No Hurt, Under Attack Self-Love

Mini-Love-Lesson  #264

Synopsis:  If you learn to practice what this mini-love-lesson is all about, you likely will not have a lot of hurt feelings, worries, anxieties or stressors that might otherwise impact your future life and interfere with all your love relationships.  So, start by wondering what the Sanskrit word, Upeksha, means and to where it can lead you and your relationships.  Especially is this useful if you want to more freely express yourself without fear of being rejected or hurt in the process.

Getting "Dissed" and Not Hurt

Imagine being confronted by several people severely "dissing" you (disrespecting, demeaning, and disparaging you) and it not bothering you almost at all.  In fact, imagine you even are feeling a bit sad for those people because they seem to be the kind of people who have to behave this negative way.  Also imagine, that then you go about your life as okay as you were before the dissing.   You only are thinking "was there anything those people said that might be a bit useful”.  You consider what might be practical usage, feel just fine and then mentally and emotionally fully dismiss it.

How do you get to be such a person?  How do you become able to be unscathed by criticism, serious verbal attack and even hate?  Yet, you still non-defensively can evaluate what they had to say garnering whatever is useful and then be free of it.  Here is a major way toward that.

The Upeksha Way

Let me introduce you to the Buddhist and Hindu way of upeksha love if you don't already know about it.  Among other things, upeksha is a way of healthy self-love that frees you from being hurt when you are being disparaged, put down under covert or overt attack, or facing rejection.  Upeksha is also a way that frees you from becoming trapped in useless defensiveness or harmful offensiveness when responding to negatives coming your way.

Furthermore, it is an approach which opens the way to loving others, even your enemies, as you love yourself.  Upeksha, therefore, is an "I win, you can win too" approach that not only keeps you okay but tremendously helps in assisting relationships get and stay okay.  Upeksha love fits well with healthy self-love understandings and especially with not giving your power away concepts. Furthermore, a upeksha love mindset often is fantastic for developing one’s healthy self-love.

Upeksha Difficulties

The upeksha way has some drawbacks.  It often is hard for the western mind to understand and practice it at first.  It is even hard to translate into western languages.  The closest term to upeksha we have in English is the quite inadequate word "equanimity" which leaves out the very strong love aspects of upeksha.  Equanimity sort of gets close to the cognitive aspects of the upeksha approach.

Upeksha, as a concept, has been misunderstood and mistranslated as detachment, indifference, uncaring, uninvolvement, unconnectedness, and even non-loving.  Upeksha is a way of not getting involved in the tangle of dysfunctional ways of relating to others and not being destructively influenced by others.  At the same time, it definitely is a major way of love.

Upeksha love is great for avoiding fights, emotional distancing problems, destructive relating, staying okay in spite of what others do, making and keeping peace, getting to rational thought mixed with love, and reducing unhealthy stress and stressor illness effects.

One other difficulty for many is the necessary unlearning process of old programming in order to proceed with upeksha.  Some of those have to do with more western ways of quickly taking and returning offense, a proneness to overt conflict, and the western world way of being highly vulnerable to emotional hurts.

Exploring Upeksha Love

In the East, the upeksha is known as one of the four immeasurable mindsets of real love.  It, therefore, is of tremendous significance.  Reportedly, it is called immeasurable because the more you give it, do it and live it, the more you have of it to give, do and live.

Upeksha means having the wisdom to love with a mindset that sees the world with an equality of values and importance whether or not it is for, against or indifferent to you and yours.  This mindset embodies many great teachings like "love your enemies", respect all life and life forms, the most stupid crazy incomprehensible ideas of today can turn out to be the wisdom of tomorrow, victory and loss, praise and condemnation, hate, love and even indifference all have much to teach us, and all our ups and downs are relative to the perspective of where we are looking from.  Therefore, we are to look for the merit in all things even those things we would oppose vigorously.

So, the upeksha mindset recommends when facing negatives about you coming from others, work to see them with democratic curiosity.  Think of this.  If someone handed you a piece of paper and on it was written a scathing, lie-filled, discrediting and very negative description of you and your character written by someone you did not know very well, how might you feel -- upset, hurt, angry or what?  Now, if it was written in a language you cannot read and have no understanding of, how would you feel?  Perhaps only a bit curious, certainly not upset, hurt, angry, etc.  That is an example of how it is not the words that come at you but the meaning you attached to them, in your own brain, that hurts or upset you.  Of course, you have been trained, programmed and conditioned to attach great hurtful, emotional meaning to quite a few words and terms.  So, it is your training and upbringing that make you vulnerable to more or less being easily, emotionally hurt.  However, with the upeksha mindset you can overcome much and maybe even all of that.

With a upeksha mindset and thought tools, you dispassionately detach yourself from your inner program for getting upset and from the meaning you attach to the words of degradation coming your way.  You need not detach from the person speaking or writing critically of you but you can if you need to.  Here are a few thought tools you might use.  Think "what your detractors say of you probably says a lot more about them than about you" and "who are you giving your power away to, to be your judge and why even do that?".  Remember, you always can make yourself at least 51% of the vote on your own okayness.  You also can think “is there anything useful in what your detractor is telling you and, if there is, be thankful for it and use it.

Once you get into not hurting yourself with what others think or say of you, you become more free to better understand what they get themselves upset about and then you can be emotionally empathetic in regard to your naysayers.  That is a loving part of the upeksha mindset.  You need not defend yourself by being uncaring, counterattacking, fighting to defend yourself or change their thinking, or by fearfully trying to just escape.  If you fear there may be some truth to what they are saying against you, that deserves some evaluation-thinking with equanimity.  That means having a mental calmness and composure that gives even-tempered, balanced, levelheaded, democratic reasoning to all sides of whatever is the issue at hand.  At the same time, the upeksha mindset empowers you to love the people, including yourself, and/or other life forms evolved.  It is surprising that once you get into this mindset you often find things that are humorous absurdities and well worth laughing at.  Sometimes this includes yourself.

Upeksha Love and Fairness

One of the best things about the upeksha mindset is how it helps with thinking and acting with fairness.  The upeksha approach greatly assists in nondiscriminatory thinking, unbiased judgment, broad viewing and even-mindedness.  It is teacher speak for "the wisdom of seeing many things equally" and, therefore, not being unknowingly biased, unconsciously prejudice, blinded by traditional thinking, but instead, being egalitarian and sufficiently impartial, and still being passionately caring and kind of heart.

Only An Introduction

There is a whole lot more to the mindset of upeksha love and how it can help in each and every love relationship.  We can only scratch the surface here in this introduction to the subject.  So, I encourage you to find out more.  You might do that by reading Teachings on Love by the highly esteemed Buddhist teacher/author Thich Nhat Hahn.

Also germane to this topic is the article “Healthy Self-Love and Not Giving Your Power Away”, a a mini-love-lesson which can be of considerable help. More can be found in this site’s indexes.

One More Thing:  Talking about anything you are learning helps learn about it better, broader and in new and different ways.  So, who might you enjoy talking to about the upeksha love mindset?  Not all branches of Buddhism or Hinduism stress the Four Immeasurable Mindsets of Real Love the same way.  However, if you find a Buddhist, a Hindu or comparative religions teacher to talk to about these four mindsets – quite a few good, big things might come from it.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Dealing With Love Hurts: Shared And Unshared Pain

Know that there is great value and importance in sharing your love related hurts.  When you share any of your feelings you share an important part of yourself.  This is especially true of anything that involves your hurt, and also your joy.  When hurt is shared the people in a relationship can join together to work against the harm that the hurt is trying to lead you away from.  (Remember, hurt’s purpose is to help you avoid harm – see blog entry “Dealing with Love Hurts: Pain’s Crucial Guidance”).

Hurt shared also can lead to stronger, more loving, intimate connection, thus, strengthening a love relationship.  Hurt handled alone usually takes longer to get past and may be unnecessarily worse.  Shared hurt has cathartic or ‘venting’ value and with the right loving people gives you a chance to replace it with an input of love.

Too many people try to hide their love relationship hurt and handle it secretly on their own.  Of course, it can be satisfying and individually strengthening to know that you handled it on your own.  However, that may not do much for your relationships and it may be harder to deal with on your own.  Lots of people want to tough it out and avoid the shame or embarrassment of failing at love, or be seen as weak and love-needy.  Toughing it out can be done but it’s ever so much slower, and often less curative of love hurts than when they are shared with caring others.

Sharing your hurt with friends and family, carrying counselors, clerics, therapists and helping professionals of many types, along with one’s higher power all can be marvelously assistive.  It’s important to know that frequently it is not so much their advice but the receiving of a sense of loving care coming your way that makes the difference.  Loving listening (see blog entry “Listening with Love”) can be the great healing medicine for love related hurt.  This is especially true when hurt is intense.  Knowledge and suggestions, however, can come more and more into play as the hurt reduces.  That’s where counselors, therapists and the lore master’s of love can be ever so helpful in assisting you not to repeat the actions that lead to love related hurt and to possible harm.

So, if you’re hurting because of a love relationship situation going poorly, or badly, or one that is over, think about who are you going to share your hurt with.  Probably it will be whoever you feel closest to.  Perhaps you will hear a message in your head that you don’t want to burden anyone with your hurts.  If that’s the case be sure to offer to do the same caring listening for whomever you share your hurt with if they are hurting some day.  I’m prejudiced but I like to suggest that the very best person to share your pain with maybe an empathetic, love-wise counselor or therapist.  That way you also probably can learn what you need to learn from the hurt.  A very love-centered cleric, teacher, physician or other helping professional, and those wise people who do seem to know more about love also may do quite well.

When you share your love related hurt with someone that you see as the cause of your hurt there are special things to be aware of and special things to do.  First, be aware that a person you think has caused your hurt is likely to hear what you are saying as an attack, full of blame and accusation.  They then may respond with defensiveness which will come across to you as offensive.  A fight may then erupt.  You may be able to avoid all that by starting your statements with “I feel…”, “I’m experiencing…”, “I want…” and other “I” statements instead of “You did…”, “You should have…”, “You should not have…” and other “you” statements”.

Also avoiding angry blaming looks and sounds helps sharing a love hurt to go better.  You also likely would do well to acknowledge that you probably helped or played a part in the causation of your hurt.  The way you caught, interpreted, perhaps misunderstood, and otherwise processed what the person you’re talking to said or did possibly has as much to do with your hurt as does the actions or words of the other person.  Here’s another thing to be aware of.  As you share your hurt the person you are talking to may feel guilty, inadequate, unworthy and in other ways simply bad.  None of that may help them help you with your hurt.

To get the help you want from them you may have to ask them exactly for what you want.  Do you want to ‘blow off steam’ and have them just listen with care?  Do you want a hug?  Do you want them to express empathy that you hurt?  Whatever it is, its best if you ask them clearly.  Otherwise you may not get what you desire to help with your hurt.  It usually helps a lot to say something like “I just want you to listen to me express my hurt, and I want you to show me you really care that I hurt by saying you care, and give me a hug, and not do anything else, like give me advice.  And I don’t want you to have any problems with what I’m saying if you can – OK?”.  Sharing your hurt with someone who helped create the hurt, when done well, can lead to improved loving, a closer relationship, better understanding, and an avoidance of similar hurts in the future.

The trick, of course, is doing it well.  It is important not to think a loved one who helped create your hurt will know what to do to help you get over the hurt.  It’s your hurt, you own it, and you are the one most likely to know what to do to make it better, while you’re loved one just may be confused.  It’s a mistake to think that because they love you they’ll know what to do.  So, at least guess what will help you and then request that as clearly as you can.  If you completely don’t know what will help either try saying something like “Give me a break until I figure it out” or “I want to see a caring look on your face, hear caring sounds and words, and feel loving, caring touch” because those things usually do help soothe love related hurts and help them diminish.

As always, Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question If and when you are baffled or overwhelmed by your hurt in a difficult love relationship situation how easy is it for you to share your hurt and seek help from the loved one(s) involved in the situation, or a friend, family member, or helping professional?

Dealing With Love Hurts Series
Dealing with Love Hurts: A Dozen Love Hurts to Know and Grow From
Dealing With Love Hurts: First Aid Tips
Dealing With Love Hurts: Pain's Crucial Guidance
Dealing With Love Hurts: Shared And Unshared Pain

A Dozen Things Love is and A Dozen Things Love is Not

For you to ponder, puzzle over, and share with others here are a dozen wonderfully important concepts about What Love Is  and  a dozen about What Love Is Not.  These ideas have been garnered from both the wisdom literature of the ages and from some of the most recent advances in a number of sciences investigating love and love’s many related phenomena.   Let’s start with what is considered to be the ‘wrong’ ideas about love.

What Love is NOT

1.  Love is not an emotion
This is easy to see when you think about the fact that love is long-lasting and emotions come and go quickly.  The truth is love brings forth many rich and varied emotions including emotions called feeling loved, lovable, and loving which may be why the natural force called ‘Love’ gets confused with emotions.

2.  Love is not an addiction
Only a false form of love can be an addiction, but there are a number of those and they can be very destructive.  Addiction to a false form of love can waste your life, help ruin your life and maybe the lives of others, and once in awhile can even lead to someone’s death.  Healthy real love is always working to do the opposite.

3.  Love is not sex
It is true that sex is a delightful healthy thing to mix with certain kinds of love.  Without some form of healthy, real love sexual relationships tend not to be long-lasting and often disappear.  With healthy real love sexual relationships can be repeatedly revived and reinvigorated.  Also without healthy real self-love sexual relationships tend to become problematic.

4.  Love is not attraction
Attraction psychologically helps us move toward others while love helps us move with them.  Attraction can lead to contact from which love may later grow.  Love works to maintain and expand the connection that attraction led to.  However, love and attraction, although often confused, are two different things.  A truth is we can come to deeply love someone to whom at first we were not attracted at all.

5.  Love is not ephemeral
Love is very real.  Science has discovered neuro-chemical brain processes and neuro-physical circuits having to do with love and its functions.   The behaviors which come from love such as nurturing and protecting even appear to be in evidence in dinosaurs who lived over 200 million years ago; and also are in evidence in all higher order species that live today.  Each of the eight major groups of behavior associated with the conveyance of love are known to trigger different biologically healthful results.   While there are many mysteries yet to be solved concerning love, the evidence demonstrates love is not some ‘airy fairy’, silly, or stupid ephemeral abstraction.  Love, therefore, is a much more solid, tangible, and increasingly knowable phenomenon.

6.  Love is not an insanity
Healthy real love is probably the most sane thing humans do.   All the evidence shows that healthy real love in fact has a very sane- making effect.   Both giving and receiving healthy real love tends to have a balancing effect on abnormal brain chemistry.  Love tends to alleviate depression and calm  anxiety.  It even has a curative effect on certain forms of  brain damage.  While under the influence of love it is possible to think more creatively, and be more open to new and different possibilities, and be more in-touch with deeper than usual mind systems; all this represents greater sanity not less.

7.  Love is not infatuation
Infatuation and its ‘cousins’ (crushes, lust, idealization, the two to four year phenomenon known as Limerance, etc.) are often confused with real healthy love.   However, these tend to be filled with the false love indicators of jealousy, possessiveness, control efforts, over restrictiveness, etc.   The majority of the false forms of love are largely fear-based rather than love-based, and the actions that come from them show this to be the truth.   These false love forms fade away while love of the real type lasts.

8.  Love is not a weakness
Everything the sciences are discovering about healthy real love shows it to be strengthening, healthful, and empowering.  False forms of love, however, often are weakening and debilitating.  There are many who have studied love who come to the conclusion that love is perhaps the most powerful force in the universe.   This would make love-filled people the strongest of all people.

9.  Love is not exclusive
If I really love you I also will try to love and like the people you love and like.  I will not try to exclude you from them, but rather will include myself, and them, and you all together.  Love also will make me reach out to others, and take in more of the world, not less.  It is fear that brings on exclusivity, not love.

10.  Love is not harmful
It is important to remember that hurt is the enemy of harm.  With love we may say or do things that are hurtful to those we love in order for them, and us, to avoid harm.  However, from healthy real love there can be no action meant to harm, destroy, damage, or harmfully deprive a loved one.  Healthy real love is constructive, not destructive.

11.  Love is not dependency
Healthy real love helps people become more self-dependent, not dependent. There may be the interdependence of teamwork and cooperation. However, the effect of love is to make people grow more competent and able not less so.

12.  Love is not frivolous
Healthy real love is probably the most important thing  people do in their lives.  According to the ancients love is above all else in importance because love is the essence of divinity.  It is love that brings us our strongest connections with others, causes us to nurture one another and ourselves, motivates us to heroic actions of protection, motivates our greatest advances, brings amazing healing, and rewards us with our highest and most profound emotions. While the word love often may be used in frivolous and trivial ways the phenomenon itself is of prime significance.
Now with all that in mind let us turn to what is really coming to be understood to represent the nature of Real Healthy Love.

What Love  IS

1.  Love is awesomely natural
The brains of all higher order species seem to contain special sections and neural net circuits for processing love, special neuro-chemistry and neuro-electric activations, and other special biological phenomena all having to do with how and why we love.

2.  Love is desire for the well-being of the loved
Healthy real love drives us to want and act for our loved ones’ healthful continuance and enhancement (and happiness when possible ).  This, by the way, includes healthy self-love.

3.  Love is the great positive force
Philosophers, scientists, religionists of many faiths, and “the Wisdom  Masters” of many ages have come to this conclusion.

4.  Love is deep connection
Wherever there is healthy real love there is profound connection with
others, with self, with life, with the universe, etc.

5.  Love is survival
Healthy real love brings us the ongoing cooperation, providing protection and strength vital to our continuance individually and collectively.

6.  Love is the pathway to myriad grand emotions
Through the giving and receiving of love we experience the greatest array of our most profound emotional feelings.

7.  Love is healing and healthful
The highly curative and revitalizing effects of healthy real love are documented throughout history, and backed by a many recent scientific discoveries about love in a wide variety of medical research fields.  Likewise, the ability of love behaviors and love relationships to keep us healthy and add to our longevity is well established scientifically.

8.  Love is passionately compassionate
From love more than any other thing emerges the great acts of caring, the intense empathy for and with others, and the passion-fueled energy it takes  to change the world for the better, again and again.

9.  Love is growthful
Healthy real love is forever pushing us to nurture, enhance, construct and create that which helps our loved ones to be more, be better, and be fulfilled.

10.  Love is freedom insistent
Healthy real love works to set loved ones free to be the most they can be, and to be the most uniquely themselves they can be, and insists we democratically relate to our loved ones.

11.  Love is the greatest motivation and reward system of the life force
Nothing motivates more constructive action than love, and nothing rewards that constructive action more than experiencing the vast and varied joys of love.  Therefore, nothing makes life worth living more than love does.

12.  Love is Divine spiritual essence
Across the high philosophies and great religions of the world, and down through the ages it is repeatedly taught that the essence of divinity is love, and that all true real love originates and flows via the grand, loving, spirituality permeating existence.

Now of course you do not have to agree with or believe any of this.  You don’t have to disbelieve it either.  The thing to do is with your very good mind study it.  It also helps to share and study it with others.

To research love further let me egotistically recommend my book Recovering Love ( available from [hardback]: McGraw – Hill, [softback]: Authors Choice Press, and at amazon.com, iuniverse.com, and at my office).  Also great for studying love I heartily recommend the Anatomy of Love by Dr. Helen Fisher, Love and Survival by Dr. Dean Ornish, The Meaning of Love in Human Experience by Dr. Rubin Fine ( this one is superb for counselors and therapists) and All About Love by Dr. Bell Hooks.  All these of course, are available in bookstores and via amazon.com and other internet providers.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Image Credits: Pink cupcakes: Flickr user makeshiftlove, Dark cupcake: Flickr user Sailor Coruscant

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The next installment in this series is:A Functional Definition Of Love

Related posts:

1. An Introduction: What is Love Dr. Cookerly?

Definition of Love Series
An Introduction: What is Love Dr. Cookerly?
The Definition of Love
A More ‘Ample’ Definition of Love
How This Definition of Love was Derived
A Dozen Things LOVE IS and A Dozen Things LOVE IS NOT
A Functional Definition Of Love
A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love
What About a Scientific Definition of Love?
7 Other Definitions of Real Love Worth Considering

Intimate Love, What Everyone Needs to Know!

       

Mini-Love-Lesson  # 259

Synopsis:  We start with the experience of intimate love; move on to what is intimacy and intimate love; the main two pathways to intimate love; its widespread healthfulness; the question “Is risking realness required” and then end with the wonders of intimate love via emotional intercourse.

The Experience of Intimate Love!

Close and personal, special and private, connecting and bonding, free and trusting, revealing and exposed yet safe and secure, known and accepted, miniscule and precious, cherished and soaring, erotic and sacred, tender and powerful, idyllic and serene, delicate and cosmic, warm and ebullient, core sharing and soul touching -- these are but some of the words people used to describe their experience of intimate love in a couples workshop on advanced intimacy and love.

Do some of these words resonate with you?  Would you use others and, if so, what?  What is your experience so far with intimate love?  Do you seek, wish for, long for, or work to create more intimate love in your life?  Are you good  at intimacy cooperation and intimate love teamwork?  Do you tend to eagerly welcome or more often dodge experiences of intimacy?  Do you tend to linger with intimate love or cut it a bit short like so many do?  In your future, what part will intimate love play?

What Is Intimacy?

Those who research intimacy tend to see it as a process of interaction in which, most commonly, two or sometimes a small group of people reveal and share their real, deeper , more personal and private thoughts, emotional and physical feelings, behaviors and sometimes their sexuality, thereby, letting themselves be more mutually and idiosyncratically known and experienced.  In doing so, intense forms of mutual feelings of closeness, bonding, joy, being preciously connected and valued can result.

Sometimes smaller, intimate experiences produce feelings of simple closeness and strong, shared appreciation along with cherished memories of the experience.  There is often a sense of conjoined caring, mutual understanding and dual affirmation resulting from shared intimacy experiences.

What Is Intimate Love?

Intimate love combines everything you have just read about intimacy with, for, and in the expression of authentic love.  Love simply is defined as a powerful, vital, and natural process of highly valuing, desiring for, often acting for, and taking pleasure in the well-being of the loved (see The Definition of Love Series “The Definitions of Love”). Intimate love therefore, is a major, close, personal way of doing just those things.

At the same time, intimate love is a marvelous process for accomplishing the five major functions of love.  In brief, they are (1) to connect us, (2) to nurture us, (3) to protect us, (4) to heal us and (5) to reward us for enacting the behaviors of love.  Intimate love often provides profound connectedness, nurturing, healing and rewarding experiences frequently in a wonderful sense of happy safety and, thus, facilitating all five major functions of love.

The Main Path to Intimate Love

The primary path to intimate love is self-disclosure and, with it, self-disclosure love (see “Self-Disclosure Love”, a chapter in my book Recovering Love). It is an act of love to disclose yourself to someone you love.  It lets them know who you are in intimate detail.  Ongoing self-disclosure shares your personal self with another so that they can understand who you are in many differing ways, enjoy you and much more fully experience the unique you.

Self-disclosure can be done by revealing your body, your way of being sexual, your physical feelings, your positive, negative and mixed emotions, your history (both bad and good) your ordinary past, your hopes and aspirations, fears, weaknesses, strengths, excesses, deficiencies, victories and failures, personal thoughts, areas of knowledge and ignorance, your troubles and triumphs, mediocrity, ugliness and beautiful parts, along with where you need healing and growth, your deficiencies and attributes, guilty aspects, shame, pride, enjoyments, proclivities, idiosyncrasies, and ways of just being yourself.

Do not forget to reveal your ways of being fair, decent, kind and ways of having pleasure.  Very important are your perceptions, understandings, conceptions and misconceptions, preferences, moods, attitudes, judgments and quandaries.  Even more important are your fears, anxieties, secret hopes and hidden desires.  In other words, share as much as you can and, while you are at it, enjoy your beloved sharing themselves with you (see “Growing Closeness -- A Love Skill”).

The Second but Equal Path to Intimate Love

The second great path to intimate love is touch or tactile love, both sexual and affectionate (mostly nonsexual).   Everything from one finger, tender, superlight touch to full body bear hugs and full body massage-type touching is included here.  When you fully, really love someone touching them in every loving way and on every loved part is a great way to create an intimate love, experience.  Likewise, letting yourself be touched every way and everywhere is a grand way to share yourself with someone and let yourself be intimately loved.

Passionate embraces and tender eyelid kisses, being vigorously lifted then swung around or super gently caressed, having your feet rubbed with scented oils or your back scratched -- they all can convey, enhance and embody intimate love.  So too does all types of wanted sexuality.  Experimenting with new types of sexuality, always done with shared love and without judgment or anything critical, can produce a wonderful sense of an intimate love experience.  That is true even if the sex part does not work out so well (see“50 Varieties of Love Touch”).

Intimate Love Is So Healthy -- Physically and Psychologically

There is quite a bit of research showing that high levels and frequency of intimacy resulted in higher levels of happiness, good mental health, better immune system functioning, less stress hormones in the blood, as much as eight years of greater longevity, greater general enjoyment of life, better body systems functioning, far better relational functioning and a host of other goodies.

Is Risking Realness Required?

Many people fear self-disclosure, intimacy and intimate love itself though still desiring it.  There are lots of different reasons for those fears.  For some, it is a fear of being judged and rejected, others have been trained to be ashamed, embarrassed or have a sense of being sinful when they reveal certain parts of themselves, while still others have very painful memories of betrayal stemming from the last time they risked being real.  Then there are those who rely on their social act and persona mask so much that they just can't bring themselves to do honest self-disclosure without embellishment and social deception.

If you self-disclose some intimate truth about yourself and it goes badly,  in one way that is a good thing.  It helps you know that the person you did the self-disclosure with probably is not a good person to do self-disclosure with, and consequently, is more likely to be a poor candidate for carrying out most kinds of love relationship with.  Thus, whatever went wrong is likely to be a message to consider ruling them out and to go looking for someone more tolerant, accepting, empathetic, less critical or whatever.

If you choose not to be self-disclosing, that can be quite a barrier to intimacy and intimate love occurring.  Some people do not do well at self-disclosure just because they were brought up that way.  Frequently they have been subconsciously programmed to mold themselves into strong silent types.  This especially is true for a lot of men in several cultures where showing your emotions is not considered manly.

Then there are those, women mostly, who have been subconsciously programmed to be attracted to the strong, silent types.  Strong can be okay but silent, not so much.  Silence is a prescription for emotional distance and loneliness.  It is done mostly for safety but, in reality, for love relationships it is not safe at all.  Whenever there is too much emotional distance in a romantic relationship love hunger tends to grow, as does, the likelihood of secret affairs.

Can you risk being seen psychologically naked?  If you are rejected, or have fled from or retreated from being criticized and condemned, can you be strong enough to be okay with the probability that you and that person may not be a good match -- which is a good thing to know sooner than later.  Risking revealing yourself is the only way to really find out if the real you and the whole you is loved.  Hopefully you have enough healthy self-love to both risk and survive going for intimate love.  Likewise, will you do well with self-disclosure coming your way?  Toleration love often is required for a love relationship to be good and lasting (see “Tolerational Love”, a chapter in Recovering Love).

Emotional Intercourse

Having emotional intercourse fairly frequently is absolutely great for making intimate love experiences happen and for keeping heart-mate love relationships interesting and enriching.  How do you have emotional intercourse?  Well, you do it by taking your positive and negative emotions about anything and everything and showing them, not just telling them to a loved one who can take them in with good listening and love reception skills.  It is sort of like living them with you as you share and self-disclose them (see “Listening with Love”).

Then, with good listening and love reception skills, you do the same as they share and self-disclose their emotions about anything and everything to you (“Tolerational Love”, a chapter in Recovering Love).   Emotional intercourse usually is fairly active though sometimes subtle.  Intimately looking into each other's eyes, while holding each other, while both have very loving facial expressions can be great emotional intercourse.  Emotional intercourse can occur at the same time as sexual intercourse if very free-form, active expression of what is being felt emotionally and sexually is occurring and is being observed with enjoyment and maybe with awe (see “Intimacy Creation – A Love Skill” and “Emotional Intercourse”).

One More Thing: With another, talking over what you have just read and sharing your feelings about it, as well as your thoughts, might lead to a bit of an intimate experience.  If you do that, please mention this site and our many mini-love-lessons.  Thank you.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: If you go emotionally naked and have emotional intercourse with someone and they, likewise with you, will you not, in one way or another, come to love each other?

Self-Love and Its Five Healthy Functions

Synopsis: Self-love dynamics and importance; the five functions via healthy self-love; living with and without functioning healthy self-love; a healthy self-love self exam.

Consider this understanding of how ‘healthy self-love’ and the ‘five major functions of all forms of love’ work, how it has great importance and how it is something you will do well to know about.

Dynamics and Importance

Healthy, real love serves us and drives us by way of love’s five major functions.  This is true of all types of love including healthy self-love.

Knowing the five major functions of healthy, real love and how to apply them in healthy self-love development can greatly assist a person in growing their healthy self-love.  That can amazingly and significantly assists people in succeeding at all other types of love relationships.

How well couple’s love, family love, friendship love and a great many other kinds of love flourish or perish often depends on sufficient healthy self-love.  The greater one’s healthy self-love the less one tends to operate from fear, insecurity, jealousy, anger, deception and a host of other positions that tend to destroy love relationships.  Greater healthy self-love also results in the development of greater self-confidence, self-reliance, self-esteem, self-understanding, self-directed living, self-trust, self-assurance and self-sufficiency.  All those strongly tend to lead to greater success in all areas of life.  Therefore, I vigorously recommend developing a really good understanding of the major functions of love and what they accomplish when applied to healthy, self-love growth and improvement.

Self-Love and the Five Major Functions of Healthy Real Love

1.  Connection
    It is by love that we are best connected to one another.
It is by ‘healthy self-love’ that we are best connected with our self.

2.  Nurturing
    It is by love that we best nurture the growth and well-being of each other.
It is by ‘healthy self-love’ that we best nurture the growth and well-being of our self.

3.  Protection
    It is by love that we protect and safeguard our loved ones.
It is by ‘healthy self-love’ that we protect and safeguard our self.

4.  Healing
    It is by love that we strive to heal our loved ones when they become afflicted.
It is by ‘healthy self-love’ that we best strive to heal our self.

5.  Reward
    It is by love that we best take joy in one another and reward one another.
It is by ‘healthy self-love’ that we best take joy in and reward our self.
So, in these ways let us adhere to the ancient admonition – love others as you love yourself.

Rewards, Survival and Well-Being

Joy (part of the fifth function listed above) rewards and reinforces the actions that stem from the previous four functions.

Each of the functions of love works for our survival, well-being and improvement.  Therefore, our healthy self-love works for our individual survival, well-being and improvement.  This in turn works to keep us going and, therefore, can greatly aid us in acting on behalf of the survival, well-being and improvement of those we love.

Loveless Malfunction

Without love and the functions it provides we malfunction.  When we malfunction we deprive both our self and those we love of the benefits that flow from our love.  Think about each of the five functions not occurring.  When we are not well-connected with our self we tend to live in inner disharmony and often work against our self.  When we do not nurture our self we grow overly dependent on others and may psychosocially starve.  When we are not sufficiently self-protective we live increasingly in danger of being harmed.

When we do not sufficiently act to heal our self when afflicted psychologically and physically we promote our own dysfunction and demise.  When we do not sufficiently take in, digest and revel in the rewarding joys of love we do not reinforce the actions that stem from the first four functions of love and, thus, they go unrewarded.  Unrewarded behavior tends to diminish and disappear.  From the diminishment and cessation of love actions everyone may then suffer.

Greater Self-Love : Better Everything

The better one’s healthy self-love the better the five functions of love tend to operate keeping the self strong, healthy and, therefore, more able to love others.  The better one’s healthy self-love the better one can operate when other sources of love are not available.  The better one’s healthy self-love the more one is likely to attract strong, healthy love from strong, healthy others.  It is true that dependent, needy, weak people also may be attracted hoping that your love and strength will aid (save, rescue, fix and/or ‘adopt’) them.  So, out of love for others one may be healthfully assistive to the weak and needy but only if out of healthy self-love one avoids becoming depleted or enmeshed in a weakness-enabling dynamic.

Self-evaluation

Now, you might want to evaluate yourself.  Here are some questions to help.  Are you becoming appreciatively more knowledgeable of yourself and your many miraculous workings and, therefore, more healthfully inner-connected?  Are you good at nurturing yourself and, therefore, helping your further growth and development?  Are you sufficiently self-protective and safeguarding of your well-being?

When you are sick, or wounded or in any other way afflicted physically or emotionally do you act sufficiently for your own self-healing?  Are you joyous about yourself and the bundle of miracles that you are and, therefore, are self-rewarding enough?  Are you helping those you love and care about grow to where they can answer the above questions in the affirmative for themselves?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
When you were growing up how much were you perhaps taught to regard self-love as a bad thing to be avoided and if you were so taught does that teaching make you a weaker person today?  For help with this see the entry “Loving Others “as” You Love Yourself ???”.

Related posts:

1. Getting Healthy, Real Love in Your Life
2. Healthy Self-Love and Not Giving Your Power Away
3. Number 51: Your Super Tool for Healthy Self-Love
4. Forgiveness in Healthy Self-Love
5. It Might Be Healthy, Real Love …