Wellness: Its Necessity, Healthy Real Love

Mini-Love-Lesson  #220

Synopsis:  How the Wellness approach includes, but takes us beyond, ordinary healthcare and reparative/maintenance medicine.  The wellness focus takes us to higher levels of filling our potential for greater health and includes how love (self, other, higher, etc. love) is crucial to the process.

The Health/Love Connection

Can you be healthy without Love?  The mounting evidence is strongly pointing to the answer being – no.  No, because it seems that without healthy, real love in our lives we begin to neurochemically and biochemically malfunction.  That sets us up for a host of serious biological, psychological and associated relational problems.  Fortunately, the opposite is also true.  With a sufficient supply of healthy, real love, our physical, psychological and relational health tends to soar.  When we are the recipient of healthy, real love behaviors our brain and body chemistry processes operate more efficiently, effectively, more powerfully and just generally better.  To know more, you can Google Love and Health and get into the plethora of supporting studies and books.  Our bodies, and especially our brains, respond to those improved chemistry changes in many wonderfully healthful ways.  In turn, that greatly assists us in achieving our personal potential for above normal health and maximum wellness.

You can learn the details of how all that functions by reading Love and Survival by Dr. Dean Ornish, a wellness-oriented physician/medical researcher.  He wrote one of the best and most interesting summary books on how love effects health.  Also, at this site, you can go to “What Your Brain Does with Love - Put Simply”.

Wellness and How It Differs from Other Healthcare?

The Wellness approach is rather different than the treating sickness and fixing injuries focus which historically is the more usual orientation of medicine.  It also is different from the prevention and safety foci of many healthcare services.  Wellness aims at helping us achieve higher than average or above normal “high health”.

Wellness practices involve a process of taking actions toward more healthful living, above and beyond just treating issues of ill health or just maintaining one’s average level of general health.  The wellness approach aims at promoting and achieving maximum health in all major areas of life.  That includes physical, psychological (cognitive and emotional), occupational, spiritual or metaphysical, environmental and relational aspects of life.  It is a lifestyle and holistically oriented, multidisciplinary effort aimed at optimal, healthful living for not only an individual’s benefit but also for communitarian and ecological healthfulness.  It's hard to live in ongoing wellness surrounded by that which is unhealthy.  Sooner or later a sick environment makes its inhabitants sick too.

Wellness approaches especially are focused on discovering and assisting the development of positive strengths, qualities and potentials for health.  It is more about advancing what is good and what can become really good than fixing what is wrong or just keeping things well enough.  Fixing what is wrong, if there is something wrong, is of course included in the wellness approach. 
The medical wellness approach to health is inclusive of augmentative and super-additional practices.  At some wellness centers this includes non-illness issues such as skin care, hair care, massage therapy, exercise and nutrition assistance. 

Helping Love Help Your Health

First, some questions.  How is your love relationship with yourself?  That is important because the more you healthfully love yourself, the more you are likely to do a good job of growing your wellness.  Conversely, a lack of healthy self-love can result in poor self-care, poor motivation to improve or to stay with a program for wellness, as well as poor self-love can lead to ignoring one's sabotaging, unhealthy, lifestyle actions.

For help with healthy self-love, at this site go to these mini-love-lessons: “Self-Love – What Is It?”,  “Self-Love, a Good Thing or a Bad Thing”, and “From Self-Love to Other Love and Back Again”.

Also, how are your love relationships with others?  Who will benefit by you growing your wellness?  That is important because the more you grow your wellness the better you are likely to be at loving those you love and those who love you.  So, who do you truly love and who are you loved by?  And/or are you going to give them a more well you?

Next, do you have and are you working at having healthy, well-functioning and empowering love relationships?  If you are, that can do absolute wonders for your wellness development.  Conversely, a lack of love, being trapped in a false love syndrome, or living in love relationships that are filled with problems can do terrible things to you and your health.  Those negative lifestyles may weaken your immunity mechanisms, bring on stress reactions, mess up digestion and metabolism functioning, increase your bad cholesterol, drain and de-energize you, cause insomnia or other sleep disturbances, lessen cancer resistance, make for blood pressure problems and greatly increase your likelihood of developing anxiety and/or depression problems, cause addiction’s relapse, increase the likelihood of heart attacks and strokes, as well as exacerbate any other health difficulties you may be dealing with.

So, how is your spouse/mate love, family love, deep friendship love, pet love, spiritual love, love of life, altruistic love, and all else you may truly love?   Are your love relationships empowering you, inspiring you, sustaining you, reducing your stress and bringing you substantial happiness?  Now, as you assess this, don't forget your love relationship with yourself.  Ample evidence shows the more you work to improve and enjoy your love relationships the more likely you are to be helping your health move toward fulfilling your personal potential for wellness.

The Flourishing of Wellness Medicine & Healthcare

Newly started wellness-focused medicine and healthcare programs are assisting people of all ages, situations and conditions to move toward fulfilling their own potential for wellness and high health.  Physicians, RNs, PAs, psychotherapists, health counselors and coaches, plus a good many others, have begun to receive specialist training in wellness medicine/healthcare and also start qualifying for recently instituted, specialized wellness credentialing.  Newly created Wellness Centers and clinics are showing up in more and more communities.  Degrees in wellness are starting to be offered at universities.  Large corporations are starting wellness programs for their workers staffed by specially trained, new, wellness practitioners.  But you may wonder, what really makes wellness medicine different or an advancement?  What does it have to offer in addition to the more familiar forms of medical care?

In the past, most of medical practice has been focused on treating illness and injury, or in disease prevention and safety maintenance.  And as stated above, the wellness focus in medicine is different in that it aims toward achieving "high health" or maximum wellness and greater fulfillment of one's potential for living healthfully.  This has led to new and different diagnostic procedures, along with new recommendations for health achieving behaviors, new and different medicinal prescriptions and protocols, as well as new and different forms of treatments and treatment regimens.

Wellness medicine is a little bit similar to the bracket of sports medicine which focuses on improving and maintaining high athletic performance.  But instead of a sport orientation, the goal is helping fulfill our potential for achieving above usual health.  You see, you are built with a potential to go beyond average and achieve above normal healthfulness.  The wellness focus in healthcare is aimed at helping you fulfill that potential.

Furthermore, a wellness approach can help you become more healthful in a wider variety of non-critical areas that often do not get attended to.  Even though some of these are not crucial, those areas when improved add to your general, all over wellness and sense of well-being.

The wellness approach is based in a growing body of medical and related research into what is different about the people who live in high health around the world.  What you do and do not put into your body, plus how and how much you exercise plays a big role.  Genetics, of course, is part of all over wellness.  But the rest of it, and perhaps the majority factor, has to do with healthful lifestyle behaviors and the thoughts and behaviors that support those lifestyle behaviors.  That is where love comes in along with everything else that impacts you emotionally, cognitively and behaviorally.

Here is a simple, arguable precept.  Those who love well and are loved well tend to live well.  They also tend to live longer, more fulfilled, happier, physically and psychologically healthier, more productive, more socially connected and satisfied, and generally live more beneficially to others.  If you doubt that, do some research.  I suggest you start with our working definition of love so that you have a more grounded and factual understanding of what we mean by love (see “The Definition of Love”).  Then read the widely acclaimed work titled Who Gets Sick by Dr. Blair Justice, a highly regarded health research psychologist.  You can Google “love and health” and dig into all the research about the many surprising ways love positively influences physical and psychological health.  I think you'll find plenty of evidence showing healthy, real love is wonderful for whatever ails you and for developing wellness.

How to Go toward Your Own Greater Wellness

Take action!  Look for wellness practitioners and Wellness Centers in your own locale.  Read some of their websites.  Call one or two of them and ask about what they offer.  Go visit a wellness center and get a feel for the place and the personnel you meet there.  Get and read some of their literature.  Be sure to get a list of the credentials of the main practitioners working there.  Check some of those out on the Internet.  Do they hold doctorates and, if so, in what?  Are they licensed health professionals?  It appears that osteopathic physicians (DOs) are providing a lot of the leadership in the wellness approach but there also are plenty of MDs, PhD's R.N.'s PAs and others.  Find out if this particular practitioner or wellness center is connected to, or associated with, a hospital, medical clinic, university or other recognized institution or health involved agency.  Then see if you can get an introductory, possibly free conference with one of the center’s practitioners so as to find out what they might do with and for you.

Wellness centers vary widely in their offerings.  Some are in places where traditional medicine is also practiced.  Others have alternative, new age and Oriental health treatments available.  Still others may offer physical therapy, hormone balancing, laser services, couples enrichment, weight control, stress management, high achievement coaching, meditation, a wide variety of different forms of massage therapy and quite a host of other services.

Some wellness practitioners and wellness centers include programs for couples and families and children and even, once in a while, pets.  Also some wellness professionals and centers have really terrific diagnostic options by which they can tell you all sorts of important health information and use to design a really fine, personalized and custom tailored, just for you, wellness program.  Group programs also may exist, and have the extra advantages of interaction dynamics, and may be cheaper too.  So, be sure to get the full rundown.  Then consider signing up for something and trying-on for size the wellness approach.  Many do and are very glad of it.

If you cannot find a wellness practitioner or wellness center close enough, you might want to check with the USA's National Wellness Institute at the University of Wisconsin.  There you may be able to find out about their programs, along with various online offerings and additional recommendations.  They also may be able to make suggestions for finding wellness practitioners, centers and organizations in your locale and internationally.

One more thing.  Who are you going to talk over wellness ideas  with, and maybe in the process tell them about this site and all its many offerings?

As always –Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question:  Who would you most like to team with going toward greater wellness?

Becoming Well Loved and More Loved – Three Main Ways

Synopsis: Here you get to learn about the counter-societal, teaching idea of getting yourself well loved; and three main, different than usual, ways to achieve that; a three level understanding of love actions you can take; and dealing with the question of who is to be in charge of the love in your life; plus some fine book and mini-love-lesson recommendations.

The Importance of Getting Yourself Well Loved

Since you are reading this you probably have an understanding of the importance of love in your life plus you are being proactive not just relying on luck, fate, etc. to take care of your loved needs.  What you may not know is just how widespread and deep the importance of love goes and some of the major things you can do to put healthy, real love into your life.

The evidence is mounting.  Research in a wide array of scientific fields points to those well loved as living healthier and longer, happier, more productive, more successful, living more balanced, having better sex, helping others more, contributing more to the general well-being of all, recovering from illnesses faster, having better friendships and having greater success in all types of love relationships.

The converse also is appearing to be true.  Being poorly loved or unloved looks to be bad for your health and well-being in just about every area studied so far.  You might read Love and Survival by Dr. Dean Ornish.

The good news is you can get yourself well loved.  The not so good news is much of what our love-ignorant world tells us to do to have love, find love, etc. doesn’t work very well.  And then there also is the myth that you should do nothing until love finds you or your love fate is determined by mystifying forces over which you have little or no influence.  One educated estimate reports that relying on that myth gives you about a 15% chance of succeeding at love.  Luckily, certain in-depth analytical works suggest your subconscious probably does not believe in that myth and naturally pushes you to actively go searching for love whether you consciously know it or not.  Now, if you add conscious learning and thinking about love, like you are doing right now, you can vastly improve your chances with some well-chosen and well informed actions.  However, those actions are not commonly understood very well.  They fall into three major categories which I will present you with right now.

I. To become well loved – become more lovable and then even more lovable!

We can know that basically you already are lovable because you grew and got enough love to survive your first two years of life.  Otherwise, you would have died of a failure to thrive illness like marasmus because that is what happens to unloved infants.

Your Lovability is something you can do a lot things about.  First, it helps to understand what being and becoming lovable means and what those things you can do about it are and are not. One thing to do, if you do not already, is to own-up to the idea that you already are in possession of at least some natural, lovable attributes.  Your job is to grow them and your all over lovableness, add to it, practice it and then show it.

Being lovable itself can be simply defined as having and exhibiting attributes, traits and characteristics which attract and draw affection and loving thoughts, feelings and actions to you.  So, what do you know about the traits and characteristics associated with being lovable?  It is important to know that lovability has both a more surface and a more deep meaning.  Both are worth consideration.

Lovability at the more surface level means exhibiting traits like being adorable, amiable, charming, cheerful, cute, complimentary, engaging, embraceable, fetching, genial, pleasing, rewarding and winsome.  There are others you may want to add.

Being lovable in a deeper meaning way includes characteristics like being kind, caring, compassionate, able to be tender, emotionally warm, accepting, supportive, trustworthy, harmonious, positive, non-judgmental, affirmative, self disclosing, tolerant, friendly, assertive rather than aggressive, and most of all easily willing and able to be sincerely loving.  Here too, there are other characteristics you might want to include.

Now, you might want to start evaluating your own having and exhibiting lovableness traits and characteristics, along with goals and actions for making improvements.  Consider journaling those.  I also heartily recommend reading Lovability by Dr. Robert Holden, a book that could really help you grow your own lovability.

II. To Have Love – Become Loving and Then More and Better at Being Sincerely And Actively Loving!

This is an old teaching literally going back at least to the year one when Ovid put it forth in his teachings and writings on love and sex in his famous The Art of Love.  Modern, behavioral, science research suggests he was quite right.  Those who are good at being actively loving to themselves as well as to others are the ones most likely to get good, healthy, real and lasting love coming their way.

Becoming more loving requires learning what being loving is and how it is done.  It is a bit more involved than you might suppose.  Therefore, you may have to study it rather closely and repeatedly.  You may have to learn to think more lovingly and more about love itself (see “Thinking Love to Improve Love”).  You may have to cultivate getting yourself in touch with the many emotions of love and feeling them more fully (see “An Alphabet of Love’s Good Feelings”).  Most of all, it takes learning and practicing the behaviors that convey love and help you gain skills for getting love to happen.  For your healthy self-love, it helps to greatly enjoy doing all that.  Some of love’s sages teach that if you are excited and joyful in the process of learning to be more and better at loving, it is a good sign indicating you are doing it well.

To help you learn what the behaviors of love are, I recommend you familiarize yourself with this three level, 12 point schema.  Remember, love is complicated and this will actually make it more clear and simplify it – some.

BEHAVIORS THAT CONVEY LOVE CATEGORIES

Cardinal Behaviors of Love (those of comprehensive and inclusive preponderant importance)
Nurturing love actions (growth, developmental, actualizing)
Protecting love actions (guarding, prevention, defending)
Healing love actions (healthcare, recovery and well-being)
Metaphysical/Spiritual love actions (meditation, prayer, ritual)

Crucial Behaviors of Love (those that are acutely important and decisive in major, ongoing love relationships)
Affirmational love actions (affirming the value of the loved)
Self-Disclosure love actions (sharing oneself, transparency)
Tolerational love actions (tolerance, acceptance and forgiveness)
Receptional love actions (receiving love well gives love)

Core Behaviors of Love (those that are basic and foundational)
Tactile love (connection, affection, sexuality)
Expressional love (facial, tonal, gestural, postural)
Verbal love (words spoken and written)
Gifting love (object gifts and experience and service gifts)

To learn and have a fuller understanding of these categories, I suggest you consult the Behaviors category in this site’s labels links below and start with the mini-love-lesson titled “Behaviors That Give Love – the Basic Core Four”.  My book, Recovering Love, covers the Crucial and Core Behaviors more fully and very usefully.  The Five Love Languages, by the Rev. Dr. Gary Chapman, has helped a lot of people with the how-to’s of being loving with a different and somewhat simpler, action-oriented approach.

III. To Become Well Loved and More Loved – Become Love Active, and then Much More Love Active!

Go create your own new and better chances for love.  You can do that by going the same old places you always go, with the same old people but risk acting in more loving, new and different ways.  You also can do that by risking going to different places and with new groups of people while acting more loving in your new and different ways.

Take what you are learning about love and put it into actions again and again.  Go out and about being lovable and loving!  Make the places you inhabit your experimental love lab and your practice fields.  Have fun with honing your skills when helping people feel more loved, valued, attended to, cared about and enjoyed.  Give some thought and a little planning to quick hit-and-run loving, fast guerrilla attack love and brisk who was that mysterious stranger love actions.  Get some images in your mind of what those terms might mean and enact some of them.  Practice on just about everybody including yourself.  Do be sensitive to other’s adverse reactions and tame it down a little when necessary.  But if done with a smile and sincere good-will, you probably will get positive reactions and will be modeling good loving and lovability in the process.

It can be very important for you to pay the price of discomfort as you go explore new and different groups of people.  To do that well, it is important for you to ponder what you think of them rather more than be concerned about what they think of you.  Remember, socially it works better to be the chooser than the chosen and certainly far better than being the beggar.  Usually, the trick is to be friendly assertive (not aggressive) as you listen and ask questions more than you talk or work to impress.  It is very okay to target people you are attracted to but don’t forget attraction and love are very different things (see “Attraction or Love or What?”).  Much of what you do probably will not work very well, especially at first.  Healthy, real love usually does not usually come easily nor should it.  It works best if you count your victories as a whole lot more important than your losses.  You can learn how to succeed from both victories and losses.

Who Is Going to be In Charge of Your Love?

Doesn’t your life of love belongs to you?  Yes, you can share ownership with those you love and those who love you but isn’t it your joyful job to not only give but get yourself well loved?  That, of course, flies in the face of much cultural training which teaches going after love gets in the way of getting it, that it is egotistical and selfish and it is not the way love is supposed to work.  Could it be that those ideas were invented to keep the competition de-activated?  Could it also be that, regarding love, whoever said “the race goes to those who dare to run it” was right?  I might add that it also goes to those who learn to run well and practice a lot.

If you really get determined to get yourself more lovable, more loving and more love active and you use the three major ways (Core, Crucial and Cardinal behaviors) plus employ everything else you can learn to do about healthy, real love, it is likely but not guaranteed that your life of love will be a much bigger, better success.  Work happily to become more lovable, more loving and more love active and see what happens!

One More Little Thing

Who can you talk this over with who may enjoyably disagree or challenge these ideas or your ideas about these ideas?  While you are at it, we would like it if you tell them about this site and its many, totally free, mini-love-lessons.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Who and what got you to think the way you have in the past thought about love and how well has that worked?

Serene Love - A Gentle Power Flowing

Synopsis: Here you are consciously introduced to a calmly flowing form of love you probably experienced very early in life and likely would do well to experience a great deal more--Serene Love.

A Love You Know and Can Know Better

You have heard of Passionate Love, Compassionate Love and maybe even Adamant Love but what do you consciously know about Serene Love?

Healthy, real love flows into its serene dynamic when it becomes calmly happy, safely and joyfully tranquil with emotional warmth and a sense of sanctified harmony.  You might have (or hopefully have) experienced Serene Love as an infant in the protective arms of a loving parent, perhaps gently rocking you into a sense of deep, secure, love-filled, connected contentment.

Or possibly you might have felt something like Serene Love in utero in the later stages of development when your mother lovingly stroked her tummy and talked softly to you.  Those and similar experiences probably planted Serene Love deep in your subconscious.  It also helped save you from dying of the infant killer – marasmus and other failure to thrive syndromes.  Now, with conscious knowledge of Serene Love, you may be able to add many enrichments to your personal and relational health and well-being.

What Is Serene Love?

Serene Love is what its name implies, love with serenity.  And it is much more than that.  Healthy, real love takes on its serene form when it is flowing calmly, peacefully yet powerfully all-around and all through us.  Serene Love puts us into a state of feeling encompassed by very nurturing love while at the same time feeling very serene, fully content and profoundly tranquil.  It includes a sense of being safe and secure with peaceful joy.  When shared with a loved one (s), it often can come with an intense sense of being joined together and united with that loved one (s) in Serene Love .  It is sometimes described as blessedly spiritual, intimately inspiring and providing a sense of total well-being and complete contentment.

How Serene Love Comes to Us

As an adult you may have experienced Serene Love when intimately “spooning” as you went to sleep with someone you dearly loved and who loved and cherished you.  Or perhaps it was when being preciously treated and gently held or tenderly cuddled.  It may occur again when feeling deeply and very personally understood, thoroughly accepted and peacefully core connected while wrapped in heartfelt unity.  Often Serene Love immerses us in its warm, gentle, restorative flow when we accept being cared for, consoled, comforted and especially highly, intrinsically valued by someone very important to us.

Sometimes Serene Love arrives and helps us to thrive via sharing tender precious intimacies, at other times with a soft sunny lightheartedness and yet still at other times as we feel a deep awesome spirituality.  When people experience Serene Love they are apt to smile and occasionally say awesome things like the following lovers quotes: “today feels like God is in his heaven and all is right with our world”; or with a loved one “right now with you I’m completely happily saturated with what seems like a perfect moment of our togetherness” or “it feels like we are soaring together as we flow into, around, through and totally with each other as we ascend into the cosmos itself.”

Serene love can be experienced in shared, tranquil closeness with another.  It might happen walking hand-in-hand under the stars, being jointly swept along with great music, holding each other as you look at your children sleeping or just being quiet and entirely with who you love and are loved by.Mindfulness and Serene Love
You may miss out on the greatness of Serene Love experiences if you are not pausing to pay mindful attention to the possibility of their gentle, flowing arrival.  This is because Serene Love often is experienced as a sort of quiet, subtle, placid drifting forward on a stream of contentment and connectedness, easily rushed past in a busy life.  A full experience of Serene Love takes lingering in awareness of the existential now after turning off the troubling concerns of the past, the future and the outside distractions of the present.  Then it is useful to start purposefully and appreciatively focusing on love and whatever might be serenely enjoyed in that moment.  Doing that can bring you the rich, golden, healthy, halcyon happiness of Serene Love.  When it is shared with someone you love, it can come with extra fine touches of tender, intimate, personal specialness.

Mild, Moderate and Intense Serene Love

Some experiences of Serene Love are only mild and momentary.  They, nevertheless, are precious and to be cherished.  In love relationships, a look of love, a few words of appreciation or affirmation, a certain loving tone of voice, a just right hug, an act of extra kindness, an intimate personal self-disclosure and thousands of other small showings of love can produce both mild and moderate Serene Love experiences (see “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love”. However, it tends to work best, for those who will notice and linger a bit, in mindful awareness of the possibility of Serene Love being present.

Serene Love also can be experienced intensely, especially by those who organize their lives to include time for this possibility.

For couples, romance can help.  Savoring togetherness and not rushing on to the next thing is essential.  It is important to make sure that romantic experiences are fully enjoyed and shared as they transpire, and are not just goal-oriented steps toward sexual satisfaction.

With children, parents, other family members or friends, having carefree, real appreciation of each other can open one to the mild, the moderate and occasionally even the more intense Serene Love experiences.

Being with yourself alone while being meditative sometimes can open you up to joining with a sense of universal love and your purely positive connection with the universe.  That, in turn, can bring on great experiences of intense, serene love even having a Nirvana-like intensity.

Your Brain and Serene Love

Via the brain study sciences, we can point to Serene Love facilitating a neurological, parasympathetic brain pattern sometimes dubbed the deep relaxation response.  That pattern sets off a group of body wide reactions generating a general state of calm contentment.  Relationally, that state then tends to be followed by a greater propensity to being cooperative, kind, appreciative and affectionate toward others.

Experimentally, those understandings were arrived at after research subjects, who were evaluated as being in healthful love relationships, meditated on those they loved while brain activity and various other neurological measurements were being made (see “What Your Brain Does with Love”).  Here, the evidence is tentatively interpreted as suggesting the experimental subjects were experiencing at least a mild state of Serene Love which induced, or triggered, the deep relaxation response in their brains.  That then resulted in increased relationally positive behavior tendencies.  Thus, we might postulate that Serene Love thoughts beget more love feelings which, in turn, beget increased love actions.  Or put more simply, love begets love just like the ancients taught.

A wide range of fields at a variety of universities and research institutions are involved in this type of brain/love research.  At those, a number of repetitions and variations of the above described type of experimental procedures are ongoing, as are further analysis and interpretation of the existing experimentally obtained data.  The works of Dr. Daniel G. Amen, Dr. Helen Fisher, Dr. Gerald Hüther, Dr. Geoffrey Miller and quite a few others may be consulted for further science-based knowledge on the subject.

The Many Wonderful Benefits of Serene Love

First of all, the evidence strongly suggests Serene Love is very good for your physical health, for your loved ones and everybody else.  Stress-related illnesses and early deaths, according to some studies, are rampant and increasing in many parts of the world.  In those places, they may account for, or be involved in, at least half the visits to physicians, more than half the prescriptions written and a majority of hospitalizations involving strokes and heart attacks.

Serene Love experiences are seen as both a very helpful preventive measure and an assistive antidote for all that.  Serene Love provides a potent path toward achieving the therapeutic serenity viewed as essential in the treatment of addictions.  Being able to experience periods of Serene Love is thought to positively influence just about every biological process going on in your body.  It has been surmised that recovery and rehabilitation from all sorts of different wounds, accidents and debilitating conditions can be assisted and enhanced by Serene Love.

Second, the evidence also strongly suggests that Serene Love is very good for your psychological health.  Depression and anxiety in particular, but virtually all other psychological maladies are thought to at least somewhat, and often to a major degree, improve when patients participate in periods of feeling Serene Love.  This probably can be done through self-love, couple love, family love, friendship love, pet love, spiritual love or any other kind of healthy, real love.  It is surmised that recovery and rehabilitation from most types of psychological and psychiatric difficulty can be therapeutically enhanced by Serene Love.

Third, Serene Love is absolutely great for all sorts of different forms of love relationships.  Experiencing Serene Love together with a love mate or spouse has been known to help cure the worst of lover and marriage type, relationship problems, get couples through the worst of relationship effecting difficulties and inspire the most positive and wonderful of love mate interactions.  Something of the same can be said to be true for families, parents and offspring and friendship networks.

Fourth, for individuals and groups, spiritual, metaphysical, cosmic connection, universality, beatific and deity focused Serene Love experiences have been reported by many from all around the globe as perhaps the most inspiring, meaningful, beautiful, healing and life transforming of all love experiences.

In short, Serene Love provides all the healthful benefits of experiencing real love coupled with and intertwined with experiencing serenity.

Cultivating Serene Love

For a lot of people, having a Serene Love experience seems to come as something of a surprise.  It also seems true that having Serene Love experiences are much sought after and hoped for but still rather unexpected when they happen.  That may be because Serene Love is not broadly, well identified and, therefore, not given much conscious thought, learned about, or understood as something which may be cultivated.

To purposefully cultivate the possibility of having a Serene Love experience, it helps to first be able to consciously identify Serene Love and then know something about how it might come to be experienced.  Then it helps to put yourself into the situations or create the conditions in which Serene Love is thought likely to occur and merge into your conscious awareness.

Here are just a few potential Serene Love possibilities.  You and a loved one comfortably cuddling together in beautiful surroundings, looking out at gorgeous scenery, being and not doing anything else or needing to.  Quietly lingering while looking in on your safe and secure, sleeping child and gratefully marveling at the miraculous wonderfulness of the love you have with that child.  Coming back to a very welcoming love-filled home after a long and arduous time away.  Lying together with your very special love mate in a sense of complete awesome connection after superbly intimate tender lovemaking.  Gratefully, appreciatively and prayerfully meditating on the beautiful, the incredible, the great, the grand and the never completely knowable marvels of existence.

Absorbing the awesome beauty of a symphonic piece or an exquisite painting and feeling deeply moved and thankful for the opportunity.  Savoring awareness and intense appreciation of the precious, the intimate and the intangibly special wonders which help Serene Love sweep over and through you.  Being un-busy in thought, feelings and/or actions also can set the stage for experiencing Serene Love.  Staying appreciatively focused and concentrating on the positive and the meaningful while not attending to distractions or the should’s and ought to’s of life can be quite assistive.  Seeking to empathetically and intrinsically know and be known by someone you intimately core connect with in love.

Critical to Serene Love are protective love actions.  These are essential elements so that the safety factor of Serene Love can be established and maintained.  Without a sense of safety and security, the dynamic flow of serenity is hard to establish and not likely to be sufficiently sustainable.

Hopefully these thoughts will at least get you started toward your own river of love flowing more often in its highly beneficial, serene dynamic.  Perhaps also, it will help you help those you love and care about to be more often tranquilly immersed in the river of Serene Love.

One More Thing

Might you find it an enrichment to talk these ideas over with another, and while you are at it, let them know about this site’s mini-love-lessons for better love relating and spreading needed love knowledge?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question:  If you are going to do something about Serene Love today, or no later than tomorrow, what might it be?

Related posts:

1. Healthy Self-Love and Not Giving Your Power Away
2. Power or Love or Both
3. Conflict, Power and Love Success
4. Self-Love – What Is It?
5. Happier Love and Six Big Ways to Make It So! 

No BUTs - A Big Important Little Love Skill !

Mini-Love-Lesson #209

Synopsis: The subtle and both conscious and subconscious, negative effect of the word BUT on love relationships is examined and a simple, effective cure is described and heartily recommended.

Does the word BUT have an anti-love effect?

Suppose, in nice tones of voice, you hear the words “I love you so much – BUT…”.  Would you feel loved?  Would you start to feel loved but loose that feeling as soon as you heard the word BUT.  Would your feeling change to a bit of disappointment, apprehension, rejection, let down, on guard, defensiveness, anger or what?  Would you end up with any good feeling?  If there was a good feeling, would it be lessened because of the word BUT.

Your feelings might be affected by whatever came after the word BUT and also how you feel about the person saying it – their voice tones, facial expressions, etc. when they said it.  Are you and those you love among the many people who just upon hearing the word BUT experience a small, quick, negative reaction?

Now think about these comments.  You are wonderful BUT…  You did a good job on that BUT…  I’m really sorry I hurt your feelings BUT…  I could be wrong BUT…  I possibly can use that advise BUT…  Of course you’re really important to me BUT…   What happens inside you with each of those sentence beginnings?  What do you suppose happens inside the people you love if they hear those words or anything like them coming from you?

Does BUT Have Different Psychological and Dictionary Meanings?

All words can have different psychological and dictionary-type meanings.  Sometimes in fact those two can be exactly the opposite of each other.  Remember when the fad was to say “you’re so bad” and it meant exactly the opposite.  In many situations the psychological or connotative meaning is much more important than the dictionary meaning.  This seems to be the case with the word BUT.  Especially may this true in personal relationships and even more so in various kinds of love relationships.

What Does Neurolinguistic Psychology Have To Do with It?

Guess what happens when most people hear the word BUT.

We can hook up people to various types of brain reaction measuring devices.  These devices can tell us whether you are having a little bit of a positive or a little bit of a negative brain (emotional) reaction, consciously and/or subconsciously, when you hear a word.  When many people hear the word BUT, their reaction is predominantly negative.  It is sort of neutral for some others.  It hardly ever is a positive or good feeling for anyone.  Sometimes there only is curiosity but that is about as good as it gets.

Worse Than Neutral !

The word BUT gets a lot of different interpretations.  Hardly any of them could be called good.  For some people, hearing the word BUT means they are about to hear something they don’t want to hear so they emotionally withdraw a bit and get defensive.  Others interpret that they are not really being heard or understood.  If a positive statement was followed with the word BUT plus something less positive, they interpret the positive part as a lie, or deception or an effort at manipulation.  None of that is likely to be helpful in a love relationship.

Are You Canceling the Positive?

Imagine you say something positive to a loved one like maybe a statement that praises or compliments them, and then you add the word BUT followed by something not so positive.  It is likely you just canceled whatever good your positive praise or compliment might have done.  Even if your loved one does not consciously see it that way, they may subconsciously.  The evidence seems to point to the idea that the word BUT has been coupled with unpleasant experiences so often in the lives of so many that just all by itself it provides a negative experience. There are okay uses of the word but.  Mostly that seems to occur in very impersonal interactions.  As soon as there is a personal relationship component, using the word BUT probably is working against you and is self sabotaging.

What’s the Cure?

The cure is quite simple to understand and a little harder to implement.  To understand the cure, first read these two statements. (1) “Yes, I love you BUT can we talk about that right now?  “Yes, I love you AND can we talk about that right now?  For most people, the first sentence means something like “I don’t want to talk about it right now”.  Also the words “I love you” seem to be somewhat insincere or of uncertain importance.  The second sentence usually is interpreted more like “I do want to talk about our love and now is a desirable time”.  The words “I love you” are seen as more sincere and the emotional tone is generally positive.

The word AND is psychosocially additive in its usual effect while the word BUT is psychosocially subtractive even though it’s dictionary meaning is not.  Therefore, the cure is accomplished by just replacing your use of BUT with the word AND every chance you get .  Then see what happens.  Talking additively as opposed to subtractively, or even neutrally, usually helps people feel more positive toward you.  And that is especially thought to be constructive in all kinds of love relationships.  In addition, you yourself may feel an internal, positive shift by substituting AND for BUT.

Replacing BUT with AND

The hard part is making it a new habit replacing an old habit.  That may take some work and it will be worth it.  With this word replacement, you will not be canceling, or sabotaging, or in effect torpedoing your main love messages.  That is because there is some evidence that shows people who talk with AND instead of BUT get heard quite a bit better, cooperated with more, and also probably are liked more and loved better.

Also AND’s and BUT’s seem to have cumulative effects.  In relationships, although subtle, there are constructive and destructive impacts.  Apparently they can add up over time (both with positives for AND or negatives with BUT).  Therefore, we suggest this little love-skill may be a lot more important to the success of a love relationship than might at first be recognized.

Little Love Skills Add Up

Using AND instead of the word BUT may seem like a too small of a thing to pay attention to.  Let me suggest it is best to come from the position that all love skills are worth learning and practicing.  Ovid was right, for love to be lasting it takes skills.  Also remember that while love-feeling is automatically natural, love-relating takes a learned set of skills.

One More Thing

Talking over this mini-love-lesson and its main message with others is likely to implant it in your own head better.  So, who might you do that with rather soon?
As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Do you agree or disagree with the idea that when you are talking with someone you love, each and every one of your words has a love positive or love negative effect?

Related posts:

1. Touching Back – A Surprisingly Important Love Skill
2. Additive Talking – A Love Skill
3. Catharsis Empathy – A Love Skill
4. Intimacy Creation – A Love Skill
5. Talking to Feelings First, Then Topics – A Love Skill 

Dog Love Is Real Love !

Mini-Love-Lesson #206

Synopsis: The exciting, new, and not so new, scientific evidence offering proof that dog’s love is real love put simply, some of the many and often surprising benefits of a love relationship with a dog, and what you can learn about real love from a dog and a dog’s love is summarily presented.

Canine Love and People

Time again in my psychotherapy practice, I saw love of and from a pet, mainly dogs, make a huge, sometimes life-saving difference.  Sometimes a depressed and lonely person getting a dog turned the tide of a deteriorating life into one moving up and forward.  Frequently in treating hurt and troubled children, a pet dog and its love proved to be amazingly therapeutic.  Many times getting a canine pet, especially a puppy, greatly aided parents and whole families become more love-oriented.

Pet dogs in the lives of the postwar trauma and disabled veterans, who I and my colleagues treated, was often crucial.  Some couples I worked with first learned some of the most important how-to’s of love from their pet dogs.  In divorce and love-loss recovery, dog love has been vital in preventing breakdowns, suicides, addiction relapses and countless hours lost to depressive malfunctioning.

But of course there are the disbelievers who say dogs really can’t love only humans can do that, and there are those who are quite sure that for dogs it’s just all about food.  There are the skeptics who ask, “How can you can really prove dogs can really love” and they say to dog lovers “Aren’t you just anthropomorphizing and seeing what you want to see?”  Plus, they ask, “Where’s the definitive evidence?”

Also from health insurance companies has come similar ideas justifying denials of services for canine assisted psychotherapy.  And that is even though increasing numbers of research studies have appeared which show how much it helps.  In fact, a whole movement for canine assisted counseling and psychotherapy has blossomed into existence.  I’m familiar with a number of therapists involved in pet assisted therapy.  They tend to claim, sometimes only secretly, that it is the love relationship between the patient and the dog that makes the therapeutic difference.  However, they have avoided reporting so officially because that isn’t thought to be acceptable in certain circles of professional influence.

Of course, for ages dog owners have proclaimed they absolutely know their pets truly loved them and they truly love their pets.  Countless true stories exist about dogs heroically saving their masters and even members of their master’s family’s lives.  Sometimes even after experiencing great pain and injury themselves.  But was it really because of love?  Well now, thanks to the brain sciences, we are beginning to have solid, science-based proof that dogs give and get real love.

The Brain Sciences and Dogs Who Love

It took a while to teach the 90 subject dogs to be still in MRI machines to get their brains scanned, while half received food in one experimental trial condition and half received verbal love messages in another.  One hypothesis was the data from the dog’s brains would show high activity indicating they valued the food in the reward centers of their brains far more than the verbal love sounds coming to their ears.  It was surprising to learn that for many dogs the two proved equal; the food did not elicit a greater response and wasn’t superior.  But in a significant number of others dogs, the neurological brain activity measurements proved the verbal love messages and sounds to be much more rewarding and more important than the food.  So, for dogs, receiving a verbal, behavioral love input was shown to be equal to, or superior to receiving food.  More brain science research on dog love is continuing at Emory University under the direction of neuroscientist Dr. Gregory Burns.

Other findings have showed that dogs can recognize and differentiate their master’s face from other human faces.  When they make this recognition their brains light up much like humans do, from infancy on, when seeing someone who they share a love relationship with.  It has long been observed that dogs go more quickly to their masters who exhibit loving behaviors including just loving facial looks.  These dogs also then begin to give actions of affection to their loving masters.  This strongly suggests that the limbic system brain centers that process love and the neurochemical reactions of processing love are likely to be much the same in humans and dogs.  That is exactly what the research evidence is increasingly pointing to.

Now, as we begin to scan inside the dog brains, we are beginning to see amazing similarities in how dogs and humans psychoneurologically process love.  The brain activity evidence shows that the neuro-electrical and neuro-chemical events in the limbic system of dog brains react much like a humans does when getting and when giving behaviors commonly associated with love.

Consider any two living beings having similarly structured brains.  When in the brains of any two such living beings, the same regions of their brains react the same way neuro-physically, neuro-electrically and neuro-chemically; and also when their accompanying, observable behavior is much the same, there is a most logical interpretation to be arrived at.  That interpretation is it is only reasonable to conclude that those two being are processing (i.e. mentally experiencing, thinking/feeling) much the same thing.  This exactly is what is proving to be true with dogs and humans interacting with each other while exhibiting the behaviors commonly associated with love.  Thus, the preponderance of this growing body of evidence points to dogs love being real love.  We are not likely to get much better evidence for this conclusion until someone invents a real way to actually do the Vulcan Mind Meld.

What Does Animal Comparative Psychology Have To Say?

The psychologists who compare the actions, reactions and interactions of animals with the same in humans are not at all surprised at the kind of results or conclusions just mentioned.  Not so long ago, the great comparative psychologist, Dr. Harry Harlow, proved that to baby monkeys receiving mother love was more important than receiving food.  Some infant monkeys even would starve themselves to death preferring to receive loving contact comfort from a mother surrogate rather than give that up for acquiring needed food.  No one expected that result and when it was discovered that part of the experiment was altered so infant monkeys did not have to suffer further starvation.

Harlow also discovered that baby monkeys who did not sufficiently receive the behaviors that give love in infancy and childhood were never able to successfully mate or healthfully interact with other monkeys.  This was true until they were given monkey therapy in the form of being lovingly treated probably by graduate student lab assistants.  Just like with human babies, non-loved and little-loved monkey infants were prone to early death involving failure to thrive deterioration syndromes.

It is to be noted that at the time of that research few researchers using animals thought that love, or for that matter most psychological factors, had much of anything to do with animals’ physical health and survival.  Consequently, it was Harlow’s discoveries which led to a revolution in the improved treatment of lab animals and after that zoo and circus animals; and the effects of those love findings are still spreading.  Human infants already were receiving much better love behavior treatment because pediatric research had discovered the same thing Harlow did with lab monkeys.  His famous research book is Learning to Love .

Now through comparative psychology’s efforts, along with neuropsychologists and other neuro-scientists, we have learned what looks like a very important general truth.  That truth seems to be that all higher order species, and especially mammals, have brains that make similar, healthful responses to the behaviors that are associated with giving and receiving love.  Therefore, the evidence more and more points to many animals, including dogs and humans, being able to give, get and do real love.
Hence, the preponderance of available evidence points to what dog owners have always known.  You really do love your dog and your dog really does love you.  It is a real love relationship and it can do you a world of good to have that love relationship.

The Many Benefits of Loving and Being Loved by a Dog

When you have a good love relationship with a dog, your stress hormones are likely to be lowered as is your bad cholesterol.  Your neurochemical reactions which allow and help you be happier will be much more active, and your immunity mechanisms will work better at keeping you from getting sick or infected.  The relating you do with others is likely to be more love-oriented and more effectively responsive.  If others see you with your dog, they are likely to be more positive toward you than they might have been.  Playing with and walking your dog will get you more exercise.

If danger is around, your dog is more likely to become alerted to it before you and then may alert and save you from some dire occurrence.  If you are ill or wounded in some way, having your pet dog around is likely to help you heal faster and maybe heal better.  If you are recovering from injury or engaged in any other kind of recovery and rehabilitation, it is much more likely to go better as you keep lovingly interacting with your pooch.  Psychologically, a love relationship with a good pet dog often acts like a good antidepressant and an anti-anxiety medication with no bad side effects.  On and on go the benefits; we don’t have space here for all of them so far discovered.

Learning Love from Dogs

Once long ago, as a scout with other scouts, I was in a large wigwam listening to an ancient Lakota Indian wise woman tell of how the great spirit put dogs into the life of humans to teach us how to love.  It seems, according to that wisdom filled legend, we were not all that good at love until the dogs taught us how.  They taught by example of love’s loyalty, caring concern, forgiving nature, playful affection, protection focus and a host of other ways love gets demonstrated.  So, I suggest you look to your pet dog to model for you some of the best ways love gets done.  Translate what you see into human behavior.  Then see if you can do as well at love as your pet dog does.

Now one more little thing.  You might want to share this mini-love-lesson with a dog lover you know or with someone you think might do well to have a pet dog.  Also you might want to check out this other mini-love-lesson, “Pet Love”.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Do you give much thought to how much more enriched your life is or may become because of “interspecies love”?

Related posts:

1. Pet Love
2. Loneliness and Love
3. Getting Healthy, Real Love in Your Life
4. Brains and Love Behavior: Oxytocin and Other Healthful Neurochemistry
5. Love Is Natural – Love Relating You Learn 

Getting Healthy, Real Love in Your Life

Synopsis: Jocelyn’s ‘no real love’ problem; Repeat failures; A dozen great ‘how to’s’ for getting the real thing; Love as a happy, habit and getting zestful about it.

Jocelyn came to me after a speech I had given on the dynamics of healthy, real love saying, “My problem is getting what you call healthy, real love.  Several times I thought I had the real thing but it turned out to be false.  Dr. Cookerly, what can I do to get the real thing?”

Jocelyn and a great many other people wonder about the same thing.  If you are a person wanting to know how to do this here are a dozen ideas that may be of considerable help.  First, know there is an all over principle.  You had better take the subject of love seriously and use your mind as well as your heart to achieve love success.  Lots of people don’t take love very seriously until they have a love relationship disaster.  Then they may take it quite seriously.  Others fail at a love relationship but never seriously look at understanding love itself, or the ‘how to’s’ of succeeding at love.

Consequently, they are likely to repeat their failure.  Like every other important subject success is far more likely for those who really study, learn and practice the ‘how to’s’.  So, if you really want to succeed at love more than you have so far look over the dozen ways that may help you achieve that success.  Here’s a ‘get started’ suggestion.  Go over this list and pick out only one or two items to begin on.  Then really work at them and perhaps get those you care about to do the same with you.  If you do this  I’m betting you’ll be really happy you followed the suggestion.  After that you can go on to other items in the list and probably achieve even greater love success.

How to’s for Getting Healthy, Real Love in Your Life
1.  Learn What Real Love Is We have two kinds of learning to consider.  ‘Experience learning’ and ‘Cognitive learning’.  They work well together.  Think about who has loved you best: parents?, siblings?, family?.  Maybe you have been best loved in your life by a dear friend, a pet dog or maybe grandparents.  How did they deliver love to you?  What did that feel like?  Whoever loved you best has provided you at least some ‘experience knowledge’ of love.  When you were born somebody loved you well enough to keep you alive because without at least some love a baby dies in infancy.  That means at some deep level you have some ‘experience knowledge’ of love.  With work you may be able to tap into that and raise at least some of it into conscious awareness, and that can help guide you.  Easier, but still requiring some work, is to ‘cognitively learn’ and purposefully study what is known about healthy, real love and how it is done.  To help you with that go to “The Definition of Love” and related entries, elaborations and discussions in the left column on this page.

2. Learn About False Love Study what are seen to be the major forms of false love and how to differentiate them from real love.  There are a great many ways people get into false love situations.  False love often results in enormous emotional pain and destructiveness, sometimes even leading to death.  To help you get healthy, real love review the mini love lessons on “False Love” in the Site Index, and pay particular attention to the entry “A Dozen Things Love Is and A Dozen Things Love Is Not”.

3.  Learn and Practice the Eight Major Ways of Directly Doing Love A great deal of research effort in social psychology went into discovering the ways people give, communicate, deliver and send love.  Out of this came a clear understanding of eight groups of behavior by which love is done in all types of love relationships.  You can learn and practice these ways and by doing so probably greatly improve any love relationship.  To do that I, somewhat egotistically, recommend you read part two of my book Recovering Love where these ways are covered in some detail.  Also consult the Site Index for “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love”.

4.  Learn and Practice Healthy Self-Love The ancient commandment is to “love others as you love yourself”.  Without sufficient, healthy self-love most love relationships with others suffer.  One can take the eight major ways of doing love mentioned above and apply them to oneself usually with great benefit.

5.  Get Good at Giving Love Essential to getting love is giving love freely, often and much.  Healthy, real love is a free gift that tends to grow the more you give it away, especially when it is combined with healthy self-love.  Actively go looking to wisely give love wherever you can while at the same time being open to getting love.  Don’t just wait for love to find you.  Go after it and as you do keep giving it along the way.

6.  Repeatedly Mix Romance, Sex and Affection With Your Lover-Love For ongoing, couple’s type love it’s best to have ongoing romance, sex and affection and repeatedly mix those into love-mate relating.  To help you with this you may wish to check out the love and sex related mini lessons in the Site Index, such as “Lasting Sex and Lasting Love”, “Men Doing Well at Love”, “Can You Talk About Sex with Love”, “Do You Want to Say Love When You Mean Sex”, “Making Love or Having Sex”, etc.

7.  Engage in Spiritual Love Practices Search for and find your own best way of relating to and with love spiritually.  Whether it is with standard prayer, oceanic awareness of the universe, the awe and wonder of nature, practices that help you feel connected to life and your fellow humans, respect for the mysteries and unknowns of existence, or regular religious observances, finding a way to connect love and spirituality within you is often marvelously healthful.

8.  Ask for What You Want, With Love Sharing your wants with a loved one is a way to share yourself.  Not sharing your desires, wishes and requests keeps those you care about in the dark needlessly guessing, emotionally distancing you both, and frequently leads to mis-perception, mis-interpretation and relational abrasion and dissonance, along with possible destruction of the relationship. It also keeps you from getting what you want, and within your wants are usually hidden your needs.  Check out this site’s entry on asking for what you want, “Love Complaints vs. Love Requests”.

9.  Be Love Assertive You have three choices.  You can be submissive, aggressive or assertive.  Submissive surrendering may get you treated nicely but it’s just as likely to get you abused, sacrificed and destroyed.  At best it relies on charity.  Aggression means to attack in an attempt to hurt, harm and destroy in an attempt to make yourself the winner and someone else the loser.  Assertion, especially assertion with love, means to put yourself (your thoughts, feelings, actions, desires, etc.) forward preferably done in a way there are no losers.  Assertion provides the ‘I win, you win’ possibility especially when love is added.  Therefore, assert all your ‘stuff’ with love.

10.  Become Good at Receptional Love When anyone does anything that might be an expression of their love for you receive it well in such a way that they see you really got it, then digest it, enjoy it fully, and be nurtured by it.  Do not dodge it, deny you merit it, or in any way negate it.  To receive love well is a gift to those who love you.

11.  Amply Reward Your Lovers (mate, kids, parents, friends, etc.)
To get love in your life, freely and amply reward any and all love and love-like actions that come your way. Also reward those you would love for their ways of being themselves, their achievements and what they take joy in.  Praises, compliments, return expressions of love, hugs, pats on the back, doing favors and hundreds of other actions can be ways to reward.  Especially do this when there are actions of love demonstrated toward you.  Rewarded, real love behaviors tend to increase real love.  This often is not true for various forms of false love.  Reward often and show your love both in your way and in their way.  Check out in the Site Index the entry “Love in the Fridge”.

12. With Joy Study and Practice the Ways of Love Ever More Make learning about love a happy habit.  Then, full of good heartedness, take more pleasure in practicing what you have learned.  Healthy, real love done well can make people joyous.  That’s true for both the giver and getter.  So get into the joy of love, learning how to do it ever better.  Delight in learning by teaching – which is one of the best ways to learn, relish every love and love-like action that you deliver to others and that comes your way.  Get zestful about all love learned, showed and shared.

There’s lots more but this much can be used to get yourself further along love’s rich and incredibly rewarding path.  Remember the scriptural quote “The greatest of all things is love”.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Of the above 12 points which one grabs your attention the most, and what is that guiding you toward?

Changing Your Emotions Via Love And Love Smarts

Mini-Love-Lesson #202

Synopsis: For many, this mini-love-lesson presents a fresh and different than usual approach to both discovering new learning from your feelings and for changing them for the better with love-befriending techniques and through some rather different ways to think and behave in regard to your own emotions, especially the ones you don’t like to feel.

About Bad-To-Better Feelings

When you feel bad, even real bad or maybe just blah or sort of neutral; do you want to feel better?  Of course you do.  But do you know how?  Many people don’t or aren’t very good at it.  Some people even think it can’t be done but maybe they just don’t know how.  There are ways to do it which you can learn, and with practice you can accomplish the changes quite well and healthfully.  Also, you might want to assist your loved ones in learning these love connected skills.

Some Stuff to Know and Think About Concerning Emotions

To change your emotions from bad to better and best, you will do well to first know some things about emotions.  Emotions are part of your feeling system.  You have two kinds of feelings, physical and emotional.  Your emotions are processed in your brain but also effect your body.  Because emotions are inside you, you can effect them (change them).  To do that you may have to give up the idea that they are entirely caused by things outside of you and over which you have little or no influence, let alone control.  That means changing the way you think and maybe the way you talk, especially to yourself.

When you say “he, she or it made me feel . . .” you may be subtly and subconsciously giving away your power to change your feelings.  He, she or it did not make you feel anything.  They only triggered, or assisted or activated your internal feeling system.  Your internal feeling system can be strongly influenced by the other two major psychological parts of you – your thinking and your behaving.  To change your emotions, change your thinking and/or your behavior.  Of course that is much simpler said than done.

How You Catch, Is Key

Think of a game of catch the ball.  Somebody throws the ball at you and how well you catch it determines whether it hurts or not, and whether or not you get to play catch with them and have some fun.  How well you psychologically catch what is thrown at you, determines how you psychologically feel.  When being cussed at or criticized, some people catch it poorly and get all upset while others can disregard it and be unaffected or even be amused.  If you are cussed at or criticized in a language you do not know, you are likely to be mostly puzzled but not hurt.

Sure, the nonverbal or expressional part might make you a bit apprehensive but it does not have the same effect as if you understand the language.  If what they send at us made us feel something, we would all feel pretty much the same thing when it reached us.  Like we all react the same way to a bullet entering us, we bleed.  It is your linguistic understanding that causes it to hurt, or upset you or whatever feeling you get.  That feeling occurs in your head where you can have influence and make (catching) changes.  You learn to emotionally catch, the way you do growing up.  You can improve on that now.

Bad Feelings Are Your Friends Trying to Help You

I once had a really brilliant little kid in therapy who said, “I guess God made evolution put that bad feeling in me for a good reason.  Without it I would never have learned to forgive and love my mother and myself for what we did to each other”.  He had learned that he does better when he learns from his hurt and that is part of why it is there.  And, no, you do not get to know about the thing with his mother.  That is private and confidential.

You have to learn that hurt is the enemy of harm (that is one of the big things to learn about emotions).  Here are some examples.  Anxiety warns you that something harmful may be approaching, so look for it.  Fear says the same thing only stronger and gives you power to escape faster.  Anger gives you emergency power to fight perceived threatening destructiveness.  Depression helps you inventory what is wrong in your life.  Very frequently depression has something do with a lack of sufficient healthy, real other love or self love.

When you hurt after hearing something negative aimed at you, it is a message telling you “maybe you need to catch better”.  All your feelings, both good and bad, were created in you to help you.  So, learn to befriend them, listen to what they are trying to tell you and then cooperate.  Doing that usually gets bad feelings to get over and be done with faster than trying to fight or ignore them.  Trying to influence your emotions with just chemicals (e.g. drugs) or escapist behavior, may only help you miss their message and make things worse in the long run.  There is a role for meds to play when bad feelings overdo it but medication is best used along with counseling or therapy.

About Seeking Help

Like all human systems, your emotions system can overdo or under do it.  None of our human systems are yet perfected.  Fear can turn to dysfunctional panic, anger to irrational rage, and so forth.  This especially can happen when people have not learned to work with their feelings and hear their feeling’s guidance messages.  It also can happen when there are certain neurochemical imbalances in the brain.  When that happens seek professional help.  A good therapist usually can work wonders.
Emotional education can help.  It can be argued that at least half of our emotional pain seems to come from love problems of one sort or another.  For more on dealing with love related hurt and negative feelings  link to the mini-love-lessons “Dealing with Love Hurts: Pain’s Crucial Guidance” and “Dealing with Love Hurts: A Dozen Love Hurts to Know and Grow From”.

What Love Has To Do with Changing Bad Feelings to Good Feelings

Have you heard the concept: “Love all your parts and all your systems, and they will be more likely to love you back better.  Especially love the ones you do not like and think you do not want.  That is the way to bring them into harmony with the rest of you so they can do you their maximum good, which is their purpose”.  What do you think of that concept?

To help you think about that, consider what Maxine thought.  “I just couldn’t stop worrying.  I over-worried about everything and nothing helped.  Distractions, drugs, alcohol, sex, cognitive behavior therapy, religion, they all did a little good but only for a little while.  Then a new therapist got me to talk and listen to my inner worrying self in a semi-hypnotic state.  She told me my worry was just a presentation of a possible problem.  But I would never do what I was supposed to do about the problems, which she told me was to make a plan and then do something about the problem, or go on to something else if there was nothing that could be done.

My worry myself also told me I just get stuck on the problem’s presentation.  That is because I don’t love and believe in myself enough, nor believe that I am competent enough and can come up with adequate solutions, which don’t have to be perfect solutions.  I was astonished that all that knowledge was in me and I just had to lovingly listen to the part of me that knew it”.

“With my therapist’s help I worked on growing my healthy self-love and believing what my worrying self told me.  It was even more amazing when my worrying self evolved into my solution suggesting self.  Now when I worry, I listen really closely and get the guidance message.  I don’t know exactly how that works but it does work for me.  I now love and respect that part of me that worries but that also comes up with solutions.  It’s a precious part of me I was ignorantly trying to reject and ignore, but now I embrace it with love”.

More Love Please!

This love is so often, at least a part if not the whole solution, needed for the emotions you want to change.  So, you might consider just going and asking someone who loves you to show you love, and see if that helps.  If you have a good loving dog or other pet, go get a dose of their love and see what that does.  While you are at it, give yourself a hug and some good, self loving, affirmational talk.  Getting more love is like putting high-octane gas in your tank.  It helps you go further with more power and more calm confidence.

The Thinking Different to Feel Different Approaches

Sometimes a new insight, a different understanding, the mental re-framing of an event, or reasoning something through, changes emotions for the better.  That often occurs in psychotherapy and personal counseling.  Another type of thinking also accomplishes changes in emotion.  This is the positive cognition approach which sometimes uses positive imagery, affirmational language, heightened emotional motivation self-talk and confidence building terms, sayings and slogans.  It does not go through investigative reasoning very often but rather works to directly create emotional change. 

Non-conscious and semiconscious approaches, such as occur in pictorial thinking and the thinking that goes into music, movement and art therapies sometimes bring about marvelous changes in emotions.  When any of these are dynamically coupled with healthy self-love, love of life, altruistic love and spiritual love focused thought techniques, they seem to have a more powerful effect, at least for a lot of people.

The Motion Emotion Love Connection

If your emotions are not what you want, out of healthy self-love decide you are going to treat yourself with a big dose of positive, upbeat movement.  That’s right, motion can change emotion especially when done with a healthy self loving thought process.  If you talk to yourself with some positive self loving affirmations and push yourself into dancing around the house, going for a run or vigorous walk, doing happy movements exercise, bouncing a ball off the wall and catching it, marching to vigorous music or any other way you choose to move, you are very likely to change your emotions for the better.

Remember before or after you do the upbeat different motions approach, or any other approach, to change your feelings, it will be important to listen and figure out the guidance message coming from your less than pleasant emotions.  Otherwise they probably will have to come back and try to deliver their maybe unpleasant but actually friendly message again.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Possibly all your life you have been practicing some other approach to dealing with what you perhaps think of as negative emotions.  It also is likely that no one around you has been effectively modeling for you the approach of loving befriending and working cooperatively with all your feelings.

Therefore, it may take quite a bit of practice to counter and reform your habitual way of dealing with certain emotions.  Working on making these changes with a counselor’s or personal coach’s help can speed the process.  Working on this sort of changing as a couple or with friends doing similar work also can be quite useful.  However, you do not have to believe in this process before you experiment with it.  It is not a true believer system.  It is a “do different to get different” system. Know that it usually does take repeated effort.  So, with good, healthy self-love why not give it a go?

Help us spread the word.  Tell somebody about this site and our free mini-love-lessons, and how knowledge about love and love-relating helps.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love success question: How much do you know about your own and other’s emotions; where did you get your knowledge; and is it doing you any good, especially in your love relationships?  You might want to read any of a number of books about emotional intelligence.

Related posts:

1. Upbeat Emotions & Learning for Love
2. Thinking Love to Improve Love
3. Loneliness and Love
4. Love Bids and Their Astounding Importance
5. Conflict, Power and Love Success 

Equality Quality in Love - a Super-Good Love Skill

Mini-love-lesson  #201

Synopsis: The values, payoffs and subtleties of treating others as uniquely different but equal, and how it is best for that to be a part of a healthy, good, love relationship is presented here with a few author’s self disclosures.

My Unseen Flaw

My bad!  I was so unaware until an intern of mine pointed out a flaw in the way I was treating some of my patients.  Unknowingly, mostly in group therapy and in lots of very small subtle ways, she pointed out that I was acting in ways that favored males over females.  And I thought I was so democratically equal in the treatment of everyone but she was right.  It was right there on the tapes.  I interrupted females more often than males, I nodded approvingly more often at males than females.  I dealt with the guy’s issues longer and maybe even better especially in group therapy.  And in a host of other tiny ways I did not exemplify my own value of loving equality.

Group therapy can be pretty much like a family and I was doing about the same as the family males I grew up around, and I did not want to be like them.  But there it was and so I had to go to work on me and change.  I asked my patients and other interns and they all agreed that I seemed a bit differential in favor of males.  Ouch!  I did change, and sure enough, my work with females got even better results.  I also became a lot more aware of the subtleties of treating people more lovingly by way of equality.  What a good gift that excellent intern gave me!

The Quality of Equality

I learned a lot in the poor, slum neighborhood where I spent my young childhood.  There was an old, Irish gentleman that used to singsong-speak to us kids in ditties.  Here is one that went more or less like this.

    “There is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us, it behooves the most of us to treat the rest of us with all the love that’s really there for all of us.”
(Yes, there are other versions of this but that was his version)

See if you agree with this idea.  People are so incredibly different from one another that the only sensible way of seeing them is as unique equals.  It is my contention that treating each person with the respect of an equal who is wonderfully and intriguingly different from all the rest usually tends to get the best results.  Of course, I don’t always live up to that ideal and I sometimes let my prejudice programming of old still have influence.  But now I catch myself sooner and put more energy into my personal, always growing programming of equality.

I also suspect most prejudicial disrespect is just a big “I’m okay but you’re not” psychological game.  It is likely based in an attempt to hide from one’s own personal fears of being inadequate by looking down on others instead of on oneself.

Loving others by treating them democratically and as equals, I suggest, is a superior trait in a person.  Though that is a bit of a paradox, like a lot of paradoxes it turns out to have a lot of truth in it.  This especially is important in close relationships.  Inequality treatment seldom, if ever, leads to closeness, or much of anything else that can help a love relationship.  It can lead those treated unequally to keep secrets from you, to resist what you want, to make sneaky passive-aggressive attacks on you, to secretly sabotage you and may lead to out and out rebellion.  It also can get you hated and distrusted or at least disliked.

Treating children slowly and in small steps, increasingly more and more democratically, with doses of growing equality until they are functioning as equal adults usually works well.  Children nurtured like this also tend to feel quite well love-bonded with those who treated them this way.
That is part of a larger truth.  Minorities, the disadvantaged and those with less than equal power who are treated more equally and more democratically tend to work more cooperatively and productively.  They also tend to make contributions that they otherwise might not.  The prejudicially ignored, suppressed and repressed often tend to react secretly against the prejudicial, one way or another.

Historically this likely was true of a great many of the wives of old, and currently is true for a growing number of today’s wives living in situations of inequality found all around the globe.
So, you might want to consider the question “how well are you doing at loving others by treating them as true equals who in many ways may be different i.e. unique one-of-a-kind people.  If you do a good job of that, you may be seen as a bit superior.

What Anti-Equality Prejudice Are You Programmed to Have?

In the Chicago slum neighborhood of my early childhood, it was seen as appropriate to disrespect and look down upon the people of 11 national backgrounds, 5 ethnic groups, 3 religions, 4 of 6 social classes, 4 racial groups, 3 political persuasions, those of weird sexuality, all females and sundry others.

Whatever your experience and training in being prejudiced might be, I suggest you discover it and work to eliminate it.  That will help you be more loving, lovable, happy and superior to who you were before you did so.

Romantic Love and Equality

If you are in love with somebody and you do not treat them with democratic equality, are you loving them as well as you might?  Some might even question whether you have healthy or real love for them.  If they do not treat you with democratic equality, appreciating your unique differences, are you being well loved?  If the two of you together do not establish your relationship as one of unique equals, what will happen to your teamwork when you face the difficulties life frequently brings?

Singles as well as couples hoping for good, romantic love do well to be aware of the issues of equality involved in interacting and doing love-relating.  This especially is important for the increasing number of people getting into love relationships with people of differing social and cultural heritages.

I worked with a  lot of the singles who were frustrated and longing for more love than they had.  They did better when they changed one big factor.  They broadened their horizons, so to speak, and started mixing with new but very different groups of people than they were used to.  Some joined co-ed sports teams.  Others explored different spiritual and religious groups, still others got into the art or music of another culture.  More and different education experiences were quite helpful to many.  A lot of them got active in good causes.  With the different people they met, they risked being very friendly, assertive, and then flirting, and a bit later even seductive.

People of different cultures, nationalities, ethnicities, races, religions, political history, avocations, vocations, educational backgrounds, recreational involvements, sexualities, travel preferences and anything else they could think of that might be different from themselves were considered and explored.  The results almost always were at first discouraging but then, if they kept at it positive, good things started happening.  Many had to put away their prejudices and learn how to be enriched by the very differences they at first had thought too odd, distasteful or worse.

Purposefully putting the quality of meeting and treating new people with equality and as uniquely worthwhile paid off in the form of new adventures, new enrichments, new friendships and, yes, new romances resulted and new love grew.  Of course, it did not always go well, and even when things went well sometimes new, undreamed of problems arose.  Frequently these new romances did not fit the previously held “happily ever after/no problems dreams” of the participants but then again how many great loves do?  The good news is, real love often prevailed.

A lot of internationally mixed couples come to counseling when one of the couple insists on having a modern relationship of loving equality.  When there is a fair abundance of healthy, real love, that usually is achieved but not without work.  Overcoming a cultural heritage of gender inequality can be a very tall order but it is what more and more couples are choosing to do and to do with love.

Equality and Healthy Self-Love

Feeling and treating people as equals, I suggest, is a gift of self-love.  That is because it opens you up to what others have to offer which usually is quite a lot when you look for it.  It also gets you treated better by those people and by the high-quality  people who respect equality-oriented others.  Disrespect and putting others down and treating them as inferior just cuts you off from the many goodies people of diversity have to offer.

Some say, treat others as equals because it is the golden rule right thing to do.  Others say it is the charitable way to be toward those who are disadvantaged.  Still others remark, it promotes democracy and peace.  Then there is the group testifying that treating others is just practical because it works far better than not treating others with equality.  I say, yes, to all that and there is another great reason.  Treating others as equal is an excellent way to do some enriching, healthy self-love.  Embrace the differences and the people who are different and you will be enriched in ways more than you can imagine.  See everybody as a unique, multifaceted, work of art and give yourself the reward of appreciating and enjoying that creation.  It really is the self-love thing to do.

Equality As a Quality Gift of Love

Isn’t having an inner mindset or attitude that all people are to be viewed essentially as equal but intriguingly and uniquely different, a pretty fine way to think and act?  Isn’t viewing those people who are very equality-prone in the way they treat and deal with others, something you can admire and respect?  Isn’t striving to be more like them a worthy goal and one you will feel good about achieving?  If you become good or better at the skill of treating your loved ones with the quality of equality, might not everybody benefit?  Won’t each of your love relationships, including the one with yourself, flow smoother and grow stronger by way of relating in equality as opposed to inequality?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

How about you tell somebody about this mini-love-lesson and this site so you help spread knowledge about love and so you have somebody new to talk all this over with.

Related posts:

1. Quality Love, Quality Life?
2. Dining with Heart – A Love Skill
3. Intimacy Creation – A Love Skill
4. Competitive Niceness: A Love Skill
5. Number 51: Your Super Tool for Healthy Self-Love