False Form of Love: Nympholepsia

Synopsis: This mini love lesson starts with a getting to know Nympholepsia; then discusses unrequited love; a typical case; getting the accurate picture; confusions; sex and Nympholepsia; not wanting what’s wanted; ever seeking and never finding; and what’s to be done about this False Form of Love.

Getting to know Nympholepsia

Nympholepsia is one of the most interesting forms of false love.  Sometimes it is like being in love without having to go to the trouble of actually having any relationship at all. It even can be a love-like relationship with someone who doesn’t even exist.  Nevertheless, the emotions involved can be extremely intense, the behaviors involved quite complicated and sometimes the outcome is quite devastating.

Judge Roy Bean, of “The Law West to the Pecos” fame, is thought to have had a pretty bad nympholeptic problem focused on the greatest actress of his time, Lily Langtry.  He went to all sorts of trouble concerning her, including even renaming a town for her, Langtry Texas.  However, he never had any but the most formal personal contact with her.  One of America’s greatest salonnières and the female who was declared the World’s First, Great, New Age Woman, Mabel Dodge Luhan, is said to have had a terrible nympholeptic relationship with John Reid, the amazing young chronicler of both Poncho Villa and the Communist revolution in Russia and who wrote the incredibly influential “Ten Days That Shook the World.”

Unrequited Love

In the age of chivalry, knights who were supposed to chastely and platonically ‘pine for’ unattainable Royal ladies, who were above their own rank and station, may have been being led to suffer from Nympholepsia (also known as nymphlepsy).  The same condition is thought to affect a fair number of the thousands who go into frenzies when adoring the rock star of the moment.  Then there are those who learn of some hero or heroine of a past time and are quite sure they have hopelessly fallen in love with that person who is no longer counted among the living.

Tragically some of those even suicide so as to have a chance to find their love-interest in the hereafter.  Others swear they meet their paramour in their dreams, while others testify strongly to having had wonderful sex with their favorite lover ghosts.  Some even claim to be madly in love with literary characters that never existed in real life.  Most who suffer from this false form of love do so in a more ordinary way, but that doesn’t make their suffering any less intense.

A Typical Case

Chastity was brought to counseling by her husband who said she cannot sleep, won’t eat and is in a frenzy about everything, but can’t tell anyone what is wrong and we are all very worried about her.  Talking to her alone Chastity frantically fidgeted, got up and paced around and showed many other signs of agitation.  After miscellaneous comments she began to blush and whisper that her condition began right after she learned her pastor was moving to another church in a distant city.  Slowly it all came out. She had become enamored of her pastor soon after he arrived at their church some six years ago.

He was a popular, handsome, charismatic figure that many women found intensely attractive. Chastity quickly came to secretly worship him from afar.  At the church she volunteered for everything that would put her in contact with him.  At night she dreamed romantic but never erotic dreams of him and never let anyone know her true feelings.  She gave him and his wife and their children very nice appropriate gifts, did them favors and never strayed over the lines of propriety.  It was enough for her to just serve him and be in his shadow, though her actions slowly became more and more frenetic.

Her husband, and her children, and later even her parents occasionally complained that her church activities seemed a bit too much but that’s all they did.  But now that the pastor was going to be even more completely unattainable than before she was in a frenzy of uncontrollable, rapidly changing, very difficult to handle emotions.  In time with therapy and some medication she did become healthier.

Chastity came to see she actually did not have an adult, real, romantic relationship with her pastor but rather she was fixated on the fantasy of him loving her.  By being valued by him in her fantasies she too became valuable.  In real life he would often thank her, praise her, compliment her, and make laudatory remarks about her to others.  This gave her meaning, purpose and fulfillment for a time.  Later she figured out that all had to do with her childhood and her father who never was very loving, seldom praising and almost never thankful.  She saw that she didn’t want her pastor to respond to her erotically or even very romantically because those actions would be too different from a father to a daughter.

These dynamics are not common to everyone who suffers from Nympholepsia but they were her dynamics.  Today she is well past all that and has actually grown from the experience but she would not want to go through it again.

Getting the Accurate Picture

The two most important words for understanding Nympholepsia are ‘frenzy’ and ‘unattainable.  The condition throws people into a frenzy of emotions, and scrambled thoughts and sometimes peculiar behaviors.  The dynamics often involve seeking or even feeling one has love for and/or from that which is unattainable.

In the worst cases some people ‘go crazy’ trying to attain the unattainable and then fall into the pits of depression or even psychosis.  In the 1800’s the condition was thought to frequently cause convulsions and seizures, along with other somatic symptoms.

The word Nympholepsia comes from the Greek ‘nympholeptos’ which means to have been caught and bewitched, or entranced by a naked, highly erotic, attractive nymph or Sprite who was by definition unattainable to humans.  This, it was thought, drove people into an emotional frenzy causing them to spend their lives in hopeless pursuit of the nymphs and finally to wither and die.

In mythology and Catholic theology the term meant accidentally seeing a naked nymph and being driven into a frenzy of ecstasy, never again to be satisfied by a mere mortal human.  The only salvation from this demonic possession required a full-fledged exorcism.  Today the term refers to going into an emotional frenzy while trying to obtain something or someone unable to be obtained and being destructively effected in the process.

Confusions

Nympholepsia sometimes is confused with pedophilia because it often involves people of rather different ages being attracted to each other or one to another.  It also has been confused with the ‘Lolita complex’ and misidentified as something that mostly men do with younger females.
It, furthermore, has been confused with nymphomania, probably partly because it has the prefix nymph and partly because it has to do with romantic-like relationship situations and dynamics.  It also has been misidentified as something young girls do toward and with older men.

Some of the people thought to suffer from this false form of love have been known to be quite fixated, and obsessive and occasionally even violent in their acting out of their passion.  The ones in this condition who are highly sexed sometimes are confused with having a sex addiction and the nonsexual ones with having a neurotic or, more recently, with having a sexual desire problem.
It’s interesting that some therapists seem to think this condition mostly occurs only in males and others think it mainly shows up in females.  In my experience it’s pretty gender even.  It also seems to occur in homosexuals, bisexuals, older people, younger people, all races, all socio-economic classes and every other category I know, although there are those that disagree with me about that.

Sex and Nympholepsia

With this condition there can be people who have no sexual desire nor even any sex feelings involved in their nympholeptic condition.  With others there is a great deal of sex especially frenzied, passionate sex.  Sometimes the sex is with a surrogate and sometimes with the target of their passions, and if that target is unattainable sublimation may occur.  A common complaint goes something like “he (or she) professes lots of love for me, has great sex with me, but won’t stay with me, marry me and won’t stop going off with others, or won’t stop doing big, long, involved things that have nothing to do with me and don’t including me”.  Another common complaint is that she (or he) is emotionally unavailable while at the same time being very sexually available.

Some nympholeptics have serial sex.  I once counseled a girl who just knew she was truly, and deeply, and incredibly in love with one drummer after another.  She had all-consuming, frenzied emotions with each drummer right up to the morning after a wild, passionate night of sex together.  Then she would have the realization that the drummer would be going on to others and never really be hers at a heart level, and he just would be like the last several drummers and probably like the next one, which essentially was that he would be unavailable for a healthy, real, love relationship.  In her case the background cause was very poor self love and very musical parents.

For some people suffering this condition it all can change if the female becomes pregnant.  At that point they often lose interest in the other person and it’s all over. This leads some of my evolutional psychology friends to suspect the whole condition has something to do with genetic survival mechanisms.

Not Wanting What’s Wanted

Some people suffering from Nympholepsia are quite secretly and safely satisfied if the unattainable person remains unattainable, though they still suffer about it.  By longing for someone they can’t have, they have a relationship without having a relationship. They can tell people that they love someone and often can tell a great deal about their romantic feelings, but when they want to do something as a single they are completely free to do it.  This accounts for some of the people who marry a prisoner serving a life sentence or serving a very long sentence.  They can say they’re married, they can send love-like messages back and forth, they even can visit, and they can have romantic, long-suffering experiences which brings the drama of romance to their life but with very little of the trouble.

This may be a sort of pseudo-Nympholepsia or just another form of it.  Sometimes people in this variation of Nympholepsia panic and run away if their ‘romantic target’ suddenly becomes available or somehow actually comes into their real life.  Others truly pine away and, to a large degree, either dysfunction or excuse their dysfunction with their unrequited love situation.

Ever Seeking Never Finding

A fair number of people repeatedly go after the unattainable lover, and for a long time they just won’t quit.  This wears them out, drains them, distracts them from healthy productive living, causes a lot of agony, depletes their self-confidence, generally wastes a lot of life, and sometimes gets them to turn to various addictions, become depressed and sometimes suicidal.

Some of these people keep going after the same person over and over, and others keep going after ‘versions of the same person’ but either way they never really get what they’re after.  That’s because what they’re after is truly unattainable.  Do they subconsciously know this?  Some therapists think so, others think not.

Interestingly for many with Nympholepsia if they actually do seem to attain the lover they are after, one of two things happens.  They either have finally won the prize and don’t need to go after it anymore, so they basically sort of say “thank you, goodbye” and go on to something healthier.
The other outcome is that what they have attained turns out not to be all that desirable after all.  In both cases the relationship comes to an end.

In its milder forms Nympholepsia is like a ‘crush’ or ‘the idealization’ phase of an IFD False Form of Love pattern, maybe without the F and D stages. (See False Forms of Love: The Devastating IFD Syndrome)   In a stronger form, the frenzy can get quite destructive and the lack of attainment can be very deeply frustrating and depleting.  All forms of Nympholepsia generally are thought to have a tendency to block people from having healthy, real, love relationships develop.

What’s to be done?

Some form of fairly deep psychotherapy usually is what’s needed to cure this affliction if it is severe.  There are those who seem to ‘mature out of it’.  Some who are good at insight and redirecting themselves, figure it out and learn about healthy, real love and go after that instead.  Knowledge about this condition helps people avoid it, especially in its earlier stages.  If a friend or family member seems to be headed toward suffering from Nympholepsia I suggest you encourage them to read this mini love lesson and then direct them toward a therapist known to be able to do deep, psychotherapeutic work.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Are you now or have you ever set yourself up for love failure by desiring the unattainable?  If so, are you likely to do that again?

Related posts:

1. Fatal Attraction Syndrome – A False Form of Love
2. False Forms of Love: Relational Dependencies
3. False Forms of Love: Limerence and Its Alluring Lies
4. False Forms of Love: Shadow Side Attachments
5. False Forms of Love – Imprint Mating Syndrome 

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Illustration: Nymph by Blanche Paymal-Amouroux, French, 1899, public domain, thanks Wikimedia Commons.

Can Love the Second Time Around Be Better Than the First?

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson is all about people making a second marriage (or love-mated relationship) and later attempts at couple’s love to succeed better than most people do.  It introduces the concept of “team love” as crucial to second and later effort success, and presents what are NOT the right answers times seven.

Second Failures and Second Successes

Second marriages, second marriages to the same person, try again relationships, re-contacts after breakups, joining up after years apart, living together again with an ex – they all start with the danger of the past repeating itself.  They also face a statistical worse chance of staying together than does a first time, committed relationship.  Even so, all these second attempts are on the rise throughout the developed world.

The good news is there is a growing group of couples (maybe up to about 30+ percent ?) who are making second goes at love, marriage, etc work and, not only that, but making them work far better than their first attempts.  Another good news factor is we are beginning to have some ideas, some understandings, some research and some new and apparently more helpful concepts about what makes second goes at couple’s love work and what makes them fail.

It is still true that most second, third, fourth, etc. marriages and other couple’s unions fail at greater rates than do first time marriages, etc. but it does not have to be that way.  This is demonstrated by a number of second marriage couples exhibiting their second-time-around as far more successful, more healthy, more happy and more lasting than their first.

I literally have worked with hundreds of second time couples.  On follow-up survey research, most of them report getting better and better at being a loving couple.  I heard from one of them just yesterday. They told about how they were before and after they came to do love-centered, team oriented, couple’s counseling. Collectively they had previously made five marriage type attempts, all ending in agonizing failure.  That was years ago before they got together and started learning what it really takes to make a second attempt, couple’s love have lasting success (defined as 10 or more years).  Furthermore, I personally know this because I am in such a second relationship which Kathleen which we have made work better and better for over 40 years.

What Is NOT the Answer Times 7!

Before we look at what does work, let’s look at some of what we can learn from second attempt failures.

1.    Relying on doing a love relationship the same way you did it before likely will not work any better the second time than it did the first.  You must do different to get different results.  Those who succeed at a second go at couple’s love usually learn to do the second relationship very differently than they did their first.  There are some exceptions but not many.

2.    Relying on finding the perfect mate who treats you just right, just about guarantees failure.  One reason is because that puts almost all the pressure and weight of succeeding on your love-mate and little or none on yourself, or on your joint team love system which often turns out to be a crucial factor.

3.    Relying on the magic of love to make every thing work right this second time is like a farmer relying on the magic of nature alone to produce a healthy, abundant harvest.  No, it is going to take a lot of new love knowledge and team work along with the magical nature of love.

For example think of acrobats and their incredible teamwork to keep each other tumbling and sailing through the air safely.  Then think of any well coordinated team artfully running plays and patterns in cooperation and harmony, so as to make scores and win the game.  Now think of couple’s love like a team sport; you don’t know yet how to play very well.  So, it is going to take a lot of joint learning and joint practicing to get good at it together.  Love’s magical nature may get you started but from there on its sheer conjoint team effort and increasing love skill that wins the day.

4.    Do NOT rely on falling in love, feeling like you are in love, or being sure you are in love now that you think you have found the single, right person for you because several forms of false love can give you pretty much the very same initial feelings.

5.    Do NOT rely on manipulation games, relating by deceptions, relational trickery, other people’s rules for romance, hiding your less pleasant truths, phoniness or any other lack of realness because while those things might get you married falsehood, likely will not keep you mated that way or get you into healthy, real love.

6.    Do NOT rely on blaming of your ex, or of yourself or anything else to help you know how to go on to second love success.  And while you are thinking about past failures do not spend too much time on what went wrong because usually that will not lead you to what you must do right or what you must skillfully learn to do well.  Remember, knowing 3 is not the answer to 2+2 does not tell you the answer is 4.  Plus, it leaves you open to the mistakes of answering 5, 6, 7, etc.  However, it usually is useful to study what and how you could have done better.

7.    Do NOT rush into your next, heavy duty relationship.  Start light and don’t specialize in any one person too soon.  Sample broadly, let the best emerge and grow into it slowly.  Take a year and preferably two, once you think something is working really well.  As Paul told us, “ love is patient”.  It usually is false love that is in a hurry.

A New Understanding of Second Love Success

Second attempts at spousal love may go better, even much better than first marriages, non-marriages, unions, etc. because the couple learns to work at doing love itself better as a team.  Team love, much like any teamwork, requires a coordinated interaction of sending love and receiving love more skillfully and more completely than might have occurred in first marriages and other love attempts.  It appears that is because successful second marriage couples jointly tend to go looking for the how-to’s of doing love better than they did before.  They may not consciously know they are doing this, then again sometimes they do.  Also being aware that they can fail appears to help them be much more careful right from the start of a new relationship.

Those who succeed seem to interact in cooperative coordination using the behaviors of love much more often and much more readily than in previous relationships.  In doing so, they continually develop and hone their team love skills.  Such couples become increasingly better at working together in unison and jointly uniting to produce positive effects.  They learn to act in much more loving concert with each other pulling together, acting side-by-side, joining their forces together and siding with each other when facing opposition or difficulty.

These couples make efforts jointly and concurrently, growing their common love connection and with it a strengthening team spirit.  Their approach is exemplified by the statement “when I win you win, and when either of us loses so does the other and so does our relationship”.  They assist each other to be individuals but that too they do with team harmony.  Sometimes they do fall into disharmony and dissonance.  When that happens it is not long before they are trying to come back together in the teamwork of healing and conjointly reconnecting.  With their success, comes a joint shared joy and motivation to succeed again together even better.

More technically, successful second time couples are thought to build a much better systemic, love-active series of positive and jointly developed interaction patterns.  When one makes a little bid for a love connection with a glance, a sound, a gesture or anything, the other one picks up on it and smoothly and quickly acts in kind.  When one directly asks for any particular show of love, the other one also smoothly and quickly is responsive in kind.  The teamwork truly is a duet of love-responsive-interaction.

Much like superb, well practiced dancers, their actions, even when very different from one another, integrate with each other to produce a synergetic, singular whole.  Their support is mutual as is their respect for one another and their affirmation is solid and frequently freely evident as is a tolerance when things do not go well.  They do sometimes clash, sometimes quite vehemently, but never nearly as much as they harmonize and demonstrate how much they value one another and the importance of their coupleness.

It is important to know that this systemic team love concept for many people is hard to understand and also not easily researched.  It is hard enough for a lot of people to comprehend the ways of an individual let alone the interaction patterns of a couple acting in loving concert with one another.
To help you with that, here is a double example.  Al stays at the office later and later because he knows that when he gets home he will be met with his angry, disappointed, complaining wife, Barb.  So, Al stays later and later to avoid that.  He secretly hopes that Barb will get the idea that being nice would get him home sooner.  Barb waiting at home gets angrier, increasingly disappointed and prone to intense complaining the longer and longer it takes for Al to get home.  She secretly hopes her demonstrable unhappiness will get her husband to start coming home sooner.

Both Al and Barb’s actions are having the opposite of the desired effect.  Neither of them sees that what they are doing, trying to make it better, makes it worse; nor do they see that it is a cyclical pattern they both jointly are creating.  Next-door, Carl works to get home as quickly as he can because his wife, Debbie, is so pleasant to come home to.  Debbie is pleasant because Carl always arrives home greeting her with happy love.  They too are creating a joint interaction, cyclical pattern but one that has a positive, team love effect instead of an anti-love, negative one. Might it be that Al and Barb are in a first marriage and Carl and Debbie in a second, having learned better from their first?

In or Going toward a Second, Big, Committed Effort at Love?

If you are already in or going toward a second, big, committed effort at couple’s love, let me suggest you get a really strong TEAM focus.  As a team, together study, discuss and practice the behaviors of love  “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love”, the understandings of love’s workings, the things that are known to help couple’s teamwork and those that do not help.  Learn how to avoid the traps of false love and the skills it takes to grow healthy, real love also can be part of your team focus.  Of course, we recommend this website and its 200+ mini-love-lessons, the books mentioned here, along with everything else you can find that looks like it might be worthy of your joint attention.  Classes, workshops, retreats, and being around loving people, especially loving couples, often can do wonders.  There is lots more but that will have to do for now.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love success question: When, where and with whom have you done your best teamwork, and can you see how to apply what you did there to growing a couple’s team love?

Related posts:

1. What Makes Love Last?
2. Trust Recovery and Love
3. Yellow Love: Are You Suffering from It and Don’t Know It?
4. Anti-Love, Non-Love & Real Love
5. Cycling Love for Lasting Love 

Does Jealousy Prove Love?

“A little jealousy proves she loves me, doesn’t it?”  “I love it when he gets really jealous.  It makes him act so dominant and sexy!”  “I guess she really loves me because she went over and beat up my ex when she found out my ex and I were talking again.”  And now a famous quote, “If I’m the one who killed her ….after she started seeing that other guy ….doesn’t that prove I really loved her?”  After all, jealousy proves love, doesn’t it?  Those are real life quotes representing the spectrum of how a large number of people think about love and jealousy in the modern world.  Those quotes also show how large parts of our culture teach or subconsciously program people to mis-understand the relationship between love and jealousy.

In my counseling practice I work with a lot of people who have problems with jealousy.  Frequently they are very serious problems.  Sometimes I hear things like, “Dr. Cookerly, I’m jealous so doesn’t that prove I really love”… so-and-so.  My answer is usually something like, “I’m sorry to say that in my understanding jealousy doesn’t prove love.  It proves  insecurity”.  In essence jealousy is replacement fear.  When you’re jealous you are afraid of being replaced by another person in the heart, mind and life of someone you find important.  When you are jealous you’re usually in a state of not trusting your own attraction power, your all-over sense of self worth, your adequacy, your lovability and maybe your ability to do love.

Usually working on your own healthy self-love is a big part of curing the jealousy problem. Those good at healthy self love don’t seem to experience much jealousy.  They also do a better job of generally doing love well.  Of course another part of curing the jealousy problem may involve doing a better job of showing, receiving and relating with love.  Let’s look into all this a little deeper.
In some circles it’s almost gospel to hear if you act ‘crazy jealous’ it proves you really have big-time love for somebody.  I’m not the first counselor who has heard messages like, “I guess I will marry him.  After all sometimes he get so jealous he slaps me around so I know it’s real love.”  People who think like that often end up in a battered spouse program, or worse.

All the tragic outcomes of people believing ‘jealousy is evidence of love’ lead me to call this idea one of our most destructive false teachings about love.  This falsity has been around a long time.  Way back in the 1100s the French Courts of Love decided jealousy did prove love.  This resulted in duels and death and continues to this day as a lethal myth.  In some sub-cultural groups death by jealousy still goes on.  In today’s world every day somebody somewhere kills somebody else because they’re jealous.  Then sometimes they kill themselves.  Sadly jealousy has cost a lot of people their lives and sabotaged many others from achieving happy successful lives .  Therefore, I like to suggest it is never wise to take jealousy lightly.  Even in small doses jealousy is worrisome because it may grow and eventually destroy a person or an otherwise potentially good love relationship.

Jealousy is based in fear, not in love.  A little bit of jealousy can indicate a little sense of threat or fear is occurring.  A lot of jealousy means there is a lot of fear.  With great fear often comes big and horrible mistakes.  Jealousy also means that in a relationship something or someone of some importance is in danger of being lost, or at least that is the underling perception.   However, it may have little or nothing to do with a loss of healthy real love.  More likely the fear concerns a loss of pride, ego, life role position, infantile dependency, status, security or some other non-real love factor.

Frequently jealousy works sort of like this:  If I fear I can’t hold on to you because my qualities are not sufficiently attractive or lovable I may get jealous.  With jealousy often comes possessiveness, suspicion, anger, controlling acts and a lot of other negative behaviors.  Powerful domination or deceitful manipulations are attempts to force you to be with me, instead of attracting you by becoming more improved, becoming love focused and acting with love.  With jealousy I fear someone better than me will take you away from me, and so I must keep you from them and keep them away from you.

If I fear losing you to someone else and my jealousy is not overwhelming I can attempt to manipulate you with guilt, play for sympathy as a victim, or try to get you to save me or fix me, none of which has anything to do with healthy real love.  The fear basis of jealousy also often gets the one who is jealous to see threat and betrayal where none exists.  Interrogation, spying, privacy invasion and paranoid ways are typical of a jealous person.  None of that represents the behaviors of healthy real love.

So, you may ask, “What’s the cure?”
As we develop our healthy self-love we get in touch with our sense of self worth more and more.  With this a person tends to see themselves as more lovable and love ‘able’.  After that happens one usually begins to trust their own attraction power more.  With that development tendencies toward jealousy are likely to reduce markedly.  Sometimes these tendencies are replaced by simple insecurity without the symptoms of jealousy.  Pure insecurity frequently is far less self destructive and less blinded to the facts than jealousy is.

Also simple insecurity far more commonly results in a person attempting to become more secure by rational and workable methods than is true with jealousy.  Look at this example.  Andy is with Betty at the dance.  Betty gets asked to dance by Charles who is much better looking, richer and a far better dancer than Andy.  Andy starts feeling inferior to Charles, becomes insecure and gets jealous (the usual three step process of jealousy).  When Betty returns from the dance floor he criticizes her for dancing too close to Charles, suspiciously questions her about secretly wanting to have sex with Charles, and they fight.  Betty breaks off the relationship with Andy and then goes over to Charles and asks him to take her home since “Andy is such a jealous jerk”.

Now let’s suppose this scenario happened after Andy had worked at becoming more mature and healthfully self loving.  When Betty gets back from the dance floor Andy bravely admits, “I’m feeling insecure and I sure would like it if you would give me some reassurance that you love me and want me, and anything else that says you like me”.  Betty replies, “Of course, Honey, I really respect you for having the courage to admit you’re insecure, and I’m so thankful you are not doing any of those dumb, jealous, trying to control me with dominance things.  It really makes you so much  more attractive to me!  It was only a dance and you’re the one I love”.  Well, of course, this is an oversimplification but hopefully it demonstrates how things might and often do work without jealousy.

The re-establishment of a sense of security via being wanted and loved is what both the insecure and the jealous person are after.  The person who has the self-confidence to simply ask for that reassurance and receive it when it comes their way has the best chance of getting it.  The tortured, often convoluted path of the jealous person is frequently self-defeating.

Be careful not to confuse jealousy with envy.  Jealousy is when you don’t want someone else to have what you want or what you might want.  Envy is when you want something like what someone else has.  Envy can lead us to achieve improvements, acquire additions, etc. while jealousy usually leads only to trouble.

In a round about way jealousy eventually is it’s own cure.  With enough jealousy you will drive off the person you are trying to keep.  With that loss either you will quit trying, deteriorate and be destroyed, or you will grow yourself into better emotional shape and get over being so jealous.  In any case the jealousy will be decommissioned.  An unhealthy danger is if someone keeps giving in to your jealousy and rewards it by staying with you.  Most often rewarded jealousy continues and increases.  The more you give in to jealousy the more the jealous person uses jealousy to control you. 

Also they work less on improving themselves because controlling you with jealousy is working.  Being compliant and surrendering cooperatively to a jealous lover’s every whim can make a relationship last longer but usually the jealousy grows like a cancer until it destroys you both.
Mostly in the modern world jealousy doesn’t work to keep somebody around.  In most modern world relationships only love will do that.  In less developed parts of the world jealousy may still work somewhat because in those places it’s harder to get away from a jealous, controlling, possessive spouse, lover, etc.  Wherever people are sufficiently free to safely get away from a jealous possessive lover, parent, family, friend, etc. they tend to do so.  Thus, jealousy tends to loose sway wherever freedom, gender equality, and democracy are becoming the social norm.

”Dr. Cookerly, isn’t jealousy natural?”  “Jealousy is hard wired into our brains, isn’t it?”  Once in a while I’m asked those kind of questions.  Sometimes I suspect the person asking may have a vested interest in the answer.  So, I like to first ask, “What do you hope my answer will be?”  Later I may answer something like this.  A number of social and evolutional psychologists, along with some anthropologists, think jealousy once may have worked well enough and long enough to perhaps now be ingrained in our brain responses.  However, there is some evidence to suggest the severely jealous are losing at love at such a rate that it may some day devolve out of existence in the human race. 

There are cultures in the world where jealousy is much less virulent, rare or almost non-existent.  Language groups lacking the possessive case exhibit very little jealousy.  This also is true for groups where sharing is more valued than possession acquirement.  Also there are cultures in which the things people are jealous about are quite different from what we in the modern Western world tend to get jealous about.  For instance polygamy, or polyandry, or what we call ‘sleeping around’ may be perfectly acceptable but someone else having better dreams can spark intense jealousy.

Cultural anthropologists with growing evidence argue for a rather interesting understanding.  According to their increasing evidence-based view men and women were considered quite equal for 200,000 years or so, and gender equal sexual sharing was probably the standard during all that time.  It wasn’t until the last 5% of Homo sapiens’ existence when agriculture was invented and ownership of women, land, and cattle occurred that jealousy was thought to have grown to importance and commonality.  That means jealousy may have had a chance to get hard wired into our brains only for the last 8,000 to 10,000 years.  The brain scientist don’t think that’s enough time for jealousy to be much of a genetic trait, if it is at all.  Thus, jealousy may not be a natural or neurologically ‘hard wired’ condition at all.  Is that the answer you were hoping for?  A scientific excuse for jealousy might be a hoped for answer by some.  It just doesn’t seem to be supported by sufficient reliable evidence.

If you have strong or ongoing problems with either being jealousy or being the target of jealousy let me strongly suggests you seek out a good counselor or therapist who can coach you into better, more healthy self-love, and a safer more productive way of going about love relationships.

If you are one of those who think that a little jealousy is a good thing my suggestion is be very careful about that.  If you know someone involved in a relationship filled with jealousy problems please consider suggesting they seek professional assistance quickly, and know you might be saving their life by doing so.  All too often strong jealousy turns deadly.  If you have a teenager or young adult dating a highly jealous person consider going quickly into family therapy because you may be facing the dynamics of jealousy mixed with immaturity which is often a highly dangerous combination.

I have dealt with many mildly, jealousy infected couple relationships and they turned out fine with help without much trouble.  I also have dealt with just enough of the more serious kind to urge great caution.  So, I like to answer the question posed at the beginning of this segment, “No, jealousy does not prove love, it proves insecurity and that can sometimes be quite dangerous”.  So, love healthfully and be careful of ‘The Green Eyed Monster’.

As always – grow in love.

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Related posts:

1. Envy With Love and Jealousy Without
2. Dealing with Love Hurts: A Dozen Love Hurts to Know and Grow From
3. Healthy Real Love -or- Toxic False Love

Forgiveness - A Much-Needed Love Skill

Synopsis: This mini-love lesson starts with the question “why forgive?”; then goes on to forgiveness is about the future more than the past; a surprising reason we don’t forgive; sex and forgiveness; the risk of forgiveness; big love forgives, small love does not; growing forgiveness; and ends with a forgiveness challenge.

Why forgive?

“Forgiveness is so hard. Why should I try to do it?”  Often the answer is because not doing forgiveness is even harder.  Not forgiving frequently means not healing.

In my work as a relational therapist I have dealt with couples where one or both have shot, poisoned, stabbed or tried to run over their mate with a car and who have come to forgive those actions and all that led to them.  I have dealt with several hundred couples who have experienced infidelity, even repeated infidelity and all the deceit that goes with it and yet through forgiveness and healthy, real love development many are happy, successful couples today.

The most amazing examples of forgiveness I have seen came in my work with the parents and families of murdered children.  Parents who sit before the convicted murders of their own, most precious children and yet still offer forgiveness to those murders.  They love beyond my own love capabilities but not beyond my ability to be awed by them.  Intellectually I understand that those who do not forgive are likely to never heal and to be forever be more troubled.

Emotionally my heart goes out to those who cannot yet forgive and experience the healing which forgiveness brings.  When we forgive we are on the path to recovery.  When we forgive we can let go and let that which wounded us recede into our past.  Frequently forgiveness offers the one who is doing the forgiving more than what is offered to the one who is forgiven.  To not forgive is to not let a wound heal and continues the harm one has experienced.

Forgiveness Is about the Future More Than the Past

Forgiveness offers a chance for a cleaner, lighter, brighter future.  To not forgive poisons the future by carrying the past into it.  This works as much for the one doing the forgiveness as the one receiving it.  Honest to God, real love demands and requires forgiveness for both individuals and relationships so that the future of both has a chance. The future of both individuals and relationships can be especially sabotaged by seeking revenge, trying to ‘get even’, recrimination and bitter, endless judgmentalism.

Forgiveness does not have to be coupled with giving someone another chance but if another chance is to be attempted loving forgiveness is likely to be essential.  Forgiveness clears the way for making new and better things happen.  It is especially necessary in a couple’s ongoing life together.  In every couple’s relationship there are small, medium and sometimes large things to be forgiven, gotten past and left behind.  This also can be true of most deep friendships and lots of family relationships.  This also is true of self forgiveness.

A Surprising Reason for Why We Don’t Forgive

“ I can’t forgive her!  I just can’t forgive her cheating on me.  I can’t forgive or forget her adultery”.  This was Jake’s painful lament as he sat in front of me to start working on his recovery from discovering his wife in bed with another.  I said, “Yes, you were hurt tremendously by your wife’s betrayal but I have to ask you, Jake, what do you have yet to learn from this terrible experience?”  Jake replied “Why do you ask that? “ My reply was “Because in my experience sometimes we cannot forgive because we have yet to learn what we need to learn”.

Jake at first was baffled.  However, in time and with work he discovered he had had a part to play which had helped motivate his wife toward cheating.  He didn’t cause it but he contributed to it, and he needed to learn his part so he wouldn’t do it again.  He slowly came to realize he too often was far too unloving, indifferent, inattentive and uncaring.  He took his wife and his marriage for granted while mostly focusing his life on career success.

Jake also prioritized being tough, strong and authoritative far above being loving or lovable.  In human interaction “winning” was much more important to him than cooperation and collaboration.  This especially was true in the way he treated his wife and his children.  Jake remembered his troubled teenage daughter once saying to him, “There’s just no way I can win with you, Dad.  So I’m going to quit trying.”  After that they grew increasingly distant from one another.

Sex and Forgiveness

One other thing Jake learned concerned his own sexuality. He was secretly afraid other men were more potent and could sexually perform better than he.  As long as he was secretly insecure, forgiving his wife’s sexual infidelity meant facing his fear that he was sexually inadequate and that his wife had sexually experienced something better than he had to offer.  However, once he had discovered and admitted this openly in therapy he became surprisingly open to developing a new and better sexuality, forgiving his wife, and starting with her again as she had asked him to do.
This is often the way it works.

Once a person learns what they need to learn about themselves and their own areas of weakness that need strengthening, it becomes a bit easier to forgive.  This can be true even for people who have been heavily brought up to believe that sexual infidelity is unforgivable.  Is it not interesting that what is sexually unforgivable in one culture is fairly unimportant in another, and even is considered admirable in still another culture.

The Risk of Forgiveness

Another reason we don’t forgive is that unless it is done with wisdom forgiveness can set you up for repeated, painful experiences.  For many people forgiveness is not offered because they fear it makes them vulnerable and more likely to be hurt again.  When forgiveness is seen as something ‘you do in your heart’ and that it is all right to join forgiveness with adequate self protection, it becomes an easier choice (See the entry Forgiveness in Healthy Self-Love).

It is important to realize that forgiveness can put you at risk.  It is perfectly healthy to limit your risk to something you are pretty sure you can handle.  Could you say and mean something like “I forgive you but I have my own problem of being vulnerable and repeating my own mistakes, so I’m not going to return to our relationship again.  Therefore, I forgive you and wish you well.  Goodbye.”  That’s one way to deal with the risk of forgiveness.

Love often takes risking or gambling on the person you love.  That often means you do give them another chance and risk again experiencing deception, betrayal and emotional pain.  Strong and sufficient love often pushes us to forgive and risk again.  That does not mean to try in ways that enable and reward being used and misused endlessly.  Cooperatively making a clearly defined contract or agreement before starting over may help to minimize the risk and pain.

Big Love Forgives, Small Love Does Not

Some people never forgive the transgressions committed against them (real or imagined).  Some hold grudges until the day they die.  Those who are big enough and strong enough to forgive, give their love relationships a chance for renewal and new, ongoing success.  Without forgiveness many, perhaps most, love relationships deteriorate and die, or at least become comatose.  Forgiveness often takes being brave and loving in a big way.

If your own personal strengths are too weak or your love not powerful don’t forgive because you may not survive what you risk.  However, if your love is real, big and bold and you have powerful character strengths forgiveness maybe is what it will take to achieve a great, lasting, love relationship.  Sheila said, “He forgave me when no one else would.  How can I not love him more and better than anyone else and choose to spend my life with him?”  Some of the best love relationships could not come into being until there was great forgiveness – given and received.  That is the way of big love.

Growing Forgiveness

If you are having trouble forgiving someone for something there are ways to work on it  and win yourself the freedom forgiveness brings.  You can work on coming to understand why someone choose a path of action that hurt you.  If you can see through their eyes, feel their feelings and comprehend their thinking it may give you considerable assistance in the forgiving process.  Understanding is best done with compassion and empathy.  You don’t have to agree or call what they did ‘right’ to do that.  You also can work to understand how your own actions and words may have contributed to their transgressions.  Furthermore, you can work to understand your weakness which made you so vulnerable to being hurt, and from that you may find a way to grow stronger and defend against that vulnerability.

Another work you can do is to accept that you and all other humans are imperfect beings prone to making mistakes and needing forgiveness so that progress can go on.  Sometimes it helps to know that major religions the world over preach and teach forgiveness as the way of love.  If you work at it you can grow forgiveness and if you do not you may be stuck in the self poisoning of non-forgiveness.  If you are in a ongoing, love relationship with a lover, spouse, friend or family member and are not sufficiently forgiving, or they are not, see if you can both go to a good relational, love-oriented therapist who can help both of you get forgiveness to start growing.  Lasting love relationships require forgiveness skills and practices, or they don’t last.

There are books to read which can help.  May I suggest you take a look at Dare to Forgive by Dr. E.M. Hollowell, and Forgiving and Reconciling: Bridges to Wholeness and Hope by a Dr. Worthington.  There are lots of counselors and therapists, and especially couples and family therapists, who are good at assisting two or more people with growing forgiveness and its many mutual benefits.

The Forgiveness Challenge

If you are going to do healthy, real love of anyone I suggest you develop your forgiveness skills.  Every human relationship that is ongoing will need some forgiveness, sometimes a lot of forgiveness.  The nature of love itself challenges you to be forgiving so that healing, repairing and love’s continuation can happen.  It is important that your forgiveness be done wisely so that it does not reward and reinforce dysfunction.  It often is important that your forgiveness be abundant and generous, but also wisely given.

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Who have you not forgiven, for what, and what effect is that having on you?

Related posts:

1. Forgiveness in Healthy Self-Love
2. Catharsis Empathy – A Love Skill
3. Talking to Feelings First, Then Topics – A Love Skill
4. Infidelity and Love
5. Dining with Heart – A Love Skill 

Repairing Damaged Love, Best Guidelines

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson gives you a dozen better, and different than usual, guidelines for working to repair a wounded or damaged love relationship.

Love Wounds Can Heal

Love relationships get damaged, wounded, broken and in other ways harmed from time to time. The good news is, often with enough healthy real love, well delivered, they can be healed, fixed, repaired and frequently in the process made stronger than they ever were before. Here are a dozen guidelines that can help accomplish just that:

1. Have and show patience Don’t rush, push, or try to force a quick repair. Do some showing of kind, gentle love and then back off. Let mother nature have time to effect some healing and then do a little more. If you do too much, too often it probably will not be love you are demonstrating. It might be weakness, insecurity and dependence, or at least it’s likely to be seen that way.

2. Focus forward Put your attention into making things better. Focus on ‘Now’ and ‘Next’ more than on the past. Work to create new, better and more positive love-filled experiences more than rehashing, analyzing or endlessly bemoaning the past. Some mentioning of past, positive experiences and learning from the past are useful so long as it doesn’t get in the way of focusing forward toward making new, better and more love-filled things happen.

3. Have and show empathetic compassion It is important that you show empathetic compassion much more than trying to communicate explanations, defensiveness, logic, analysis or reasoning. None of those are likely to convey much love. Especially defensiveness and explanations usually just result in making things worse because people see everything so differently, and they frequently are interpreted as making excuses and attacking with blame. They may have a place but usually only after a show of sufficient and repeated empathetic compassion (empathy = to feel another’s feeling; Compassion = to genuinely care).
4. ‘Own’ your share of the actions needed for cure and healing If you ‘own’ the desire for it to get better, you ‘own’ the responsibility (Response + Ability) to take actions to make it better. This usually includes owning-up to your share of causing the problem. Avoid blaming yourself or others, judgmentalism, denial and dodging the hurtful truths involved. Never conclude that just one person caused all the problems or one person can effect all the cure.

5. Work toward ‘I win, you win’ joint victories Concentrate on ‘we’ and ‘us’ more than ‘I and you’ so as to build toward connection, acting as a team, cooperation, collaboration, bonding and unity. Remember that in a ‘one person wins and one loses’ encounter, their relationship loses. It is only in ‘I win and you win’ situations that the relationship wins and the problems lose.

6. Work to do, say and hear all things through and with love Remember it is all about a LOVE relationship, so aim to do it all with love. Well shown, healthy, real love is extremely healing. All things can be said with love. All messages, even the worst ones, can be heard with heart-centered love. Without love actions, love-filled communications, and love-based understandings, all else is likely to be ineffectual or worse.

7. Love assertively, not aggressively or passively Act to freely offer your love, not force it on anyone. While doing this, remember to assertively love yourself as you love another. With love assert your ideas, feelings, wants, understandings, hopes and everything important to you. Non-action and surrendering can be seen as indifference or a lack of strong vigorous love.

8. Practice affirmational love especially Affirm clearly and often, the high value and worth of your loved one, yourself and your love relationship. Minimize or avoid all that might dis-affirm such as criticism, demeaning remarks, blame, condemnation, put-downs, character attacks and devaluing statements about your loved one, yourself and your relationship.

9. Relate from self respecting strength Don’t act desperate, beg, grovel, play victim or helpless. Those may get you some pity but not love. Show you have the strength to admit and own-up to your failings and shortcomings, but not as an inadequate, infantile weakling. That garners no respect and without respect adult-to-adult love fails.

10. Deal from clear requests, not expectations Remember the ancient adage “expect nothing, want everything and say what you want”. Misinterpretation, misunderstanding, malfunctioning and disappointment are the common results of operating from expectations which usually go unsaid, poorly related and not mutually or sufficiently comprehended.

11. Learn about love Then practice what you learn. Yes, love is magical, mysterious and complicated. That is all the more reason to study it. Study what it is, how to give it, and how to get it. Study what it is not, what it is confused with, and study the many tragic mistakes people make about it when they don’t sufficiently understand it. Study the false forms of love and how to avoid them. Study what the ancient wisdom masters taught and what modern science is discovering about love. There is a great wealth of available, practical knowledge about love all of us can put to good use. There is also a great deal of useless and destructive trash to sort through. The more you know and practice the skills of love, the more likely you will succeed.

12. Get help Preferably together, but if not together then by yourself search for and go to love-knowledgeable helpers. There are counselors, therapists, personal and relational coaches, clerics of many faiths, teachers, mentors, sponsors and those who just love well who can help guide you as you work to repair a wounded love relationship. Use them.

The many mini-love-lessons found at this site exist to assist you with # 11.

In particular, those mini-love-lessons found in the Subject Index under Pain and Problems may be of special help. Also let us suggest that if you know of others suffering with a love relationship problem, you might refer them to this free, informative site.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What do you read concerning love? And by whom?

Special note:
It seems like most of the people who seriously start to learn about love, do so after a big love failure or a very painful love relationship experience. Most of them turn to self help, relationship books, some of which are wonderful and some terrible, and many useless. Readings in religion, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, the brain sciences and many related fields also are usual places where people start their search into “loveology”.

For those who want to go deeper and broader, there is Aristotle, the apostle Paul, Rumi, Montague, Fromm, Kierkegaard, Brandon, Hooks, Reik, Harlow, Siegel, Fisher, Chapman and a host of other authors from a wide variety of fields and backgrounds. They all can be profoundly instructive for the serious student of love and how to succeed at it. Seek and you shall find!

Related posts:

1. Forgiveness – A Much-Needed Love Skill
2. Competitive Niceness: A Love Skill 

Protecting Those You Love from Yourself

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

Real Love Is Protective

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

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

Our Protective Blind Spot

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

Overprotection Is Anti-Protection!

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

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

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

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

What Are You Modeling?

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

Romantic Rage

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

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

Protection and Affairs

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

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

Protection and Addictions

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

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

Self Appraisal with Self-Love

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

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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

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?

Sex Fears Mastered with Love

Synopsis:  This mini-love-lesson first presents the harm that sex fears do to individuals and couples; and then goes on to review the many faces of sexual fears both, conscious and subconscious; talks about things not to do; and much more.

The Harm Sex Fears Do

Samuel and Sarah are breaking up mostly because of their fears related to sex.  Sarah dreads even thinking or talking about some new sexual activities Samuel wants them to experiment with.  Samuel secretly fears he is not sexually ‘man enough’ or sexy enough to keep turning Sarah on, so he wants to attempt some new, exciting, erotic things he has been hearing about.  Both Sarah and Samuel are too afraid to openly and honestly talk with each other about their sex fears.  Consequently, on the increasingly rare times when they try to make love, Sarah tightens up with fear.  That in turn makes attempting intercourse painful for Sarah.

Sensing Sarah’s reluctance, Samuel has begun to fear that he will say or do something that will turn Sarah off to him more, which he thinks seems to be happening.  This fearful worry is making him have trouble with maintaining erections.  Recently Samuel has started having premature ejaculation problems.  Because of those problems Samuel and Sarah are beginning to emotionally withdraw from one another.  They also have started to argue about all sorts of small things that really do not matter to either of them.  Therefore, they both are becoming increasingly sex and love malnourished in their relationship with each other.  Both have begun to secretly fantasize about how things could be better with someone new and different.

In desperation Samuel and Sarah went to a counselor.  It turned out the counselor did not know much about handling love relationship or sex problems; as that had not been a part of the counselor’s training.  However, the counselor was able to refer them on to a well qualified couple’s therapist who had also been trained in sex therapy.  Over a fairly short period of time this therapist artfully guided them to tap into their love for each other which gave them the courage to carefully, kindly and compassionately say the things they feared to say, in loving ways, and to accept the things they heard from one another, and later to do the erotic things they feared to do together before.  In the process Samuel and Sarah learned to develop and use a variety of new love skills, applying them to overcoming fear and greatly expanding their sex life together.

Unfortunately there are thousands and thousands of couples and individuals whose relationships are defeated, divided and destroyed because they do not know how to ‘use their love to master their fears’.  There are thousands more whose love and sex lives continue on but are hindered, hampered and harmed because they don’t know how to ‘use their love to master their fears related to sexuality’.

The Many Faces of Sex Fear

“I’m so afraid my wife doesn’t love me because I found her reading women’s porn and masturbating”.  “I’m scared he just wants me for sex”.  “I mask it well, but I’m really threatened by the idea that I may be sexually inadequate and inferior”.  “Since I got out of the hospital I am totally terrified to try sex again”.  “I guess I am a coward but I can’t bring myself to ask my husband to do the erotic things I want him to do to me and I’m just dying to try”.  “I get really shaky when I start thinking about my sexual performance not being as good as what my spouse experienced with others”.  “I sort of panic when I suspect my sex dreams and desires are actually very sick, wrong and sinful”.  “Even though I really want to, I just can’t bring myself to do the things my lover wants me to do”.  “If I get into sex the way I’d dearly like to, I fear I’ll get addicted to it, my husband will think I’m a slut, and God will hate me”.

These quotes represent just a fraction of the many life-limiting, sex-related fears people are struggling with and are consciously aware of.  But then there also are the unrecognized, subconscious, sex-related fears which may be doing more harm than the conscious ones.

Subconscious Sex Fears

Many couples’ love relationships are being crippled, or at least limited, by deep sexual, non-conscious fears and the ‘cousins’ of fear – anxiety, worry, apprehension, sense of threat, etc.  Subconscious fears often are rather complicated, confusing and a little harder to get to.  After some in-depth counseling, Beth said, “I finally admitted to myself that I get mad at my husband for one thing or another, whenever I think he might want sex.  Then we fight instead of having sex.  Something about having sex makes me fearful”.  “Looking way down inside me, I suspect I still believe sex is essentially bad, and I was taught no one will really love me if I’m bad”.   “Understanding it that way makes me feel I might be able to change it.  Now I think I might be able to by talk this over with my husband by asking him to choose to be extra loving as we work to get rid of this problem.  I think that may work”.

Bill stated, “I see it now.  What I’m actually upset about is not her looking at other men, it’s when she looks at me I irrationally think she will remember my penis is small and think those other men probably have bigger cocks than I do.  God, I hate to say that but when I say it, it feels true”.  Barbara related, “I’ve been denying the truth so much it’s coming out in my dreams.  Although I truly enjoy sex with my husband, I dream about having sex with other women.  I’m scared to ask but does that mean I’m really a lesbian, or maybe bisexual, or perhaps a sex addict who wants it with everybody?  If I am one of those things what will that mean for my marriage, and my family and everything about my life?  That’s really scary!”

Everyone can have, and just about everybody does have, or will have some sort of fear issues related to sex.  When it happens to you, you may be quite conscious of it or it may affect you in strange subconscious kinds of ways.  The good news is that with healthy self-love and/or the love of another, plus with some good inner-work you can master, overcome and defeat fear and its effects.  But take note, it also is good to be aware of some of the things not to do.

Things Not to Do

Don’t blame!  Don’t blame yourself, or your beloved, or your parents or anyone else.  Blaming seldom arrives at solution.  Don’t surrender!  Letting your fears have their way just gets in the way of developing the love skills and methods which help you get past your fears.  Don’t keep quiet!  In the most loving way you can, talk to your beloved if you have one, talk to non-judgmental friends, knowledgeable source people, helpers like counselors and therapists and talk to yourself in encouraging, self honoring ways.

If it is your beloved who is having the most obvious problem with fears, don’t come at them without lots of love showing.  Don’t use argumentative reasoning, logic and debate skills on them.  Don’t use sarcasm and ridicule, and especially don’t use any condemnation.  Don’t try to hint, suggest, use innuendo or in other ways ‘beat around the bush’ about the problem but rather ask for their loving help, while talking clearly and directly about the difficulty.  Don’t use anger, threats, manipulation deception, withdrawal, cold silence or anything else that might be anti-loving.

How Love Wins over Sex Fears

Listen to Joe and Jesse.  Joe asked Jesse to do a striptease for him.  Jesse replied she would like to be able to do that but she couldn’t because she was too afraid.  Joe with slow, soft kinds of tones in his voice reassuringly said it was okay if Jesse did not do that.  Then he asked her if she could share what her reluctance was all about.  With much hesitation and nervousness Jesse related that she thought she was too fat, and far too clumsy and awkward. She said, “Joe you will just laugh at me, and it would all end up as a great big turnoff”.  Joe tenderly suggested that they just dance together, and as they dance together they take each other’s clothes off.  Jesse replied she was still scared but that was something she could try if they turned down the lights.  That’s how they started.  A month later Jesse turned on stripper music and told Joe to just watch and applaud.  Then she danced and stripped for him, better than anything he had ever imagined.

How did this victory over fear happen?  Jesse and Joe approached each other, and the problem, gently but clearly with stated truth, mixed with tender caring love. Their love of each other led them to help each other take small, careful steps toward what was desired.  Jesse said Joe made it obvious that his love for her was a lot more important to him than his desire.  And that, she said, made her want to do what he wanted ever so much more, and gave her the courage to try.  She also related that her self-confidence and self-love improved in the process.  Joe says his love and respect for Jesse were already big, and now they were much bigger because she worked so very well with him about doing what he wanted.

How Fear Can Assist You

When you work with your fear, it can assist you.  Fear is in us to protect us but, like all human systems, it can overdo it, miss do it, under do it, and otherwise malfunction.  Fear tries to protect us from harm.  However, many things we are trained to fear have no real harm potential.  This is especially true in the area of sexuality.  As Jesse learned, taking off her clothes to music could not really harm her.  No bleeding, bruising or breakage would come from it.  However, not doing it might be a bit harmful to their relationship.  So, whatever you fear, assess the harm potential.  ‘Harm’, by the way, is not to be confused with its enemy ‘hurt’.  Hurt, like fear, warns you that harm may occur, so be careful.  Some sexual hurt may occur, much like what happens with exercise, and then turn out to be a good thing for you.

What to Do

The basic thing to do is study love and develop your skills for conveying, receiving and applying love.  Then use those skills of applying love to work on your own and your beloved’s fears.  Whatever you fear to do, for healthy self-love, assess the harm potential.  That may take some research.  If the harm-potential is nonexistent or not high, carefully explore and experiment toward what you fear.  Remember, many sexual things can be lovingly done best by playacting and shared fantasizing.

In good loving teamwork, help your beloved to do the same.  You might want to read the book Feel Fear and Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers.  If your own efforts are not quickly getting you far enough, seek good professional assistance in the form of a love knowledgeable, couples therapist with sex therapy training and experience.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Sexually, what fear have you already overcome and what sexual related fear might you want to overcome next?

Related posts:

1. Can You Talk about Sex – with Love?
2. Dealing With Love Hurts: Pain’s Crucial Guidance
3. Intercourse Absent Lovemaking – a Love Skill
4. Dealing with Love Hurts: A Dozen Love Hurts to Know and Grow From
5. Elder Love