful lover can vary holding hands by greater or lesser palm pressure, intertwining fingers, squeezing or giving very soft touch, and many other subtle, small movements.  In making these variations, different emotions may be felt and conveyed or triggered.  There is some evidence to suggest that people who love each other may experience a neuro–electrical interchange and harmonizing phenomena when holding hands.  That, in turn, may have something to do with feelings of being bonded together or feeling deeply united.

The Many Ways of Holding Hands with Love

Holding hands side-by-side, two hands holding one hand, two hands holding two hands, holding hands walking together, holding hands sitting side-by-side, holding hands in the moonlight, holding one hand as you lay back and relax after making love, holding hands as you pray or meditate together, holding hands at times of mutual excitement and exultation, holding hands at times of sorrow, holding hands at times of celebration, holding hands when one is in pain, and holding hands during day-to-day ordinary life: all these, and many more, can be times of hand holding with love.  Each of those times can be moments of cherished, precious nurturing and united loving by way of holding hands.

The Importance of Place and Situation

Frequently holding hands in special places and situations enhances the sharing and connecting of those who love each other.  Hand holding also assists in generating more love and more lasting love.  When needed, hand holding also can be very helpful to love’s healing influence.  This healing effect often can facilitate the repair of a wounded relationship, or aid a troubled person, or even be assistive to physical healing.

Holding hands while looking at awesomely beautiful, natural wonders frequently is said to double the pleasure of the viewing experience.  Also often reported, hand holding assists the people who are holding each other’s hands to connect, not only to each other but to the transcendental, the universal and the divine.  Whether they are holding hands while looking at the natural wonder of a gorgeous mountain range, or a newborn baby, or are looking into each other’s eyes, this metaphysical or spiritual sense of connection is enhanced by their hands connecting.

Holding hands in the hospital, in a place of worship and reverence, at a funeral, in a court room, at a graduation, in a place of danger, or in any other place or situation of special significance, hand holding has been known to make major differences in how people feel in those experiences.  So, if you are going to make good use of holding hands to give, receive and generate love, give some thought to place and situation.

Examining Your Holding Hands’ Program

Around the world people grow up with different hand holding customs and cultural training.  In some countries, societies, cultures and subcultures, and also in some families, there are strong social rules governing the do’s and don’t’s of holding hands.  In some, the rule is ‘no public showing of physical affection’.  In others, the rule is ‘no public male with female physical contact’, including the holding of hands; but in some of those female with female public hand holding is acceptable, and in some not.

In some communities it is quite common and acceptable for men to hold hands and in others it is forbidden.  In still others, men holding hands is considered homosexual and okay, and in others it is just friendly.  Then there are those places where any signs of affection between men is forbidden, and in a few countries even illegal and could lead to imprisonment, public flogging and even execution.

Almost everywhere these rules are under attack and are slowly changing.  These changes, however, are meeting with a great deal of resistance in various localities.  Anyone holding hands, other than a child’s hands, may be scolded by local elders and authorities in some places.  Fathers and grandfathers holding teenager’s hands is considered quite inappropriate and suspicious in some lands.  The more conservative religious leaders of a number of faiths preach and teach against holding hands, except with one’s legitimate spouse and only in private.  In other religious settings holding hands is accepted, or encouraged, or actually is part of certain ceremonies.

In many places, a sort of new rule seems to be being offered.  It is something like ‘holding hands, and lots of other physical affection between any two or more people, in any place is a good thing because it helps make our world a more loving world’.  All of these rules, standards, customs, etc. have a programming effect in the subconscious of many people, perhaps including you.

If you have not already, we urge you to raise into your conscious awareness, the training or programming effects of your own upbringing and cultural influences.  Then see if you are unknowingly abiding by that programming and, if so, do you consciously wish to alter it?  Will making some changes regarding holding hands improve the giving, getting and generating of love in your love relationships?  That is how you might use this knowledge.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Are you now going to experiment with more holding hands with someone you love?

Kissing with Love

Synopsis: We start with a kiss puzzle; then address a kiss learning question and give steps you might want to take along with some important things to consider about love-filled kissing; then we go on to great kiss reception; and some thoughts about what could get in the way; then we end with a personal challenge question.

A Kissing Puzzle

“His kisses are so filled with love,” Angela sighed.  “There’s something about the way she kisses me that makes me feel like I am really loved and really special,” Brad affirmed.  “The way he kisses me is totally hot and sexy, and it really turns me on.  But I don’t feel any love in it,” Claire protested. 

Donald moaned, “my lover is such a romantic kisser.  The trouble is it’s just romance.  I don’t feel any love in it”.  “Evelyn sighed and said, “I wish when I kiss or get kissed there was something more to it.  It’s nice but it’s always kind of blah; no sex, no romance and nothing I’d call kissing with love feelings”.

What is going on or not going on for the people who made those statements about kissing?  Is there a problem in the way they kiss or the way their partners kiss?  Is it that love’s magic is sometimes in the kiss and sometimes not?  Does it have something to do with the way they saw kisses done in the families they grew up in?   Does it have something to do with the mood or attitude at the time of kissing?  Is the answer in their neurochemistry?  Were they, as children, somehow traumatized with kissing?  Do some people have good kissing teachers and some not?  Are all of them in some type of false love and so they just can’t feel any real love?

The answer to the above questions is – maybe all of these things and other answers too. Biochemistry is likely to be part of it because the saliva in people who are feeling love and the people who are not feeling love is perhaps rather different.  There also may be tiny neuro-electrical differences sensed only in the non-conscious mind.  Definitive research on this has yet to be done.

Can We Learn to Make Our Kisses More Love Filled?

I think the answer to this is probably yes, and you really have to put your heart into it.  Here are three ways and some additional things to think about that may help you do the giving, the getting and the growing of real love through kissing.

∙    First, before you do anything else, take a few seconds to center yourself in your love for the person you are about to kiss. (See mini-love-lesson “Love Centering Yourself”).  You might want to use mental imaging, or something similar, and fantasize your love pouring up from your heart and across to your loved one through your kiss.

∙    Along with love centering yourself, mentally see yourself putting everything else out of your mind except your love.

∙    As a you start to kiss purposefully, tell yourself you are opening yourself to letting your love out and your loved one’s love in.  You are filling with love and pouring love into your beloved.  You both are wonderfully saturated with love.  Focus on those or similar thoughts as you begin the kiss.  Then just feel what you feel.

Here are some additional things you might want to give thought to.
Kissing with love often begins with the eyes and the facial expressions of love. Sometimes looking at someone with love, especially if they are looking back with love, is done at some distance and sometimes it starts just inches away from each other.  These looks may be of tenderness, may be intense, may be caring, or may be a sweet happy smile.

∙    How you move toward someone to kiss them is important too.  The movement toward starting a love-filled kiss often is a bit slow but very direct.  The slowness helps the other person mentally and emotionally start to psychologically connect with you before the physical kiss actually happens.  The directness helps them mentally and emotionally feel that energized intimacy is starting to happen with you.  Fast surprise kisses also can convey love but usually not with the precious, cherishing feelings of the kisses that are approached more slowly and directly.

∙    Closing the eyes first on the part of the recipient, and then the initiator, often helps.  This allows a fuller focus on the feeling of the kiss and the emotions that come with it, without visual distraction or interference.

∙    Touching with hands, arms and body are also important to creating a love-filled kiss.  With a loving embrace, the kiss becomes a total body experience.  Caresses, so long as they are not too sexual, holding hands, and light fingertip gliding touches on the back, neck, cheeks, arms, etc. can assist a person feeling this really is about being loved.

∙    The length of time the kiss takes also has importance.  Usually lingering a bit, and truly savoring the experience, and not darting away too soon helps to both convey love and receive love feelings.
∙    Be aware of lip pressure and movement.  Kissing can be very light and tender, or more firm and passionate.  It kind of depends on what a person likes and wants to feel.  In the love-filled kiss, there may be some lip movement but again it is important for it not to be too sexual so that it can be really about love first and most.

∙    Parting from the kiss is the next important part.  After lips part, it usually is important to keep looking into the eyes of the person you have just kissed and continuing to lovingly touch them with your hands for a bit, then slowly pull apart while really savoring the experience.  That often is very enhancing to the love feelings possible.

Those are pretty specific instructions.  What I want to convey is for you to make kissing a love-filled art.  You may prefer eyes open – fine.  Your partner may not like the face touched much, that is OK.  Talk about your kisses, then give and ask for what you really like, as long as ‘love’ is the main ingredient.

Receiving a Love-Filled Kiss

How well do you think you receive a love-filled kiss?  Do you respond in kind?  Do you really focus on opening to the love coming in?  Do you let yourself feel fully and really loved?  Do you think things like “I’m really being loved at this moment”?  Do you think you really savor, digest, absorb and let yourself intensely experience the kissing with love you are receiving?  Are you able to be ‘in the here and now’, and nowhere else as you are kissed and kiss back?  Remember, receiving love well is a major way to give love.

What Can Get in the Way

Lots and lots of things can get in the way and block love being given, received and generated in a kiss.  Fear and its cousins, apprehension and anxiety, can do it.  Self-doubt, self-consciousness, feeling unworthy, insecurity and allowing distraction can operate to deprive you of the love experience in a kiss.  Coming from habit instead of love may dilute the kiss for both of you.  Worry about anything, trying to impress, focusing in the future or the past, guilt, duty, work, embarrassment, shame connected to anything, feeling clumsy, awkward, inferior or superior, all can take you away from fully experiencing the kiss and the love that may be coming with it.

Letting any of these things occur can crowd your mind and prevent you from fully feeling a love-filled kiss.  That can make the experience far less than you both might want it to be.  It also can have a negative effect on the person you are being kissed by.  Any of these things might make you pull away too soon, or make you move in some less than loving way.  Such movements can be interpreted as rejection, repulsion, discomfort with intimacy, valuing the person kissing you as relatively unimportant, or in some other way sending an anti-love message.

So, as you think about these things, how are you doing at giving, getting and growing love through love-filled kissing?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Who are you going to kiss next, and how are you perhaps going to make it a truly love-filled kiss?

Self Talk for Improving Love

Synopsis: This mini love lessons starts with the surprising importance of self talk; then goes to what is self talk; what is positive and negative self talk; some things to do about better self talk and love relationship improvement; more.

The Surprising Importance of Self Talk

Self talk is very important in all sorts of ways.  It can be especially useful in improving love relationships.

Recently researchers were surprised to learn just how important self talk could be to our physical, mental, emotional and relational health.  Negative self talk can lower one’s immunity, cause destructive stress hormones to flow in the body, and increase a whole lot of other physically, unhealthy things.  Mental efficiency is decreased, anxiety mounts, and self confidence can take a dive, all because of negative self talk.  It is thought that couples who practice negative self talk tend to fight more, and breakup more and are far less happy in their relationships.  The allover happiness in families seems to decrease if there is an abundance of negative self talk.  Certain kinds of positive self talk have produced the exact opposite results in individuals, and couples, and families and friendship networks.

What Is Self Talk?

Self talk has to do with how we talk out loud, or silently to ourselves about ourselves.  It includes what we think about our own thinking, our feelings and our behavior past, present and future.  It expresses our attitude toward who we are, how we are, and what is best and worst about ourselves.  Self talk is seen as ‘setting us up’ for future success or failure.  Self talking can encourage or discourage us when facing difficulties, help us feel weak or strong, and many other similar things depending on whether self talk is negative or positive.

What Is Positive and Negative Self Talk?

If the way you talk to yourself, about yourself and your life is mostly critical, judgmental, full of putdowns, punishing remarks, demeaning, derogatory, fearful, guilt ridden, hopeless, deficiency-oriented, etc. then it is negative and very likely quite unhealthy.  If, on the other hand, the way you talk to yourself is realistically balanced toward the positive, affirmative, laudatory, self rewarding, encouraging, challenging; if it is toward improvement, includes recognition of limitations without bad feeling, is more proud of attributes than unhappy about shortcomings and is in awe of the many miracles that make up a self, then it is likely to be very positive and quite helpful and healthful.  The inclusion of mild self depreciatory humor coupled with pride of qualities and achievements, and the ability to enjoy one’s own idiosyncratic ways also can be seen as part of the positive picture.

Where Does Our Self Talk Come From?

Originally most of our self talk comes from the way we were talked to is a child and the way we heard others around us talking when we were young.  If we had a highly critical parent we are likely to talk to ourselves about ourselves in highly critical ways.  If, on the other hand, our parents were more realistically prone to appreciative affirmation, praise and compliments and thankful statements, we are much more likely to talk to ourselves about ourselves in the same way.  Some therapists like to explain this as ‘your incorporated copy of your parents’ or your ‘inner parent self’ talking to you from your subconscious.

Self talk can come from how you choose and teach yourself to talk to yourself about yourself.  That can replace old messages with new and better messages.  And, of course, this re-training takes a fair amount of work but usually it is quite worth it.

How Does Self Talk Effect Love Relationships?

Self talk has a number of important positive or negative effects on our love relationships. One of them works this way.  If we are talking continuously critically and ‘down’ to ourselves, it may help us to tend to try only for love relationships with those who are less than we see ourselves to be.  This can lead us to repeatedly get involved with ‘losers’.  If we do achieve a love relationship with someone better than we see ourselves to be, that negative self talk can assist us in feeling insecure, suspect our love mate will find someone better than we are, and abandon us for that person.  Thus, jealousy, possessiveness and fear-based relating can come to dominate our relationship instead of healthy, real love.

If you continually put yourself down in self talk, you are likely to go down emotionally, making you less fit for good, love relating.  You also can make yourself very suspicious, mistrusting and unbelieving when affirmational  love comes your way.  That can help you end up love-starved.  Those who have adequate, healthy self-love are better at being nourished by the love that does come their way.  When you do realistic, positive, self-affirmation self talk, you have more to give and you are more likely to go around in your world more friendly and more loving.  That generally attracts other people who want to be friendly and loving to you.

By the way, coming across egotistical, stuck up, superior, etc. does not represent a person who actually loves themselves healthfully, but rather someone who is trying too hard but in self-defeating ways.  So, it is okay to brag briefly, which many people find rather charming because it shows you believe in yourself and are confident about yourself, but remember – briefly.

Self Talk for Healthy Self-Love

It turns out that realistic, positive self talk can be super important for the development of healthy self-love.  Being able to encourage yourself through a challenge with “You can do it” and similar affirmations, can make a huge difference as to whether you will succeed or not.  Healthy, loving self talk can help you to be proud of yourself for accomplishments, attributes, qualities, etc..  And loving, positive self talk generally can help you be more effective and happier with yourself and with your life.

Talking to yourself hatefully or in any other way negatively, or just indifferently, tends to have a weakening effect which can lead to increased anxiety and depression.

The Importance of Positive, Future-Oriented Self Talk

One of the best ways for self talk to help a love relationship improve, works like this.  Imagine saying to yourself, “Hello John (or whatever your name is).  I’m your inner self and I want to tell you to give a lot more physical affection and praise to your wife today.  You really can make her feel especially good, like no one else can, so get busy and start right now.  You want to become a more loving person and this will help you do just that, and it will keep you getting better at it.”  You can talk, challenge and orient yourself to love improvements by encouraging yourself to learn and practice getting good at the major love skills taught in the mini-love-lessons found at this site.  Encouraging self talk is often a big help in going forward with just about everything.  Obviously, discouraging self talk has the opposite effect.

Be and Do Self Affirmation

Do you ever tell yourself you are worth loving?  Do you own-up to the fact that you are a wondrous bunch of miracles and that is the nature of your being?  You don’t have to do anything but recognize that, and feel good about it because it is a ‘being’ thing rather than a “doing” thing.  You are a unique work of art that also can get something done.  Both your being and your doing make you worthwhile, not just your doings.  You can see yourself by one or both of two ways.  Either your being is a wondrous work of God or of millions of years of evolution.  Either way, you are a bundle of miracles – own that!

Self Love’s Relationship to Other Love and Self Talk

Have you heard it said “you have to love yourself in order for other people to love you”?  That is not exactly true but it hints at an important idea.  It does seem to work out that the more you healthfully love yourself the better others will love you too.  A lot of love-filled self talk often seems to result in more love coming your way from others.  That is probably because you become more lovable and probably more loving by that kind of self talk.

Some Things to Do for Better Self Talk and Love Relationship Improvement

Try writing down some statements you would like to hear you tell yourself.  Then do it.  Tell yourself statements you want someone else to tell you, and then ask them to do so as you also tell those statements to yourself.  Make a list of ‘100 Good Things’ about yourself – small, medium and large things; then talk positively to yourself about how each of those things is true and be happy about it.  Then get someone you love to do the same thing.

Then say things from each other’s list to each other.  Give yourself praise and be glad about how you are unique and different from others, instead of being a dull, normal copy of other people’s standards.  Work to be more ‘up’ on yourself than down on yourself every day, and do that with the words you say to yourself.  Also you might want to get a copy of the June, 2015 issue of Psychology Today, which has as its main feature article, a rather good presentation about Your Inner Voice.  It touches on recent discoveries and what is known, useful and important about self talk.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What do you think of the idea that says your self love determines how much and how well others will love you?

Related posts:

1. Can You Talk about Sex – with Love?
2. Listening With Love – Are You Good At It?
3. Additive Talking – A Love Skill
4. Critiquing without Criticizing 

The Fourth Key Is Love

Synopsis: First we introduce the four wondrous, summation keys for a full long life; then we talk about ‘Aiming’ your love; unlearning issues; the biggest love lie; a great truth about love; and finally, paths by which to love more.

Four Keys to a Good, Long Life

Are you Interested in living a full, long, healthy life?

There are four keys, according to Dr. Dean Ornish, a much noted physician whose research and many publications, including his excellent book Love and Survival, focuses on living healthfully longer and having a high-quality, enriched life. After reviewing a huge number of studies, he concluded that living well and longer can be boiled down to four major areas in which your actions can make an enormous difference. There are two big areas to do more of and two other big areas to do less of.

For people in the developed world, the number one key is eat less, the number two key is move more, the number three key is stress less and the fourth key is love more! The next issue to ponder is how to do well in each of those four, big, key areas? There are lots of subcomponents you can learn about from many sources concerning diet, exercise and stress management. But what about love? Well, if you have been reading many entries on site you know that there are many components, factors and applications you can learn concerning love, and that is what we are focusing on here.

Aiming to Love More

Loving more is probably going to take you thinking more about love, actively studying more about love and, most of all, practicing love actions more. It also helps to have a lot of love questions to ask yourself, and maybe talk them over with others. Questions like: Who and what are you going to love more? How much do you know about all the actions that convey love? What do you do about receiving love? What is your involvement with altruistic love? Are you good at love adventures? How much do you know about the differences between real and false love? Indeed, there are at least 1000 more questions to get excited about, and enriched by, as you search and find answers. You might want to start by thinking of where is it best for you to begin to aim your love efforts? Also, exactly how will you increase your love studying and learning?

Unlearning May Also Be Necessary

Unfortunately, there are many false teachings, destructive cultural messages, misleading traditions and counterproductive societal norms which may have gotten into your head concerning love. All those may lead you to fail at love. It seems we are just now beginning to start understanding what makes healthy, real love. Interestingly, down through the ages there are many ‘wisdom Masters’ who seem to have known all along what science is just now discovering. Then there is false love and its several syndromes lurking there to lead you astray. You may have to examine what has gotten into your head that you might need to unlearn. Without unlearning the falsehoods you can’t go freely onto the better knowledge about ‘loving more’. (To help you with that, look at the entries on this site, in the Subject Index under Love Myths).

The Biggest Lie About Love

One false teaching or understanding about love deserves special attention. It comes in lots of different variations. Basically, it is the myth that says “love is all done by mysterious, perhaps supernatural magic which is out of your control and, therefore, there is nothing you can really do about love. It is all done by luck, fate, the stars, one deity or another, or who knows what. If you are a ‘star-crossed lover’, or just unlucky at love, well too bad, you lose, and that is all there is to it.” However, I suspect you don’t really believe that or you would not be reading this right now.

If you even subconsciously or semi-consciously sort of think that big lie might be true, you can be in danger of that belief (or suspicion) becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even worse, that myth might guide you away from learning all the many, wonderful things there are to learn about love which actually work, and which can help you grow your own great love successes.

A Great Truth About The Fourth Key

Love is natural but how to get it, give it, grow it and share it is learned. Some people are lucky enough to grow up in a very loving family, and they subconsciously learn all this at an early age because love-success actions were repeatedly modeled for them throughout their upbringing. The rest of us can consciously work to learn how to love well and love more, much like we learn everything else important. We purposely study it, and we explore it, and experiment with it to find what works for us, and then we practice, practice, practice! Both modern science and the wisdom of the ancients point to this truth about love.

Love like food is natural but there’s a tremendous amount you can learn to do about it. Teaching how to love better and more is a major component in the great religions of the world. The natural phenomenon of love is increasingly becoming evident in the brain and other medical related sciences. Learning to love well and more also can increasingly be seen in the behavioral sciences. Even in behavioral economics, love is being studied so it can be understood and accomplished better and more. (Read The Psychology and Economics of Happiness Love, Life And Positive Living by Prof. Lok Sang Ho, head of the Department of Economics at Lingnan University, Hong Kong).

Paths to Loving More

First of all you can do what you doing right now, and that is read. There is a lot written about love and some of it is pretty worthwhile. Another thing you can do is join with other people who have a love-centered orientation or involvement. That could mean a really deep, loving, friendship network; a voluntary effort trying to lovingly assist some group of people who need one sort of help or another; joining with those involved in a life betterment cause and for which love provides a method or some form of real “ministry”.

Meditation and prayer have provided many people with a sort of core loving approach which then stretches out to all they contact. Applying yourself in multiple kinds of love, of which there are quite a few, works well for many. You can start by reading entries at this site on kinds of love which is found in the Subject Index. Learning to center yourself in love, and come from love toward each major area of your life is another kind of path toward loving more.

Deciding to enlarge the number of ways you show love, choosing to magnifying the intensity of your demonstrations of love, and refining and elaborating the quality by which you do love actions, all can get you on a path toward loving more. Some people keep expanding their number of love targets, but remember one of your love targets needs to be yourself. Part of healthy self-love can be striving to eat less, move more and stress less and, thus, you will be using all four keys to a good, long life.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Of all the people, creatures and other entities you personally have involvement with, which would be your best target for loving more first?

Protecting Those You Love from Yourself

Synopsis: This important and possibly uncomfortable mini-love-lesson starts with explaining how real love is protective; alerts us to a common protection ‘blind spot’; explains overprotection is anti-protective; a prescription for self appraisal with self-love; and more.

Real Love Is Protective

Healthy, real love automatically involves the high valuing of the loved. Therefore, protecting that which is highly valued follows naturally.

Real Love helps us naturally to see after the safety and well-being of those we really love, safeguarding them if we can, from whatever might harm or destroy them including ourselves. By the way, false forms of love usually are not very protective.
In the Chicago slums where I spent some of my growing-up time, there was a sort of adage. It went like this, “It’s okay for me to fight my family and friends, but if you try to fight them, I’ll destroy you!” In my old neighborhood, expressions of love were seldom tender but they usually were often strong and clear, at least when it came to the love that protects. Of course, violence is not the best way to be protective; I’m just giving an extreme example of a verbal, protective attitude.

Our Protective Blind Spot

Just about everybody wants to protect their children from bad guys and bullies, but what if the bully is you? We don’t like to think about it this way, but there may be some part of how you go about your life that could be harmful to someone dearest to you. If you are going to be really effective at ‘protective love’ won’t it be good for you to start by evaluating your own, possibly harmful effects on those you genuinely love? Now, maybe you already do this kind of self-evaluation. Great! Maybe you even overdo it and worry about every single, little thing you do and how it might negatively effect someone you love. That has its own love effectiveness problems. You can be so worried about your effect on a loved one that the excessive worry will sabotage your effectiveness itself.
Let’s look at just a few of the more common ways we can be blind to having a harmful effect on someone we love.

Overprotection Is Anti-Protection!

Years ago it was discovered that lots of parents did not let their children go play in the dirt because they were protecting them from germs and the evils of dirtiness. It turned out that this was setting the kids up for not being able to fight off certain kinds of possibly serious infections. Ordinary dirt was just what little kids needed to help their immunity mechanisms develop. Sometimes overprotection has a spoiling effect. Bartley knew his parents would always bail him out of any trouble he got into, until his seventh arrest. It was only after that and six horrible months in jail that his judgment began to improve.

Of course, a lot of overprotection efforts really are self protection efforts. Here are a couple of examples. Bill would not let his wife go inside bars with her sisters because something bad might happen to her there. Actually he later admitted he was just afraid she would get attracted to somebody coming-on to her, and that person would treat her better than he did. Doris handled all the family finances and did not want her husband “to have to deal with money issues”. She died unexpectedly and he found out their accounts were overdue and all their other monetary affairs were a mess; Doris had been denying her inability to keep up the accounts – to herself and to him.

Overprotection tends to block people’s growth and their strengthening processes which makes overprotection anti-protection. Joe was vehemently against his wife taking a promotion offer. It would take her out of an all-female department and force her to mix with a mixed gender, upwardly mobile work staff. She would be part of lower-level, white-collar management and he was blue-collar with little likelihood of advancing as far up the ladder as his wife might go. It turned out that he trying to block her, cost him a lot more marital problems than supporting her job improvement would have.

Sometimes it is hard to know the difference between real protection and overprotection. It is something to keep working on, with love. So, ask yourself if you are doing things that might ‘protect’ your mate, children, family members, friends or other loved ones from the very growth challenges that might be good for them to have. Sally worked very hard at cleverly keeping her husband away from finishing his degree. She said it would take a lot of time, and cost too much money, and she was sure some of their friends would start judging him as “uppity”, and she didn’t want him to lose those friends. Then it came out. Secretly she was panicking that if he finished his degree he would start looking down on her and run off with somebody better educated.

What Are You Modeling?

Do you ever find yourself, kind of automatically, saying or doing something a loved one says or does? Or conversely, maybe they are saying or doing something you say or do? That is because loved ones kind of can rub off on each other. What we model and the examples we set can automatically get subconsciously incorporated. Some of what you are modeling may be very good and some not so good for those you love. You may want to protect your loved ones from those ‘not so good’ ones. If you are modeling fits or rage, hate, racism, abuse, neglect, addictions, poor self love, anti-love actions, etc. protection is called for.

Romantic Rage

Have you bought-into the myth that tells you love can lead to justifiable rage against those you love if you feel betrayed by them. Many murders of a spouse or lover result from this kind of belief about how love works. (No, Wrong, Untrue) Many battered mates or children, judged to be disobedient or violating some rule, also result from similar thinking. Along with this goes a sort of understanding that ‘if I love you, I own you, and because I own you I can hurt and harm you, if you don’t behave the way I insist you behave. Love give me that right.

My understanding is that healthy, real love of every kind, including romantic love, does not motivate or lead to hurting and harming those you love. It is only various forms of false love that do that. Love is protective not harming.

Protection and Affairs

Having a secret love affair, sex affair, one night stand, cheating, etc., even if you hide it really well so you “protect your mate from getting hurt”, is usually a really poor way to do protective love. We have a lot of problems with love/sex affairs in our culture, as do other cultures, but not all cultures. In some parts of the world it is understood or expected that spouses who have strong sex drives will have sex with a number of other people, and is OK as long as it is not done deceitfully or destructively to already established love relationships.

For a great many people in highly monogamous-oriented societies that seems both impossible and incomprehensible. Still, some manage to live honestly with love while swapping, swinging, doing open marriage, etc., and things go okay or even go better than good. Some even make the ‘secret affairs approach’ seem to work tolerably well. However, secrets, lies, deception, and the like, even if not discovered, tend to have corrosive relationship results. Truth expressed, even if disruptive, usually is far more protective in the long run than are lies. This is especially typical if the truth expressed is mixed well with lots of love.

Protection and Addictions

Substance abuse and addiction, and certain behavioral addictions and abuse syndromes are super-destructive to just about everybody in the addict’s or abuser’s immediate life. Spouses, family members, especially children, friends, co-workers and sometimes strangers are all harmed. The problem is the addict or abuser seldom sees how bad their effect on others actually is. Defensiveness, dodging and denial almost always reigns for quite a while, sometimes until somebody is dead.

Compounding the problem is codependency and the patterns of enabling. What is usually needed for all concerned is a loving confrontation with the uncomfortable truth. That usually is the only way to avoid causing or supporting serious harm being done. However, remember confrontation with out expressions of sufficient love tends not to work.

Self Appraisal with Self-Love

None of us is perfect. We are made so that we always can improve. To improve it often takes self appraisal, which does not mean ‘beating up’ or ‘being down’ on yourself’, or in any way being negative. In all probability there are some ways in which you have some negative effect on those you love. Just try to accurately evaluate what trends and behavior patterns you might exhibit which would be good to protect your loved ones from. Then work on it with forgiveness and tolerance, i.e. with healthy self-love for yourself.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Are there things those who raised you did that you wish they would have protecting you from, and are you perhaps subconsciously programmed to do something like that also?

In the Garden of Love

In the Garden of Love It Is More Important to Grow Flowers Than to Pull Weeds!

If you only pull the weeds out, all you will have left is a garden full of holes — into which new weeds will likely grow.
If you plant and nurture flowers, add grasses, crops and trees, also nurturing them — they will push out all but the toughest of weeds.
Those you can pull.  JRC

Think about it.
Is your way of dealing with a love relationship more about pulling weeds than growing flowers? Are you more prone to work on what is wrong or work on making things improve? If you are more prone to focusing on problems, deficiencies, faults etc., than focusing on creating and extending attributes, benefits, advancements etc., then your love relationship is not likely to be like a garden that you or anyone else wants to be in.

Are you watering your love relationship’s flowers, or its weeds? Do your praises, compliments and expressions of appreciation greatly outnumber your gripes, complaints, and expressions of disapproval? Sincere ‘thank you’s’, a soft touch of appreciation, a genuine offer to help with a chore, etc. water the flowers. The gripes, etc. tend to water the weeds.

In your garden of love are you doing the necessary work of being a good gardener. Growing and tending a healthy, good, love relationship takes a good deal of work just like growing and tending a healthy, good garden does. Nature only does so much, and then we have to do the rest.

Are you and your love ones spending enough time together in your garden of love, letting it nurture you by your shared mindfulness of its beauty and wonder? Are you soaking up the beauty of your garden of love’s flowers and deeply, fully appreciating them, holding them in awe, letting them inspire and nurture you?

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What kind of new and wonderful flowers might you plant in your garden of love? Would you do well to plant and grow more flowers of kindness, forgiveness, affirmation, lightheartedness, spiritual connection, appreciation or …..?

Anger and Love

Synopsis: This mini-love-lessons looks at what anger does to love; love constructive, destructive and neutral anger; internalized, suppressed and repressed anger; the Teakettle understanding; anger’s deeper dynamics; anger’s big secret; and ends with “love over anger” and other things you can do about anger problems.

What Anger Does to Love

Anger can destroy your love relationships! It can and often does bring an end to what otherwise could become healthy, lasting love. This happens with marriages, families, lovers, parent and child relationships, truly love-filled friendships and all other forms of love relationship.

Furthermore, it can sabotage a person’s healthy, constructive self-love. Those love relationships which are not fully destroyed by anger are often damaged, reduced, made more limited, hobbled, slowed, wounded, made more emotionally distant and generally made less than they could have been, at least for a time, sometimes for a long time.

On the other hand, there are love relationships which handle episodes of anger quite well and even make improvements in the relationship by way of anger. Sometimes, in anger, things are brought out that need to be dealt with which would not have been revealed but for the participants getting angry. Sometimes the venting of anger leads to a useful reduction in stress and strain in a love relationship. It is anger that sometimes gives people the power to face and deal with the hardest and most difficult problems effecting a love relationship.

Even in those cases where anger is assistive, it still can be harmfully tension producing and dissonance causing. Some people think there are almost always better ways to handle difficulties than with or through anger. Learning and practicing non-angry, powerful and productive ways to handle difficulties, solve problems and make advancements in a love relationship usually takes a concentrated and sustained mutual effort. Most of those who make that effort are very glad they did because they appear to get far better results in their love relationships than do those who behave with frequent or intense anger.

Love Destructive, Love Constructive and Love Neutral Anger

Ask yourself these questions. When you get angry with a loved one, do you aim your anger at that person? Do you do anger by way of demeaning, degrading, denouncing, condemning, putting your loved ones down, calling them derogatory names and otherwise acting to undermine their sense of worth and value? If you do, you are likely to be engaging in strong, anti-love and love destructive behavior. When you are angry with a loved one, do you engage in threatening behavior? All forms of threatening usually are very love destructive. When angry at a loved one, do you become physically hurtful, harmful or controlling? If you do, the result may be extremely love destructive. A general rule is ‘never touch a loved one when angry’ and, therefore, ‘make all touch love constructive’.

Love relationships only can withstand so many strong, anti-love actions. Are you aware that showing intense anger at a loved one is, more often than not, an anti-love action? Are you also aware that frequently showing anger at a loved one, and infrequently showing love, can be just as destructive. Both the frequency and the intensity of anger must be considered. If the number of anti-love actions exceeds the number of pro-love actions for too long, the love relationship is likely to be seriously damaged or destroyed. With each anti-love anger episode, relationship recovery become less likely. Anti-love actions, born of anger, can be among the most destructive of all anti-love actions. If the anti-love actions, born of anger, are more powerful than the pro-love actions the love relationship is almost sure to be badly damaged.

Not all anger is love destructive in a love relationship, but a much more of it is destructive than most people realize. There are ways for anger to be love-constructive in love relationships, and also for anger to just not have much effect on the love in a love relationship. Actively demonstrated anger against a loved one often can easily become one of the most love ruining kinds of behavior a person can do. Some people vent their anger at the universe, or at substitute targets, but do not use it to attack or act against a loved one. That type of active demonstration of anger sometimes can look quite frightening, but might not be otherwise harmful to the love relationship itself.

Most acute anger in a love relationship means that, prior to the anger, someone experienced strong, emotional hurt, possibly considerable fear and probably mounting frustration. One or both people also may have a desire for those feelings, and the things that brought them on, to go away or change and for things to be better. Contradictory though it seems, it also is likely the angry person hungers to receive a dose of well demonstrated, healing love despite their current anger. That can assist the ‘making up’ process.

Internalized, Suppressed and Repressed Anger

Outwardly expressed anger, frequently causes or triggers arguments, fights, retaliation, desires for vengeance, emotional distancing or debilitating fear and physical distancing and escape. Does that mean that you should hold your anger in and not let it show? No, because repressed, suppressed and internalized anger can be even more love destructive than outwardly expressed anger.

Anger held in can turn into or exacerbate stress illnesses like strokes and heart attacks, or cause neurochemical imbalances resulting in irrational swings in mood, irritability, sleep and appetite disorder, and even serious depression and anxiety problems. Anger held in also tends to result in anger leaking out in the form of passive/aggressive retaliation. That tends to insidiously poison love relationships. To not let anger damage or destroy your love relationships it helps to understand how anger works and what can be done about it.

The Teakettle Understanding

One way to understand anger is to think of a teakettle full of increasing and expanding pressurized steam. If the steam does not vent the teakettle will explode and be destroyed. People who do not vent their strong anger may one day blow up and spew their anger in all directions, and then break down and be very dysfunctional. If people hold in their anger to well, for too long, it may turn into serious depression. That is something like the teakettle blowing out its bottom and collapsing. Another thing that happens to people who hold in there anger too much and too long is they develop a stress related, physical illness. That is a little like a teakettle developing metal fatigue and structural failure at the molecular level.

Arguing with an angry, venting person often is like feeding the fire under the teakettle. It just makes the teakettle have more to vent. Frequently trying to reason and explain to an angry, venting person also just can feed their fire.

Another thing not to do is go stand in front of the venting teakettle spout. If you do you just will get scalded and, therefore, hurt a lot. Likewise, getting right in front of an angry, venting person just may get you hurt or even harmed.

Of course, lots of people faced with an angry, venting person let the teakettle dynamics take them over, and it becomes like two teakettles venting at each other which, of course, does nobody any good.

The best thing to do is to stay out of the stream of steam, and see if you can find a way to turn the fire off, and let the teakettle cool off. Getting the teakettle away from the fire and then cooled off also can help. Then you may be able to deal with it. To help an angry person get away from a ‘fire’ source, let them finish their venting and after that cool down which usually works pretty well. Until then they may be like a teakettle that’s too hot to touch. Loving listening, and not adding anything but supportive caring words may help them cool down faster.

Anger’s Deeper Dynamics

When you get angry it means you felt powerless or insufficiently powerful first, if only for an instant. That triggered your emergency power system which gave you the emergency power we call anger. If you were sufficiently powerful in a situation from the start, you would not get angry. You would handle the situation in an ordinary way, using an ordinary amount of your powers and methods for handling situations in which you desire some change. It is only when you perceive your ordinary powers, skills and methods as insufficient to make something change, that your emergency power comes on and gives you the power of anger.

The power of anger can be very big and incredibly quick. The problem is that it often is very clumsy and full of backfire potential, plus it is not useful for fixing things that are intricate and delicate. Anger is somewhat like a sledgehammer. You would not want to use it to try to fix a broken watch. Thus, anger frequently is counterproductive for fixing love relationship problems which often are intricate and delicate.

Anger’s Big Secret

Did you know that the more often a person feels angry the more powerless (weak & inadequate?) a person feels in their own life. The truly powerful seldom get angry because they just don’t need the clumsy, emergency power called anger very often. Sometimes the truly powerful use fake anger because it is much less clumsy and more manageable than real anger. Otherwise, the truly powerful use their other strengths to get things done and to make the changes they desire. Thus, it is that anger can be seen as indicating pre-existing or underlying weakness. The samurai warriors knew this when they put forth the principal in their code “first to anger, first to die”. They understood that excellence in fighting required being free of the clumsiness and blindness that occurs with anger.

Love Over Anger

The more you develop your skills in using the incredible power of love, the less you will need anger to provide power in your life. The more you develop any and all other skills for human relating, the less you will need anger. Anger will always be there, available if you really need it, sort of like a spare tire, but it best not be something you rely on or use frequently.

If you have a chronic anger problem make an act of healthy self-love and get yourself into an anger management therapy program with a good therapist. If you and a spouse or other loved one keep having destructive, anger episodes interacting with each other, get to a good couples or family therapist who can help you with the teamwork that replaces anger interactions.

There is a lot more to learn about the relationship of anger and love but hopefully this will give you a good base. Other mini-love-lessons having to do with love and anger can be found at this site. You might want to look at “Bull Wrestling, Bull Dancing and Love Quarrels”, “Destroyers of Love – The 7 Big D’s”, “Difficult Topics: A Love-Centered Way to Approach and Broach Them All” and “Touch Only with Love: an Anti-violence Tool”.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Who taught and/or modeled how to be angry for you, and do you really want to be like them?

Starting And Parting Love

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson explains the importance and effects of both good and bad ‘start’ and ‘part’ love actions with short, real-life examples.

How Are Your Start and Part Dynamics?

Sheila and Kim both were looking forward to getting home after work and being with each other.

Sheila had a really hard day and was desiring comforting love.  Kim’s day was pretty boring and Kim was all geared-up for more exciting love.  Soon after they met each other everything seemed to go wrong.  Sheila had imagined a soft, tender, slow start to their evening.  Kim had fantasized an exciting greeting, active playfulness and behaved accordingly right away.  Then Kim saw that Sheila’s face looked disappointed and with displeasure responded with sour tones of voice.  The evening was ruined for both of them.

How could things go so wrong when both started toward their time together with thoughts of love?  What could they do to stop this from happening again?  How could they both get what they wanted with one another when they were in such different emotional places?

Starting on the Same Page

As you can see from the above example, how you start and also how you part can have a great amount of influence on how loving people spend time together.  If you have been away from each other, even for just a few hours, you may both be in very different, psychological places when you come back together.  If you re-enter each other’s space without lovingly greeting and coordinating with each other, you may clash and crash, or at least miss-out on what might have turned out to be good time with each other.  Like singing a duet together, you both have to start by singing the same song or you just make noise, not music.

Love Connecting Actions

Sheila and Kim learned they have to start with ‘lovingly checking-out’ how the other one is feeling and what the other one is wanting, before they start acting from their own agenda, even though both agendas might be love-oriented and generally good.  A good hug and kiss, and saying things like, “hello sweetheart”, “what are you feeling, and what are you wanting” when first encountering each other are good ‘checking out’ strategies.  Then a truthful response and acceptance if there is a difference in a loved one’s psychological place.  Next comes working to synthesize desires.  Maybe for Sheila and Kim they plan an hour of rest and cuddling, after which something more playful might occur.  Maybe they try flipping a coin to see who gets their desires met first.

There are lots of other ways they might proceed after starting well with lovingly checking-in with each other.  The trick is to start with love and good connecting actions.  Good, loving connecting actions can take less than a minute but often determine how the next several hours, or more, may go.  Connecting actions allow you to express your feelings and desires, and find out about the feelings and desires of your loved one.  That allows for coordination, synthesis, and ‘I win, you win’ outcomes.

The Dangers of Unloving Ruts

Lots of couples, family members and friends fall into unloving ruts, in which they are unknowingly expressing indifference to one another, in the way they start and part their encounters.  Couples that once passionately kissed hello and said goodbye the same way, too often get distracted by life’s many ‘to do’s’, and then they barely say hi or goodbye to each other as they come and go.  Thus, they miss-out on the energizing influence possible from their love.  Yes, it may take a tiny bit more time to say hello and goodbye with more love in the message, but doing so helps avoid relationship deterioration, and keeps putting ‘emotional gas’ in each other’s tanks.

The Importance of Parting with Love

When two people who love each other, take about 30 seconds or less, to really hold and kiss each other goodbye when they go off to work or wherever else they may be going, they are likely to come back together sooner and better.  This is true even when they may be gone from each other for relatively short periods.  Parting love also tends to make whatever they are doing next, done better.  Remember, love works like an energizing, healthy food.  Parting without a love-conveying-action is like going somewhere after skipping a regular meal.  You may do okay enough, but with a dose of love nourishment you will be stronger.  Without it, you may become easily irritable, annoyed and aggravated.

Saying goodbye with a really good hug and a genuine kiss, rather than something brief and perfunctory, sets up your next time together, and is more likely to be a time of mutual enrichment.  Beware of saying the same words every time; they can loose their meaning and power.  Be creative with hello and goodbye words; you may see a surprised response which probably will show that your love words have been soaked-up better.

Of course, if the time you are likely to be apart is going to be longer, bigger doses of love may be in order.  Good loving goodbyes also tend to help ensure your love bond with each other will stay strong while you are apart.

As always Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: If you think you don’t ‘start and part with love’ well enough, have you figured out what might be stopping you, and what you are going to do about that?

Competitive Niceness: A Love Skill

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson first introduces competitive niceness; it then tells how it helps circular good things to happen in a love relationship; reviews how to develop this love skill; and addresses how to get past problems that might occur.

In a Happy Land

Most appropriately, we were in Denmark when we first heard about “competitive niceness” (Danes are the happiest people according to national comparison research). Competitive niceness had brought Phil and Gay’s long-standing marriage much good. Gay told of how one morning she was feeling puny and Phil brought her a cup of tea without asking him to do that. She thought something like “How very nice. It makes me want to do something nice for him, and I did”. She also noticed that she felt better.

Just about every morning since Phil has brought her a cup of morning tea, and has done other nice things that move her to do nice things for him – not because she has to but because she wants to. She wants to treat him as nice or nicer than he is treating her. Phil related it is a fun game they play with each other which reaps many good, loving feelings. They compete on treating each other well and it has been making them happy together ever since.

Later we met some other couples who practice another version of competitive niceness. They compete with themselves to ‘out do’ their own last loving, ‘nice’ action toward one another and toward other members of their family. That seems to work wonders for all concerned. Still others compete by keeping track of their ‘nice’ acts toward those they love. They are always working on making their list of nice love actions longer and better than it was before. Competitive niceness and kindness seems to benefit whole families and friendship networks, bringing them a lot closer to one another, not to mention having more fun with one another.

A Circular Good

If I do a ‘nice, kind, pleasant’ love action towards you or for you and you do one for me, we have created a circular event of good, positive, love-giving actions. If we repeat this over and over, we create an ‘ongoing cycle’ and a ‘couple’s teamwork habit’ of cycling positive, love-giving behaviors. That can help us grow our love bonding together and help pre-counterbalance whatever might be difficult or go wrong in our love relationship later.

Competitive niceness is an example of loving teamwork operating in a “I win, you win, nobody loses” style. It also sets forth good examples for children to model on. Done lightheartedly it tends to produce a lot of smiles and laughter together. Therefore, this is an example of the kind of love skill, and the most important dynamic, which creates successful love relationships – that of mutually sending and receiving actions that convey love. We call that a circular good.

Developing Your Competitive Niceness Love Skills

Go do something nice for someone you love, maybe as a surprise. Don’t make it a big deal or be too elaborate – short, simple and quick will do just fine. It could involve a favor, a small gift, something funny or just creating a nice little experience. Enjoy thinking it up, then enjoy giving or doing it, enjoy the positiveness it creates for your loved one, and then enjoy your loved one’s reaction.

You then could challenge them to do likewise, or talk over the idea of doing an additive competitive niceness with one another as a fun game to play, or you could just see what happens after your first extra act of loving niceness. Either way, keep doing daily actions and enjoying them. After several weeks of doing that, it is likely to become a good habit. Especially is this true if you both are having fun being competitively nice to each other.

If right now you are a couple reading this, you might want to have a little discussion to see if you want to teamwork together and experiment with creating a joint competitive niceness game. Remember the idea is not to defeat your loved one by doing better than they do, but just to enjoy the process of being competitively nice.

Problems?

If your actions seem to go unnoticed, unappreciated or unreturned you have some options. You can give hints. You also could lightheartedly say that there might be something your loved one is missing or not noticing, and they might enjoy noticing it. Then make a bit of a guessing game about it. Or you could just directly request your loved one to notice, understand and appreciate certain behaviors you are doing. Be sure to say it in a happy, upbeat sort of way. It is important not to do ‘guilt trips’, criticize or blame. If they cooperate with this, be sure to thank them, praise them and maybe hug them.

A special thanks to Gay and Phil for introducing us to Competitive Niceness!

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What is a nice thing you did for someone that made you feel good? Will you do it again or something like it again soon?

Related posts:

1. Intercourse Absent Lovemaking – a Love Skill
2. Checking It Out – As a Love Skill
3. Connection Matching – A Love Skill
4. Intimacy Creation – A Love Skill
5. Gratitude – As a Love Skill 

Listening With Love - Are You Good At It?

Synopsis: This is both a mini-love-lesson and a Rating Test which aims to get you to attend to 12 important points concerning becoming a really good at listening with love; and you can use it to rate yourself, as to your love listening skills.

Rate Yourself

Listening well to those you love is one of the best ways to demonstrate that you love, care and value them.  Sometimes one of the most important ways to feel that you are loved is to experience someone who loves you doing a really good job of listening to you.  But what really constitutes good, love-filled listening?  To find out take this 12 item test, rating yourself as you go.  Each item will help you know a major way you can nourish and help improve any and all love relationships through being good at listening with loving.

Test Instructions

Carefully read each of the following tests questions.  Each question mentions one of the factors associated with quality listening with love.  As you read try seriously to think about how well you do what the test statement refers to when you are talking face-to-face with someone you love.  Then with each question look at answers A through F, and pick the one that comes closest to what you think accurately rates you on how well you listen.  Record each of your answers so you can come back later and tally your score.  Instructions for tallying your score will be given at the end of the test, along with interpretations.

Listening With Love – A Test

1. When talking with a loved one, you say fewer words than they do.
(A) Almost always (B) Frequently ( C ) Half the time (D) Seldom (E) Almost never (F) Don’t know

2. When listening to a loved one, you silence your own mind and what it is telling you to say next, so that you can attend to what they are saying more fully.
(A) Almost always  (B) Frequently  ( C ) Half the time  (D) Seldom (E) Almost never (F) Don’t know

3. You can repeat back to a loved one what they have just said, close to verbatim.
(A) Almost always  (B) Frequently  ( C ) Half the time  (D) Seldom  (E) Almost never  (F) Don’t know

4. When a loved one is talking, you repeatedly identify in your mind what the emotions your loved one is experiencing as they talk.
(A) Almost always  (B) Frequently  ( C ) Half the time  (D) Seldom  (E) Almost never  (F) Don’t know

5. When talking with a loved one you ask what they are feeling, so as to be sure you are in tune with their emotions, and to check out your own perceptions of their emotions.
(A) Almost always  (B) Frequently  ( C ) Half the time  (D) Seldom  (E) Almost never  (F) Don’t know

6. When talking with the loved one you have and convey empathetic, corresponding emotions i.e. you hurt when they hurt, you’re happy when they’re happy, etc.
(A) Almost always  (B) Frequently  ( C ) Half the time  (D) Seldom  (E) Almost never  (F) Don’t know

7. You listen attentively for a loved one to fully vent, express themselves, discover and think-out their own issues, solutions, concepts and feelings before offering your own thoughts, advice, possible solutions, etc.
(A) Almost always  (B) Frequently  ( C ) Half the time  (D) Seldom  (E) Almost never  (F) Don’t know

8. Your facial expressions, head movements, voice tones, gestures and posture changes consistently and repeatedly show interest, attentiveness, care and other appropriate corresponding feelings to your loved ones when they are talking.
(A) Almost always  (B) Frequently  ( C ) Half the time  (D) Seldom  (E) Almost never  (F) Don’t know

9. When talking with a loved one you physically touch them appropriately showing care, support, celebration, affection, etc.
(A) Almost always  (B) Frequently  ( C ) Half the time  (D) Seldom  (E) Almost never  (F) Don’t know

10. When listening to a loved one you avoid listening primarily for their pauses so you can start saying what you want to say next, and while they’re talking you avoid rehearsing in your mind what you’re going to say next, plus you do not let yourself be otherwise easily distracted from giving them your full and close attention.
(A) Almost always  (B) Frequently  ( C ) Half the time  (D) Seldom  (E) Almost never  (F) Don’t know

11. When talking with someone you love do you do a good job of listening with your eyes, i.e. closely watching your loved one’s face and movements in order to see your loved one’s indicators of emotion, so you can be emotionally in tune with them and respond accordingly?
(A) Almost always  (B) Frequently  ( C ) Half the time  (D) Seldom  (E) Almost never  (F) Don’t know

12. When talking with a loved one do you stay aware that listening well can help your loved one feel affirmed, valued and cared about, and not listening well can result in your loved one feeling devalued and less than well loved?
(A) Almost always  (B) Frequently  ( C ) Half the time  (D) Seldom  (E) Almost never  (F) Don’t know

Scoring

Score 5 points for each (A), 4 points for each (B), 3 points for each ( C ), 2 points for each (D), 1 point for each (E) and zero points for each (F) – Don’t know response.

Interpretation

Scores  49 – 60  suggests someone who is a great loving listener, or someone who is overrating.

39 – 48  suggests someone who is a good loving listener who can still improve.

25 – 36  suggests someone who is a fair loving listener who can do quite a bit better with learning and practicing.

13 – 24  suggests someone who is rather poor at loving listening and probably is in need of a fair amount of improvement.

0 – 12  suggests that a very poor loving listening performance is frequently occurring and considerable work at improvement is recommended.

4, or more, zero (Don’t know) responses suggests considerable study of loving listening skills is probably highly desirable.

If you wish to rate another person on their loving listening skills you will need to alter the questions a little so they read in a way that indicates a loved one listening to you.  Then record the responses (A – F) that best indicates how you think they behave on each item.  Then tally the scores as before.
To learn more about this important skill go to the mini-love-lesson at this site titled “Listening with Love”.  You might use that entry to talk about listening skills with a loved one.

As always – Go and Grow with Love.

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Who listens to you with love the best, and have you sufficiently thanked them for that?

Related posts:

1. Listening with Love
2. Listening With Love and IN and OUT Brain Functions
3. How Smart Is Your Love? – A Test
4. Alphabet Love Test
5. Intimacy Creation – A Love Skill