Self-Love - What Is It?

Synopsis: This mini love lesson starts with the many contradictions and confusions concerning self-love; healthy, real self-love defined; the operational definition of self-love; and ends with the functional definition of self-love, plus a few important questions; more.

Contradictions and Confusions

“I’ve been told again and again I need to learn to love myself but I don’t know what that means.  I also have been told that before I can successfully love somebody else I first have to love myself, and until I love myself no one else will be able to love me enough or right.  Is all that true?  How can I figure all this out?

“As a kid I was told self-love was a bad thing.  It seemed to mean being selfish or self-centered and egotistical, conceited and even narcissistic.  Sometimes it seemed to mean doing something with myself that was sexual and bad but I never figured out what all was included there.  I knew I was supposed to put others first and myself last, and if I loved myself too much no one would like or love me.

“My religion taught me to love others and not myself, then the opposite by quoting Scripture at me telling me to love others as I love myself.  Isn’t that contradictory?  I don’t know what to think.  I’m so confused about ‘self-love’.  What am I to do?  I know I’m supposed figure all this out on my own but I don’t know how.”

This lament is echoed by a large number of people whose mental and emotional health, indeed, will greatly improve if they come to have greater, healthy, real love for themselves.  Not only that personal enrichment, but their relationship life, likewise, probably will show lots of improvement if they learn what healthy, real self-love is all about, how to do it, and practice what they learn.  But how are they to do that if they don’t know what it is?

Loving Those Who Don’t Love Themselves

There is another perplexing problem related to this confusing and contradictory self-love situation.  If you are trying to love someone who doesn’t know what healthy self-love is, who doesn’t know how to practice healthy self-love, and who even may practice anti-self-love, you possibly are going to have a very problem-filled love relationship.

If you’re trying to love someone whose healthy self-love is low, or someone who is indifferent to themselves, or who even hates themselves it is likely you are in big trouble and are going to need help.  Oh, loving these troubled people can be done and it can turn out well but it sure isn’t easy.  However, if you can encourage them to learn about healthy, real self-love, and to practice it, your love relationships with these un-self-loving people can get a lot easier and way more successful.

Getting A Sense of Healthy, Real Self-Love

You might be thinking, so Dr. Cookerly, are you going to tell us what self-love really is?  Yes I am and rather exactly, but first let’s try to get a sense of self-love before we more precisely define it.  Let’s examine several important ways to get a feel for what self-love is really all about.
First, understand that ‘self-love is healthy, real love’ going from the self to the self.  It’s sort of like feeding yourself healthy, tasty, nourishing food.  Next, be aware that loving yourself may involve some psychological actions you may not be used to.  For instance, it may involve your ‘adult self’ talking to your ‘inner child self’ in very loving ways.

The more scientific may prefer thinking of this as your neocortex sending composed messages to your brain’s limbic system in very loving ways.  Brain research shows that this positive internal dialogue accomplishes real neurochemical improvement, which you experience as feeling better and increasingly thinking more positively about yourself.  Some prefer to say it is your ‘cognitive, conscious mind’ choosing to speak lovingly to your subconscious mind.

Then there is a behavioral component.  Healthy self-love involves treating yourself well, taking good care of yourself, doing yourself favors, taking yourself into good experiences and enjoying them, being sure you surround yourself with good people, and a host of other actions which demonstrate you acting with love toward yourself.

People who do the actions of love toward themselves tend to experience the feelings of happy, healthy self-love which usually follow.  At the emotional level healthy self-love can mean feeling really good about yourself, glad to be you, feeling upbeat and positive about and toward yourself, highly honoring and highly valuing yourself without getting into the forms of false self-love like egotism, arrogance, overbearance, insolence, vanity, ostentation, conceit, self-pity, grandiosity, etc.

Awe and Joy

Healthy, real self-love can involve becoming awed, thankful and joyful about the one-of-a-kind, unique bundle of miracles that you are.  Deeply becoming aware that you are a product of a miraculous creation system that got you started, and keeps you going, and is all part of who you really are – and this, I suggest, is truly awesome.  Therefore, it is worth being joyous (occasionally or even often) about these aspects of yourself.

Regrettably, if you have been brought up only on ‘product’ valuing yourself instead of ‘essence’ valuing yourself, in response to these self-love messages you may think something like “But I didn’t do anything to earn that”.  You are much more than what you earn.  You are born with high-value and you maintain your essence-value as a part of your core whether you do anything productive with your essence or not.

Perhaps you have been trained to discount your value by thinking something like “But there are so many humans; I’m just one of the many millions.  There’s nothing special about me”.  Not true!  You are an individual work of art.  No one is exactly like you.  You are unique and, therefore,  special.  No one thinks exactly like you, has exactly the same emotions, or behaves exactly the same way as you do.  We all are just like our fingerprints –  totally one-of-a-kind, though somewhat similar to others.  So, you can value yourself, especially your essence and core self.  Consequently, the experience of awe and joy about yourself, your essence and your core can be part of healthy, real self-love.

Self  Delight

Do you delight in yourself when you figure something out?  Do you get a little spark of happiness when your wonderful, incredible memory system brings to you the memory you have been searching for?  When you appreciate anyone or anything do you appreciate yourself for a few seconds for having an appreciation system which brings you happiness?

When you fix something broken, or make something new, or cause someone to smile, or help someone in any way at all do you also take just a little bit of time to appreciate yourself for being able to accomplish what you just accomplished?  Do you ever look back on the best experiences of your life and think something like “Good for me, I got and let myself experience that, and it was good”.
Do you take joy into yourself when you see, or touch, or smell, or taste or hear something beautiful and then have a good feeling about being able to do that?  When you have a really good time with another person are you also glad about your own ability to have that good time?

All these things and much more are (and can be) part of healthy self-love.  Actually, when you were a young child you did all these sort of things naturally (baring some disabilities).  Young children around the world do ‘self delight’ unless and until they are taught anti-self-love.  Your own natural tendency to do this may be deeply buried but it’s there, and you can resurrect it.  If this ‘self delight’ mechanism is active in you, but a little rusty, you might polish it up with awareness and experience it more.

Self Care

Part of healthy self-love comes from valuing yourself enough to take good care of yourself.  Diet,  exercise,  good medical attention when useful or needed– developing a very positive, mental/emotional attitude about life and yourself with lots of healthy empathy for yourself so that you are really in touch with your inner messages – healthy, positive, strong relationships full of love of many different types (a couple relationship, friends, family, pets to name a few) – and keeping yourself psychologically growing and actualizing your potentials, all are part of the healthy self-love and the self-care picture which you can develop.

Self-Love and Other Love

Self-love involves a lot of ‘loving others’ and this is how it differs from what might be considered selfishness.  A great deal of research shows us that when you love others well you do yourself a lot of favors.  Those who are good at loving others tend to have lowered bad cholesterol, better brain functioning, stronger community connections, greater longevity, get treated better by others, and a host of other benefits.

Those who live by the great commandment “love others as you love yourself’, in fact, do the best at succeeding and being benefited in life.  Those who don’t love themselves, or don’t love others, or don’t love both themselves and others are much less happy and much less benefited in life.

Healthy, Real Self-love Defined

With all the above in mind, I hope you have a sense of what healthy, real self-love actually is.  So, let’s now define it more accurately.  We will use this site’s working definition of love, found in the left column as “The Definition of Love”.

Healthy self-love is defined as:

Healthy, real self-love is a powerful, vital, natural process of highly valuing, desiring for, often acting for, and taking pleasure in the well-being of the self.

I will now, with healthy self-love, brag that this site’s definition of love recently has been acclaimed in places as diverse as Egypt and China and the US.

Let’s take a look at the elements in this definition. Powerful, yes, healthy self-love is powerful.  It is something you can greatly change your life with, for the better and it can make you much more powerful in beneficially influencing the lives of others.  Vital, means it is important to life and for enhancing life functioning, and that’s exactly what healthy self-love can do.

Natural, demonstrates that it is part of nature and essential existence biologically, psychologically and relationally.  Process, refers to healthy self-love being an active succession of systemic changing operations, all aimed at natural well-being.  High valuing yourself in a deep, emotional sense is the key factor which leads to desiring for and acting for your own well-being and taking pleasure in your own well-being.  It is by this that healthy self-love brings you to thriving wholeness and joy.

The Operational Definition of Self-Love

One of psychology’s ways to define something psychological is to describe its operations.  This usually means to detail the observable actions or behaviors which bring it about, or which occur when the phenomenon being discussed is occurring.  For example, smiling, laughing, animated movement and other such behaviors are acting in ways called happy.

This gives us the operations or behaviors that occur with happiness.  Therefore, those actions give the operational definition of happiness.  Healthy, real self-love can be operationally defined as doing ‘to or for’ yourself ‘one or more’ of the eight major groups of behavior which operationally define healthy, real love.

These behaviors can include things like talking to yourself out loud or silently with loving words, using loving tones of voice and feeling yourself smile as you do this; lovingly caressing or holding yourself; affirming yourself with praise and compliments and accolades; exploring and, with ‘insight’, self disclosing yourself to yourself with appreciation and acceptance; tolerating your shortcomings, failures, etc.; receiving deeply inside yourself praise, compliments, thanks, etc. from others; giving yourself both ‘object gifts’ and ‘experience gifts’; and a host of similar actions.  To learn more about the operational definition of love consult the “Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love” in the left column on this site.

The Functional Definition of Self-love

Another way to define something is to give its functions, or describe what it does or what it accomplishes.  There are five major functions accomplished by healthy, real love.  There also are the same functions found in healthy, real self-love.

Healthy, real self-love functions to:

1. Connect you to yourself and, thereby, harmonize all your parts
2. Safeguard yourself

3. Works to improve yourself in many different ways

4. Causes you to act and be self-healing if you become physically, or emotionally, or relationally damaged or ill

5. Rewards you for doing any or all of the above with joy and other highly pleasurable feelings.
To learn more about the major functions of healthy, real love study “A Functional Definition of Love” found in the left column of this site and in “Self-love and Its Five Healthy Functions”.
Some questions for you to consider: Are you highly valuing yourself in a deep, emotional way?  Are you acting with the behaviors of love toward yourself?  Are you living by the functions of good, healthy self-love?  If not, are you going to learn these things and practice what you learn?  Are you going to inform and maybe teach those you love about healthy self-love?

Special Note: There are many other kinds of definitions of love and self love including poetic, biological, psycho-neurological, phenomenological, recursive, nominal, mathematical, linguistic and a great many more.  Interestingly, the word ‘definition’ in a good dictionary has a very long entry!

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Have you been trained in anti-self-love thinking and acting and, if so, are you practicing those actions and thoughts more than practicing the actions and thoughts that go with healthy, real self-love?

Related posts:

1. A More ‘Ample’ Definition of Love
2. The Definition of Love
3. A Functional Definition Of Love
4. An Introduction: What is Love Dr. Cookerly? 

Escaped Love Truths ???

 

Mini-Love-Lesson  #230

Synopsis: Explore the concept that simple but profoundly important truths about love escape vast numbers of people leading to repeated love mistakes and relational disasters.  Learn how we are made blind to these hidden in plain sight truths and how to unlearn misleading myths to see these truths is also explored.  Learn a highly significant, often missed love truth is given as an example and, finally, what to unlearn to see it and 3 things to learn in its place are given.

Important Simple Truths That Escape So Many

The earth was flat and that was that.  Then somebody noticed that when person comes over a hill, you see their head before their feet because they are coming up over a rounded surface.  Then somebody noticed you see the top of a ship’s mast coming over the horizon before you see its hull.  Then it was noticed that this works in reverse too.  The hull of a ship disappears first as the ship sails over the horizon and you see the top of the tallest mast disappear last.  OMG, the earth must be round like a ball!

Some of the most important truths about love seem to work just this way.  They go unnoticed and not understood even though they are right there pervasively obvious once they have been identified but not until then.  Even many of the smartest surgeons did not believe the germ theory at first, then years later the microscope was invented and germs were seen for the first time.  How many lives could have been saved?

In the world of love, many make disastrous mistakes over and over because they see only what they have been taught to see and are blind to what they have been taught to be blind to -- just like with the flat earth believers.  Some people do not see love truths because they have been taught to be afraid that knowing about love would somehow spoil it.  They do not know that the more truth you know about love the more fantastic and wonderful love turns out to be.  Love truths also turn out to be far more useful than are the magical myths and fantasies about love, but surprisingly in agreement with some of them. (See “Conclusions, Confounding and Corrupting Your Love?”)

There are those who can not see simple truths about love because they have bought-into the fallacy that love is too complicated to ever be even a little bit knowable.  Then there also are the followers of US Senator Proxmire who worked to defund love research because he was sure the American people did not want to know what love was or how it worked.  This, despite a 50 percent divorce rate, high spouse murder rates in every state, high severe parental abuse of children and a lot of other evidence of love relationships going tragically wrong.  Can knowledge about love be put into practice curing and preventing most of those love relating disasters?  More and more evidence points to the answer being a resounding – YES!  (See “Above Normal Love”).  However, there also must be some unlearning.

What Must Be Unlearned?

If you have anything in your head that says don’t, or you can’t, or it’s wrong to learn about love, you will do well to discover what that’s about and explore going against it.  You also will do well to search out and discover the mistakes, wrong training, incorrect connections, blind spots, destructive conditioning, misunderstandings and contradictions about love put into your head by family, culture, religion, etc.  Those will be specific to you but similar to others.  A common contradiction example is “love is not jealous and jealousy proves love is real.  Resolving that contradiction in some people’s heads has caused their relationships and even their lives to either be saved or lost. (See “Ever Think Seriously about Real and False Love?” and link “Does Jealousy Prove Love?”)

So, how about you?  Do you suppose some important truths about love may have escaped your awareness?  Could it be that you might come to have a realization concerning love that could vastly improve your life?  Back in my relational therapy practice days, it was wonderful, time and time again, to see people come to a new realization about love and change their lives with it and, even in some cases, save their lives with it.  The trick is you have to search for it and be open to it, no matter how scary or weird it might seem to be. (See “Contemplating Love”).  So, let’s examine one of the truths that a lot of people don’t seem to quite get.

A very ramifications-filled, complicated, multifaceted, tangled, simple truth about love is this, at least as I see it.

LOVE  FEELING  IS  NATURAL, LOVE  RELATING  IS  LEARNED!

So many people have been led to believe that falling in love and having love feelings will be enough to take care of their love relating issues.  Sure, there may be a little work on communications, or something like that, needed along with that love.  However, it’s your love feelings that will magically or automatically lead you to the solutions, answers, fixes or whatever else you need.  After all, love conquers all, doesn’t it?

One of my postgraduate interns did a pilot study asking a little over 100 divorce clients questions about what they believed would make their marriage work, before they got married.  92% agreed that essentially all they really needed to make it work was love and the rest would take care of itself (i.e. they didn’t need any special learning about relating).  Post-divorce, 97% believed they could use all the special learning about love relating they could get.  2% still thought true love alone would suffice and 1% were not sure.  There were some problems with this pilot study’s methodology so it did not go further but all-in-all I think it hits on a huge love truth.


The huge truth is Love is the most important factor but, by itself, it does not take care of the learning required to make love-relating work.  That you have to work at.  The knowledge and skill of how to relate in and with love is not going to get into your head or your habits automatically or by love’s magic just because there is love in your heart.  The love in your heart can motivate you to learn what you need to know, but that is not magic – it is time, effort and struggling to really get it and then do it in thousands of different ways.  The struggle is enriching, surprising, mysterious, captivating, often joyous, awesome and super worth it.

There are people lucky enough to grow up in very loving homes and they learn by a sort of osmosis.  So many others, who make love-relating work well, first had a very painful failure.  That failure motivated them to go looking for better ways which started them on the path of learning and practicing things that work better.

What Has To Be Learned?

Here is my understanding of major things to focus on to make love-relating work well.  It is important to see what other people, who think somewhat differently than I do, say about this and form your own ideas and then invent what you will practice.  (See “Thinking about Love to Improve Love”).

1. Developing a Love-Oriented Mindset  - This usually involves acquiring an increasing amount of knowledge about love to think with; practicing learning to think about love in a variety of ways, times and situations; growing a habit of pondering how to practically apply what you are thinking about love to your life.  Then making those thoughts lead to new love actions and finally analyzing the results of those actions so as to make future improvements.  It also involves enjoyably pondering the great wonders of love, its mysteries, puzzles, possibilities and even its imponderables.  Also important is growing the habit of thinking with a love-orientation whenever confronted with life issues, challenges, difficulties, opportunities and puzzlements.  Perhaps most of all, is having fun with your growing love-oriented mindset.

2. Developing a love-oriented way to deal with love’s many emotions  - Comprehending that love is not an emotion but rather a natural life process that produces many different emotions, including those of feeling loving, lovable, loved and love empowered.  Learning how to find the guidance message in every emotion and what to do with that guidance, especially working with love’s connectedness, empathy, compassion and awe.

3. Developing the ability and habit to behave with, from and through love toward all including yourself  - Technically, as I see it, this means learning and practicing the identified 12 groups of behavior for giving and getting healthy, real love.  Also learning to operate via the 5 flowing forms of love identified as Adamant Love, Compassionate Love, Ebuliant love, Passionate Love and Serene Love while enriching others with each and being enriched by each.  And learning actions to take in the fulfillment of the 5 functions of healthy real love, to connect, to nurture, to protect, to heal and to be enriched and rewarded with joy.

There Is so Much More

The above are the big three to get started on but there is a great deal more.  Happily you can go on a joyous love learning journey for the rest of your life because real love is an immense, oceanic, yea, even cosmic topic.  These are just some of my accumulated ideas, discoveries and understandings about love (arguably well-grounded in much experience and broad ranging research).  It is important that you learn there are many more which may do you as much or more good than mine.  So, look for them.  Also know more are being developed as we speak because more and more love research is being conducted in so very many fields.  It can all be so very exciting and worthwhile once you get into it, if you haven’t already. Let me further say, I lovingly hope none of the great truths about love will escape you.

One More Little Thing. How about sharing this mini-love-lesson with somebody and seeing if it turns into a loving cross-enrichment event?

As always – Go and Grow with Love
Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: If love is supposed to be so mysteriously unknowable, why did major religions of the world spend so much effort telling us about it?

Heartbreak Mending and the Deep, Multi-Love Remedy

Synopsis: Heartbreak and the fallacy of time mending; heartbreak defined; heartbreak’s secret benefits; heartbreak’s dangers, and five things you can do that are likely to help are all covered in this mini-love-lesson.

Heartbreak And the Fallacy of Time Mending

We all can become heartbroken from the loss of a loved one or the loss of love itself.  Loss can come from a breakup, divorce, a death, abandonment, betrayal, a severe lasting estrangement, a major defeat in life where someone or something you truly love is lost and also by experiencing a severe contradiction to your understanding of how love is to be carried out in your life.  Wherever there is love there is the potential for love loss and, therefore, heartbreak.

The good news is wherever there is heartbreak there is the potential for heart mending.  Without mending, heartbreak can destroy people’s lives or at least large segments of people’s lives.  Therefore, knowing how to assist and hurry the mending process is very important.  Some say time alone will cure heartbreak but that is not true.  More accurately it is that given enough time we slowly, eventually may stumble across some of the things that bring about mending.  It’s what happens ‘in the time’ that makes the difference and, while for many it’s very slow, the process can be hurried somewhat when you know certain actions to take.

There are people who get stuck in their brokenhearted living and stay there for the rest of their lives, not recovering at all.  You do not have to be one of them, nor do those you care about.

What Is Heartbreak

Heartbreak can be defined as intense, emotionally painful, overwhelming and seemingly crushing distress, grief and ongoing agony over the loss of a major, love involvement.  One of the major functions of love is that it brings us into deep, heartfelt connection with the loved.

Another major, love function is that love provides us with vital, psychological, life nourishment.  When our connection to life nourishing love is lost we become at risk. Depression, despair, fear, anxiety, grief, loss of will to live, loss of energy, loss of functionality, and a sense of profound agony and emptiness can result.  These are some aspects of what true heartbreak is.

Heartbreak is seen as a more severe form of heartache, heart sorrow, having an empty heart and other terms indicating hurt is occurring over the absence, or loss, or distancing of someone or something loved.

To be truly heartbroken is a serious and dangerous condition though the term heartbreak and heartbroken are often inaccurately used to indicate milder forms of disappointment and disillusionment, usually connected to romance.  Heartbreak also can be understood as a serious, pathological, neurochemical imbalance occurring in the brain following the loss or severance an important love relationship.

Heartbreak’s Secret Benefits

Having a broken heart may tell you a lot about what you need to know.  It may tell you that the way you are going about love needs an overhaul.  The agony of a broken heart may tell you that who you are choosing, or who you are letting choose you for love relating may need some drastic change.
Heartache and heartbreak from the loss of a love may tell you how important love is in your life, and to give love much more serious attention, and not take it for granted.

Heartbreak may persuade you to expand the number of sources and kinds of real, healthy love relationships in your life.  Heartbreak can tell you to get yourself repaired and then learn how not to be so vulnerable and susceptible, but instead be stronger and more able to cope with love gone wrong.  That usually points to the need for considerable, healthy, self-love improvements.

Heartbreak often is what it takes for a person to finally re-orient and re-direct their lives into more healthy and constructive pathways.  For many people without having experienced serious, broken heart problems they never would have given love enough thought to learn how to do it well.

Heartbreak’s Dangers

Heartbreak can be quite dangerous.  Love loss can and often does bring on serious, suicidal depression.  It also can trigger major abandonment feelings and fears, and a sense of being lost in life.  Heartbreak may result in a retreat from life and an overly defeated, self protective lifestyle.  It can lower your immunity system defenses and make you vulnerable to infectious diseases, and it can cause or exacerbate stress illnesses like heart attacks and strokes.

Heartbreak is known to cause people to turn to various addictions for escape from the pain of heartbreak, although the pain still is there undealt with.  Heartbreak also is thought to be a major cause of addiction relapses.  So, if you are suffering or if someone you care about is grieving with a ‘broken heart’ watch for these danger signs and get real help.

None of these need be your result.  Most people recover from heartbreak.  Most people who get help recover faster, and sooner, and also more thoroughly.

What Helps

One approach to recovering from heartbreak is to take a deep, multi-love approach.  This means purposefully developing your healthy, real love of life, others, self, spiritual love, possibly family love, friendship love, possibly the love of a cause or a worthy involvement, and then throwing yourself into those loves.  Later you can learn to give yourself a chance at a love, similar to the love you have missing from your life, but go about it in a more likely to succeed manner.

In my work with the families of murdered children, those recovering from divorces and breakups, widows and widowers striving to recover, sole survivors of family tragedies, and in my own former recovering from love loss I have found five things that particularly can help many people get started on a path to recovery.  It takes hard work, but it’s easier than living without healthy, real love in your life.

Here are five things that you, or those you care about, can do to help recover from heartbreak:
1.    Go to counseling with a very loving, love-centered counselor or therapist.

2.    Get yourself into daily psycho-educational experiences about love, and love relationships, and everything that’s related.  This means read about healthy real love, watch video presentations, listen to audio talks, journal, search the Internet, go to classes, workshops, seminars, retreats and anything else you can find that relates to learning the how to’s of healthy, real love.

3.    Immediately, but very slowly, and in small steps involve yourself in all sorts of other love and love potential relationships with pets, friends, positive family members, groups of people who are or may be positive and loving.

4.    Increasingly do anything and everything that is potentially distracting and which later may have the potential for being enjoyable.  Start with spectator events like going to happy movies, and then later get involved in things that move your muscles a lot because motion helps change emotion usually for the better.  Even the mildest and briefest of distractions from emotional pain are useful in helping you heal and are likely to help you grow stronger the longer you repeat them.

5.    Slowly and in small steps immediately get into increasingly healthful living.  Exercise, healthy diet (including some strictly pleasurable comfort foods, especially chocolate, a mood elevator, are okay in small amounts), affirmations work, meditation, prayer, yoga, art, sports, upbeat music, nature, etc. all can be part of a healthful lifestyle.  These things first can be first done alone if you prefer, and then later with others doing similar things.  Get a physician’s help, and other health professional’s assistance, and possibly a trainer who may help with motivation. All this can be part of your healthy, self-love program.

This outline is much too brief but is aimed at helping you to get going toward heartbreak recovery, or to help someone you care about who is suffering a broken heart.  It points the way toward a ‘path that many have traveled’ to full, heartbreak recovery and beyond.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
If you already have been a survivor of serious heartbreak, do you know how you did it so that you can do it again if need be?

Critiquing without Criticizing

Synopsis: This mini love lesson presents attracting or repulsing speech; critiquing and criticizing differences; headed toward bonding or breaking up; and what’s coming at you.

Attracting or Repulsing Speech

Which of these statements will you be more likely to make to a loved one:

1. “That was really dumb of you.  How could you have been so stupid?  You never learn do you!  If you just weren’t such an idiot.”
Or 2. “I could’ve made that same mistake.  That just proves were both human and we don’t always get it right.  Do you want to figure out how to fix it on your own?  Or, do you want some help?  By the way we can use this slip-up to learn from so we can avoid this problem in the future.”

The first statement ‘puts down’ both of you psychologically and the speaker probably creates emotional distancing and probably projects a sense of the listener being alone with the problem.  In the second statement the speaker emotionally works to join with listener and to avoid giving a put down message, yet acknowledges a mistake has been made and a want to fix it. You might want to examine which of those two statements is closer to how you learned to talk growing up.  You also might want to think about the people in your life who talk more like the first statement and those who talk more like the second and what influences they might have had.

Here are a couple more statements to examine:

1. “Let’s look at what’s best and worst about what you just did.  Then let’s look at how to improve it.”
Or 2. What you just did is all crap!  There are so many things wrong with it I’m not even going to bother trying to tell you how to correct it.”

Which of these two statements would you rather receive?  Which would be more typical of the way you communicate, especially to loved ones?  The first statement has to do with the speaker and the listener together critiquing something that was done.  By acknowledging that what was done has both ‘a best’ and ‘a worst’ it offers what can be regarded as a critique instead of a criticism.

Critique and Criticism Differences

Criticism is a word with a connotation of tearing down self-concept, personally attacking, searching for and pointing out what’s wrong, and paying no attention to what might be right.  Modern dictionaries now define criticism as fault-finding, disapproving, and unfavorably evaluating.  Criticism at one time just meant analyzing with knowledge.  In some circles that definition still holds true.  Relationally ‘connotation’ often is more important than definition.

Critiquing means to examine with a view to determining something’s nature and qualities. A critique used to be defined as an act of criticism.  However, critique is coming to have the connotation of giving a balanced evaluation without likelihood of emotional dissonance.  Of course, some people can take anything badly and feel wronged by the statement, no matter what.  This is where saying things with a loving tone of voice and loving facial expressions and gestures usually helps to carry a connotation of critique instead of criticism.

Critiquing is evaluating with knowledge, hopefully without the negatives of criticism.  It’s not enough just to change your style from criticizing to critiquing, you also need to make an attitudinal change from blame to one that can be a benefit to both people in a love relationship (this includes to children, family, friends and other love relationships).

Heading toward Bonding Or Breaking up?

Being demeaning with putdowns, complaints, fault-finding, derogatory remarks, etc. is increasingly taken to mean a person is criticizing.  This is the number two reason for couple’s breakups (the number one reason is insufficiently loving) according to some research.  Criticism helps love relationships break apart. Critiquing, as a rule, helps love relationships address issues in a balanced, positive way.

There are some exceptions. There are people who have grown up thinking all positive speech is sugar-coating and only negative, critical speech can be trusted.  There is a type of masochism in which a person feels very uncomfortable hearing anything positive.  Barring things like that, critiquing works a whole lot better with loved ones than does criticism.

If you find it a lot easier talking about what’s wrong rather than what’s right with someone you supposedly love, something may be amiss in your way of going about love.. It just can be that you grew up around people programming you to talk more negative than positive.  In any case, there’s a whole lot of research saying focusing on and talking about the positive more than the negative helps you stay physically and psychologically healthy and is good for love relationships.

What’s Coming at You?

Do you hear lots of criticism coming at you?  There are several possibilities about that. One is ‘you have been programmed to filter out the positive and only hear the negative’ and you possibly may give negative interpretations to neutral and positive statements coming your way.  Another is you are encountering  too many people who would rather talk about the ‘weeds’ rather than the ‘flowers’ in everybody’s psychological garden.

Both of these possibilities can be true.  Then there is the possibility that you are way too much of a noxious influence on others and, therefore, what’s coming at you is appropriate. That too can be fixed with the help of a good counselor or therapist.  If nothing negative ever comes at you suspect that you are surrounded by people who give ‘false positives’ or everybody’s too afraid of you to give you their truth.

If you hear more critical than critiquing talk, it may be time to change some things.  Ask yourself, are the people in your life more negative or positive?  Do some really love you and, if so, do they know how to love well?  Are you unknowingly rewarding them for criticizing you and, thus, reinforcing their tendencies to do criticism more than critique?  Is your interpretation system in need of improvement?   Are you really counting the positive things that are said to you, or are you discounting them, or even not really hearing them at all?  Most important, are you figuring out what to do about these things?

If you let criticism come your way more than critiquing, it can do you and your love relationships a lot of harm.  Are you going to help your loved ones who criticize a bit too much change to a more critiquing style?  With some work, anyone can make critiquing with love a most effective and rewarding love skill.  You might want to read related topics at this site in the Subject Index under the Communication heading: “Communicating Better with Love”, “Love Complaints versus Love Requests”, “Love Positive Talking” and others.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Which are you better at saying to yourself and others: putdowns or praises, compliments or complaints, criticizing or congratulating?

Catharsis Empathy - A Love Skill

Synopsis: Hank on alert; confrontation and bafflement; a wife and sister’s explanation; preventing fighting; catharsis empathy unraveled; and the benefits are all parts of this very important love skills, mini-lesson.

Hank On Alert

Hank went on alert when he overheard his wife and sister sounding mad and nasty in the kitchen.  Cautiously he eavesdropped more.  He figured out they were not mad at each other or at him, but rather at someone else they both knew, and that brought him some relief.  As he listened he was appalled at all the putdowns and criticism they were viciously leveling at this acquaintance.  Then he heard mean-spirited sounding laughter and got anxious again.

He worried maybe this negativity he was hearing eventually would spill over onto him.  Their talk sounded unreasonably one-sided, irrational and illogical.  Hank really wished his wife and sister would be more balanced in their appraisal of this person.  Surely, the unfortunate, targeted person they were talking about wasn’t all bad and maybe even had some good traits.  Besides, being so negative and mean-spirited was bound to be bad for them too.  He wanted the women in his life to be pleasant and kind, and what they were doing sounded so sour and ungenerous.  He screwed up his courage and decided to confront them about their negativity.

Confrontation and Bafflement

Hank bravely walked into the kitchen ready to argue and cajole, but he was caught entirely off guard.  His wife saw him and lit up with a big smile saying, “Hi Hank, come join us.  Your sister and I are having a great talk.  I just love chatting with her.” Everything seemed cheerful and Hank was baffled.  Slowly he diplomatically got around to bringing up his great puzzlement over what was really going on between them.

A Wife and Sisters Explanation

Hank’s wife explained it this way, “We’re helping each other blow off steam, or maybe more accurately, we’re bonding with each other as together we vented out our toxic, bad feelings.  It helps us get clear and feel better.  It’s a lot like what you do at a football game.  You scream and holler insults at the other team or at the referee, and pretend to hate them.  In doing so you bond with your buddies there with you.  We just were doing the same thing more personally.  If anyone ‘really meant’ what they were saying when you are screaming about how awful the other team is, you’d think they were stupid or maybe crazy.”

Then Hank’s sister added, “It’s also like going to a rock concert.  You’re mostly there for the feelings brought on by instrumental music, not the ideas and information in the lyrics. You’re there sharing your emotions and your feelings, and because there’s a like-minded crowd you can do it bigger and better.”

Preventing Fighting

Hank’s wife then thoughtfully added, “I just realized a lot of our fights happen when I want you to be my ‘cheerleader’, and I want to feel like you’re on my side but you start playing devil’s advocate and reasoning with me and trying to calm me down.  When that happens I feel you are not on my side, and even sometimes like you’re my enemy, and I want to get away from you and find somebody who will treat me with empathy, and feel what I feel whether I’m right or wrong.  Besides, that right or wrong stuff that has nothing to do with it”.

Hank replied, “This is a whole different way for me to think and it’s going to take me a while to wrap my mind around it.  I think you’ll have to tell me when you want me to be your cheerleader or to just listen with empathy and not try to reasoned it out.” His wife replied, “Okay, I know you get worried when I cathart, so I’ll try to remember to ask you to be my care companion and not my instructor or fixer or debater.  Thanks for hearing my point of view and being willing to try to be empathetic when I have to vent.”

Catharsis Empathy Unraveled

What Hank ran into and misidentified can be called “catharsis empathy”.  It refers to a time in which one or more people need to vent, or let various emotions out, and have the feeling that the person they are venting with is right there with them, on their side, is joining with them without criticism, and is helping bad feelings come out.

Often when there are pent-up, negative feelings and the dam breaks to let them out, lots of things get said that make no real sense unless you understand the words just help the feelings get vented or experienced better.  It’s like when you tell your kids “It’s time to go to bed” and a kid replies “I hate you, Mommy”.  You know they don’t really hate you.  They are just venting frustration.  It’s not to be taken seriously, but instead understood with empathy.

The Benefits

Cathartic empathy helps people unburden themselves and at the same time helps them become bonded with one another.  When done intimately and personally, it helps us grow more love-bonded.  Receiving empathy and the ‘comradery’ feeling that comes with it while venting helps clean out psychological toxicity.  That, in turn, leads to the ability to think much more clearly afterward.  When one person wants cathartic empathy and not intelligent discourse, it useful for them to say something like Hank and his wife and sister talked about.  An example would be “I just want you to be my cheerleader ,not my coach; just hear me and feel with me, okay?”

It useful to ask loved ones “Is this one of those ‘be your caring cheerleader’ times, or is it something else?”.  Getting good at identifying such times, and showing empathy when catharsis or when any emotional expression occurs is a ‘super important’ love skill. Thousands of arguments and fights, and even breakups might be prevented by showing empathy to a catharting, venting loved one – instead of that ‘blowing off steam’ leading to destructive conflict which so often happens.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
So, how good are you at asking for and giving empathy when emotional catharsis is needed?

Related posts:

1. Listening With Love and IN and OUT Brain Functions
2. Emotional Intercourse
3. Talking to Feelings First, Then Topics – A Love Skill
4. Connection Matching – A Love Skill
5. Intercourse Absent Lovemaking – a Love Skill