Gender Diversity Love

Mini-Love-Lesson  #194

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

Synopsis: How a lot of people are a wide variety of something other than strictly male or female; the big problems that diversity presents; what that can have to do with several kinds of love and how those kinds of love can help are presented in this mini-love-lesson.

Whose What And What Difference Does It Make?

Transgender, transsexual, intersexual, gender dysphoric, omni-sexual, bisexual, homosexual, androgyny and other not strictly or primarily straight female or straight male gender variations have been scientifically identified as existing in the human race.  Both psychology and biology offer confirmation of these different gender diversity states being part of natural reality.  Neurophysiology, neurochemistry, neuropsychology and other brain sciences in particular yield evidence that gender is much more in the brain as well as much more diverse than previously thought.

What is not very different in all gender variations including heterosexuality is the natural need for love, the ways of giving love and the many beneficial effects of being healthfully well loved.  There are some larger differences in the area of love problems but even in that area there is not as much difference as you might at first think.

But for the gender diverse there are extra confounding complications, conflicts, confusions, stressors as well as some very puzzling romantic and heart-mate dilemmas.  Also there can be some hard to cope with biological concerns.

Perhaps worst of all for many are the very dangerous social and religious value clashes that occur in many cultures and subcultures around the world.  For all too long and for far too many, being gender different has been deadly.  To this day in many parts of the world having certain types of gender diversity can get you physically assaulted, jailed and even killed.

Especially dangerous has been the area of who you love and who loves you.  Romantic and spousal love, family love, friendship love, parent-child love, spiritual love and healthy self-love all have been fraught with stressors and serious problems for those whose gender is other than standard heterosexual.  Children, youth and young adults having gender diversity issues have suffered especially.  Embarrassment, shaming, bullying and religious guilt-tripping push many to suicide.  In pockets of the world, it is getting better but certainly not everywhere.

We suggest all this means the people of gender diversity can use extra acceptance, extra understanding and extra love.  So, let’s look at three very important, different kinds of love and what they can mean for the gender diverse.

Healthy, Real Self-Love

Healthy, real self-love is so often extremely important, hugely needed and so very often hard to come by for the people of prevalent and strong gender variation.  The problem is worse wherever there are prevailing anti-gender variation biases, fears, social norms, teachings and laws.  As perhaps you know, some societies, religious groups and families are much more loving and positive toward the gender variant.  Others are very condemning, anti-loving, rejecting, hateful and even murderous.

The gender diverse are so often confronted with overt and covert hate, rejection, exclusion and severe social disapproval.  Sometimes even worse is this.  Whether it is in a family or a whole culture, there frequently is a prevalent teaching something like “you should hate yourself for being anything but straight male or straight female”.  When that teaching becomes an internalized mindset in an individual, the results can be devastatingly self-destructive.

Doing the hard work of finding and growing enough healthy self-love to survive all that can be the best defense.  That is because healthy self-love is something you can carry with you and always have available.  Without sufficient self-love and its strengthen effects, it is very hard to stay okay when hearing “you’re wrong, you’re sinful, you’re sick, you’re not right, etc. for being the way you are”. 

Whether you hear that sort of message internally, externally or both it is destructive.  Depression, anxiety, self rejection, lonely isolation, escape into addiction, breakdowns and suicide all may result.  The good news is all that can be prevented, blocked and reversed with enough healthy self-love.  The bad news is self-love is taught against just as much as gender diversity is taught against and often by the same people.

Gender diverse youth especially are vulnerable to becoming victims of diversity negation coming from culture, society, family, religion, governments and elsewhere.  As gender identity and preference begins to emerge, insecurity and hormonal based confusions tend to mount.  Furthermore, the development of strong, healthy self-love frequently is quite tentative at best among the young.

If you are not strictly heterosexual, go to work on your self-love.  Learn, know and own the fact that you have a lot to offer and certainly are at least just as worthy as any other human being.  Then find out how your variance from standard is a blessing if you use it smartly, bravely and productively.  Most of all, learn and own the following: The core, real you is lovable just the way you are.  Also own that you have healthy, real love to give and that, all by itself, makes you of high value.
If you care about and/or love someone struggling with gender diversity issues, love them by assisting them toward healthy, real self-love.  See this site’s Subject Index concerning healthy self-love for more mini-love-lessons on how to do just that.

Family Love

Those families that offer accepting and affirming love to a gender diverse family member tend to have and keep better cohesiveness, be more resilient and generally function more healthfully and happily.  Those families who try to force or manipulate a family member into a conformist, gender role that the person is not comfortable with, tend to experience severe family disruption and family dysfunction.  Families that reject, shame, personally attack, expel, condemn, guilt trip and are judgmental against someone showing A gender diversity can and are so often ripped apart by these anti-love ways of behaving.

On the other hand, if family members have ongoing clashes about gender issues but they handle disagreements with loving tolerance and democratic acceptance of each other, they can be quite functional and successful.  Likewise, families wounded by gender issue disputes can be healed by activated family love, whether or not they come to agreement on the disputed issues.  Love focused family therapy can be wonderful for this healing process.

Best of all are the loving families that accept, expect and encourage their individual members to develop themselves in whatever way they want to, so long as it is sufficiently healthy.  Love is not dependent on conformity in such families but rather is given freely for whatever variations come about.  Then those variations become enrichments to the family bonded together by family love rather than restricted by compliance.

Friendship Love

Friendship love has been known to save the lives of those suffering conflicts concerning gender.  Friendship love also is known to greatly help lives to be lived well in spite of discrimination, misunderstanding, prejudice, bias, fact free opinions and the other negatives that commonly beset those who are a bit different in gender.  Friendship love also has been known to counterbalance the anti-love effects of hateful, abusive and indifferent families when they cease giving nurturing love to a family member of a diverse gender orientation.

Friendship love is so often a vital element in the development of healthy self-love among the more isolated individual struggling with gender issues.

A big problem arises when a person of gender variation fears peer rejection and, therefore, hides their gender differences, pretending to be someone they are not in regard to gender preference.  They tend not to do the required self-disclosure needed for the development of deep, real, friendship love.  If they do reveal their gender truth about themselves and they receive loving acceptance from a friend or friends, they then may blossom and their social whole world can change for the better.

If they meet with rejection it can be very dangerous unless they have sufficient self-love or other loving friends.  I do understand the fear and self-protectiveness and I suggest careful patience when deciding who might be a worthy friend to share your true self with.  Observe over time who appears open to differences and start with small revelations to test the water before jumping in the deep end.

Those who publicly show openness and acceptance to all gender variations do a great love-positive service.  They give to those struggling to figure out who and what they are gender-wise and to the self rejecting, the chance to know acceptance, inclusion and real friendship is possible for them.  From such demonstrations of open-heartedness, great and enduring friendships have been known to result.
In the next mini-love-lesson, “Gender Diversity – Romantic, Heart-mate Love” we will cover romantic and mated love issues among those of gender diversity.

Help spread love knowledge – tell some people about this site.

As always Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: How much do your ideas and feelings about gender influence who and how you love?

Related posts:

1. Other Genders Love
2. Age Differences and Romantic Love
3. Removing Your Hidden Blocks to Receiving Love Fully
4. Power or Love or Both
5. Does Sexual Preference Influence Love? 

For Longer Life - Love That Which Is Greater Than Yourself

Mini love lesson #192

Synopsis: Four major candidate categories of greater than yourself love and their quantity and quality of life benefits backed by research are covered in this mini-love-lesson that might just result in you adding more and better years to your life and the lives of those you love.

Want to Add More and Better Years to Your Life?

The research results are in and they are very clear.  The major way to a longer life that is healthier and happier can involve loving that which you understand to be larger, grander and greater than yourself.  That is what we conclude drawn from a host of longevity, quality of life and love relational studies done in a wide variety of universities and medical centers.

Things “Greater Than Yourself”

In the lives of those people considered to make a positive difference in their world, it often is found that they truly loved and gave much of their life to something they considered to be far larger and more important than themselves.  Sometimes it was altruistic – helping the disabled, the disadvantaged, the needy.  Sometimes it was political – helping the cause of freedom, democracy, oppressed minorities and those politically misused and abused.  Often it was medical – administering to the sick, searching for the cure of a dreaded disease, preventing or limiting the spread of illnesses, building health care facilities.

Education in its many forms has been the greater than yourself cause of many.  Nature is another cause –  the environment and assisting the survival of many other species we share the planet with.  For many others it is been one form or another of what we call the arts and humanities.  A caring religion, devotion to a compassionate deity or a positive philosophy and set of principles frequently has been involved as has a general sense of loving in its broadest meaning.

Almost invariably the people who have given themselves to something they saw as greater than themselves have experienced a great many positive effects in their lives for doing so.  May you also!  Let us look at four main candidates for this life extending and life improving type of love.

Love of Life

Do You love life?  Do you love living, experiencing the many awesome marvels and wonders of life itself ?  Do you know how to be awesomely affected by this incredible gift you are given to feel, think, be aware of and to be a part of existence and its endless mysteries and miracles.  Most things in the universe can not do that, so far as we know.   In fact, of the many living creatures on our planet we are the ones blessed with being able to do that best, so far as we know.
There are people so enamored of life they truly love it and experience it much more fully than most.  So, it is understandable that research shows those are the ones that tend to live life longer and healthier.

Those who more frequently experience awe and who find life wondrous (as in marveling at gorgeous scenery, being deeply moved by great music, being inspired by the astonishing phenomena of nature or heart-touched by viewing a newborn infant of almost any species) are aware at a high level. Then there is marveling at the world of different life forms seen via the microscope or the vast universe seen via the telescope; those may be the ones who have the greatest life experiences.  Frequently the same life-appreciating people are the ones doing the most to affirm, preserve, defend, protect, improve and advance the causes of life itself.

Unknowingly for most, there is a great payback for loving life.  These life-affirming and life-appreciative activists significantly benefit from greater production of cytokines in their biological systems.  Cytokines are super important to all sorts of cellular health, growth and replacement in just about every part of the body.  Without them serious deterioration and increased susceptibility to diseases of all sorts exists in the body and the brain.  One recent source of research about this is from the University of California at Berkeley.  You might want to check on what Dr. Dacher Keltner has to say about this and related health and longevity issues.

Love with a Higher Purpose or Cause

Closely related to the love of life people are those that have discovered a greater than themselves cause or purpose in life.  There are so many examples of people who just had to find and give their lives to something that mattered.  Something it was to improve life conditions, advance or enrich our world or some portion thereof.  Sometimes a life purpose has to do with the actualization of a talent as often occurs in the worlds of art but also for gifted intellects in science.

Sometimes it is labeled a calling and involves a passionate curiosity, interest or inner drive to create something of use, meaning, inspiration, etc..  Also, a calling to a cause can be to provide a service, defend against a threat, achieve a worthy goal or to maintain, conserve or restore something of impactful quality.  Whatever it was, having a positive and constructive higher-purpose-love tended to make healthier, happier and longer living people who had a greater than self purpose.

Do you want to live at least seven good years longer than you probably otherwise would?  If so, find and get busy with your purpose in life.  Find something more important than yourself and love it (or who and what it helps) and you might extend your life quality and quantity for up to seven years.  It has to be beneficial, constructive and positive for those it effects.  Causes that are basically centered in avarice, negativism, the inconsequential, regressiveness, negation, entropy or are life harming do not tend to work.  In fact, they often work in reverse harming their adherents.  That is what the preponderance of research and clinical opinion points to.

Looking forward to what you can do for your cause every morning as you get up can make everyday feel worthwhile, more exciting, more enjoyable and considerably healthier.  According to a study in the esteemed British medical journal, the Lancet, a strong sense of life purpose makes you 30% less likely to die of any and all causes (including accidents).  That may hold true for every year you are actively involved in your life’s purpose.

Spiritual Love

Having an active, spiritual, love relationship with whatever you perceive to be your metaphysical something greater (higher power, the force, the life force, nature, the universe, universal love, the great mystery, your deity, spiritual entity or energy or more simply God) probably will add between 4 and 14 years to your life depending on which study you read.

This longevity also appears to be rather dependent on how active you are in your spiritual life.  Regular meditation and a sense of communicating with your greater something, plus doing various spiritual rituals and spiritually motivated acts of service, along with meeting with like-minded others all seem to contribute to longer and healthier life according to a passel of related research.

Love of People and Other Living Creatures

If your love of something greater than yourself has to do with people in general, the human race or any other large group (i.e. children, the elderly, your country, identity group, etc.) and you are actively involved in what you are doing about that love, your life likely will be better for it.  Furthermore, health benefits also accrue to those who actively love other species.  This especially is true of the species who are good at loving back and those good at demonstrating behaviors exemplifying love toward each other.  Dogs, great apes, horses, parrots, cats, elephants, dolphins and a host of others are all candidates demonstrating at least some of the behaviors and the brain chemistry that goes with love.

Love of people in general, various groups of people and other living species gets very similar positive results to loving particular people like spouses and family members and also having healthy self-love.  Such love helps your immune system get stronger, makes for blood pressure improvements, lowers risk of heart attacks and strokes and has a wide range of other health benefits.  Adding to your love of particular people, the broad scale greater than yourself aspect diminishes the risk of early death by about 45% according to a study in the PLOS Medicine Journal.

Love of smaller groups such as one’s family counts too but in somewhat different ways.  Having strong, healthy, love connections with family and dear friends also can lower your chances of dying early unless those relationships are too often highly stressful and highly problematic.  Adding a life purpose, greater cause or love of larger human or animal groups can add quite a bit to life expectancy and quality of life both, so long as other anti-health and anti-love factors are not overwhelmingly strong.

So, ask yourself how is your love of humanity, the human race or any big part of it?  Check out your love of our creature cousins and how active you might be on their behalf.  If you are doing well here, your quality of life mentally, physically, emotionally, and just about in every other way is likely to be better.  You also are likely to have less illness, quicker recovery from illness, live more joyfully and have a far greater sense of life fulfillment.  That is what the preponderance of research is showing.

As you can see, the above categories overlap and integrate, are expandable and are in no way exclusive of one another.  Those who actively live their love for something they see as greater than themselves has given millions a better and longer life.  Emulate them and you may do likewise.
Help us spread love knowledge – tell some people about this site!

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love success question: Would it perhaps be good for you to write out a completion of this sentence stem?

Related posts:

1. Is Love the Most Important Thing in the Universe?
2. Is Love a Value?
3. Spirituality and Love Great and Grand”
4. Cuddling for Greater Love and Better Sex – a Love Skill
5. Getting Healthy, Real Love in Your Life 

From Self-Love to Other Love and Back Again

Mini–Love-Lesson # 185

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson teaches you about how healthy self-love supports and improves love of another, how that influences how much love comes your way and how it improves love’s quality.  This mini-love-lesson also covers self-love’s influence on the magic ‘five to one ratio’ that keeps relationships alive and growing, and it reveals the importance of love cycling.

What About This First Love Yourself Stuff?

“To love another you must first love yourself” is a frequently stated concept – you may have run into it before.  You even may have wondered about it.  Is it true?  Can self-love really help you in your love of someone else?  Are problems in love relationships rooted in a lack of self-love?  (See mini-love-lesson Self-Love – What Is It?)  What does love yourself really mean?  How exactly does self-love effect loving another?  Doesn’t this idea contradict the ethical and religious teachings that say self-love is a bad thing and a serious sin?  If someone I love doesn’t love themselves is that hurting our relationship?  How exactly does one go about loving themselves?  Yes, there are a great many questions to ponder concerning this often repeated concept.  Let’s see if we can answer some of them and let’s start with this one.

What Happens in a Relationship Lacking Sufficient Self-Love?

Without sufficient self-love, an adult love relationship is not adult enough!  At least frequently that is the case.  Especially in romantic and life-mate style love, childlike neediness tends to occur and get in the way.  Dependency forms of false love, including the much written about one called codependency, develop.  Healthy, adult style real love is blocked from developing.  Immature, dysfunctional ways increasingly tend to sabotage the interactions in the love relationship.  Usually this destroys the growth of healthy, real love and the relationship comes to a painful end.  At best, the relationship never attains its potential for fulfillment, happiness or healthy adult functioning.

One way to think about it goes like this: the love relationship is dominated by the love-needy, inner child self in one or both partners.  That subconscious, inner child self wants parent type love instead of adult-to-adult love too often and too much.  That makes it easy for one or both partners to have lots of child level, fear-based dynamics.  Then frustration, misunderstandings and miscommunications increase.  Frequently sibling-like fights break out and immature, unhappy, childish emotions prevail.

Worst of all, a great lack of developing, adult ways of going about life together occurs and keeps getting worse.  The how-to’s of adult, healthy, real love never are learned because needy, child-level love is the best the couple usually can manage.  They may at times play well together in passionate sex and other fun ways which helps them keep going but that too usually fades as resentments and disappointments go unresolved.  Adult love skills never sufficiently are learned and adult, problem solving, love-based teamwork goes unpracticed.

Erich Fromm, the great psychotherapist and social philosopher, once said, “To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love”.  Without sufficient self-love we keep getting easily wounded and then we act to wound back the one we love most and we don’t know how to stop.  We keep wanting our loved partner to play the all-forgiving, loving parent and fix us.  If they don’t, it just gets worse because we do not know how to do self-love based, self fixing, let alone couple fixing.

Self Fixing and Team Fixing Via Self-Love

With sufficient self-love you do not easily get hurt but when you do it is a lot easier to either fix yourself or ask your loved partner to lovingly assist you in your adult self fixing and to work with you in relationship fixing.  Without that self-love, you are likely to ignore your own needs or get defensive, manipulative, demanding or overly wimpy.  Then you may put too much needy, fix me pressure on your beloved.  Healthy, real self-love helps you stay adult and keep working out adult  “I win, you win” improvements and solutions.  Insecurities, frustration and anger may corrupt cooperative, love interactions. If you can stay on track with the help of your real self-love, and not go into escape or attack modes of reacting, improvements can occur.

When hearing what sounds like criticism or putdowns, with self-love it is easier to think something like “It’s getting kind of hard to catch what this person is throwing at me, so it must be time to remind myself that I am abundantly okay and wonderful enough, so I don’t need to let myself get all hurt and upset.  In fact, I’m also strong enough to hear, with love, what this person has to say, knowing it may tell me something useful and perhaps tell me more about them than me”.  Without sufficient self-love you might find yourself thinking something like “I’m under attack and have to attack back or escape, and what a terrible person my beloved is for attacking me” or “Of course my beloved is right and what a miserable and inadequate person I am”.  Self-love can help you stay okay enough to keep working on mutual solutions even when things are hard and not going well.

The Lack of Self-Love and the Growth of False Love

Those who lack sufficient self-love are thought to be much more vulnerable to false forms of love infecting their lives.  It works sort of like the starving person who is much more likely to eat anything they can get and, thus, is in danger of becoming malnourished and food poisoned.  The self loving person can be much more discerning about what they take in.  They also are much more likely to insist on getting higher-quality, real love.  If they are love knowledgeable and can tell the difference, they will not long put up with false, stingy or poor quality love efforts, which is what low self-love causes people to do.

It seems dependency forms of false love are particularly common among those who are low in healthy, real self-love.  Living with large amounts of neglect and both psychological and physical abuse, along with unfulfilling false love, is seen to be much more common among those with low self-love.  Susceptibility to destructive addictions unfortunately frequently can become part of this picture.

The dynamics described above show how important it is to learn the differences between healthy, real love and the major forms of false love.  That is part of why Kathleen McClaren and I wrote Real Love False Love, Which Is Yours? which is the only book we know of covering multiple forms of false love and the only book that tells you how to understand each and what you can do to avoid, escape or transform false love into real love.  By the way, Real Love, False Love is now available internationally at Amazon.com, in the Kindle edition at a new low price; reviews are desired.

What Happens in Relationships That Have Enough Self-Love?

The couples who have enough healthy self-love in both people are thought to be much more able to accomplish the almost magical five to one rule.  The five to one rule refers to the discovery that when couples send back and forth 5 love-positive statements or actions for every 1 anti-love or non-love statement or action they are far more likely to succeed as a lasting, okay couple.  This 5 to 1, positive, communication, ratio dynamic especially is found to be helpful when couples are interacting where conflict is involved.  Those with low self-love are thought to be much more likely to fall below this ratio which means mutual misery and possibly break-up is much more likely. (Consult the “Love Positive Talking” mini-love-lesson).

High self-love also means a greater likelihood of avoiding, or more quickly fixing, all the problems mentioned above.

With healthy self-love you have far more love to give because your cup runneth over, a lot and often.  Not only that, but because you seldom are in an empty or needy state, you want to give your love more and better.  It is like the difference between being hungry and malnourished with only scraps to eat or having a full larder and wanting to create and serve up wonderful meals for all those you care about.  Not only are you able to feed the hungry but you can serve up love meals that are much healthier and especially tasty.

One of the greatest advantages to high self-love is the lack of fear in people who have it.  With high self-love they tend not to fear being worthy enough, being important to their beloved, being afraid of rejection or abandonment or being unlovable.  Those with low self-love tend to fear those things a great deal of time.  High self-love people also do not have to fear asking for the love they want and the way they want it showed.  That means they are free of having to play psychological games and other trickery trying to get the love they hunger for.  In turn, that means they do not have to go for long periods tolerating not having love showed to them (being fed) and they are not likely to undervalued or poorly receive the love coming their way.

Remember, with high enough healthy self-love, part of your self-care is to insist on getting frequent, high quality love and not just scraps.  First insist on that of yourself as well as insisting to yourself that you give likewise.  Then you can lovingly effectively go after what you want with and from your beloved.

People with healthy self-love tend to have more love to give and tend to do it better. That helps make them more okay and, thus, more desirable to healthy, self loving others.  Two strong, okay, loving people make a strong loving couple much better than if one or both are weak or stuck in victimness and in need of repeated rescuing.

The Return Trip of Love

In healthy, happy, well functioning, love relationships there is a cycle of love going out to a beloved and then love coming back from the beloved.  Self-love is very important for creating this cycle and keeping it going.  Sometimes there are things that get in the way like a crisis, having to be absent from one another for a lengthy time, external ongoing heavy demands on time and energy for one or both, etc..  At these times healthy self-love is a big assistance for getting through them.  Healthy self-love can motivate healthy self-care to compensate for gaps in the ongoing cycling of love. Healthy self-love also can provide strength and motivation for getting those gaps closed so the love cycling is flowing again.

It is not good to barter giving love so as to get it because real love is a free gift.  But when two people connect in love with each other, a two-way cyclical dynamic can be created.  The same happens in families and friendship groups except the numbers of participants often are larger.  Part of the support for the dynamic of healthy love cycling is healthy self-love.  Healthy self-love supports and often motivates healthy love of others and then it motivates an other to send back love, creating an ongoing cycle of love.

Work at keeping your cycle running and your love relationships likely will be lasting  (See mini-love-lesson “Cycling Love for Lasting Love”).

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question:  How good are you at self-love and self-care, while at the same time lovingly interacting with someone you love, especially when there is a difficulty occurring?  (We suggest you take some time with this question and maybe talk it over with a loved one to find out how they see it).

Related posts:

1. Number 51: Your Super Tool for Healthy Self-Love
2. Infidelity & The Love Messages That Block & Stop It
3. Respect – As a Love Skill
4. Unselfish Self-Love 

Self-Love, a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

Mini love lesson #185

FREE, over 200 Mini-Love-Lessons touching the lives of thousands in over 190 countries – worldwide

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson helps you look at how unknowingly you may have been subconsciously infected by destructive teachings about self-love and much more.

What They Say about Self-Love

“You can’t let people think you love yourself.  If you do they will think you are conceited, you have the big head and are stuck up.  Then no one ever will like you or want you around”.  Did you ever hear anything like that as a kid?  Did you ever think anything like that about yourself?  How about this: “You can’t love somebody else until you first love yourself”?.  I hear that idea about once a week from different people.  Then there is “self-love leads to becoming a sex pervert”.  Of course, there also is the great commandment or admonition “love others as you love yourself”.  Have you ever wondered what that “love yourself” part is all about?

Do these contradictory statements about self-love confuse you, or cause any inner conflict or have you just never given any of that much thought?  Whatever is in your subconscious mind about self-love – contradictory or not –  could be having a surprisingly big but hard to see influence on how well you do in life.  It especially could effect your success at love relationships.  Self-love has been found to be a big factor in love of others, work success or failure, the harmony or lack of it in child raising, general health, victory or defeat in any endeavor, defense against stress illnesses, resilience in overcoming setbacks and how much good you do or don’t do others.  So that we can really understand the issues involved in self-love, let’s briefly look at a few of its surprising and intriguing development issues.

How Did Self-Love Get Such a Bad Thing Reputation?

It is the government’s fault.  Does that surprise you?  You see, a major source of anti-self-love propaganda was put out to support the form of autocratic government known as monarchy.  That propaganda effort has been going on for several thousand years and continues to this day.  Historically, self-love was thought to encourage people to be for themselves instead of living for and in obedience to their liege lord, or monarch.

Self-love also was seen as a social order disruptor.  That is because self-love leads to individuality and that leads to being uppity or trying to raise yourself above your preordained, proper place and station in life.  Everyone keeping in their place in the order of things was understood to be the basis of social stability and collective safety.  Self-love meant self interest might prevail over the interests of authority.  It was greatly feared that self-love could even help lead to that horrible thing known as democracy.  By the way, that is why marrying for love never had much of a chance until America got invented.

The Royals and the priests of ancient Greece used religion to teach that the one thing the gods could not tolerate was human pride.  Apparently that was because prideful people could get uppity and in doing so might challenge and maybe even overthrow the gods and the Royals.  The early church seems to have picked up on this, joined in with the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, and has been, off and on, condemning self-love as a dangerous sin threatening authority and the orderly functioning of society ever since.

Words & Terms Used to Effect Your Thinking about Self-Love

Here are two lists of some of the words and terms that may have gotten into your mind and the minds of those you care about concerning self-love.  In the first list the words tend to carry negative connotations and trigger negative feelings about self-love.  The second list is more positive and represents more recent influences and understandings related to self-love.  Notice what you feel as well as what you think while you read each word or term.  That can help you ascertain how you may have been influenced or programmed to react concerning self-love.

Self-love has been called antisocial, alienating, conceited, disobedient, egocentric, egotistical, heresy, hedonistic, indulgent, jealous, narcissistic, non-empathetic, prideful, selfish, sinful, self-centered, self exulting, self-important, self interested, sociopathic, subversive, stuck up, uncaring, ungodly, uncharitable, and vain.  Is it any of these things to you?  Was it any of these things to the people who raised you?  Is it any of these things to the people who are important in your life now?

In recent years in many more modern circles, self-love has begun to be seen in a much more positive light.  Healthy, real self-love has been called autonomy assistive, altruistically beneficial, balancing, charity inspiring, constructive, confidence building, contributory, democratic, empowering, energizing, ego supportive, enlightening, emotionally healthy, freeing, good parent modeling, honest, individualistic, individuation fueling, mentally healthy, pride making, protective, resilient, socially beneficial, self caring, self honoring and self strengthening.

Can you see how healthy, real self-love can be helpful to each of these factors in a person?  Is it reasonable to you that each of these factors may be elements of self-love or its result?  Does it seem right to you to conclude that self-love is something you and everyone else would do well to have lots of?

Healthy Self-Love Against the Problems and Deficiencies of Today

Millions are in counseling or therapy today because they suffer from crippling low self-esteem, inadequate self-confidence, poor self-concept, inferiority fears, feelings and complexes, issues of deficient self worth, self limitation syndromes and the like.  Still millions more would do well to become engaged in counseling or therapy for the same reasons.

Then there are millions more suffering from overcompensation reactions to the same problems and that is what leads to narcissism, arrogance and the like.  Let me also mention those who are lost in escapist patterns of addictions stemming from the same root sources.  Then also there are all the millions of children, spouses and families ill effected by those who suffer from these same causes.

Developing sufficient, healthy, real self-love is seen by many mental health professionals as the cure, or at least part of the cure, for all this.  Alienation, debilitating isolation, love starvation and a lot of other problems can and frequently are made better by healthy, self-love development via love infused therapy.  That at least is the growing clinical conclusion being drawn from the new understandings of what healthy, real self-love actually is all about.

For Growing Healthy, Real Self-Love, Consider Doing These 3 Things

If you or anyone you know or care about seems to suffer from any of the maladies mentioned above, consider these actions:

First, read, study and put into practice what you learn from the following list of mini-love-lessons on self-love found at this site.  It might be best to read them in the order given but it’s okay to do it otherwise.

0.  Self-Love, a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? (You are doing this one)
1.  Self-Love – What Is It?
2.  Self-Love and 12 Reasons to Develop It
3.  Number 51: Your Super Tool for Healthy Self-Love
4.  Unselfish Self-Love
5.  Self-Love and Its Five Healthy Functions
6.  Self-Love the Enemy of Egotism
7.  Self-Affirmation for Healthy Self-Love
8.  Self Talk for Improving Love

By doing these additional, eight, brief mini-love-lessons on self-love, in effect you will have taken a short course on self-love and how to grow it.  There is lots more to learn but though I’m biased I say that is a great start.  These mini-love-lesson teachings on self-love have been known to help a great number of people to start and improve the way they grow their own healthy self-love.  Hopefully you can do the same.

Second, consider finding a good, love knowledgeable counselor, therapist, personal coach or mentor.  Then work with them on a regular basis focusing on the development of healthy, real self-love.  This can be done in individual or group sessions and sometimes quite well at personal growth workshops, special retreats and seminars.  But be careful.  We suggest you get user references before you select because quality can vary greatly.

Third, nothing helps you learn something like teaching it.  Leading a discussion group, a reading club, or facilitating a self-study class or giving an out right class on healthy, real self-love or something similar likely will put you in touch with a lot of fine people and help you really get this super important, life-changing knowledge.  You also informally can do something like introducing and talking over these self-love topics with friends, family, workmates or whoever.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Seriously, how often is your self-love an active part of your everyday life?

Related posts:

1. Why Love Problems Hurt So Bad
2. Love Affairs: Bad?, Good? and Otherwise
3. Returning to a Bad Lover? – A Blocking Technique
4. Self-Love – What Is It?
5. Self-Love the Enemy of Egotism 

Expressional Love Behaviors – The Last 6 of 12

 

The first part of this article:

Expressional Love Behaviors – The First 6 of 12

Mini-Love-Lesson #292

Synopsis: Here are 6 more of the 12 things to know for succeeding at doing the very important way of love known as expressional love, including greater sexual love and 7 significant questions to ask yourself.

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

To accomplish expressional love’s best actions, there are a dozen, lesser known, love sending behaviors.  We covered the first 6 in the blog post titled “Expressional Love Behaviors – The First 6 of 12”.  Now, let’s cover the last 6.  They may seem rather technical but they contain some really useful, concrete information.  Being genuine is always a best practice for relationship success.

7. Approach and Avoidance Action Messages

Love relating often involves approach or avoidance relationship signals and actions.  Think about approaching anything.  First, we notice it, then we read the signals of its approachability and then we choose to go toward it or avoid it.  Now think about love relating.  The importance of comprehending the signs and signals of our loved ones helps us determine whether or not to interact with them.  If we do not accurately read those signals, we can stumble into mis-communication and mis-understanding.  

Also important in this process are the signals we send.  The actual action of approaching a loved one can broadcast the love message that we want to be close to them physically and emotionally.  How we do that is best coordinated with their emotional state.  For example, if they look sad, we might approach more carefully and caring.  If they look happy, we might make a more exuberant approach.

If we expressionally project an approachable countenance, it can lead to so many relational benefits.  Connecting and bonding, functioning together and teamwork, and intimate knowledge of each other are only a few of the perks.

There also can be avoidance or distancing issues communicated by our signaling behaviors.  Sooner later every couple, family and ongoing friendship faces a situation where someone wants to approach some topic and the other person wants to avoid it.  This can lead to conflict if not handled well.  Consider this couple’s conundrum.  

Kelly wants to introduce Chris to a new sexual activity.  Mischievously, Kelly shows Chris a photo of the desired activity in a sexy magazine.  Chris freezes up and moves away from Kelly.  Instead of getting upset, Kelly decides to be more loving and considerate of Chris’s obvious discomfort and stiffness.  When Chris sees Kelly’s soft, caring look, it triggers a relaxation of Chris’s tension.  Kelly seeing this relaxation, moves a bit closer and makes an open arms gesture.  Chris smiles and moves into Kelly’s arms.  

This couple had a wordless, expressional conversation about whether to approach or avoid a touchy topic.  Doing that helped them get to a successful point where they were comfortable enough to openly start talking together about this sexual issue.  This example shows how important sending, recognizing and receiving expressional signals can be to richer communication in love relationships.

8. Receptive and Reciprocal Love

Suppose a person is handed an unexpected gift from a loved one.  Do they smile and look pleasantly surprised?  Or feeling interrupted, maybe they look mildly annoyed, put the gift down (to open later) and turn away?  The way we expressionally receive and respond to an act of love frequently sets off a positive or negative cycle in our close relationships. 

Here is a little, seven question survey to help you access the strengths and weaknesses in your receptive and reciprocal, expressional practices.

  1. Are you good at noticing smiles aimed at you, and smiling back?

2. When you hear loving tones of voice coming your way, do you respond likewise, or with flat tones, or gruffly, or are you often non-responsive?

3. If someone who loves you leans toward you as they talk, do you tend to lean toward them, become a bit rigid, lean away or stay as you were?

4. If you are greeted with open arms by a loved one, do you respond with open arms that are wider, not as wide or with no arm gestures at all?

5. If a loved one moves closer to you, do you move closer to them, do you stiffen or relax, do you move away or do you do nothing?

6. If a loved one looks and/or sounds troubled, sad, upset or aggravated, do you look and sound caring, annoyed, threatened, angry, baffled, unaware or what?

7. Does your everyday demeanor around your loved ones usually look and sound happy, friendly, loving, positive or more neutral, more unhappy, irritated, grouchy, indifferent or otherwise negative?

Whatever your responses to those questions are, do you wish to make improvements in your love reception responses?  If you do, how might you go about that?

Be careful of automatic responses.  They can be seen as mechanical and insincere.  If you dare, instead pepper replies with extravagant motions, exuberant gestures, chipper voice tones, and zany facial expressions that show your reciprocal love in lively ways.  Some might see that as overdoing it.  Cultural, societal, family and personal experiences influence that perception.  A lot of this may be repression training.  Look at young children who naturally are expressionally animated.  Observe the spirited interchanges of people in Latin cultures.  More and more with the help of the behavioral sciences, we see positive expressional freedom as healthy.

9. Expressionally Communicating Emotional Responsiveness

We have touched on this before but this area is so important it deserves fuller treatment.  In all our love relationships, it is immensely useful to keep current about our loved one’s feelings.  This is the art of tuning-in and then responding to those emotions.  Our loved one’s feelings might change more frequent than we think.  They can change in strength, in a different direction or in the kind of feeling projected.  Our job is to accurately read those emotional expressions.  One cannot over-estimate the importance of two indicators – facial expressions and voice variations.  Sometimes gestures, postures, positioning and all the other expressional ways of influencing a love communication are of considerable significance in reading a loved one’s emotions and then responding appropriately.

Showing a fitting emotional response to a loved one’s feelings helps them to handle bad feelings and enriches good feelings.  It also helps to grow the bond between those who love each other.

To be a star when doing expressional responsiveness, let’s look at a few basics regarding emotions and feelings in general.  Technically, all of us have physical and probably emotional feelings almost all the time, even in our sleep.  Many of the smaller feelings never reach our conscious awareness.  Some feelings reach our semi-conscious awareness in the form of intuition, hunches, notions, impulses and things like that.  Our responsiveness can be affected by any of those.  All of our emotions are thought to have evolved to help us survive and thrive, even the ones we call bad.  For example, fear tries to keep us safe, anger gives us emergency power, depression may get us to inventory what is wrong.  Good feelings guide us toward what to do again and can assist us in getting through bad feeling times.

If a loved one is happy or is having any other pleasurable feeling, it is best to respond in kind.  If a loved one expresses a bad feeling, usually it is best to respond empathetically with care.  This tends to show you believe in them and in their ability to improve, thus, helping to restore their own confidence and courage.  The general rule here is be stingy with advice at first and go further into problem-solving only if met with clear, eager receptivity.

Active listening is a good way of responding expressionally.  In active listening, your mouth says very little while your expressional behaviors say a lot.  With facial expressions, tones, gestures and postures you continuously can show your love.  If you are puzzled, you can look quizzical which communicates you are trying to understand.  Never underestimate how much love relating is accomplished by emotional interacting or how much emotional interacting is accomplished by expressional communication.

10. Gestural Love Communication

Did you know that the more you talk with your hands the more likely you are to get your message heard?  Preachers, politicians and ardent lovers seem to be adept at this.  A great many impactful messages can be communicated by hand, arm, head, and once in a while even by foot gestures. 

Gestures come in many forms and can broadcast different meanings.  You can wave at someone as an act friendship love or you can wave off someone from danger as an act of protective love.  You might gesture approval and affirmation with a thumbs-up gesture or agreement by the OK hand sign (be careful about hand signs, they can mean very different things in different cultures).

Subtle gestures also can be a part of our ability to send and receive love.  If you welcome the approach of a loved one with a recognition smile and a brief hug, they probably will feel lovingly welcomed.  If you accidentally keep your hands in your pockets or down at your sides that could be interpreted as a subtle, anti-love rejection or a devaluing gesture.  A V for victory sign flashed at a loved one can be an obvious “I’m proud of you” love message.  In more sedate or formal settings small gestures, like a slight head nod still can send strong messages of love. 

Some loving couples develop their own personal and private, gestural language.  A hand held over the heart may mean “I love you”.  While seated at a gathering, wiggling a foot in the direction of an exit, secretly may suggest “Let’s go home and be alone together”.  Certain types of smiles may beckon a loved one, shrugs may communicate “I don’t care” and a wince might suggest “I just got my feelings hurt and would like your loving support”.  Couples that grow in love, tend to increasingly and effectively interpret many mini-gestures and are guided by them.

Couples, families and friends, from time to time, get body language messages confused which makes for unhappy situations.  In counseling, I heard a wife tell her husband that at a party the night before, she had felt rejected by him.  She had crossed her legs at him, over and over, and she concluded he had rejected her request.  He looked baffled and said “What request”?  She replied, “You know perfectly well that means let’s go home and make love”.  With astonishment he swore he had no idea it meant that but from now on he certainly would abide by that seductive inducement.

Some gestures have fairly widespread understanding, at least in Western society.  A loved one is struggling with anguished feelings.  If you lean forward and assume an open body posture, they likely will feel cared about.  If you lean back and cross your arms, they may interpret you as rejecting or closed off.  In a noisy, crowded environment, pointing toward someone and clapping can convey strong praise and camaraderie.  Copacetic feelings often rise when hand dancing movements are used.  Italians have the best reputation for energetically gesturing conversely, upper crust, English speakers not so much.  Whether gesturing is with tiny movements or bold and vigorous ones, good use of gestures can be very additive to love relating.  For a best practices approach to love, we recommend you give expressional, emotional responsiveness some of your sincerest attention.

11. Non-Verbal Vocalization

Here is a somewhat obscure area of expressional communication called Paralinguistics.  It is a bit complicated but it has its importance.  Researchers report paralingual factors may be four times as important as the words used in face-to-face, personal conversation. 

Scientists in this field, study everything about spoken communication except the words. 

Besides the words we speak or their dictionary definitions, there may be as many as sixteen factors that influence vocal intercourse.  Don’t worry, we are not going to cover them all.  

 Non-word components of speech include things like volume, inflection, pitch, pauses, rates of speech, spacing of words, sighs, grunts, pacing, hesitations, cadence, accent, noise making and other related stuff.  These non-verbal vocalizations get subconsciously analyzed and then influence how we interpret, understand and choose to react and interact.  Consider how these things can affect the messages we send to our loved ones.  

We can affect the potency of our love messages by understanding and using some of this paralinguistic knowledge.  For instance, if we focus on our tones of voice, we may determine whether or not they are as loving as we want them to be.  Also, volume, speed of speech and pacing can be custom tailored to each of our loved ones.  Impressions we do not want to make include weak and whiny, frenetic, sing-song, always annoyed, dull and boring and so forth.  The impressions we do want to make with our voice expressiveness include up-beat, sensitive, interesting and interested, positive, loving and so forth.  If with our voice tones we can sound melodic, effervescent or joyful, we can make our love more impactful, rich and welcome.  Honing and sophisticating our ways of showing love using these factors can help us treat our loved ones as special and unique.   

12. Expressional Mirroring for Love’s Sake

Now, we come to an expressional area that encompasses all the above into one best, practices package.  If you want to help a dear one that is troubled, you could try expressional mirroring.  That also is useful in dealing with those who seem closed to hearing outside input or who just seem hard to reach.  Expressional mirroring is a way to help them feel emotionally understood and loved.  If it is done well, it frequently leads to new ideas and better dealing with hard to handle issues.  One caveat, it does not work with everyone. 

When a troubled loved one is expressing something that obviously is quite important to them, try this.  With empathy, begin to mirror back to them their movements and their voice modulations while saying very little verbally and listening intently.  If they lean one way or another, you do too.  If they smile, so do you.  If they start talking softer and slower, you say something slower and softer also.  If they make a gesture, you make a similar one.  Many who begin the art of mirroring start with more miniature behaviors until they become comfortable with mirroring. 

 New practitioners of love-by-mirroring usually have some doubts, worries and questions about this approach.  One concern is, “Won’t those I mirror ask why am I doing the same things they’re doing?”  Surprisingly, that question almost never arises.  But if it does, you can reply with the truth by saying, “It helps me feel really with you and with your emotions.  Another worry is that your loved one might feel they are being made fun of.  That probably will not happen if your empathy really shows.

Empathy is a way of riding with them as they continue their emotion-filled journey of struggle.  Don’t add anything new with words!  Just keep mirroring.  Mirroring helps to behaviorally show you are feeling what they are feeling as well as viewing what their mind is viewing as they reveal it.  Essentially, it is sort of like trying to live inside their drama as they describe it.

With mirroring, it is amazing what can accomplished.  A loved one often feels profound acceptance and deep emotional understanding.  Emotional strengthening also occurs with being well loved.  Loving through mirroring often tends to be an extremely intimate experience.  

Mirroring is a great way to help people with catharsis, tension release and stress reduction.  It seems to clear the way for new insights, for arriving at solutions and for achieving a sense of closure.  It also is a way to help your loved ones arrive at their own answers.  Quite often it appears to help open mental doors to hearing new inputs, suggestions, recommendations and fresh expressions of care and love.  However, it is surprising how often that guidance is not needed after a mirroring experience.

Mirroring also can be integrated with reflective listening.  Basically, the practice of reflective listening involves saying back to a person, versions of what they have just said, coupled with the emotions they are describing and expressionally exhibiting.  Simple example: your loved one, with a big huff and a scowl says, “Your mother told me I don’t look good with long hair”.  A reflective response might be, “Awww, that hurt your feelings”.  

Recipients of mirroring frequently express feelings like, “You really understand me”, “I felt so alone in my problems but now I don’t”, “You went to the trouble to really know me and I feel so loved”, and “I don’t know why I feel so much better but I do”.

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

Benefits of the 12

Again, marvelous benefits can accrue to those who becoming mindful and active with these 12 lesser known expressional behaviors.  Relationally, love connecting, bonding, nurturing, communicating, teamwork and emotional understanding improve.  Individually, these valuable and skillful ways to convey love can enhance everyone’s love-ability. 

One More Thing

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

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: How often do you think about how well you are doing your love – showing, giving, demonstrating, etc.?

The first part of this article:

Expressional Love Behaviors – The First 6 of 12