Dealing With Love Hurts Series
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.
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Work With and Without Love
Synopsis: Intriguing concepts; Successful failure; Sacrifice and imbalance, Four factors most don’t know to think about; Healthy self-love; and Asking good questions for happy, healthy, work success via love.
2. To love your work and work your love is to make much of life ‘play’.
3. The best work is ‘love made manifest’.
4. One of the healthiest acts of self-love is to find work that you would pay to do if someone wasn’t paying you to do it.
5. With work, love and play in balance we succeed at life. Without all three in balance we fail at life.
Harlan told me his story which, sad to say, I’d often heard before. His version went like this. “I did what my upbringing taught me to do. I put almost all my time and effort into succeeding in business. To accomplish this success I put my wife and kids ‘on the shelf’, so to speak. I thought I would get back to them once I had climbed high enough on the ladder of success and made enough money. I lied to myself saying I was doing it all for my loved ones. The trouble was my loved ones did not stay on the shelf. "My wife ran off with a guy who doesn’t even make half of what I do. My kids treat me like the stranger I am to them, and I only have business friends or, in other words, no real friends at all. I enjoyed my business success so much I neglected learning how to enjoy the rest of life. Now I am rich in money and status but concerning love and joy I live in poverty. Please help me.”
Well of course, I and those who work with me went to work helping Harlan learn to help himself in all his neglected areas. After some rather intense therapy and a lot of ‘practice work’ putting concepts and realizations into healthy actions I’m pleased to say Harlan now lives a much more balanced and far happier life.
Work is such an enormous part of most people’s life. Work is also an enormously important factor influencing how well one does healthy self-love and healthy relational love. Yet many people do not give these aspects of their work-life much thought. There are those who sacrifice their emotional and their relational life for work. There also are those who sacrifice their physical health for their work. Some people actually do work themselves to death. Like Harlan there are many people who, perhaps unknowingly, sacrifice their love relationships for success, money, status and other work related goals. There also are work related problems that sabotage love which hardly anyone thinks about.
Here are just four:
* Succeeding at the wrong thing Here are some examples: Dean is a very well-off, successful, corporate attorney but he longs to be a camp director – he loved scouting as a boy. He dreams of this almost nightly and his anti-depression medicine seems to be working less and less. Janet just wants to raise her kids which is what she both loves and is super good at. However, being a high dollar, traveling, medical equipment rep just has too many payoffs, even though it takes her away from her family for weeks at a time. Next year John swears he’s going to stop selling real estate and start back to school to become a veterinarian, but will he? This is the fourth year he has made this proclamation.
Sarah is a rising project manager in an upscale, big-city, healthcare company but her doodles and daydreams are all about being back on a Navajo reservation working with children where her life felt most fulfilled. Each of these people do not love their work even though they are good at it. Sadly, they are more likely than the average person to develop stress related illnesses, damaging alcohol or prescription drug abuse, love relationship deterioration, and an existential crisis resulting in what most people call a complete breakdown. Hopefully none of those will happen. Each of these people just may live unfulfilled, unhappy lives being successful at the wrong occupation.
* Loving only work It’s wonderfully healthful to love your work, enjoy your labors, revel in succeeding, be passionate about the challenges and so forth but only if you balance it with other things to love like healthy self-love, healthy relationship love, healthy love of life, healthy spiritual love, etc.. There is much more to life than work, even highly meaningful work. People working for important causes, people manifesting their talents in the arts, professions, etc., people doing fascinating research into the great mysteries, and people just enjoying doing a really good job at something they are good at — all can be in danger of imbalanced living because their work is so rewarding and enjoyable.
* Only tolerating your work Do you ‘love’ your work? If you don’t do you suspect you ever will? Many people will leave a job or occupation they hate but will stay in a vocational situation they only can tolerate. This often is referred to as being “stuck in a dead-end job”. It is true that a great many people’s life situation does not provide for much more than a vocational situation which is merely tolerable. However, as an act of healthy self-love searching for better than that and risking a change can mean you will have a longer and happier life, and everybody you love and care about probably will enjoy you more.
It’s always a joy when I get to help a person find the kind of work for which they can get decent pay and be passionate about. It’s surprising how often this leads to improved financial success. I once helped a couple who had been saving for years to change occupations from being well-paid engineers to metal sculptors but they just were not brave enough to make the transition. Finally they worked up their courage to go ahead and become ‘starving artists’ devoted to their passion. However, it didn’t pan out that way because in their second year they were making twice as much money with their art as they ever had in engineering. Sometimes it works out like this and sometimes not, but usually the life happiness level is greatly improved.
* Poor self-love makes for a lousy work life Let me suggest that people who are high in healthy self-love tend to manifest that self-love partly by going after work that actualizes their talents and in which they find enjoyment or even great enjoyment. Conversely, people with poor self-love and its accompanying low self-esteem and low self-confidence often put up with low satisfaction types of work and less than desirable work settings.
People with high, healthy self-love know they are worthy of good treatment and they won’t tolerate for long people or conditions that are too negative for them. Those who grow a healthier self love seem, almost invariably, to keep making work-life improvements of one kind or another. People weak in self-love are seldom proud of the work they do even when they do a pretty good or better job at it and often they don’t go after promotions or improved placement. At least that is my experience with the many people I have counseled concerning these issues.
Let’s look at some questions concerning love and work. For you, are love and work two different things or are they integrated? Do you put love into your work? Do you love yourself through your work? Do you love the people you work with? Does the way you go about work influence the way you go about love away from work? Does the way you go about love influence the way you go about work?
Now look at a bigger question. Are you succeeding at the big three i.e. Work, Love and Play? Are you keeping the big three in a fair amount of balance with each other? Will it be good for you to give some thought to your work and its influence on your healthy self-love and on your love relationships? Hopefully this will help you examine the enormous part of life we call work.
As always – Grow and Go in Love
Dr. J. Richard Cookerly
Willing and Ready for Love?
This mini-love-lesson starts with some essential questions; then goes on to consciousness readiness versus subconscious readiness; willingness for readiness; 12 important willingness for readiness questions; the issue of willingness to be willing; more.
Essential Questions
Do you know what it takes to be ready for love, for new love, for better love, for a lasting love, for love adventures, for ever-growing love, for truly strong love, for the love that surmounts horrendous difficulty, for great and wondrous love and for love life success in all forms of real love? Lots of people feel ready for love but in many ways they may not be at all truly ready. So you may be asking how do you get ready for love? Well, for that read further.Conscious Readiness Versus Subconscious Readiness
Some people’s subconscious minds seem to know they’re not really ready for love, so, quite effectively they subconsciously dodge love or new love opportunities. Some people seem to know they do not have enough healthy, real self-love, or love knowledge or love skills to get and maintain a healthy love relationship like they might want. This can lead to trying to do a sort of junior grade love relationship with people who just won’t do for what is really wanted.A large number of people who have been seriously hurt in a love relationship may be very love-hungry but, nevertheless, their subconscious will not allow them to go after love successfully. That can be because the subconscious knows they are not strong enough to deal with or survive another huge love loss or painful love failure. Many people’s subconscious seems to know or sense that a new love relationship is a risky relationship.
Subconscious, protective mechanisms seem to be able to keep some people from trying for love success, even though they are in a state of love-starvation which is damaging their health and well-being. This, in particular, often is a time for growing healthy, self-love and the inner strength that comes with it. It is important that both your conscious and subconscious know that love may require long, hard work on the development of your love relationship skills. Without that you may not be ready for the love you want.
Sometimes it is the conscious mind that has decided love relationship attempts have just been too painful, and so they are not to be attempted again. However, your subconscious may decide just the opposite. The subconscious may cause you to go looking for love possibilities in all sorts of ways you might not be consciously, fully aware of.
Many have proclaimed, “I’m not looking for love” but they dress just a bit more sexy, choose to go to places where opportunities may exist, and in those places they gravitate and flirt with the more likely candidates for a love relationship. Then there are all the people who have bought into the myth that love comes to you when you’re not looking for it, so they pretend to themselves that they are not looking but they really are, consciously or subconsciously.
A host of people seem to want the love they have to improve, but they are not preparing themselves for going after the improvements they desire. Subconsciously or semi-consciously they may think all love is accomplished by luck, or by the will of a deity, or by magic. Others think they are not worthy of the love they want, so they do nothing to ready themselves and or to actively seek what they desire.
Like so many things in life, your chances of succeeding at love are greatly enhanced by knowledge and practice. Luck or heavenly intervention may play a role in who you meet but what you do with them after that is best accomplished by those who have readied themselves with love, skills development.
To really be ready for love, it is useful for both your conscious and subconscious minds to be ‘on the same page’, cooperating with each other.
Willingness For Readiness
Willingness can be regarded as the first, major factor in being ready for love. Without willingness love-readiness is unlikely to be achieved. Love-readiness means you have acquired the minimum, necessary, love knowledge and have done sufficient practice with that knowledge to make you at least tolerably skilled at giving, receiving and living your love.If you really want to succeed at love ask yourself, are you truly willing to do what it may take? To help you figure that out, examine yourself in regard to the following dozen questions about love willingness.
Do you have: 1. Willingness to do the work of learning to love well?
2. Willingness to do the work of practicing loving well, often?
3. Willingness to do the work of unlearning unloving, anti-loving and counter-loving, negative ways of thinking and feeling, and unlearning the negative behaviors that go with them?
4. Willingness to risk failure and experience hurt (not letting fear or safety have primary importance)?
5. Willingness to learn and practice healthy self-love?
7. Willingness to explore and experiment with new ways of doing love relating?
8. Willingness to be open and vulnerable in the process of getting and giving love?
9. Willingness to choose and use the power of love over all other forms of power?
10. Willingness to be transformed by love (because that is what happens) into an ever-growing, better self and, therefore, possibly becoming a rather different self than you find yourself to be now?
11. Willingness to let real love heal you, and to use real love to heal you of your old, love relationship wounds and, therefore, to give up whatever advantages and unhealthy, behavior systems your wounds may empower?
12. Willingness to let love deeply connect you with others, with life, with nature, with spirituality and with other love forces in the universe?
Hopefully you are willing to closely and seriously examine your ‘love willingness’ by way of the 12 questions just listed. Some of them may take some study. So, are you willing to give these willingness questions due attention?
How Big Do You Want Your Love Success To Be?
If you want big love success you probably have to have big willingness to do what it takes to achieve big love readiness. With high willingness and high readiness you much more effectively can go after big love success. If love success is not all that important to you consciously (even though it may be vitally important to you at the natural level) you probably don’t have to have much willingness or readiness.Much like athletes or performance artists, you have to be willing to get yourself very ready for opportunities, and then when those opportunities come along you really can do well with them because you’ve acquired the readiness of knowledge and practice. Without that readiness, big success is much less likely.
Willingness to Be Willing
As you can see from examining the dozen items above, full readiness for love may involve a good many different things. For lots of people love relationships are the biggest and most important things they are ever involved in. Willingness to do what it takes to do love well is essential for achieving true, love success in life.Lots of people fail at love relationships, be those relationships with a lover, a parent, a child, a family, a friend, with oneself, with spiritually, or with life itself or any of its major involvements. One of the highly important factors to consider when looking at love failures and love success is willingness to ready oneself by gathering knowledge and practicing what one learns. So, are you truly and sufficiently ‘willing to be willing’ in all the ways that may be necessary for your own love success?
Hopefully your answer is YES because in my personal and professional opinion it is worth all the effort, all the necessary development and all the practice for the rewards of a loving and love-filled life!
As always – Go and Grow with Love
Dr. J. Richard Cookerly
♥ Love Success Question If really good love success takes readying yourself with acquiring knowledge about how to do love well, and lots of love-skills practice, are you really willing to do all that?
Why You Need to Know More About Real Love
Mistakes about how love works result in life tragedies. Love gone wrong can destroy the will to live, bring on serious depression, consume enormous amounts of time and energy, block productivity and creativity and, at the very least, deprive people of much happiness. Learning how healthy, real love works can help prevent all that.
Knowing how to do healthy, real love well leads to huge improvements in health, happiness and life success. Knowing the “how to’s” of healthy, real love means your love of others can be far more effective, and the chances that you will become truly well loved are likely to vastly improve.
Love of a special other, love of children, family, friends, healthy self-love, and spiritual love all can grow when you learn to apply what science is discovering about this wonderful thing we call Love.
Surprisingly the new love knowledge matches much of what the ancients taught about love. Spouses, parents, singles, youths, and lovers, the lonely and brokenhearted, the happy in love – yes, everyone can put this new knowledge about love to incredibly good use.
You may ask, “How do we learn more about healthy, real love?” Here’s how! First, with determination decide to search for useful love knowledge. It may take fighting the enormously destructive cultural teaching that subconsciously tells you to avoid learning about love. These untruths proclaims “love is an unknowable mystery and we want to keep it that way”, understanding love will destroy its specialness, to keep love exciting keep it a total mystery”, etc.. These pro-ignorance teachings lead many to ruin or to very poorly done attempts at love.
Next, read and experimentally apply what you learn from reading. You may have to sift through a lot of misinformation and some out and out nonsense, but know there is a growing body of well-founded and very useful information to read about healthy, real love. At this website you will find lots of knowledge and sources. Next, read Dr. Dean Ornish’s Love and Survival, Dr. Helen Fisher’s The Anatomy of Love, Dr. Richard Cookerly’s Recovering Love and Dr. Bell Hooks’ All About Love.
After you start reading the really good stuff about love – talk! Talk to friends, lovers family and just about anyone concerning what you are learning. Our knowledge grows when we talk it over with others. Then practice and perfect your love actions because love must be done, enacted and put into action or it’s likely to stagnate.
Love focused workshops, retreats, seminars, courses, etc. can sometimes be found and may help enormously. A good love-focused and love-knowledgeable counselor or therapist can be invaluable to developing your own ability to give and get love healthfully and abundantly.
As always – Go and Grow with Love
Dr. J. Richard Cookerly
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