Learning About Love - Together

Synopsis: Why learn together and a very positive life case starts this mini-love-lesson. What couples are doing around the world;  followed by five things you can actually do together to develop your love skills and learn more about healthy, real love; this mini-love-lesson then ends with a ‘make it happen’ challenge; more.

Why Learn Together?

Chad was excited!  He said, “the thing that helped Sarah and me the most was when we started to learn about love together.  Sort of reluctantly, I gave in and let Sarah talk me into reading some new stuff on the Internet about how love can be made to grow in a relationship.  Then we got to talking about it, and together we worked on how to apply it to the way we got along with each other.  I got a total, new ‘wow’ experience from that.  I am a factual kind of guy and what we were reading wasn’t the usual fuzzy, mishmash about love.

It was totally fascinating and fact-based, but also, to us at least, it was an inspirational way to see and deal with our relationship.  Best of all it worked, I think mostly because we were doing it together.  We both had read some and worked kind of independently trying to learn about how to do our relationship better, and that did help some but by doing it together, well, that made all the difference.”
When a couple learns together a team synergy can be created which is greater than either of them separately.

Experiencing or reading the same material, and talking about it, can create a cross-fertilization of ideas and understanding.  When both people are working from the same knowledge-base; acquired together it is much more likely that they will work better in coordination and sort of like ‘be on the same page’ together.  Separate learning is much less likely to achieve that easily, although that can be good too.  Even better is that learning together helps create better behaving together.

Every team sport or endeavor requires practicing together.  Doubles tennis, football, two or more people dancing together, etc. all take practicing together for it to work well.  Five good basketball players who never played together are much more likely to lose a game to average players who are really good at teamwork.  Individual learning and practicing can add greatly to the team, but adding the ‘as a team together’ component makes a world of difference and can greatly add to the bonding experience a couple is having with one another.

It is sort of like what was once discovered with couples doing joint counseling.  Counseling together, and learning about love together, seemed to make it much more likely that a couple would stay together than if they were doing the counseling, or the learning, separately.

As Sarah put it, “It’s been a really fine adventure for us; working on our love skills together has been a lot more fun and a lot more meaningful.”

Around the World

Around the world there are couples experiencing what Chad and Sarah discovered.  Working together to learn the new and better information about healthy, real love and developing their love skills together is making a great many love relationships much better relationships.  How do we know this?  Well, we know this because at this sites we get feedback from different people all over the globe. The mini-love-lessons are being viewed in over 150 countries.

While the feedback we get from individuals is great, we also get some wonderful feedback from couples.  Also, there is research going on about what couples are doing to help their relationships, conducted by various universities and sometimes governments.  We tap into that too.  By the way we would love to hear your input also.

It’s Not Only Couples

It is not only couples who are learning together about love and developing love skills.  Sometimes it is two or more friends who get together in a sort of informal study group. Sometimes it is families, or a parent and a child learning together.  Colleges, universities and a wide variety of religious institutions sometimes offer courses and classes, or personal development workgroups for couples focused on learning about love and love improvement.

A fair number of personal growth and retreat centers, as well as Counseling and Therapy clinics do the same thing.  In all these the cross communication, interaction and interchanges that occur add to the learning and improve the practicing.  Part of that is because love gets done to a large degree by interaction, interchange and cross-communicating.  Therefore, it makes sense for love to be learned and practiced in such a way as those actions actually are being done together with one or more others.

What To Do Together

First of all, think about love and share what you think with each other.  Puzzle over what you think and what the other one thinks; question, imagine, fantasize, reason, suspect, doubt, guess, hypothesize, posit, remember, dream and share it all with one another.

Second is what you are doing right now, but do it together.  Read about love and what can be done to grow and improve love in your life together.  Now you are reading one of more than 140 mini-love-lessons (with more on the way) which you can use to make love in your life more real, more complete, more healthy and more wonderful.  Read the same mini-love-lessons together, if possible at the same time, and then talk about them a lot.  You don’t have to agree with what you read, and you don’t have to stay on the topic.

Sometimes the offshoots and side trails are the most important pathways for your talk to go.  Remember to share and show your emotions as well as your thoughts.  That often is the most significant and meaningful part.  (See mini-love-lessons focused on feelings and emotions in the titles and subjects indexes).

Third, together do the same thing with books and other writings about love.  Be sure to include books that are of more than one type.  Be careful not to just read books about love problems and what goes wrong in love relationships, or ones that offer no real solutions or ways to improve.  Unfortunately, there are quite a few of those.  Also be wary of books that have ‘love’ in the title but all they are really about is sex.  To me that is like false advertising.  Then there are those books that have ‘love’ in the title but there isn’t anything much actually in the book about love.  Maybe the publisher just thought it would sell better if love was added to the title.

Most romantic novels are not that much help either.  Most just seem to promulgate falsehoods and destructive myths.  What works for one does not work for another. Different books click for different people and for some people at certain times but not other times.  That makes it hard to recommend but here are four possibilities you might want to consider.  All About Love by Bell Hooks, The Anatomy of Love by Dr. Helen Fisher, The Five Love Languages by Dr. Gary Chapman, and the e-book Kathleen McClaren and I wrote Real Love or False Love.

Fourth, together go to the movies whose reviews seem to indicate they may have something worthwhile and positive to say about how love is best done.  Schedule at least an hour after the movie to talk about it.  Look for the true and the false messages about love that may be embedded in the movie, and watch out for tear-jerkers that may move you, but not teach you.  For many people a really good movie offers a much more complete experience, well worth sharing together.

Fifth, together go to workshops, retreats, classes, courses and talks that have to do with improving love relationships.  Some colleges, some religious institutions,  a variety of personal growth centers, therapeutic agencies, etc. give worthwhile workshops, classes etc. that have to do with healthy, real love.  Especially the kind of workshop that offer an intensive experience over a weekend or even a week, often can provide you with one of life’s best together experiences.  There also are some great workshops that combine learning about healthy, real love interwoven with great, healthy sexuality.  (Look for workshops that have the word Tantric in the title).

When Not to Learn Together

It probably is not a good idea to learn about love together if one of you uses what you are learning to criticize, control, condemn or be condescending to the other.  It also probably is not a good idea to try learning together if one of you keeps trying to prove the other one is wrong, playing “I’m more okay than you are”, focusing on what’s wrong more than what can become right, or better, and focusing in the extreme on what has happened in the past more than what can be made to happen in the near future.  Remember, the historical, diagnostic analysis of a flat tire doesn’t tell you how to change it, even if the analysis is spot-on and brilliant.

Unless the focus mostly is on how to do, act, behave and put into practice what you are learning together more constructively, productively and healthfully concerning love skills, you may not be using this ‘together’ learning experience in the best way. It is important and okay to think and understand better, more accurately and more fully, anything and everything connected to love but thinking about love without the actions that grow, give and send love will seldom be enough.  It also is important that the actions and the thinking lead to improvements in the many wondrous feelings that come with love.  If that is not happening sufficiently, then learning together may not be working for you.

Make It Happen

Now here is a suggestion.  With a spouse, lover, friend or family member, ask them if they would experiment with you in doing some joint-learning about healthy, real love and developing your love skills together.  You can start by picking a mini-love-lesson for both of you to read, or reading one of the other actions listed above.  You might want to specify a short amount of time for this experiment, and if it is working well you can extend it.

If the person you ask is dubious and reluctant, tell them that is good, and this is only an experiment, so why not try it.  If they positively will not do this, well, that is not a very good indicator for developing love, is it?  Maybe try asking somebody else.  Of course, it’s fine to start on your own, and maybe inviting somebody into the process with you later.

As always – Going and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question

What do you suppose you might need to ‘unlearn’ about love, because it could be wrong or false?

Related posts:

1. Upbeat Emotions & Learning for Love
2. Communicating Better With Love: Mini Lessons
3. Listening With Love – Are You Good At It?
4. Men: Doing Well at Love !
5. Why You Need to Know More About Real Love 

Blocked Love Talk ?

 

Mini-Love-Lesson #293

Synopsis: Erasing embarrassment programs, anti-love talk habit replacement, tender and tough love talk and growing a bigger, better love talk custom are all briefly and helpfully touched on in this quick Mini-Love-Lesson.

Families that talk love together, do love better.  Couples do too.  On the other hand, some people grow up in families in which no one is talking about love, sex, emotions or any other intimate aspects of life.  For many, those and similar topics can trigger embarrassment and its awkward discomfort.

Erasing Embarrassment Programming

If we do something which embarrasses us often enough, the embarrassment lessens and may even disappear.  We all can break through our embarrassment barriers with “I can do it” self-talk, repetition and some work.  We can think about the words and subjects we have been programmed to be embarrassment about.  Emotional programming is governed by subconscious conditioning, whereas, reasoned choice can be ruled by the conscious mind.  Whatever was not talked about in the family we grew up in, programmed us to not talk about those things.  If the topic of love was one of those subjects, we would do well to overcome that conditioning and free ourselves to be at ease talking our love.  Not talking about love can diminish or even block love and the amount of love in our lives.

Anti-Love Talk Habits

We would do well to examine whether we might have any anti-love-talking habits.  A couple examples are seeing love-talk as too mushy or too intimate.  Another habit is feeling uncomfortable talking about love related emotions like affection, intimacy, vulnerability and so forth.  Once we realize habits like these interfere with growing and improving love in our lives, we can start to interrupt and replace them with new habits of speaking up about these uncomfortable topics.  Thereby, the uncomfortable becomes more comfortable.  Mindfulness is the way we can catch an old habit when it pops up and replace it with a new one.

Tender and Tough

Another block, particularly love-damaging in some men’s lives, is that power emotion talk is OK but tender emotion talk is taboo.  In many social spheres, this problem appears to be diminishing but in other spheres it still rears its ugly head.

To keep some gender equality here, let’s address a female issue.  In some circles some women seem comfortable only talking about the mild, tender or soft aspects of love and shy away from tough love issues and intense expressions of love.  It seems now more women are becoming more at ease with the stronger assertions of love.  

Love Talk as a New Custom     

In family therapy, one of the most common issues tackled is overcoming blocks to actually saying “I love you” to family members.  If that has been the unspoken custom and the topic silently avoided in a family, encouragement to directly bring it up and create a new custom of talking love frequently and meaningfully is the best practice.  Once in a while, when people make the commitment to go tell some family member that they are loved, they may say they did it and at first it was awful but usually they finish by saying it got good or even wonderful.  They often declare that it led to a breakthrough in communications, that they held hands for the first time since they were a child and that they finally felt accepted.  Statements like “We got close and it was so meaningful”, “I’m really glad I got that said before she died” and “It seems we now have started a real relationship” are among the things heard when people start talking their love.

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: For you, who is it hardest and who is it easiest to talk love feelings to, and do you know why?

Dealing With Love Hurts: Pain's Crucial Guidance

While life’s greatest joys can occur because of love some of life’s greatest hurts also can occur because of love going wrong, gone wrong or love lost.

Love relationship failure and its profound agony, the despair of love leaving, the brutal stab of love rejection, the anguish of love betrayal , the angst of love in doubt, the sickening emptiness of love never present are but some of the hurts we humans face when dealing with insufficient and malfunctioning love.

Few people are raised with good examples, helpful knowledge and useful guidance concerning dealing with the many types of hurt possible in love relationship situations.  The good news is we can learn the skills it takes to cope and even grow from these painful experiences.

What to do when we are deeply lonely for a love that is absent?  What to do when we are involved in a love relationship that is becoming more agonizing than enriching?  What to do when in spite of our best efforts destructiveness is mounting and constructiveness disappearing?  Right this minute around the world there are countless millions facing how to cope with abandonment, feeling unwanted, continuing on when profoundly neglected, being repeatedly demeaned, seriously disregarded, suddenly displaced, and worst of all is not knowing how to get back up and try again after being disastrously love defeated?

Well, I know something of the answer to these questions both from my own personal life love hurts and from working with all the suffering people who have come to me for help with their love hurts.  Take heart and be hopeful if you are hurting or have hurt from similar difficulties!  You can surmount the pain and, like the Phoenix rising from the ashes, fly again more beautiful, more powerful and far higher than ever before.

The vast majority of the people I deal with who seek assistance with these love relationship agonies do recover, and learn to soar again going on to love victories greater than what they knew before.  Sadly, of course, there are some who don’t.  They let love relationship related pain bring them down.

Relapses into addiction, profound ongoing depression, long-lasting anxiety, fear-based living and self-destruction of many types are all too often the result of love relationship pain inadequately dealt with.  If you are hurting due to problems related to love I dare you to suspect you can recover.  If you’re not hurting right now but have before, then dare to suspect that none of that deep hurt has to happen to you again.  Dare to believe that “seek and you shall find” is true when it comes to getting over love relationship pain and going on to the victories and joys of a new and different healthy, real love done well.

So, let’s talk of some of what it takes to adequately and successfully deal with the pains that sometimes come along in our love life.  I like to suggest that you start with the idea that all hurt has something to offer.  You see, hurting has usefulness.  Hurt exists for the purpose of guiding us away from harm.  It is important not to confuse hurt and harm; they are quite opposite and are actually enemies of one another.  Hurts are feelings.  Harm is a condition of destructiveness.  Hurt causes you to jerk your hand away from the hot stove before your hand is truly harmed.

It is hurt that gets you to go to the surgeon who takes out your appendix before it blows up and kills you.  Thus, hurt saves your life.  Emotional hurt can get you to study how to do love well so your next love relationship efforts are better.  Yes, hurt in essence is your friend trying to guide you away from harm.  One of the most dangerous things in the world are those diseases which cause no hurt until it is too late.

Some of the most dangerous relationships are those in which one person, without warning, suddenly explodes with long suppressed, hidden hurt and in doing so suddenly causes another person great harm.  Had the hurt been expressed and mutually dealt with they might have worked out a better resolution for all concerned.  Hurt warns us something is wrong and tells us do something different.  Our job is to work with hurt against harm.  This is especially true for hurting, loveless individuals and for those in painful love relationships.

Therefore, a very important thing to do with the pain you experience in a love relationship is to go looking for the ‘guidance message’ in that hurt.  These guidance messages that come from pain can vary greatly.  Your hurt may be sending you a message that says, “Learn to ask for what you want better”, “Do more loving listening”, “Mix sex and love better”, “Stop taking everything so personally”, “Go to counseling”, “Get a divorce”, “Find somebody better”, “Run away” or a thousand other things.

Then, of course, you have to evaluate the message against all the other factors involved.  The trick is to act constructively not destructively.  If possible do that for all concerned.  Remember that hurt always says do something different.  If you don’t do something different expect more hurt.  Your love for someone may tell you to endure the hurt and that may be more important than hurt’s message to do something different.  However, remember that hurt warns you that harm may be coming your way unless you change something.  Hurt becomes harmful when it grows too big for you to be able to get its guidance message.

Often that happens because you have not paid attention previously and sufficiently to hurt’s guidance message.  Here’s a simple example:  Joe kept falling for cold, distant, difficult women.  Once he had such a woman the agonies of dealing with her became intolerable.  Each of these relationships hurt more than the one before.  Finally he heard his hurt’s guidance message and established a lasting relationship with a warm, close and easy to get along with female, so unlike his mother which is where it all started.

Consequently, a really good thing to do with love hurts is to look for and discover their guidance messages.  You can try to reason that all out and sometimes that works quite well.  Often better and quicker is to do a ‘gestalt internal dialogue’ or ‘psychosynthesis – two sub-personalities exercise’.  It works like this: say “Hello” to your love hurt and ask it “What are you trying to tell me?”  Then in fantasy you become your hurt and say, “Hi self, I am your hurt and what I’m trying to tell you is …” followed by the first thing that pops up in your thoughts.

At first this may take some practice but those who practice usually get surprising and surprisingly useful replies from their subconscious.  When you practice these techniques more they usually help you go much further and get excellent results.  Some people learn from their hurt by journaling or writing out what their hurt is telling them, others draw or use other visual arts, some achieve understanding through music and others through dance therapy techniques.

Love hurt is likely to increase and repeat if you don’t learn its guidance message.  Of course, after learning the guidance message you have to heed that message, and do something different and hopefully better.

As always, go and grow with love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Can you list what you have learned from some of your past love hurts?  Is that learning still with you or will you have to learn it again?

Related posts:

1. Dealing With Love Hurts: First Aid Tips
2. Dealing With Love Hurts: Shared And Unshared Pain
3. Dealing with Love Hurts: A Dozen Love Hurts to Know and Grow From
4. Dealing with Love Hurt: Diagnosing Love Hurt Accurately
5. Why Love Problems Hurt So Bad

Dealing with Love Hurts: A Dozen Love Hurts to Know and Grow From

It is wonderful that those who know how to learn from their love related pain do in fact come to do love far better than many others.  It seems such people give and get far more healthy, real love and have far more love related joy.  To understand how this works let’s look at some of the standard guidance messages associated with a dozen different types of love related hurt.

It’s important to know that there are many more types of love related pain than the 12 covered here.  These just are some of the more common ones.  A usual consequence of learning how to successfully deal with a type of love related pain is that one or more types of love related joy becomes more available to you.

Number One: REJECTION  For many people the hurt of rejection involves a secret, subconscious self rejection and a secret suspicion that their rejecters and detractors may be right concerning their flaws.  Learn to love and believe in yourself enough and you tend to be protected from the hurt of others’ rejection.

Number Two: LONELINESS is usually guiding you to get and keep more loving people in your life.  It also may be pushing you to overcome your fears regarding love relating.

Number Three: FEELING DEMEANED is likely to be telling you to stand up for yourself better, and also examine how you might be accidentally rewarding and reinforcing people for treating you badly.  Asking yourself how well you are insisting on good treatment may be essential here.

Number Four: BETRAYAL usually says learn to be much more careful about who and how much you gamble your heart on.

Number Five: JEALOUSY is best understood as requiring you to deal with your own insecurities from which your jealousy rises.  The cure for romantic jealousy almost always involves looking at how you secretly and subconsciously don’t trust yourself as being adequately attractive, worthwhile, desirable or sufficiently love competent to keep a loved one.  When you have enough self love you usually don’t let insecurity morph into jealousy.

Number Six: ENVY tells you to go after something like you see others have.

Number Seven: DECEPTION AND DISHONESTY PAIN both given and received sometimes means you must get much more comfortable with truth and honesty.  Generally the more you are dishonest the more you won’t trust others because they may be deceptive like you.  The underlying guidance message usually is something like “grow strong enough to handle displeasurable truths”.  Learn to be strong enough to face truth, give truth and require truth.  Some professionals think that only the love-weak feel they need deception and dishonesty in love relationships.

If you are dishonest and deception-dependent why not work at growing your ability to live with, and mix your truth with your love?  If the pain of discovering dishonesty and deception has come your way look at how you may be accidentally helping others think they need to deal with you deceptively.  You may be seen as too critical, judgmental, etc. or you may come across as too weak to be able to handle the truth.  If you are, or appear to be, rather naïve you may be inviting unethical people to use and abuse you with their dishonesty.

Number Eight: BOREDOM in love relationships can be seen as a guidance message to do something different and probably something more lively than you have been doing.

Number Nine: ANXIETY in a love relationship gives you the message “search for what may be going wrong or threatening your love life, love network, main love relationship, etc.”.  Then if you discover something destructive take corrective action.  Carefully begin to do something to lessen or eliminate whatever threatens your love situation.  Don’t let the fear of doing something wrong, or making it worse, totally stop you because doing absolutely nothing is very likely to make it worse in most situations.

Number Ten: DEPRESSION in a love relationship, and possibly depression in general, may be telling you you’re not getting enough healthy, real love.  Depression gets you to stop everything and inventory what’s wrong, what’s missing and what’s needed.  This usually has something to do with the quality and quantity of love and the love dynamics in your life.  Don’t forget to inventory and count love from and for yourself, love from multiple sources, and what may be referred to as higher power love. (See blog entry “Is Depression Love Starvation?”)

Number Eleven: TURMOIL related to Love And Sex usually is sending you a message about how well, or not well, you do emotional intercourse, and how you may be subconsciously programmed to not let yourself be fully lovingly sexual.  You and a partner may need to work on doing lots of sex with love in teamwork and in team play.  Sex and relationship therapy may be needed.

Number Twelve: FEAR in love dynamics is usually trying to tell you that you or someone important to you may be harmed.  A sense of fear is to be honored but usually not allowed to dominate or overwhelm.  Moving carefully forward into areas you fear, in small steps, is often the cure.  If your mind tells you that you may be hurt, but not harmed, the cure may be to feel the fear and do it carefully anyway in many circumstances.  It’s also very useful to examine ‘if the worst happens’ how will you handle it, before that ‘worst’ happens.

Thus, if what you fear involves possible physical or psychological damage to yourself or others, major lifestyle damage to yourself or others, major opportunity loss to yourself or others, then extreme caution and probable escape from the fearful situation is likely to be indicated.  Fear that causes you to panic or freeze means you may be dealing with something eminently dangerous and you may need the protective help of others as soon as you can get it.  Love relationships  that involve the frequent, repeated experience of strong fear are often destructive and indicative of false love rather than real love occurring.

Each of these twelve pains can be  associated with love going wrong in small, medium or large ways.  As such they constitute warning signs that improvements are to be made if your love relationship is to be protected and continue.  Each of the understandings of these love hurts and possible actions to take are just sample possibilities.  The specific guidance message you receive from a love related hurt, or pain, may be different than the usual or common understanding given above.  Your pain may be pointing at very different messages or lessons which you will do well to search into.  Note, a fair number of people report that when they learn a guidance message from a love related hurt the pain frequently diminishes or disappears.  However, if you don’t act on what you’ve learned it may come back.

Working with your love related hurt instead of fighting it, or denying it, or just medicating it can involve hard psychological and emotional work.  However, in the long run that kind of work is a lot easier than making the same love mistakes over and over and feeling the same love hurts over and over again.  It’s also better than just trying to exist love-defeated.

Talking things over with loving friends and family often can help, and working with a love-oriented counselor or therapist can do wonders in dealing with love related hurts.  Meditation, prayer and what is sometimes known as ‘universal love work’ along with higher power work has been known to help many enormously.  Remember, you must do your own share of the love work.  That seems to be an essential part of your own love health and healing.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love  Success Question
Can you identify and label the type of love related pain you are most vulnerable to?  If so are you working to build a better, healthy, self loving defense against that type of love related hurt?

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Image credits: “Know Grow” by J. Richard Cookerly.

Related posts:

1. Dealing With Love Hurts: Shared And Unshared Pain
2. Dealing with Love Hurts: A Dozen Love Hurts to Know and Grow From
3. Dealing With Love Hurts: First Aid Tips
4. Dealing With Love Hurts: Pain's Crucial Guidance
5. Dealing With Love Hurts: Shared And Unshared Pain

Dealing with Love Hurt: Diagnosing Love Hurt Accurately

Are you good at diagnosing your love related hurts?   When you get hurt (small, medium or large) in a love relationship situation are you good at figuring out what to do about it?  When you have a pain seemingly coming from something going wrong in your love circumstances do you quickly and accurately know what to do to stop it from getting worse and to make it better?

Did your family teach or model for you how to successfully deal with the many emotional hurts that can occur in all types of love relationships?  Are you good at learning from love related hurt and using it to make love relationship improvements?  If your answer is mostly “no” to these questions, take heart, all this can be learned.

Good “hurt” diagnosis means figuring out three, basic, big things.  First, what ‘harmful’ event  is occurring, or is in danger of occurring?  Second, what is to be done about both the hurt and the possible harm it points to?  Remember, hurt is the enemy of harm (see blog entry “Dealing With Love Hurts: Pain’s Crucial Guidance”).  And third, what can we learn from it?  This means asking ourselves  questions like What’s wrong, What can be done to make it right or to make it better, What can be learned to prevent what’s wrong from happening again, and What can be learned to advance and sustain improvement?.

Also it may mean asking ourselves what useless, fruitless, self destructive, wasteful, idiotic, unhelpful, wrongheaded, prejudicial understandings do we have that we need to get out of the way before we can diagnose our hurt accurately?  Many a person messes up their ability to diagnose and improve their hurtful condition by seeking to blame someone (maybe themselves), or they spend a lot of time on useless defending of mistakes, or they just dodge the whole thing because it’s hard to figure out accurately.   Then too, lots of people only work on what went wrong and never get around to working on what can be done to make it better.  Good diagnosis means arriving at a good treatment plan or improvement strategy.  Nevertheless, if you want to diminish hurtful and harmful happenings in your love relationships, or want them to be eliminated, the useful diagnosis of what your hurt can tell you is vitally important.

When working with love related hurt I like to ask people what they think the guidance message is that’s inherent in their hurt.  Usually at first this question is confusing but then with work an understanding of hurt’s natural guidance message starts to emerge.  Some of these guidance messages are easy to understand and others are quite complicated.  The hurt called ‘loneliness’ is likely to be telling you to go find someone good and loving to be with.  ‘Love related anxiety’ is usually attempting to guide you to search and discover what love-destructive thing may be on the way to happening.  Of course, once identified you’ll probably have to do something about it.  Frequently this involves doing more work about creating love relationship safety.  Love hurt from ‘betrayal’ in a love relationship usually carries the message to be more careful about investing one’s trust.  Hurt in betrayal also is usually about not giving one’s power away to others so that their actions can damage you or be used against you.

When you don’t learn from hurt in a love relationship situation, hurt likely will act like a good friend and come on stronger and more often until you get its guidance message.  I like to suggest that almost all forms of suffering which have to do with love relationships contain a common basic message.  They all usually are, in essence, saying “learn to do love better”.  Much like the message of hurting your hand on a hot stove, the hurtful message is to learn to cook more carefully.   It does not work well to quit cooking or give up eating because you got burned touching the stove.  Don’t give up on love, just learn to do it better.   Like it is dysfunctional to give up driving a car because you got hurt in an auto accident, so it is dysfunctional to give up on love because you have been in a love wreck.  Learn to drive the car and the love relationship better or you may have another wreck.

Unfortunately love hurt is one of those areas in which lots of people don’t know how to arrive at an accurate diagnosis of what’s going wrong and what to do about it.  Therefore, they don’t get the helpful message inherent in their hurt.  The basic diagnostic message that says “learn to do love better” may not be one of your culture’s or your family’s teaching.

Consequently that message may be rather strange and working with it may be unfamiliar to you.  In the Western world culture, and others, too many people have been programmed to believe that love is all automatic and magic, and that we are but helpless fools waiting for our love fate to overtake us.  I never trust training in helplessness.   All hurt tries to tell you to diagnose what’s wrong and do something about it so harm is avoided.  Hurt related to love is no exception.  Sometimes the diagnosis tells us to temporarily endure the hurt so as to avoid greater harm.   Occasionally the diagnosis yells “Escape as fast as you can because you’re about to be destroyed”.  Often the diagnosis is telling us just to change some of the ways we go about love and learn to do it more fully and better.

Another destructive training sometimes occurs which damages the love dynamics of that special love relationship called parenting.  It usually goes something like this, “What was good enough for my parents is good enough for our children”.  Usually this type of statement means that the parents who think this are resistant to learning the better, more well researched and discovered, improved ways of doing parenting.  I sometimes like to ask people to name some areas of life in which there have not been improvements over and above the way their parents or grandparents knew to do things.  I don’t get many good answers.   Let me suggest ‘love and parenting’ are not exceptions.

The knowledge exists on how to do both far better than once was commonly practiced.  However, in some cases truly ancient knowledge, that somehow went out of style, and the most recent developments correspond beautifully.  One of the newer and yet ancient understandings is “learn from your hurt, that’s what it’s there for”.  Another one is “it’s insanity to expect new and better results from repeating old actions that have failed time and time again”.  So, unless you’re hurt is overwhelming I want to suggest you work to understand every part of your hurt’s guidance message.  That is likely to be the best way to eliminate or reduce the hurt and not repeat it.  If the hurt is overwhelming get some help from a good love-knowledgeable counselor – you don’t have to suffer interminably.

Feeling hurt is a natural life system and all life systems can malfunction.  There can be too much hurt just as there can be too little hurt.  Hurt can be both subconsciously and consciously exacerbated or denied.  Frequently doing either can be detrimental.  Hurt can go on too long and hurt can interfere with other life systems designed to assist us.  However, most often if you work with your hurt you will learn and be guided to that which is healthier and happier.  Deny or over sedate your hurt and it may get worse so that its guidance message gets through to you.

Another thing to be cautious about concerning hurt has to do with what you were previously taught to do about it.  Blaming others, or blaming the stars, the fates, etc., just submitting to it, toughing it through without learning, using it for manipulating others as in ‘guilt tripping’, and playing the victim for sympathy, or getting to be the virtuous martyr and a host of other misuses are to be identified and eliminated.   Lots of people have learned to use their hurt as an excuse for not being ‘response able’ and then get drunk, or do drugs or destructively act out.  For some their love hurt is an excuse for doing violence to others, seeking to ‘get even’ via vengeance, retribution, etc.   Such anti-love actions usually are self defeating and may represent no real love being there in the first place.

There are a few special cases of desired and enjoyed love hurt.  Pain can accentuate pleasure when both are conditioned to occur together, and when the pleasure exceeds the pain.  When a person has felt almost nothing strong or intense for a long time pain can help some people feel much more vitally alive, and for that they are glad.  Case in point: Steve felt he was stuck in a dull, boring job and a marriage that wasn’t any better, neither from which he saw an immediate good way to escape.  He became entangled in a complicated, difficult, painful affair.  He actually was grateful for it because it made him feel excited and intensely alive as nothing had for a long time.

This is an example of a ‘good’ coupled with a ‘bad’.  I am not saying that his approach was all that healthful but it was desired and enjoyed more than bland living.  Certain kinds of physical pain and sexual pleasure occurring simultaneously, especially when there is intense, emotional, love-filled intimacy can greatly add to sexual pleasure for some people whose neurological physiology is built for that.   Some people have been conditioned to believe their pain signifies great love occurring or other similar positive things.  In these cases it still is best to diagnostically think about the presence or likelihood of harm.  The enjoyment of getting permanently damaged is to be avoided no matter how pleasurable it might be to someone.

Let me now challenge you to think about when you have had hurt in a love relationship.  Any love related hurt you have experienced will suffice.  It may have been with a parent, or sibling, or friend, or lover, or a spouse.  Can you identify what the guidance message was in that hurt?  Practicing the skill of identifying hurt’s guidance messages using old hurts can be quite useful in learning to do love hurt diagnosis well.  If the old hurt still hurts it could mean you have more guidance messages yet to identify.  If the old hurt no longer hurts it could mean you have gotten over that, strengthened yourself, and learned a lot, so be proud of your growth in diagnosing and following the guidance messages from that hurt.

Did the love relationship hurt that you just thought about lead you to break up or go away from someone who would have been destructive or inadequate for you?  If so, be thankful for that hurt.  If similar hurt started today would you diagnosis its guidance message sooner and act upon it quicker?   If you get your feelings hurt in a love relationship today are you quicker to diagnose what you are doing poorly, or wrong, and make improvements in your own behavior.   Are you then quick to figure out what you want different from what you are getting – and ask for it?  Remember, it is important to diagnose your own contribution to your hurt as well as another person’s, and don’t forget to diagnose what circumstances contribute to the hurt.

By reading this you are studying love hurts and how to diagnose them, how to avoid them, how to fix them, how to learn from them and, thereby, do better at love.  So then, the question is “are you going to keep studying”?  If you are having trouble diagnosing your love hurts, remember, it is quite smart, appropriate, efficient and usually highly useful to get help from a love-oriented and love-knowledgeable therapist when dealing with the pain involved in love relationship difficulties.
 
As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question When you feel hurt in a love relationship situation have you learned the wisdom of looking forward for what to do next about it rather than looking backward in extended analysis, or for whom to blame or what to blame?

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Image credits: Original graphic, "Stethoscope" by Flickr user tjmwatson (Tess Watson) modified for use here by Wade Watson.