Expressional Love Behaviors – The First 6 of 12

Mini-Love-Lesson #291

Synopsis: Doing love is as important, or more important, than feeling love; doing love well and doing it expressionally well can be crucial to the success of every relationship; here are 6 of the 12 things we all need to know about to achieve expressional love success.

The expressional choreography, going back and forth between people who love each other, can be like a beautiful, artful dance.  At times this dance can be fun and joyful, or intimate and romantic, or spirited and daring, or sensual and sexy or precious and tender if carried out skillfully and loaded with love.  To become good at this art form, takes feeling-filled practice and plenty of playful teamwork.  I’ve seen couples of all ages, families, parents with their kids and diverse others learn the dance of expressional love.  Therefore, I bet you can too!  (See “Love Expressiveness”)

Doing Expressional Love and Doing It Well!

Let us remember that love must be done, not just felt.  Let us also remember that the better we do love the more our love is likely to be effective, helpful, healthful, successful and wonder-full.  Remember too, expressional love may send as much as 93% of the actual communication in a face-to-face, personal, love interaction.  

To accomplish expressional love’s best actions, there are a dozen, lesser known, love sending behaviors.  We will cover the first 6 here and the last 6 later.  They may seem rather technical but they contain some really useful, concrete information.  Being genuine is always a best practice for relationship success.

1. Body Language Attentiveness

Attentiveness is a very important part of doing love well; it works with loved ones of all ages.  But the question is how do you show attentiveness?  Our body language can do that for us without saying a word.  When we show attentiveness, it conveys that we value a loved one and we are focused on their concerns, interests and ways of thinking, feeling and doing.  When our attention is desired and there is a lack of attentiveness, that might be interpreted as being uncaring and not valuing them.  Speaking via your body language, showing loving attentiveness, allows us to stay verbally quiet and listen while our loved one conveys what they want to get across.  At times, that can be a considerable communication advantage.  Here are some ways to show loving attentiveness.

When a loved one starts talking to you, stop what you are doing, turn toward them and move at least a little closer.  If you are standing, square your body with theirs while looking interested.  If seated, lean toward them.  As they speak, notice their emotions.  You can bob your head or lean toward them when they show stronger feelings.  Keep your heart area (chest) open and not covered by crossed arms or with things you might be holding.  Leave your arms and hands free for gesturing.  Shift positions mostly only with small, posture changes made slowly unless exuberance is called for.  Be sure to avoid turning your back on your loved one or giving them a cold shoulder posture.

By doing these body language actions, you send a message of attentiveness which likely will convey, consciously and subconsciously, that your loved one has a love importance to you and you are with them and for them.

2. Loving Eye Contact and Looking Movements

People who love each other frequently look into each other's eyes, often in close proximity.  They regularly make and hold eye contact longer than they spend time looking away.  When a loved one is expressing strong emotions or something of importance, loving eye contact can be imperative.  For your own better understanding, brief glances to the right or left assist the brain with processing memory, future focus thinking and figuring out what to do or say next.  A caveat here is, a brief glance away is OK if not done too frequently.  Be careful not to stare past a loved one or do much prolonged looking off into space or looking down, those actions could be interpreted as uncaring disinterest.  

Clues to a person’s feelings often are conveyed by eye movements like wide eye looks, squinting, eyebrow movements, winking, blinking, eye rolling and glancing away.  Sometimes the eyes contradict the words being spoken which sends a confusing message.  That can undermine a verbal love message.  You probably don’t want to do that.

A hard-eyes-look (intense or strained) with a frown sometimes can be interpreted as indicating uncaring, undervaluing, disapproving and that unloving reactions are going on.  When focusing on the love you feel for someone, best is to have a soft-eyes (relaxed) countenance.  

3. Positive Proxemics

Are you aware that how you place, move and position your body in proximity to another person’s body may be a communication in itself?  Love, friendship, rejection, your own approachability and quite a few other relational elements can be influenced by proximity.  We humans and quite a few other species often communicate with proxemics.  Proxemics is the science of communicating messages by positioning and altering one’s body in proximity to another’s body.  This has a lot to do with emotional closeness and distance, inclusion and exclusion, belonging and isolation, and love network dynamics.

One can stand protectively or invasively near another.  Intimate closeness can be considerably enhanced by close body positioning.  Holding oneself at a greater than usual distance may indicate a negative feeling toward someone.  Therefore, having awareness of your own body proxemics can be important to all relationships, especially love relationships.  

Consider elevation positioning.  This has to do with above, below and equal proxemic positioning and how it might affect the emotions in a love relationship.  For instance, when soothing a hurt or fearful loved one, it generally is best to appear like a strong and comforting parent who usually is positioned slightly higher.  When listening to an angry catharsis, a thrashing about rage or an anguished, anxiety-ridden loved one, usually it is more accepting and non-confrontational to be a bit below them, looking up from the seated position while leaning forward.  However, when seeking egalitarian and harmonious communication, usually it is best to be about on the same level.

Love relationships are enhanced by knowing about and using proxemics.  With whom, when and where might you use this information?  One general rule is to be close, get close.

4. Positive Posturing

Postures are different than proxemics.  Postures are about how you hold your body when sitting, standing or even laying down.  These postures tend to be subconsciously interpreted as positive, negative or rather neutral especially by those in close relationships.  To get any encounter with a loved one off to a good start, choose a positive posture.  Usually that means standing tall or sitting upright, shoulders back, head up, arms open and other gestures that communicate friendliness.  More concretely, when in family or group situations, social scientists have found that standing approximately at a 45° angle to a loved one often achieves higher levels of cooperation.  In private, facing a loved one directly usually achieves the best results.  

Asymmetrical postures tend to be seen as more friendly than symmetrical ones. An asymmetrical posture is one in which the right and left sides of the body do not mirror each other.  For example, a stance with one hand on a hip and the other hand gesturing often is seen as confident and open to happy interaction.  A symmetrical posture is when the right side and left side of the body look alike.  For example, when a person stands with their fists on their hips, with their elbows out and their feet spread apart that can be interpreted as confrontational and threatening.  In love relating, relaxed, asymmetrical postures tend to work better for everybody. 

Consciousness raising about all this can enhance your love relationships considerably.  Some people accidentally or habitually take on postures that can be interpreted as negative.  If you stand with your arms crossed, tense, and scowling you may be seen as judgmental, dismissive and uncaring, bored or boring or emotionally distant -- all these tend to be counter-indicated for goo, love relating.  If you feel positive and want to be seen as loving use postures with open arms, with palms up, head up and maybe slightly tilted, and with your body inclining forward to some degree.  

Being consciously mindful of your posture messaging to loved ones may help you get more accurately interpreted and understood.  Being aware of the possible posture messages from your loved ones usually can help you understand and more effectively relate to them.  

5. Connection Kinetics

Motions can indicate emotions.  Especially with loved ones, our motions almost continuously are being subconsciously monitored by them.  Notably, our facial, expressional motions are tracked.  Smiles, frowns, happy and unhappy looks, signs of irritation, aggravation, joy, serenity, elation, sadness, anxiety and the many other emotions a face can project are monitored.  This monitoring offers guidance to our loved ones for how to recognize our feelings and connect with us.  Likewise, we can be more aware of our loved one’s emotion indicators.  That can help us love them better. 

It is not only our facial kinetics but also all our other body movements that enable us to be psychologically and emotionally read and related to.  One of the very best practices of healthy, real love is demeanor presentation.  Creating and practicing a happy, loving countenance is a love gift you can give every day.  

This was dramatically brought home to me when learning to do family psychotherapy at a cancer treatment center.  Stage 3 and 4 cancer patients and their families did much of the training.  In spite of the pain and dire diagnosis, the patients kept choosing demeanors of genuine happiness.  This proved to me it was a choice rather than something governed by chance.  I saw happy, loving expressions, gestures and postures have wonderfully therapeutic effects on the patients and their families.  These kinetic expressions were crucial in keeping the family connections healthy and functioning.  I’ve worked to carry this lesson about choosing a happy, loving demeanor into my professional, relational and personal life.  I’ll bet you can too.

Facial, gestural, postural and other expressions can provide highly significant love connecting experiences.  When families were divided by the Berlin Wall, back when Germany was a divided nation, families on both sides could be seen still communicating.  For years, split families could not visit, hug or hold, or talk unmonitored to each other because of that barrier.  However, with exaggerated motions, they expressionally catapulted their love over that wall.  This is a potent example of how behavioral expressions of love can be instrumental in keeping our bonds with loved ones alive and well.

6. Head Movement Messaging

Nodding your head up and down to express approval, tilting your head right or left to express curiosity and interest, tilting your head forward to demonstrate keep going, I want to hear more and rocking your head backward in astonishment or surprise -- all can be used to convey loving listening.  Sometimes head movements can be tiny and still communicate support, agreement and connectedness in a love relationship.  Laughter-filled head bobbing and weaving often are a part of sharing fun.  Nodding or a slight jerk of the head in a particular direction can silently and unobtrusively point to something for another to notice or attend to.  Turning your head away can tell someone you are not willing to deal with something or with them.  Head movement messaging sometimes is developed almost into an art form within love relationships.  The intimate and elaborate variations can be infinite. 

Note: It is important not to fake but rather to more accurately convey your emotions as you interact with loved ones using the above suggestions.  Remember, it is not likely to be real love if you have to fake it.

Benefits of the first 6 of 12

Marvelous benefits can accrue to those who becoming mindful and active with these lesser known expressional behaviors.  Relationally, love connecting, bonding, nurturing, communicating, teamwork and emotional understanding improve.  Individually, these valuable and skillful ways to convey love can enhance everyone’s love-ability.

One More Thing

How about telling someone about this mini-love-lesson and this website about love?  Spreading the positives about love really might make your world more love enriched. 

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Is one of your goals to keep doing love better and better?

The second part of this article:

Expressional Love Behaviors – The Last 6 of 12

Yellow Love: Are You Suffering from It and Don't Know

Mini-Love-Lesson #183

Synopsis: With an ancient love master’s help yellow love briefly is explained, its commonness noted, how those who don’t suffer from it are different, and a five point cure is described for those who do.

A Most Common Relationship Affliction

Rumi, around 616 A.D., Islam’s great Sufi master of love knowledge, once asked “Why be content with Yellow Love?”

Yellow love like yellow fever (which makes you jaundiced with yellow skin) was seen as an all too common love-relationship affliction.  Its symptoms sneak up on people causing love relationships to be d-energized, depleted, dull, dragging and depressed.  It makes one subject to low-grade emotional illness, lack of happiness, lack of closeness, romantically and sexually less active and less enjoyably interactive with those you love.  Yellow love also can make life and love seem considerably less enriching and worthwhile than they once were.

Worst of all, many people believe this is just what happens in a love relationship as it goes on over time.  So they accept this affliction as normal.  Rumi and the Sufi masters of old saw that this did not have to be.  Modern love relationship research agrees.  There are all sorts of love relationships in which people continue to be, in an ongoing way, energized and enriched by love-filled interactions.

There are couples who after 40 years together still have a lot to pleasurably say to each other.  They quite frequently, pleasurably and playfully interact with each other in ever-varying ways, want to be around each other and to continue to actively behave in ways that can only be described as love filled.  Much the same can be said about a great many love-filled friendships, families, relationships with and between pets and don’t forget healthy self-love relationships.  In all these, yellow love is not a problem.

What Makes the Difference?

We must admit that sometimes yellow love symptoms stem from a lack of real love and a false love condition which exists. However, in many cases real love started the relationship and continues in the participant’s hearts but a yellow love condition is slowly seeping in and taking over.

What makes the difference is that those people in love relationships in which the yellow love affliction does not happen, are relationships which do not rely on love being something that takes care of itself.  Instead, the participants continually work to learn about love, work on practicing what they learned, especially work on honing their skills at giving and getting love, jointly work to fill their interactions with healthy, real love and both individually and jointly work to eliminate anti-love problems as they arise.  In short, they keep working at their love relationships.

Can Yellow Love Be Cured and, If so, How?

The answer to this question is an enthusiastic yes, and here’s how:

1. Individually and jointly accept that ongoing, healthy, real love must be worked on continually.  It will not automatically take care of itself, is not magically maintained or automatically improved.  The work can be done so harmoniously it doesn’t seem like work at all, and maybe even sometimes seems more like play.  Like everything else worthwhile, it takes work.  Doing the work jointly in loving teamwork is faster and better but individual work is also required.  Much of this work is to be done with joy, happiness, satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment.  Those positive elements in fact must be included as some of the goals involved in that work.

2. Continually and often happily, study love and how it can be done well, freshly, deeper, higher and more broadly.  Think about how people get good at anything enriching or important.  They study, or in other words, get into it, learn more and more about it and its variations, applications and manifestations.

3. Continually experiment and practice what you are learning about love.  It is not just a mental learning but in action-practice learning.  Like a good craftsman, sportsman, artist, scientist, etc., with joy practicing and experimenting for variation and improvement is magnificently ongoing and endless.

4. Whenever possible, work jointly as well as individually.  Love relationships best take working and learning through two or more person relationship actions.  This is how harmonious, cooperative and victorious teamwork is developed.  A love relationship is best done as a team effort that requires team members to learn and work as a team together in interaction.  Add to that, individual work on and with yourself about how you give and get love to everyone including to yourself.

5. Work together and individually on the anti-love problems which come along in your life, preferably as they arise.  Problems left un-dealt with often get worse.  This usually is done with much honest self-disclosure, openness, a lack of secrecy and lots of tolerational love  (see Behaviors of Love: the Basic Core Four).  If problems persist, seek help preferably jointly.  Couples and family therapy, parent guidance counseling and relational psychotherapy are increasingly working wonders with many.

Don’t Settle for Less

Yellow love essentially is underdone and poorly done love.  Love must be actively and enjoyably engaged in.  If you are not enjoying and helping those you love experience love enjoyably, at least much of the time, something is missing.  It is sort of like swimming.  You have to get in the water and practice it to really experientially know and have it.  The more you do that the more you can just jump in and have fun doing it.  If you just settle for wading in the shallows, it will not be near what it could be.  In swimming, those who learn and practice all nine basic strokes, learn to dive and swim underwater, learn the skills of long-distance swimming, etc. get to have the most fun and also are safest. Yes, love is much like that.

In case you’re interested, you might want to read The Sufi Path of Love, the Spiritual Teachings of Rumi by William C. Chittick. and/or The Love Poems of Rumi by Deepak Chopra.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Are your ways and skills of giving and getting love growing and improving or are they a bit stale, rusty, blah and maybe becoming a little yellow?

Related posts:

1. Repairing Damaged Love, Best Guidelines 

Love Hugs for Health and Happiness

Mini-love lesson #182

FREE over 200 mini-love lessons touching thousands of lives in over 190 countries – worldwide!

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

Love Hugs and Their Surprising Goodies

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

The Many Types of Love Hugs

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

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

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

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

Two Way Benefit

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

On the Lighter Side

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

Give and Therefore Get More Love Hugs

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

Anti-hug Issues?

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

Develop Your Love Hugging Skills

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

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

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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

Related posts:

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

Small Love for Lasting Love

Synopsis: Big impression romantic actions and their significance starts our mini-love-lesson; which then goes on to explore love action vacuums; love like food; and more.

Grand Love Gestures and Big Love Impressions

Joe was really good at making grand, romantic gestures and big, extravagant impressions on women.  He sent a stretch-limousine for his first date to pick up his first wife, a helicopter for his first date with his second wife, and before he went bankrupt he sent a large yacht for his first date with his third wife.    Obviously Joe was great with big, romantic, impression-making but not so good at lasting, real love: he was good at catching but not keeping.

Lover’s myths, stories, and histories abound with tales of grand gestures and outlandish actions which made huge impressions.  They were done for launching, conveying, solidifying or repairing love, or at least so we are told.  These giant gestures create astounding memories but, alas, they are not the stuff of which lasting love is mostly and best made.  No, the research shows lasting, healthy, real love comes from small love-conveying behaviors enacted day after day, after day.

A tender touch, a special smile, a tiny nod, some words of praise or thanks, a special little favor, a thoughtful remembrance, an extra embrace, a sweetness in the voice, or any other of thousands of different kinds of acts that can convey love – these are the things that make love lasting.  Those who give and receive love daily, through small acts meant to show love, create a kind of love cycling (see the “Cycling Love for Lasting Love” mini-love-lesson) that keeps a love relationship going on, and on and on.  This is what field, laboratory and clinical research reveals. (Check out the latest findings from the Gottman Institute).

The Love Action Vacuum

Clinical research of which I have been involved points to the most relationship-destroying factor: a deficiency in the demonstration of love in an ongoing way. This was hard to discover because discovering ‘something that is not there’, or is absent is a lot harder than discovering something that is there.  Probably that accounts for the fact that, until now, laboratory type research pointed to ‘the presence’ of derogatory and demeaning words and actions as being the most common relationship-destroying behavior.  Both are very important.

If there is an absence of regularly demonstrated love or an absence of good love reception, a love relationship is likely to wither and die.  Some relationships do live on with very sparsely shown love but they are not thought to thrive like they could.  If there is both the absence of daily actions showing love and the presence of demeaning words and actions, a really close, enriching love relationship is not likely to develop and most likely will die.

Love relationships which are not so close, like those of distant friends and family members, can do well with only occasional actions conveying love.  Also those who have previously done really well at showing each other love, but no longer have much contact, can sort of pick up where they left off to re-contact.  The participants know that their love relationship continues though it seems at times dormant.

Love As Food

Love is a psychological food.  In fact, it is probably the healthiest and most energizing psychological food there is.  Like with physical food, it helps to have daily meals.  So, with your closest loved ones, it is best to be sure you regularly feed them, preferably multiple times every day.  Also, don’t forget yourself.  Healthy self-love also nourishes best when it is done regularly.

A lack of small, daily showings of love leads to love malnutrition and love starvation (see the mini-love-lesson “Is Depression Love Starvation”).  So, don’t starve those you love – spouse, children, closest friends, or yourself.

Learn & Practice the Eight, Major, Direct Ways to Show Love

Massive, well conducted research in social psychology led to the discovery of the major ways that people show each other love.  There are eight groups of behavior that do this according to that research.  Each of these behavior categories has been found to result in different benefits.  You can learn and practice small, easily done behaviors in each category.  It is all covered in our books Recovering Love and Real Love False Love.  You also can start learning about them with the mini-love-lesson titled “Behaviors That Give Love – The Basic Core Four”.  There also are indirect ways that convey love but those are for another day.

Big and False, Small, Regular and Real

Sometimes the grand gesture comes from someone who is in one form or another of false love.  Maybe they just want to make really big impressions for boosting their own ego or something like that.  One of the signs of healthy, real love is the consistency of love actions.  This is done a little bit, but not too much, regularly and fairly frequently, but not too frequently.  Overdoing it can be just a symptom of insecurity.  That does not mean that the grand gesture or big production can not occasionally happen.  It just has to be mixed with the regular, more frequent and smaller love-conveying behaviors.

Even if the great big, amazing, romantic things never happen, be sure to count the little ones you do get from those who love you.  There are too many people who don’t notice or really receive the smaller love messages coming their way.  So, remember that receiving love well is a major way to give love.  Also regarding the occasional big gestures, remember, it is your job to ask for what you want if you are not getting it.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Who could you go show a little love to today, and what about tomorrow, and the day after that?

Related posts:

1. Lasting Sex and Lasting Love
2. Cycling Love for Lasting Love
3. Behaviors That Give Love – The Basic Core Four
4. Other Ways to Say I Love You
5. Love in the Fridge 

Self-Affirmation for Healthy Self-Love

Synopsis: The huge and often poorly dealt with problem of self ‘dis’-affirmation is first presented; followed by why affirmation from others is not enough; and then how to do healthy, strong self-affirmation complete with a 10 Point Program for helping you grow your own healthy self-love through self-affirmation exercises.

The Huge Problem of Self Dis-Affirmation

Chelsea, everybody agreed, was gorgeous but in her own evaluation Chelsea was sure she was, at best, average looking.  Everybody agreed Chelsea was quite sweet but she believed she was far too often very mean.  Chelsea made high grades in college but secretly believed she was below average in intelligence.

Worst of all, Chelsea was convinced she was so basically inferior she was unlovable and, therefore, destined for a life of loneliness.  Her self dis-affirmation caused her a lot of self defeat and as those defeats mounted she became increasingly depressed and eventually suicidal.

Then a loving friend trying hard to break through to her, forced a puppy on her.  Her parents had never allowed pets.  The unconditional love this dog seemed to have for her began to put sparks of color into her formerly gray life.  Later that same friend, along with another, cajoled her into seeing a very loving therapist.

She soon was aware of the very negative way she was brought up that programmed her to think of herself as sinful, selfish, inadequate and unworthy.  With good therapy she fought back, beginning to re-program her inner thinking about herself.  One of the tools that helped the most was learning self-affirmation for growing her own healthy self-love.

Chelsea is not alone.  There literally are millions of people who as they grew up heard and incorporated far too many negative messages and far too few positive messages about themselves.  Too many positive messages without counterbalancing with accurate critiquing of what does need improvement can be a big problem too. However, subconsciously incorporating copious negatives seems to be much more common in many parts of the world.

There also is the problem of indifference where a child hears neither negative nor positive messages about themselves.  That can be almost as bad as the problem of too many negatives and not enough accurate, realistic positives.  If the negatives are accompanied by a lack of other behaviors that convey love, serious depression and other forms of mental and emotional illness problems seem very likely to develop.  Escaping the ‘inner voices of self-criticism’ through destructive substance addiction is thought to be especially common for those with high negative message backgrounds.

Why Affirmation from Others Is Not Enough

Chelsea, and many like her, later did get praise, compliments, thanks and many other positive messages about herself but she never believed them.  Each positive statement was blocked from doing any good by her earlier training that told her things like “other people don’t really mean what they’re saying, they are just being nice”, “they are after something and trying to manipulate you, so watch out” and “if you let yourself be praised, complimented, etc. you will become egotistical and then for sure no one will want you” and “you’re in danger of being led astray by flattery and false praise.” Not to mention “Thinking well of yourself is the road to destruction and damnation”.  Thus, all positives coming into Chelsea were poisoned as they often are for so many.

Once a person has been taught to thoroughly dis-affirm themselves, other people’s positive messages about them often are nearly useless.  However, if they are lead to look at the actual evidence of what is truly good about themselves, improvement sometimes can begin.  There always are a lot of good or positives which have been hidden from their awareness.  The process of learning self-affirmation for the development of self-love can greatly hurry the achievement of healthy, accurate self opinion.
Once the natural process of growing healthy self-love gets started or re-started, it can accelerate.  When that happens the wonders of healthy self-love can be achieved and everybody benefits.

How to Self Affirm for Healthy, Self-Love Development

There are many good programs for self-affirmation.  Here is an outline that has worked well for a large number of my clients who’ve needed self-affirmation.

Usually I adapted it somewhat to fit the individual, so feel free to do the same for yourself.  You also can weave it into other self-affirmation systems.

SELF AFFIRMING FOR HEALTHY SELF-LOVING, A 10 POINT PROGRAM

1.    Start talking back to whatever part of you tells you not to try this program.  If in your head you hear things like “this is silly, stupid, how can this really help?, its phony, shallow, don’t ever try because you can’t do anything right and besides you’re hopeless, or put it off, you will do it someday but not now – talk back.  Tell that self-defeating part of you to shut up, and say it with vigor and determination!  You also might say to the naysayer within “what you’re doing doesn’t help even if it is meant to, so learn to do something else better, more positive.”  Internal naysayers can become yea-sayers.

2.    Decide to do the following practices wholeheartedly.  After all, the negative messages in your head probably got there with energy and emotion being expressed, so countering them will need the same – energy and emotion.  It is okay not to believe this will work but it is not so okay to believe it will certainly fail.  Be open-minded to help your experiment not be self sabotaged by your negative programming.  Doubt and skepticism are okay later after you really have done the exercises recommended here.  It is like physical exercise, you do not have to believe in it, you just have to do it.

3.    Start making a list of 100 Good Things About Yourself. Yes, you have at least 100.  Small, medium and large, they all count.  Most everything about you can be made good use of.  If you are short, you can get to the stuff down low.  If you are tall, you can get the stuff up high.  If you have been programmed to ‘not notice’ this kind of positive (and lots of other positive things) that are true about yourself, when you ‘do notice’, you then probably will devalue it automatically.  Whatever is true, or at least a bit true, counts so put them on your 100 positives list.  If you have a good heart (kind, caring, empathetic, etc.) that truly is of value.  0ur planet needs more people like you.  Got a nice smile?  That counts too.  It is okay to ask friends, family or whoever for some input on this, but remember, it is about ‘your’ positives, nothing else.

There are two categories of personal value, ‘who you are’ and ‘what you do’, also known as your ‘intrinsic value’ and your ‘extrinsic or production value”.  Many people have been programmed to only count their production value, i.e. what they can accomplish, produce, etc..  As you grow elderly or if you become disabled, your production value may lessen.  So long as you are alive, your intrinsic value remains.  Perhaps you can get a sense of that by meditating on the statement “all babies are born important”.  “I was born important”.  “I am of value”.  Then try to ‘feel loving and to feel loved’ toward yourself, showing yourself you are of (intrinsic) worth.  Then, if you want to, ‘do’ (produce) something with those feelings, all the better.

4.    Go somewhere pleasant, private, and fairly quiet as soon as you have at least five things on your list of 100 Good Things About Yourself.  It is okay if there is pleasant but not distracting music in the background.  Then just be there for a few minutes, doing nothing but breathing.

5.    Slowly stretch, twist and pleasantly bend your body every way you can.  Then sit down and begin to breathe slowly and deeper, at least three times.  Think “I will do this exercise to the best of my ability”, with each breath.  Continue breathing slowly and deeply, (to your own comfort level) repeating that statement.  Then say to yourself  “I am doing this exercise to the best of my ability” with each repetition take more deep, slow breaths.  With firmness, you may need to command “silence” to any and all other, interfering, or negative thoughts which might creep in.  You also can add “naysayer within, I will listen to and deal with your thoughts later but not now.  Repeat as needed.

6.    Look at your list of five or more good things about yourself and pick one.  It is best if it is a short, specific statement.  “I can intensely enjoy beautiful sunsets” would be an example.  (Anything you know how to truly appreciate is a valuable attribute, so ‘own’ it as a part of yourself!).  “I enjoy puns and that is no joke, and it’s a good thing about me” would be another example.
7.    Now, from your list, say these good things about yourself, out loud, beginning with a firm “I am…  “followed by the good thing from your list.

Something to know, motions help change emotions.  Therefore, begin to move your arms in ways that express how you want to feel about what you have just said.  If you strongly said “I am smart”, putting a finger on your head with a bold gesture would be an example.  Whatever ‘negative’ got in your head, probably was expressed and received with certain tones of voice, facial expressions, body posture and perhaps hand and arm gestures.

If someone scowled at you, pointed a finger at you and in mocking tones said “you’re so stupid”, it isn’t just the words that stuck in your head.  It is the whole picture, with sound.  So it will work best, if while you’re implanting a counterbalancing positive in your head, you are doing it with vigorous, strong movement and sound.  Looking in the mirror while doing this can get to the facial expression part.  If you were scowled at, smile as you affirm yourself.

Talk simply and in the present tense.  Declare the positive about yourself. Sometimes it helps to add a short bit of evidence.  “I’m smart!  My good grades give me strong evidence that is a truth about me”, is an example.  Each out-loud statement, done with motion, may counterbalance or erase as many as seven negatives that came your way, some experts suggest.  It is okay to pound your fist, shout, get up and march around, dance, jump, or anything else that helps you intensely live your affirmation of yourself.  Remember to command the naysayer within, who may be trying to tell you this is stupid, silly, etc. to be silent.

8.    Now pick another item from your growing list of 100 Good Things About Yourself and do the procedures just described.  As your list grows to 100, keep repeating this process with new items from the list.  Doing this exercise once a day and at the very least once a week until you have done this exercise with at least 30 of the self affirmations on your list, is strongly recommended for getting good results.  Many concentrate on one a day for 100 days.  It is good to repeat the ones most important to you.  Also suggested, is drawing a little:-) on a calendar for each day you do this, and not being down on yourself if you miss a day.  Just pick one tomorrow and keep going.

9.    Each time, after you have done the out-loud and strong movement part of this exercise, sit quietly for a bit.  Then read this statement to yourself.  “I am doing these exercises as acts of healthy self-love because I am important to myself, I am worthy of my own love and, therefore, feeling good and being positive about myself, to myself, is a worthy exercise.  I am in the process of ‘owning’ all that is good and miraculous in me.  By doing these things, I am becoming thankfully happy about who I am, and how I am me.  I will strengthen and improve myself with these truths about me.”  Then close your eyes, breathe deeply and slowly again, and meditate on what you have just read for at least two or more minutes.

10.    After doing the above exercise with 10 of the items on your list of 100 Good Things About Yourself, add this statement to your meditation reading.  “I will love others better as I love myself better”.  Then close your eyes and meditate on how you will make that true.

Now, go and do some of this and start noticing how it helps you feel about yourself, as you keep doing it.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question:
Do you know and live by the truth that you have to ‘do’ different, again and again, to ‘become’ different?

Related posts:

1. Self-Love and Its Five Healthy Functions
2. Forgiveness in Healthy Self-Love
3. It Might Be Healthy, Real Love …
4. Healthy Self-Love and Not Giving Your Power Away
5. Getting Healthy, Real Love in Your Life 

Love Bids and Their Astounding Importance

Synopsis: How pitching and catching love bids makes an enormous difference starts our discussion; followed by what love bids are; and finally ending with the super significance of well caught and well returned bids; more.

Pitching and Catching Love Bids Makes All the Difference

Across the crowded room Michael glanced at Grace, then briefly smiled and nodded ever so slightly in her direction.  Grace coyly smiled back as she gave a slow subtle return nod.  Such a small, quick interaction but it made both Michael and Grace feel slightly elated and a bit more emotionally connected.  Both thought about how good their love relationship was and how glad they were to have it all these many years.

They both then moved through the gathering toward each other and went happily home earlier than they had planned, enjoying each other all the way.  Because Michael had ‘pitched’ Grace a little behavioral “bid” for love connecting and Grace ‘caught’ it well and pitched one back, this couple had one of their many, excellent, loving evenings together, feeling close and intimately connected.
Nan and Buck did not fare nearly as well.  Buck was eating an early lunch at work when Nan called and said, “Let’s go to lunch together”.

Buck, lost in his work, said a rather abrupt, “No, I’m already eating here at my desk.  Is there anything else?”.  Nan feeling discounted and rebuffed mumbled a goodbye and ended the call.  After work, Nan decided to get a drink with some of her fellow workers and went on to spend the evening flirting and dancing, and then got home rather late.  Waiting at home, Buck felt lonely, a bit worried and then a bit angry.

When Nan came in he greeted her with a very critical, parent-like, “Where have you been. You should have called if you were going to be late”.  Feeling criticized like a child, she lied saying she had to work late and she was going to bed because she was really “wiped out”.  Now both of them felt lonely and rebuffed.

Had Nan pitched her bid for love connecting in a much more clear fashion like, “I really want a little personal, close, ‘us’ time together.  Let’s use today’s lunch time for that.  Okay?”.  Had Buck been more aware and ‘caught’ and understood Nan’s ‘love bid’ for what it was, a chance for a love connection experience, they might have done as well as Michael and Grace but sadly they didn’t.
Research is showing that the ‘pitching and catching’ of love bids may be crucial to the success or failure of many love relationships.  This is true not only for couples but also parents and children, family relationships, deep close friends and even with pets.  There even is evidence that love bidding also may occur in the animal world, especially among mammals.

What Are Love Bids?

Simply put, a love bid is any action aimed at initiating an experience of mutual love connection.  It can be as simple as a wink, an intimate tone of voice, a tender touch, a welcoming gesture or an inviting smile.  It can be a bid for love connecting by way of showing and sharing humor, ideas, affection, excitement, fun, silliness, conversation, empathy, affirmation, self-disclosure, caring, support, catharsis or just time together.

Love bids often are subtle but they also can be quite clear and obvious.  They are accomplished by both verbal and expressional (non-verbal) behaviors.  They help fill one of love’s major purposes, that of healthful connection (see mini-love-lessons “A Functional Definition of Love”).  Love bids, well pitched and well caught, and then returned again help us come together, get happy together and help bring about the best and most important of love nurturing and emotionally nourishing experiences.

Love Bids and Love Success

There is research from the pioneering and famed Gottman Institute that shows successful couples tend to connect and interact 86% or more of the time when one partner or the other makes a bid for love relationship connection; success here is defined as a couple being together six or more years.  Failing couples, those who break up or divorce in less than six years, connect after a bid for connection is made, on average, only 33% of the time or less.  That is only one of an increasing number of findings from a growing body of large-scale, long-range, ongoing research efforts in a wide number of fields working to discover what succeeds in love relationships.

A considerable amount of growing evidence points to this conclusion.  Love bids and love connecting experiences are vital for maintaining and growing healthy, real love relationships.  The maintenance of ongoing relationships, the healing of damaged relationships and living balanced and healthfully in active relationships is crucially affected by how well people in these relationships ‘pitch and catch’ their bids for love connecting.

Subtle Bids for Love Connecting

Jennifer looked up and in whispered tones said, “Aren’t the clouds beautiful”?  She was making a small, subtle bid for her husband to briefly connect with her in a sharing appreciation, love experience.  She was purposefully making it small and subtle because, to her, it seemed more intimate and romantic that way.  Perhaps it also seemed safer protecting her from being obviously rejected if he didn’t catch it or reacted somehow negatively.

If Jennifer’s husband made absolutely no response to her bid she might see him as being insensitive, not valuing her, perhaps upset with her, or even evidence of him not loving her.  If Jennifer’s husband responded with something like, “No, I actually don’t like those clouds, they look like a storm is brewing and that’s going to ruin our barbecue plans for tonight”.  That would have been better than no response at all.  Even though it presents disagreement, it involves replying and interacting with her about what she said, and that is more of a love connecting than not responding at all.

If he added to his disagreement statement, terms of endearment like Sweetheart or Darling, along with pleasant tones of voice, it could be considered quite loving.  That might have met Jennifer’s desire to be dealt with, and connected with, as someone who is loved by her husband.  It, therefore, would have been a love nourishment and bonding experience, better by far than silence.

If Jennifer’s husband responded by putting an arm around her, and pulled her closer as he also looked at the clouds and then kissed her on the cheek, that would have given her the love connection that her bid actually was aimed at producing.  If he had added words like, “I feel so close to you when we see beautiful things together”, that might have made for an intimate moment of superb, love connection.
The pitching and catching of subtle love bids sometimes can be something of an art form.  It may involve all sorts of intriguing, enjoyable, enticing and surprising, artfully delivered, variations.  It also can be quite spontaneous and even unconsciously done.  Without even knowing it, a sad look can be a bid for supportive, caring, love connecting.

Obvious Bids for Love Connection

While subtle bids for love connection are considered more romantic and safer from embarrassment, obvious bids are much more likely to be clearly understood and successfully enacted.  However, when they are lovelessly rejected, the ‘ouch’ factor usually is much stronger.  So, unless your self-love is quite strong, having your obvious bids for love connection turned down may result in you feeling really hurt.  The healthfully, sufficiently self loving can sincerely think “their loss” and go on feeling okay.  Others, not so much.

Obvious bids usually are accomplished through the use of words requesting specific behaviors.  “Let’s cuddle on the couch for the next half-hour and just be close, okay?” is an example of an obvious bid for love connection.  A well pitched, obvious love bid includes four elements: (1) the behavior desired –  to cuddle, (2) the desired place where the behavior is to occur – on the couch, (3) the desired time – the next half-hour, and (4) the desired emotional mood – closeness.  A good, obvious love bid usually is stated in loving tones of voice with loving facial expressions, gestures and perhaps some loving touch.  If delivered in written form, it usually is good to add some additional words expressing love directly.

It also is good to be careful about making a clear difference between a bid for sex and a bid for love, or a bid for both together.  It is important that you and your intimate love partner both be sure you have the same understanding.  If you say, “I want to hug” and it means “let’s have a raunchy, good time together, miscommunication problems are highly likely.

Well Caught and Returned Love Bids

Responding to love bids is crucial for having ongoing, love success.  When couples, or families, or friends reduce their pitching, catching and return pitching of their bids for love connecting, as one might expect, connection reduces.  Reduced love connecting sets up a love relationship for all manner of problems.  Love malnutrition and love starvation may occur.  This especially is dangerous for the health and well-being of young children.

Vulnerability to couples having affair problems becomes greater.  Friends and family members can grow distant with reductions of love bids.  And all sorts of other maladies become more likely when bids for love connection are markedly reduced or absent.
Frequently and, if possible, artfully pitching your bids for love connection, receiving other’s bids, and responding with a return pitching leads to love cycling.  This in turn tends to grow love and make it stronger, as well as healthier, not to mention more enjoyable.

To do all that requires several things.  It is just like the game called “catch” when the ball is thrown back and forth.  (Notice the game is not called “throw”).  First you have to be aware that something is being thrown or pitched to you.  Otherwise, what is pitched may fly right by you.  Once you notice what is coming, you have to try to catch it.  This requires some understanding of what it really is, or might be, and a receiving response, followed by an awareness of whether you got it or not.

Misinterpreting or misunderstanding is like fumbling the ball.  Next you have to come up with how you are going to make a return pitch, followed by aiming and sending it.  Each of these steps can be handled artfully with practice, clumsily, or not at all.  The research suggests everybody totally misses some of the time, fumbles at other times, but with practice, sometimes with coaching, they can get better and better at this astonishingly important love skill.  So, the more you study and practice both your pitching love bids and catching your loved one’s bids for love connection, the better the relationship likely will be.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What kind of bids for love connecting are you good at making, and what kinds are you likely to miss or misunderstand?

Related posts:

1. Lying to Protect Those You Love ???
2. Connection Matching – A Love Skill
3. Wall and Catapult Love Destruction & How To Avoid It
4. Anti-Love, Non-Love & Real Love
5. Cycling Love for Lasting Love 

Unselfish Self-Love

Synopsis: Three contrarian questions lead off our mini-love-lesson; which then goes to eye-opening answers to those questions; some knowledge about the benefits of unselfish self love; more.

Three Contrarian Questions

Who do you think does more good in the world, the highly self caring or those who are frequently self-sacrificing?

Who do you think are more giving and helpful to others, those who are highly self-critical or those who like and love themselves a lot?  Who do you think attends more to the less able and less fortunate, those who are low or those who are high in active self-love?

Eye-Opening Answers

The research data shows, contrary to what many have been taught to think, the healthfully self loving are more effective and more frequently active in doing kind and compassionate love behaviors and working for the benefit of others than those in various other comparison groups.  It appears the self-sacrificing are not viewed as very good at self care.  Therefore, they are thought to grow depleted and less able to help others over time.

The self-critical often are seen to be too busy giving themselves negative attention to do all that much for others and are considered to have a lack of sufficient self-confidence which slows them down.  The emotionally needy and low in self-love put much more of their energy into confused attempts to get their own needs met, so they too often do not have much to give others.  The timid and guilty fear to act because they might do something wrong and they also are believed to back away from criticism, resistance and disagreements that arise in trying to benefit others.

Those who are healthfully self loving turn out to be the more unselfish, compassionate to others as well as to themselves.  They also are more likely to act altruistically, charitably and champion humanitarian causes, plus be more steadfast in encountering resistance and they are far less likely to surrender to criticism or opposition.  At least that is what a growing body of research points to.

There are other groups that are largely unselfish but it seems that without sufficient, healthy self-love and the self-care and self compassion healthy self-love brings them, for various reasons, don’t do as well.  There are those who think they have never done enough but the self-negativity that brings can be de-energizing and counterproductive.  There are those who have been taught that all pride is a sin, feeling good about yourself is egotistical and blinding to one’s own flaws, and all types of self-love lead to being self-centered, self-indulgent, self-seeking, smug, complacent to the detriment and expense of others.

So far at least, research does not support the contention that people who believe this way are better at being beneficial to others than are those who have strong, healthy self-love. Quite the contrary in fact.  There is evidence that points to the self compassionate and self caring being the most compassionate and caring to and for others.  Thus, they more than others, actually best fulfill the ancient admonition “Love others as you love yourself”.

Are the Selfish the Least Self Loving?

It can be argued that the highly selfish, egocentric, braggadocios, egomaniacal, etc. are just misguided and mistaken, and are attempting to make up for their own considerable lack of real and healthy self-love.  In essence the selfish are seen as trying hard to be self loving but they are trying in the wrong ways.  From this point of view they are doomed to real, self love failure.  Their’s, in fact, is seen as fake self-love.

The healthfully self loving are thought to more likely have a large sense of mysterious awe concerning their own nature, a great sense of gratitude for all that contributed to their own, unique selfhood, plus a tendency toward humorously accepting their own flaws and fumbles.  These are not characteristics thought to be easily found in the strongly selfish.  It is the unkind, uncharitable, unforgiving, un-thoughtful and insensitive to others who are deficient in self-love.

Those who are healthfully self loving are more likely to have what can be called ‘a full cup’ and, therefore, have a lot more they can give to others than those who are desperately trying to fill their very empty and leaking cup, so to speak.  The healthfully self-loving do not need to be egotistical because their cup not only ‘runneth over’ but does not leak.

Narcissism Versus Healthy Self-Love

Narcissism often is defined with the term self-love.  In light of a growing body of evidence concerning healthy, real love, it would seem appropriate to re-think narcissism.  Narcissism is understood to be a condition which blocks or at least lessens love for others.  More and more available evidence shows healthy self-love to enable and promote the love of others.  In fact, narcissism most accurately may be seen as a form of false self-love.  Perhaps it was not self-love that Narcissus experienced when he saw his image in the pool of water and fell in love with himself, but rather just a romantic infatuation, crush, or some other form of false love like love/lust confusion (see the entry) or even a case of time-limited limerence (see the entry).

One of the characteristics of the healthfully self loving is self compassion, well mixed with empathetic compassion for others in suffering and misfortune.  Narcissism is understood as making people so enamored of themselves that they do not notice or care about the suffering and misfortune of others.  Clearly healthy self-love and narcissism appear to be two very different things.

The Benefits of Unselfish Self-Love

It is very self-serving to be unselfish.  A bunch of surprising research results, show that when you act from altruism for the benefit of others you get all sorts of health benefits like improved immunity mechanism functioning, lowered bad cholesterol, better blood pressure and a number of other very, healthy things.  When you show compassion for the suffering of others, but also when you show compassion for yourself at the same time, or soon after, the likelihood of feeling depleted from giving to and caring for others is much less.  Likewise, if you show empathetic responses tor others, they are much more likely to show the same back toward you.

So, if you want to be good to yourself be good to others.  Once again, the amazing wisdom hidden in the simple words “Love others AS you love yourself” is being shown to have biological validity.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Have you ever decided to make yourself feel good by going to do some kind of good for another?  If not, how about starting now?

Related posts:

1. Compassionate Love, A Big Sign of True Love?
2. Thinking Love to Improve Love
3. Forgiveness in Healthy Self-Love
4. Self-Love – What Is It? 

Happier Love and Six Big Ways to Make It So!

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson covers six important ways recent research in behavioral economics and the emotions of economic decisions have discovered, which can help people in love relationships be happier together.

About Happier Love

Is your love life getting happier?  By love we don’t just mean sex but that is definitely included.  We mean, are you doing love in such a way as it makes you and those you love smile, grin, laugh and have a sense of shared joy and, maybe once in a while, even have a sense of oceanic rapture together?  Whether you are a couple, a family or are really close, loving friends, you ‘together’ can learn and practice certain behaviors which researchers have discovered may assist us in growing happier as we go about love together.

1.  Savor more and more together!
Any good, joint experience is worth lingering in, so enjoy and share it longer and more fully.  So often we cut short our joy in order to get to the ‘next thing’.  Usually the ‘next thing’ could have waited a bit longer and wasn’t really that good, important or as necessary as you might have first thought.  Jointly sharing and, in essence, saturating yourselves longer in any positive experience likely will do you and your love relationship more good than whatever you are about to hurry on to.  Savoring any positive experience together can double your joy, strengthen your relationship and help you be more physically and mentally healthy.

Savoring basically is accomplished by purposely focusing longer on, and sort of soaking up, or emotionally digesting further the experience and it’s various elements.  Then for doing it more fully together, you can share what you focused on and the feelings that brought you.

2.  Be jointly open to flexibility!
Do you push to have the excellent date, set the just right scene, produce the most superb romantic dinner, create outstanding and incredible sex, have the finest time ever, give the perfect party or even just have a super clean house before company comes.  Well, doing all that often makes for way too much pressure, tension and stress for happiness to have much of a chance.  At best you may get a sense of pride and a sense of relief when it’s all over.

The more perfectionistic the goals and standards, and the more elaborate and picky the plans, the greater the likelihood of insufficient mental flexibility for shared elation to occur.  With flexibility and tolerational love, shared merrymaking has a much better opportunity to happen.  The ability to laugh together at various foul-ups, jointly appreciate odd occurrences, be united in humorous tolerance for deviations from the plan, and celebrate the unexpected as a loving team, the more you are likely to create great, happy memories and fine togetherness.

3.  Schedule fun including sexual fun frequently.
Most good and happy times occur because they were on somebody’s schedule to make happen.  Even if an experience seems spontaneous it is likely at least part of it was planned.  By its very nature, spontaneity can help provide some wonderful times together but it cannot be counted on to provide all the recreation (re– creation) fun love relationships need.

I suggest you abide by the principle that says ‘it won’t happen unless it’s given a time and it’s on your calendar’.  Enjoy whatever else comes along but don’t depend on it to fulfill your minimum, regular quotient of quality love experiences.  That requires scheduling.  Those who do this are found to have a lot more happy times, have greater experiences together and consistently grow their love better than those who don’t.  By the way, shared experiences usually bring more happiness than most acquired objects.

4.  Grow your mindfulness sharing.
Mindfulness means focusing on what you are experiencing right now, in thought and feeling.  It also means not letting your focus switch to anything in or from the past, the future or anywhere besides the ‘here and now’.  Mindfulness sharing means doing the same thing but sharing your ‘here and now’ awareness with someone you love.  It can involve verbally expressing the thoughts and feelings you are having right now about and with each other.  That works especially well if the mindfulness has to do with appreciation and affirmation.

Sharing mindfulness also can be done nonverbally with the expressional communications of touch, lovingly looking into each other’s eyes, facial expressions, tones of voice, gestures and posture changes, and just being physically close while experiencing emotional connectedness as you experience what is happening around you.  Think of standing together holding hands and feeling awe together as you both look at a truly awesome sunset, over and equally awesome land or seascape.

Now if for example, you are there but your mind has wandered off to some issue at work, checking your e-mails, or worrying that you didn’t lock the door back home, you have lost a “precious now” and are no longer receiving and sharing the “present” of the present.  Love’s intimacy, closeness and bonding will all be less.  When that happens I suggest you practice ‘mind yanking’ back to the ‘existential now’ and lose yourself in it together.

5.  Go for shared, serene joy as much, or more, as you go for jubilant excitement!
Shared calm serenity, simple easy-going non-demand comfort, quiet awesomeness, and the grand mystical togetherness feelings of deep, joyful love often bring much greater happiness than momentary ecstasy, or the highs of adrenaline-filled adventure.  Relaxed, peaceful, ongoing joy and happiness often is the best of love, although elation surprises and experiences also can be great.  Go for both.

6.  Enjoy emotional intercourse every day you can!
Emotional intercourse happens when you empathetically feel whatever a loved one is feeling emotionally, and they know or sense you are feeling something very similar to what they are feeling.  It can happen mildly to moderately, or in wonderfully strong and powerful ways.  If you ever feel like you really are inside each other, or you have melded together, or in ecstasy you exploded together and have become one with the universe, you have experienced great, emotional intercourse.

If you feel comforted and safe, pleasantly but deeply with, peacefully connected and just right with someone you love, you may be having the very excellent, more moderate form of emotional intercourse.  And if you have moments where you just are showing and feeling care for someone and they for you, that might be one of the milder, emotional intercourse experiences occurring.  There is great individual difference in these, but they all are very good.

To have emotional intercourse, focus on your loved one and what is going on in their heart and gut as much, or more than what is coming from their mind.  Enjoy their enjoyment.  Then center yourself in care or loving appreciation.  Do this especially when they are happy, or up, about something as well as when they are down.  In happy experiences be sure all your attention does not go outwardly to the experience and what is happening there, but also that some of you attention, or a lot of it, goes to the one you love and sharing the joy, or whatever feeling they are having.

At the same time share your own concurrent emotional experiences.  Then keep going back and forth in the sharing of feelings with them, responding with your thoughts and feelings about their thoughts and feelings.  Notice and share each emotion you are having when your loved one relates an emotion they are having.  This back and forth sharing of emotions of both of you, especially the happy ones, is the emotional intercourse that jointly grows happy love. (See the mini-love-lesson “Emotional Intercourse”).

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What do you think of the idea of becoming ‘a happy love farmer’?

Related posts:

1. Other Ways to Say I Love You
2. Intimacy Creation – A Love Skill
3. Emotional Intercourse
4. Upbeat Emotions & Learning for Love
5. Intercourse Absent Lovemaking – a Love Skill 

Loneliness and Love

Synopsis: First this mini-love-lesson covers the surprising ways loneliness harms us; then the issues of ignore, fight, escape, just get used to loneliness, or what?; doing what loneliness wants you to do; a cautionary note; Ricardo’s example and Ricardo’s results, (can they be yours?).

Surprising Ways Loneliness Harms Us

Recent research shows loneliness is especially bad for your brain.  What is bad for your brain can be bad for many of your body’s health processes and systems because the brain influences and regulates them.  Loneliness also is bad for your psychological health and that can influence everything else in your life.  One study of over 8000 men and women showed the lonely have up to a 20% faster rate of decline in mental abilities.

Those who have prolonged loneliness are seen to have more stress illnesses and a greater likelihood of having brain inflammation problems.  Loneliness can be seen as a component of love malnutrition or love starvation, which is understood to have a very negative impact on our immunity mechanisms, cancer resistance, blood pressure and a host of other physical problems.

Ignore, Fight, Escape, Just Get Used To It – or ???

Many people try to escape their loneliness by diving into their work, business or various other involvements.  Some try to escape into substance abuse or various behavioral addictions.  Others get some temporary help from antidepressants and other medications.  Another group of people try to fight loneliness seeing it as some kind of weakness or enemy.  Still others see it as just one more human emotion to be ignored.  Learning to live with it can dull the pain but the damage being done by prolonged loneliness  still can happen.  Usually none of these approaches prove to best serve our health or well-being. At best, they may provide some assistance in the short run but they can turn out to be quite bad for us in the long run, or at most, useless.

So what are we to do?  Wallow in our loneliness and just let it do all the harm it can?  Of course not, that won’t help but there is a way that will.

Doing What Loneliness Wants You to Do!

Like all emotions, loneliness was created in us to do us some good, even though it feels bad, sometimes extremely bad.  It may in fact get worse for not doing what the feeling of loneliness wants us to do.  When we follow the guidance message in loneliness, the bad feelings tend to subside.  Sometimes they begin to subside as soon as we get loneliness’s message, even before we have begun to follow that message with action.  So what is the healthful, constructive, guidance message in the feeling we call loneliness?

Basically loneliness can be seen as an emotional message telling us to go in search of love in any of its many forms.  If you can’t find love quickly, go in search of “like” or at least tolerable company first because that might be on the way to healthy, real love.

It also is important to know that it is not just about romantic love, as our culture and/or family training may have subconsciously programmed us to think.  We are a gregarious species, meant to connect with each other and especially to connect in love relationships with one another.  So, hear the guidance message of loneliness telling you to go in search of new or renewed love.

You may be de-energized from your loneliness, think searching for love is too much work, you don’t have what it takes, love is all a matter of luck anyway and your luck in love is bad, and 100 other self sabotaging negatives with which to block yourself from taking productive action.  Remember, your loneliness may just get worse if you do that.  And none of those blocking mechanisms get you to a new and better place though they might help you rest up a bit first.

A Cautionary Note

As I have emphasized before, all our emotions, even the most painful ones, were created in us to do us constructive, healthy good though they may overdo it, under do it, or mis-do it like all human systems.  If you get any kind of interpretation of an emotion’s guidance message that is destructive to yourself or to anyone, it may have cathartic value but that is all.  Acting destructively is almost always destructive to yourself and not the real guidance message of any emotion.  Unless your interpretation of an emotion’s guidance message goes toward health and well-being, probably for all concerned, it is likely not to be your best or most accurate interpretation.

Following Ricardo’s Example to Love

Ricardo was laying awake night after night, hurting badly with loneliness.  He tried various prescription medications, then alcohol and other substances but nothing seemed to help all that much.  Some people at work, including his boss, pressured and nagged him into going to a counselor, and he went along with that just to get them off his back.  He expected to have to dredge up a lot of his past which would just use up a lot of time and money, but he thought he could probably cut it short being able to say okay, he tried that and it didn’t work either.  He was surprised that his counselor didn’t want to talk much about his past but wanted him to do some immediate things that might be helpful.

After resisting and just a few sessions later, Ricardo got himself a pet dog and everything started changing for the better.  He learned that a good pet dog is perhaps the world’s quickest and surest way to get some good, healthy love.  Brain studies of canines show evidence that, in brain functioning, dogs really do love pretty much just like we do and it is not just because we feed and pet them.

In counseling Ricardo did have to do some work on his blocks and fears that had some causation from his past, but mostly it was about understanding and following the guidance messages in his emotions.  It wasn’t long before Ricardo tentatively went in search of new involvements and new acquaintances.  He went online and discovered some groups with similar interests to his own, and with reluctance got himself to some meetings.  The new acquaintances showed him that new friendships might develop and were even likely.  He then looked up some relatives that he had lost contact with and a renewed family love possibility came out of that.

Ricardo volunteered to help in a cause he believed was good, and surprise surprise, out of that came a new romantic interest.  He took a class in something he was intrigued by and that yielded some more very interesting new people in his life.  He got involved in a religious connected singles group and out of that came a sense of spiritual love that he had not known before, plus some other new friends.  In counseling Ricardo learned about healthy, self-love and that there is a lot of good that comes from that.

Ricardo’s Results

Today Ricardo has a small group of deep, close friends he feels very bonded with, a renewed family love connection, a wide network of medium and milder friends, a fine and growing romantic love relationship and a much improved, healthy self-love.  Ricardo is not lonely anymore.

Whether loneliness comes from months or years of aloneness, or the death of a mate, or from shyness or any other reason, the prescription is the same: overcome reluctance and connect with others, and grow a loving support network for your health and well being.

Can you follow Ricardo’s example if you are struggling with loneliness?  I suspect you can, and hopefully you will if you need to.  It would be a healthy act of self-love and self-care, if loneliness is pushing at you, to do something rather similar to what Ricardo did.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question

Are you willing to be a good friend so as to do your share of having a good, friendship love relationship?