Understanding Friendship: From Mild Geniality to Profound Love

Mini-Love–Lesson  # 203

Synopsis: How friendship is defined, understood and valued differently in different countries, cultures,  the importance of your own valuing of friendship and doing more about it are presented here and more.

Friendship Seen Differently Here and There and Elsewhere

Internationally friendship is understood in a number of rather different ways in different countries, cultures and societies.

There also are quite a few different definitions and connotations to the words friend and friendship in its various translations.  Not only that but in different social classes, strata, diverse subcultures and societal spheres, friendship is viewed and valued quite divergently.  All of these variations of meaning can be seen as contributing to an all-over enriched understanding of friendship.  These differences, however, also suggest it is best to be careful when dealing with the subject of or engaged in the activities of friendship, or trying to comprehend exactly what other people mean when they use the words friend or friendship.

Defining Friendship Differently

It is kind of amazing how differently various sources have defined friendship.  One source says it’s just “a mutual association of those who like each other”, another says it’s people who feel attached to one another by feelings of personal regard and fondness” and still another says it’s “a relationship of those who grow emotionally close to one another and who have a mostly positive mutual appreciation and therefore feel attached, linked or at least somewhat bonded and in union with each other”.

Other definitions use terms and phrases like “mutuality of affinity”, “ having ongoing rapport”, “enjoy each other’s company”, “repeatedly interacting pleasurably” “people you feel more good than bad about”, “those who treat you nice”, “people who you hope like you”, “those acting in mutually beneficial alliance” and more cynically and hopefully as a joke “anyone who doesn’t want you dead”.

I have heard it taught among the Sufis who have been emphasizing friendship since the year 900 or so that “a friend is someone who helps you know yourself with love”.  Aristotle, who had a fair amount to say about friendship, noted that “a true friend is one who likes who we are and wants what is good for us”.

A Three Level Understanding of Friendship

Concepts about friendship can be analyzed as indicating it is a phenomenon occurring on at least three different levels.  Here they are called Mild, Significant and Profound and are explained as follows:

Mild Friendship: a relationship between those who at least mildly like each other, who at least mildly enjoy being in each other’s company and mildly but pleasurably have at least some ongoing, occasional interactions with each other.

Significant Friendship: a relationship between those who mutually emotionally feel fairly closely and positively connected, are mutually trusting, have a fair degree of shared values and interests, have some mutual intimate and personal knowledge of each other, are mutually concerned about each other’s well-being and who mutually have a mostly positive effect on each other and who find importance in their relationship continuing.

Profound Friendship: a relationship of healthy and usually sibling or familial like real love.  In addition, those whose relationship manifests a sense of mutual, deeply felt, meaningfulness along with intimately personal and privately shared knowledge, a sense of being strongly bonded with attitudes of unconditional acceptance, non-condemning, all forgiving, intense loyalty, mutual appreciation, respect, and affirmation, dependability especially in troubled situations and involving people who are solidly committed to each other’s well-being and their relationships continuation.

These three levels can be seen as a existing on a continuum of sequential degrees going from more or less mild to more or less profound.  Some analysis suggests it would be appropriate to add a fourth category of Friendly Acquaintance mostly for those who have briefer or only occasional friendly interactions with each other.  In analyzing friendship, others suggest additional situational categories are useful like “work buddy”, “good neighbor”, “school chum”, “comrade-at-arms” “internet pal”, “Facebook friend”, etc..  Additional terms like best friend, fast friend, bosom friend, confidant, crony, sidekick, etc. also may be useful in seeking a full understanding of friendship.

The Varying Valuing of Friendship

In some parts of the world, you would not use the word friend for someone you had known less than two years nor would you invite them to your house before then.  In other parts of the world, one can hear oxymoronic statements like “hello, old friend, what’s your name?” probably stated by someone being artificial with something to sell.  Among still others, ending a friendship is commonly more significant and impactful than ending a marriage.  Then there are those for whom the word friendship privately means a relationship conducted for selfish benefit and easily ended for the same reason.

Among health professionals and psychological researchers, friendship is increasingly being seen as highly contributory to health, well-being, happiness and especially to longevity.  Of course, this means friendship closer to the Significant and Profound levels.  Rehabilitation and recovery specialists count real and deep friendships among the most important factors effecting their patient’s return to health.  Even Mild friendships, as described above, have been found to contribute substantially to the physical and psychological repair of the wounded, injured and otherwise impaired.

Research also is showing that those who do not value friendship and friendship love significantly or sufficiently enough are much less engaged in friendship actions and consequently are more susceptible to killer stress illnesses, substance abuse problems, severe love-life difficulties and workplace non-cooperation and passive/aggressive resistance.

Intriguingly there also is foreign affairs research showing that the more international friendships citizens of a country have the more a country tends toward peaceful and cooperative relations with other nations.  The reverse also turns out to be true.  The more people of a country do not cross borders and befriend dissimilar people the more suspicion, hostility, non-cooperation and international dysfunction there is likely to be with that country.

Likewise, and contrary to much of the past, there has been a recent joint call from major leaders of six of the world’s great religions for developing worldwide, cross-faith friendships.  This worldwide call is aimed at producing a reduction in cross-faith religious bigotry, hostility and violence.  Those inter-faith and internationally minded clerics ask us all to escape our insular provinciality and work at befriending those not only different from us religiously but also socially and culturally.  They postulate doing so will lead to joyfully discovering more about our positive similarities than our disharmonious differences.

How Is Your Own Personal Valuing of Friendship?

Generally, the more you value friendship at all three levels but especially the deeper Significant and Profound levels of friendship, the more you will do about it at all three levels.  Because of that, the better off you likely will live and probably the longer you will live, the healthier you will live and the more enriched your life will be.  So, how are you doing that at all three friendship levels?  Do you think you do enough about your friendships, making new friendships, developing friendships further and what about your friendship with yourself?

One of the things a person runs into when studying friendship and friendship love is this.  Again and again from lots of different places lots of different scientists, authorities, experts, sears, sages, teachers and wisdom masters cry out for people to see how important friendship is to individuals, families, societies and the well-being of our whole world.  They all urge us all to study, think about, talk about, more highly value and then do more about friendship.

So, the challenge is for you to do some more about friendship in your own life.  You, of course, can continue studying friendship as you are doing right now and then you can add your own friendship actions.  Whether it is locally, refreshing current and old friendships, connecting on the Internet, reaching into different communities, reaching out internationally or becoming a part of answering that call for creating interfaith friendships across the world, you can do some things you perhaps have not done yet, but could.  Remember also, that doing more about friendship is a great, healthy, self-love action because you are one of the ones who gets enriched along with the others you connect with in friendship.

Want More to Help You with Your Friendship Life?

To learn more about what you can do for more and better friendship in your life, you may wish to consult the following Mini-Love-Lessons “Friendship Love and Its Extraordinary Importance” and “Friendship “Like” to Friendship “Love”.

For making new international friends, check out Friendship Force International which has local groups in over 300 communities in 60 countries around the world, headquartered in Atlanta Georgia USA and also you might look into the International Friendship League with members on five continents, headquartered and quite active in the UK but also around Europe, Africa, India and Asia where they also have contact centers.

For a more in-depth understanding of friendship, here are some books you might want to consult: Love and Friendship by Allan Bloom, Friends As Family by Karen Lindsey, Friendship: How to Give It, How to Get It by Dr. Joel D. Block, The Friendship Factor by Alan Loy McGinnis and Friendship by Martin E. Marty.

Maybe make a better friend by telling them about this mini-love-lesson and this mini-love-lessons site?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: What are just 2 acts you could do before 2 days pass that likely would benefit another’s and your friendship life?

Related posts:

1. Friendship Love And Its Extraordinary Importance
2. Friendship “Like” to Friendship “Love”
3. Gender Diversity Love
4. Gender Diversity & Romantic – Heart-mate Love
5. Connection Matching – A Love Skill 

Changing Your Emotions Via Love And Love Smarts

Mini-Love-Lesson #202

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

About Bad-To-Better Feelings

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

Some Stuff to Know and Think About Concerning Emotions

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

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

How You Catch, Is Key

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

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

Bad Feelings Are Your Friends Trying to Help You

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

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

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

About Seeking Help

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Love Please!

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

The Thinking Different to Feel Different Approaches

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

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

The Motion Emotion Love Connection

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

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

Practice, Practice, Practice

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

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

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

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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

Related posts:

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

Equality Quality in Love - a Super-Good Love Skill

Mini-love-lesson  #201

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

My Unseen Flaw

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

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

The Quality of Equality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Anti-Equality Prejudice Are You Programmed to Have?

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

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

Romantic Love and Equality

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

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

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

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

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

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

Equality and Healthy Self-Love

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

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

Equality As a Quality Gift of Love

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

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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

Related posts:

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

Affirming Love, Realness and Dodging Pitfalls

 

Mini-Love-Lesson #295

Synopsis: Affirmational love is so important in helping loved ones and love relationships grow but it doesn’t work well without realness and avoiding certain pitfalls.  This mini-love-lesson covers and helps with that.

Being Real

Affirmational love is incredibly powerful!

Affirmation rests on authenticity and sincerity.   If our affirmations are perceived as credible and realistic, they will encourage trust in us and what we are asserting.  If our affirmations are perceived as genuine, they can be relied on, whether or not the recipient perceives in themselves any of the same affirmed quality.  

When affirmations are seen as false, fake or unrealistic, they get discounted.  The person making a phony affirmation loses credibility and may be judged as untrustworthy.  Even if the motivation is to improve or advance a relationship, making false affirmations is like building a relationship on feet of clay --  it likely will topple in the first storm.

Positive affirmational love can encourage hope, especially when someone is facing a difficult challenge.  It sends the messages, “You’re not alone”, “I’ve got your back” or “You can do it”.  Be careful not to overstate your affirmation because the affirmation is to help a person grow strength in themselves.  Plus, if it is not seen as plausible, it will do little or no good.    Heartfelt affirmations are more likely to ring true and get through to loved ones.  

Sometimes no matter how sincere or accurate an affirmation is, it may get discounted.  For example, a parent validly might say to their child, “You played really well” and the child’s response might be, “You’re just saying that because you’re my parent”.  A loving, stronger, more detailed affirmational message may be required to get through a disqualification barrier and help the receiver glean its benefits.  

Some of What To Avoid

It is important to know what is important to our loved ones in order to be accurate when affirming their spheres of interest and who they are intrinsically.  If we overshadow their concerns or enthusiasms with our own, affirmations can fall flat or not even occur.  Remember, an affirmation is an assertion of something we find admirable in our loved ones and we want them to feel good with what we have seen in them.

It is best not to affirm the harmful.  “You are so sexy and cute when you get drunk” said to an alcoholic, rewards alcoholic behavior.  “You are a super daredevil” may encourage dangerous behavior.  “You are so lucky, why don’t you go ahead and bet the ranch” could result in considerable financial harm.  Encouraging unhealthy, dangerous or risky behavior by way of affirmations is not in the best practices of love category.

Another affirmational blunder is praising the same thing over and over.  If a couple has lived together for 40 years and she has heard him say, “You have such a cute upturned nose”, usually it will be brushed off because it has become boring and has lost its endearing impact.  What works well is developing a broad ranging and ever varying awareness of the qualities of those we love and affirming all of them. 

Of course, avoiding affirmations that smack of insincerity, phoniness, hypocrisy, mockery, over exaggeration or anything less than heartfelt affirmation might harm a relationship.  So, let’s not do that.  

Looks, sex, and work are areas too frequently singled out for affirmation, to the exclusion of all the many others.  These areas do not need to be avoided but need to be in balance with other important qualities deserving affirmative attention. 

Affirmations can fizzle or flop, as in this interaction.  

“I admire how social you are at the country club”.  “I don’t care.  I don’t want to mess with those people, even though I mess well with them”.  

If an affirmation sent is not agreed with or valued, it likely will fail.  What we do with that, if it happens, and it does happen, is up to us.  There are a number of ways to handle this but the overarching point is to stay loving to ourselves as well as to the sender when an affirmation flops.

Affirmations can be ill-used manipulatively.  Something to definitely avoid.  If an affirmation is used to soften up somebody only for selfish gain, it is not for the other person’s benefit.  Another example of manipulative affirmations are those books and courses on salesmanship that encourage using concocted praise and compliments to sell stuff.  Such tactics are destructively manipulative when used within a personal network.  Our affirmations need to be constructive to have loving effect.  After all, the very word affirmation means to strengthen and improve. 

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: With those you love and care about, do your praises outnumber your criticisms, your approval statements sound stronger than your disapproval utterances and you appreciation remarks number more than your fault finding?

Faithfulness Fears and the Love Cure

Mini-love-lesson  #200

Synopsis: In some surprising and different-than-usual ways, this mini-love-lesson addresses the problem of what to do when someone is troubled by fears that their spouse, love partner, special other is not being faithful.  Included are what to do before you do anything else, the role of healthy self-love, not letting fears take you over, using more and different love relating skills and the importance of self-disclosure love.

Fears to Face and Fight

Are you afraid your special other is secretly now, or going to get involved with someone else?  Do you fear maybe they are in love with somebody else, may be having sex with somebody else or even several other somebodies?  Are you apprehensive that they are planning to leave you for another who maybe has qualities you secretly fear you do not have?  Might it be that your beloved is more attracted to somebody more attractive than you, better at love or sex, or life, or something you are not even aware of?

Are you suspicious about their time with friends, their fellow workers or that they might be spending time with an old flame, an ex or someone you know nothing about?  What is going on when your beloved is spending time away from you?  Or when your beloved is with you are they longing or lusting for another?

There is so much you can fear, suspect, worry about, be threatened by, feel insecure about, have anxiety over and generally drive yourself crazy with.  What are you to do?  How can you get to a dependable, true safety and sense of security?  Should you just try to dismiss these fears if you can, confront your beloved with accusations, spy, be more controlling, restrictive and possessive, repeatedly third-degree question them, hound and/or beg them for constant reassurance, or what?

In my practice I dealt literally with hundreds of couples and individuals where infidelity, cheating, adultery, etc. was an issue.  I counseled even more where these things were a worry and cause of anxiety.  I shall be a bit braggadocios.  I am happy to say that the vast majority of those situations were worked out rather well, often for all concerned including the others sometimes involved.  What I discovered dealing with these aching and struggling clients was that focusing on healthy, real love made the big difference in most of these very agonizing, complicated situations.  So, what follows are some of the love cure particulars that helped the most and are best done before you do anything else.

You Must Include a Strong, Healthy, Self-Love Focus!

Struggling with the kind of fears we are talking about can be very undermining of your self-love including your self-esteem, self-confidence, self security and your all-over sense of worth. (“Self Love – What is it?”)  It is very important you work to keep your healthy self-love as you struggle with fidelity and relational fears.  Otherwise, your fears can take over, distorting your perception and cause you to make a lot of serious relationship mistakes.

Time again, I have seen fears of a lack of faithfulness have a frequently, unrecognized, serious, component problem.  That component problem is twofold.  First, there can be a preexistent, long-standing lack of sufficient healthy self-love.  Second, the lack of self-love gives rise to an inability to accurately examine oneself and one’s own contributions to what is really causing or contributing to the fears about faithfulness.

Without sufficient self-love, there can be a subconscious mindset in the person feeling the fear that works something like this.  “Secretly I think I’m not good enough to be really loved by my beloved.  That means I don’t have the attraction-power to hold or keep my beloved.  If that is true, my beloved is bound to want and get attracted to somebody better than me.  They’re bound to be looking for somebody with qualities I don’t possess enough of.  Maybe they already have somebody else.  Maybe I’m already about to lose them to somebody else.”  At that point, creeping and then flooding into conscious awareness is a growing sense of anxiety-ridden-insecurity and fearfulness.  Out of that comes a driving, sometimes obsessive, need for reassurance and the return of relational safety.  That in turn, then drives all sorts of often self-sabotaging fear-related behavior that seldom gives much relief.

The nature of the fears usually has a lot to do with the areas we secretly feel inadequate or conflicted in.  If we most fear sexual infidelity, our area of secret weakness is probably sexual.  If we fear losing out to someone more attractive, we may not see ourselves as attractive enough, and so forth.  Facing and examining our fears actually may tell us something about where we do need to improve but denial can make us blind to that useful insight.

Not Letting Our Fears Take Us Over

Sometimes our secret sense of inadequacy is more global or total.  That can give rise to very broad ranging and ever varying fears of infidelity.  Sometimes when that happens, the lack of healthy self-love can be so complete that a person becomes fully convinced their beloved is having an affair and fully believing their fears are definitely true.  Sometimes no amount of evidence to the contrary or reality checks can convince us to believe otherwise.  When this is the case, several profound, destructive and dangerous problems can arise.

Fear of infidelity can cause people to start spying on their beloved, invading their privacy, being increasingly controlling, possessive, blaming, obnoxious and unloving.  This, of course, is self sabotaging, counterproductive, anti-love behavior and exactly the opposite of what is needed.

In counseling sessions, I don’t know how many times I heard things like “he or she accused me of cheating so often I finally decided to go ahead and do it”.  That is how self-fulfilling prophecy mechanisms work – you fear something so much, you don’t know you are doing it, but you are making what you fear happen.  Fear-based behavior can crowd out love-based behavior and result in exactly what you fear most.

Profound, secret insecurity about one’s own power of attraction and worthiness can either result in or stem from the serious mental illness often called paranoia.  One of the syndromes of paranoia involves slowly, increasing crazy, fear-based fantasies of infidelity which the sufferer believes are real.  That can lead to destruction of the marriage or romantic relationship which actually sometimes gives temporary relief to the sufferer.

Rarely, it also can result in the sufferer physically abusing and even sometimes killing their spouse or love partner and then themselves so as to at least be with them in death.  Some think people who are prone to the fatal attraction form of false love are strangely attracted to just the sort of people who suffer from this deadly form of paranoia.  I have treated people where indeed this did seem to be the case (see “Fatal Attraction Syndrome – A False Form of Love”).

More and Different Love, Not Less, As the Love Cure

After self-examination and self love work, there is a second area usually needing attention.  It is not whether or not your beloved actually is being or wanting to be unfaithful.  Before getting to that issue, let’s look at the issue of love-relating and the quality, quantity, nature, and skills involved in your love-relating.

You see, you can have lots of real love and feel lots of real love for someone you love.  However, that is a very different thing from how well and often you do the relating of your love.  It is not enough to know you love someone for it to do you and them the good it can do.  You have to relate it or actively send and receive it, preferably with skill and coordination ( see “Love Is Natural – Love Relating You Learn”).

Occasionally it seems we can subconsciously sense poor or insufficient relating of love and the poor or insufficient interrelating with love occurring in a relationship.  That can arrive in our conscious awareness as a vague fear that gets interpreted as a fear of losing our beloved to someone else.  With that interpretation, we can mistakenly focus on defending ourselves against outside threats that do not really exist instead of improving our love-relating actions.

To avoid that mistake, ask yourself these questions.  How well and often am I, and are we, relating our love?  Have my ways or our ways of showing our love dwindled in quality, creativity, freshness, depth, intimacy, closeness, sincerity, power, realness, appreciation, or many other ways?  Am I or we custom tailoring and making special our love-relating?  Are we making and remaking our ways of love-relating current with who we are today, or are we a bit behind and out of date with what is current for both of us in today’s life?  How do we need to do our love-relating differently and better?

The Incredible Importance of Self-Disclosure Love

Many who have fidelity fear issues try to sneak up on the problem by just being better lovers, sex partners, more affectionate or nicer, but they do it secretly and without the necessary self-disclosure.  Doing those improvement things is good except that it may lead to missing the real issues involved and also the intimacy and closeness that realness can bring.  It also avoids team-working the issue together which usually is much more successful and love producing.
Of the eight major ways to show love directly, self-disclosure probably is one of the most important for fixing fidelity fear problems. (“A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love” and Recovering Love book).

This means that in loving ways you self-disclose that you have fears and insecurity concerning your own attraction power and your ability to keep your beloved from wanting someone else.  You ask if they think you and both of you are relating in and with love well enough to keep things faithful and sufficiently safe from outside threats.  You do that directly because those two things are at issue whether you consciously know it or not.

Thus, you bravely expose your insecurity and risk being chided, misunderstood or ignored, or just possibly lovingly dealt with and respected for your bravery and realness.  Do not hide your fears and try to look more okay than you feel, but do not overdo it either.  Also, self disclose that you as part of this love relationship may need new, better and different relating-work alongside the work of your love partner because, that too, turns out to be almost always a true need in the relationship.  Do not blame, accuse, find fault with, guilt trip, beg or be defensive.  Do good listening as you internally do good self-love.

Now, after working with all that you may be ready to lovingly ask if your fidelity fears have any basis in reality and, if not, could you please have some sincere loving reassurance anyway.

If you do hear that some form of unfaithfulness has or is occurring, do not totally despair, turn into a condemning parent, or retreat into being like a severely abused and hurt child.  A timeout is okay if needed.  The question to ask, and face, is what do you both want to do about it.  To work that out, couple’s counseling with a therapist experienced in dealing with faithfulness, affairs and cheating issues is highly recommended.  You also might want to look at the mini -love-lessons titled “Infidelity and Love”, “Infidelity & the Love Messages That Block & Stop It”, “Adultery and No Divorce Love”, “Forgiveness – A Much-Needed Love Skill” and “Forgiveness in Healthy Self-Love”.

Help spread the word.  Knowledge about love-relating helps.  Tell someone about our Mini-Love-Lessons and this site.  Okay?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: What do you think about the fact that most couples stay together after one, or both, have an affair, and they report they are glad they did, while most couples who break up over an affair are not?

Related posts:

1. Intimacy Fears and Love As the Cure
2. Sex Fears Mastered with Love
3. Infidelity & The Love Messages That Block & Stop It
4. Infidelity and Love
5. Trust Recovery and Love