False Form of Love: Nympholepsia

Synopsis: This mini love lesson starts with a getting to know Nympholepsia; then discusses unrequited love; a typical case; getting the accurate picture; confusions; sex and Nympholepsia; not wanting what’s wanted; ever seeking and never finding; and what’s to be done about this False Form of Love.

Getting to know Nympholepsia

Nympholepsia is one of the most interesting forms of false love.  Sometimes it is like being in love without having to go to the trouble of actually having any relationship at all. It even can be a love-like relationship with someone who doesn’t even exist.  Nevertheless, the emotions involved can be extremely intense, the behaviors involved quite complicated and sometimes the outcome is quite devastating.

Judge Roy Bean, of “The Law West to the Pecos” fame, is thought to have had a pretty bad nympholeptic problem focused on the greatest actress of his time, Lily Langtry.  He went to all sorts of trouble concerning her, including even renaming a town for her, Langtry Texas.  However, he never had any but the most formal personal contact with her.  One of America’s greatest salonnières and the female who was declared the World’s First, Great, New Age Woman, Mabel Dodge Luhan, is said to have had a terrible nympholeptic relationship with John Reid, the amazing young chronicler of both Poncho Villa and the Communist revolution in Russia and who wrote the incredibly influential “Ten Days That Shook the World.”

Unrequited Love

In the age of chivalry, knights who were supposed to chastely and platonically ‘pine for’ unattainable Royal ladies, who were above their own rank and station, may have been being led to suffer from Nympholepsia (also known as nymphlepsy).  The same condition is thought to affect a fair number of the thousands who go into frenzies when adoring the rock star of the moment.  Then there are those who learn of some hero or heroine of a past time and are quite sure they have hopelessly fallen in love with that person who is no longer counted among the living.

Tragically some of those even suicide so as to have a chance to find their love-interest in the hereafter.  Others swear they meet their paramour in their dreams, while others testify strongly to having had wonderful sex with their favorite lover ghosts.  Some even claim to be madly in love with literary characters that never existed in real life.  Most who suffer from this false form of love do so in a more ordinary way, but that doesn’t make their suffering any less intense.

A Typical Case

Chastity was brought to counseling by her husband who said she cannot sleep, won’t eat and is in a frenzy about everything, but can’t tell anyone what is wrong and we are all very worried about her.  Talking to her alone Chastity frantically fidgeted, got up and paced around and showed many other signs of agitation.  After miscellaneous comments she began to blush and whisper that her condition began right after she learned her pastor was moving to another church in a distant city.  Slowly it all came out. She had become enamored of her pastor soon after he arrived at their church some six years ago.

He was a popular, handsome, charismatic figure that many women found intensely attractive. Chastity quickly came to secretly worship him from afar.  At the church she volunteered for everything that would put her in contact with him.  At night she dreamed romantic but never erotic dreams of him and never let anyone know her true feelings.  She gave him and his wife and their children very nice appropriate gifts, did them favors and never strayed over the lines of propriety.  It was enough for her to just serve him and be in his shadow, though her actions slowly became more and more frenetic.

Her husband, and her children, and later even her parents occasionally complained that her church activities seemed a bit too much but that’s all they did.  But now that the pastor was going to be even more completely unattainable than before she was in a frenzy of uncontrollable, rapidly changing, very difficult to handle emotions.  In time with therapy and some medication she did become healthier.

Chastity came to see she actually did not have an adult, real, romantic relationship with her pastor but rather she was fixated on the fantasy of him loving her.  By being valued by him in her fantasies she too became valuable.  In real life he would often thank her, praise her, compliment her, and make laudatory remarks about her to others.  This gave her meaning, purpose and fulfillment for a time.  Later she figured out that all had to do with her childhood and her father who never was very loving, seldom praising and almost never thankful.  She saw that she didn’t want her pastor to respond to her erotically or even very romantically because those actions would be too different from a father to a daughter.

These dynamics are not common to everyone who suffers from Nympholepsia but they were her dynamics.  Today she is well past all that and has actually grown from the experience but she would not want to go through it again.

Getting the Accurate Picture

The two most important words for understanding Nympholepsia are ‘frenzy’ and ‘unattainable.  The condition throws people into a frenzy of emotions, and scrambled thoughts and sometimes peculiar behaviors.  The dynamics often involve seeking or even feeling one has love for and/or from that which is unattainable.

In the worst cases some people ‘go crazy’ trying to attain the unattainable and then fall into the pits of depression or even psychosis.  In the 1800’s the condition was thought to frequently cause convulsions and seizures, along with other somatic symptoms.

The word Nympholepsia comes from the Greek ‘nympholeptos’ which means to have been caught and bewitched, or entranced by a naked, highly erotic, attractive nymph or Sprite who was by definition unattainable to humans.  This, it was thought, drove people into an emotional frenzy causing them to spend their lives in hopeless pursuit of the nymphs and finally to wither and die.

In mythology and Catholic theology the term meant accidentally seeing a naked nymph and being driven into a frenzy of ecstasy, never again to be satisfied by a mere mortal human.  The only salvation from this demonic possession required a full-fledged exorcism.  Today the term refers to going into an emotional frenzy while trying to obtain something or someone unable to be obtained and being destructively effected in the process.

Confusions

Nympholepsia sometimes is confused with pedophilia because it often involves people of rather different ages being attracted to each other or one to another.  It also has been confused with the ‘Lolita complex’ and misidentified as something that mostly men do with younger females.
It, furthermore, has been confused with nymphomania, probably partly because it has the prefix nymph and partly because it has to do with romantic-like relationship situations and dynamics.  It also has been misidentified as something young girls do toward and with older men.

Some of the people thought to suffer from this false form of love have been known to be quite fixated, and obsessive and occasionally even violent in their acting out of their passion.  The ones in this condition who are highly sexed sometimes are confused with having a sex addiction and the nonsexual ones with having a neurotic or, more recently, with having a sexual desire problem.
It’s interesting that some therapists seem to think this condition mostly occurs only in males and others think it mainly shows up in females.  In my experience it’s pretty gender even.  It also seems to occur in homosexuals, bisexuals, older people, younger people, all races, all socio-economic classes and every other category I know, although there are those that disagree with me about that.

Sex and Nympholepsia

With this condition there can be people who have no sexual desire nor even any sex feelings involved in their nympholeptic condition.  With others there is a great deal of sex especially frenzied, passionate sex.  Sometimes the sex is with a surrogate and sometimes with the target of their passions, and if that target is unattainable sublimation may occur.  A common complaint goes something like “he (or she) professes lots of love for me, has great sex with me, but won’t stay with me, marry me and won’t stop going off with others, or won’t stop doing big, long, involved things that have nothing to do with me and don’t including me”.  Another common complaint is that she (or he) is emotionally unavailable while at the same time being very sexually available.

Some nympholeptics have serial sex.  I once counseled a girl who just knew she was truly, and deeply, and incredibly in love with one drummer after another.  She had all-consuming, frenzied emotions with each drummer right up to the morning after a wild, passionate night of sex together.  Then she would have the realization that the drummer would be going on to others and never really be hers at a heart level, and he just would be like the last several drummers and probably like the next one, which essentially was that he would be unavailable for a healthy, real, love relationship.  In her case the background cause was very poor self love and very musical parents.

For some people suffering this condition it all can change if the female becomes pregnant.  At that point they often lose interest in the other person and it’s all over. This leads some of my evolutional psychology friends to suspect the whole condition has something to do with genetic survival mechanisms.

Not Wanting What’s Wanted

Some people suffering from Nympholepsia are quite secretly and safely satisfied if the unattainable person remains unattainable, though they still suffer about it.  By longing for someone they can’t have, they have a relationship without having a relationship. They can tell people that they love someone and often can tell a great deal about their romantic feelings, but when they want to do something as a single they are completely free to do it.  This accounts for some of the people who marry a prisoner serving a life sentence or serving a very long sentence.  They can say they’re married, they can send love-like messages back and forth, they even can visit, and they can have romantic, long-suffering experiences which brings the drama of romance to their life but with very little of the trouble.

This may be a sort of pseudo-Nympholepsia or just another form of it.  Sometimes people in this variation of Nympholepsia panic and run away if their ‘romantic target’ suddenly becomes available or somehow actually comes into their real life.  Others truly pine away and, to a large degree, either dysfunction or excuse their dysfunction with their unrequited love situation.

Ever Seeking Never Finding

A fair number of people repeatedly go after the unattainable lover, and for a long time they just won’t quit.  This wears them out, drains them, distracts them from healthy productive living, causes a lot of agony, depletes their self-confidence, generally wastes a lot of life, and sometimes gets them to turn to various addictions, become depressed and sometimes suicidal.

Some of these people keep going after the same person over and over, and others keep going after ‘versions of the same person’ but either way they never really get what they’re after.  That’s because what they’re after is truly unattainable.  Do they subconsciously know this?  Some therapists think so, others think not.

Interestingly for many with Nympholepsia if they actually do seem to attain the lover they are after, one of two things happens.  They either have finally won the prize and don’t need to go after it anymore, so they basically sort of say “thank you, goodbye” and go on to something healthier.
The other outcome is that what they have attained turns out not to be all that desirable after all.  In both cases the relationship comes to an end.

In its milder forms Nympholepsia is like a ‘crush’ or ‘the idealization’ phase of an IFD False Form of Love pattern, maybe without the F and D stages. (See False Forms of Love: The Devastating IFD Syndrome)   In a stronger form, the frenzy can get quite destructive and the lack of attainment can be very deeply frustrating and depleting.  All forms of Nympholepsia generally are thought to have a tendency to block people from having healthy, real, love relationships develop.

What’s to be done?

Some form of fairly deep psychotherapy usually is what’s needed to cure this affliction if it is severe.  There are those who seem to ‘mature out of it’.  Some who are good at insight and redirecting themselves, figure it out and learn about healthy, real love and go after that instead.  Knowledge about this condition helps people avoid it, especially in its earlier stages.  If a friend or family member seems to be headed toward suffering from Nympholepsia I suggest you encourage them to read this mini love lesson and then direct them toward a therapist known to be able to do deep, psychotherapeutic work.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Are you now or have you ever set yourself up for love failure by desiring the unattainable?  If so, are you likely to do that again?

Related posts:

1. Fatal Attraction Syndrome – A False Form of Love
2. False Forms of Love: Relational Dependencies
3. False Forms of Love: Limerence and Its Alluring Lies
4. False Forms of Love: Shadow Side Attachments
5. False Forms of Love – Imprint Mating Syndrome 

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Illustration: Nymph by Blanche Paymal-Amouroux, French, 1899, public domain, thanks Wikimedia Commons.

Love Hopes All Things

Mini-Love-Lesson  #251

Note: this is the 14th in our series  What Is Love?- A New Testament Reply based on Paul’s descriptions of love and informed by the relational and behavioral sciences.

Synopsis: Love’s Hope and hope itself are quickly, freshly and rather deeply explored here with probes into a new defining of hope; ways to keep hope alive; an introduction to co-hope love relating; listening to your own hopes “all things” insights; cultural conditioning pro and con; and the results of love’s hope.

The Miracle of Love’s Hope

Love gives birth to great hope!  Let’s look into that.  Love’s Hope is of incredible importance.  Every love relationship starts with hope and grows with hope.  The hope of love gives both joy and power to love relating.  Sharing the hope of love bonds and brightens us as we love.  In down times we are lifted by hope and in up times hope helps us soar.  But do we understand the nature of hope?

Is not Hope an enthusiasm for the future, a sort of pre-happiness that future happiness can and will occur?  Does not love’s hope encourage, inspire and empower us to go forward even when there is little or no reason for optimism.?  Is it true that with fear held at bay by love’s hope, love’s hope sustains incredible endurance, achieves victory in the face of overwhelming odds and cheers up the most dreary of our days?

Is the following a truth about hope?  Hope and love have a circular relationship with each other.  Love breeds hope which then in turn feeds love which then in return feeds and breeds more love and more hope.  To grow love, grow hope and to grow hope, grow love.

Research shows Hope to be one of our most powerful psychological forces for surviving and thriving.  Hope has been found to be wonderfully assistive in helping our biological and our psycho-neurological processes be and get healthy.  It also is a major factor in the dynamics of all types of love relationship and love relating well.  Suppose it is for those reasons that hope and especially love’s Hope exists.

What Is Hope Actually?

Hope is an emotion that occurs in higher order species and much like love is a natural, often vital process assisting survival and advancement toward well-being.  We can define hope as an elated, positive suspicion that a desirable, positive something can or will happen.  In addition, Hope creates the elated, positive suspicion that when positive results occur, positive feelings will accompany them.  In effect, hope is a positive emotion about the possibility of future, positive emotions brought on by future, positive occurrences.

Hope is thought to be processed in the limbic system of the brain which activates and involves our good feeling neurochemistry and neuro-physical brain regions.  It also is thought to frequently, quickly activate when the brain’s love processes activate.

Simply put, hope can be seen as a happiness about the chance for more happiness.

Hope From, With and For Love

Giving love contains the hope that the love given will be helpful, nurturing, enjoyable, perhaps bonding and, when needed, healing.  Hope is pretty much vital to joint love action.  Hope gets people to cooperate toward mutual goals, motivates giving, getting and sharing love experiences and works to heal love relating wounds when they occur.  Love’s Hope can come from love, with love and work very much for love’s health and well-being.

When love relationships get mired in difficulties, it is love’s Hope that keeps the people in those relationships trying for repair and recovery.  When things get so bad, for so long, hope can be lost and then the love relationship itself can be lost.  Keeping love’s Hope alive, therefore, is a major concern for all love relationships having troubles.

Keeping Love’s Hope Alive

When couples, or any close or intimate love relationship, are having trouble it helps if the people in the love relationship decide to be lovingly co-supportive as they work on their troubles.  That helps them work as a team against problems instead of against each other.  Whenever couples or others go against each other, their connection with each other loses and hopelessness tends to grow.

When love relating is suffering, hope can help a lot.  It can make more love-hope happen by sincerely making encouraging remarks, mixing in statements of affirmation and appreciation, taking a break to do shared enjoyment, practicing loving listening skills more than talking, and showing loving care for a loved one’s pain no matter where that pain came from or who caused it.  Making a mutual goal of getting past the troubles and back to happy love relating also can help get love’s helpful Hope going (see “Dealing with Love Hurts: A Dozen Love Hurts to Know and Grow From” and “Conflict, Power and Love Success”).

Co-Hope Love

Do you hope for your loved ones to receive what they hope for?  One way to use Paul’s “Love hopes all things” is to include hoping for what your loved ones hope for.  Then show it to them in a sharing way.

Let’s think about this a little.  Do you seek to know and understand what your loved ones hope for?  Do you help your loved ones discover and understand their own hopes?  Do you share your hopes with them?  In sharing hopes, will you do it in a way that is joyful, celebratory and love bonding for you both?  Doing those things is doing co-hope love .

Here is one of the better ways to love someone via co-hoping.  Joyfully agree to co-share your more outlandish, whimsical or intimate and perhaps secret hopes and dreams.  Then do so sweetly and tenderly.  That often accomplishes doing some Self-Disclosure Love and sometimes some Affirmational Love too.  Both are major ways to communicate Love (see “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love” in The Definition of Love Series).

As you do co-hope, it is important to remember not to go negative.  Any hope is best enjoyed together before and without it being realistically analyzed and/or its down sides being discussed.

Worries and fears are sometimes aroused when hearing what loved ones hope for.  When that happens it usually is best to first examine our own feelings before trying to change those of your beloved’s.  What a loved one hopes for can represent and reveal deep, cherished parts of themselves.  I suggest such revealing is to be not only cared about but enjoyed, even if you do not like the subject matter.

Generally for good love relating – celebrate first, critique later and do not mix the two.

The Importance of Listening to Your Own Hopes

Let’s say you notice you are hoping for something.  Where did that hope come from?  Maybe it came from deep inside your own inner wisdom.  Maybe it is a message that is telling you something you need for your own well-being which is coming to you in the form of a hope.  Perhaps it is a message about someone you love and what they need.  Is your subconscious talking to your conscious via your hopes?  It probably is safer to conclude the answer is yes than no.  It can be good to delve into your hopes to see if they are telling you things you would do well to know.  So often hidden in our hopes and wants are our needs.  This has to do with healthy self-love so do not be too quick to dismiss even your wildest and strangest hopes as merely idle and frivolous thoughts.  Remember, we are talking about hopes ALL things.

All Things- Good?

Translating is tough.  Perfectly interpreting one language’s word into another is like all other earthly perfection --impossible.  Some words in other languages carry or suggest different and additional meanings than our own words for the same thing and vice versa.  For instance, let’s look at our words for believing and for hope.  In English, the word believing does not automatically connotate believing good things but our word hope does.  The word hope, by definition, suggests looking forward to something desirable, or in other words, something good from the point of view of the one doing the hoping.

Some people in language studies posit the ancient Greek words for both believing and hope may connotate a good things meaning.  Therefore, making both believing all things and hoping all things more easily logically sensible and not mysteriously open-ended.  Then perhaps Paul’s words can be accepted as meaning all things good i.e. positive, beneficial, constructive, helpful, healthful, virtuous, holy and sacred.  But that is only a maybe.

These semantics are important because they may help us to more fully understand Paul’s teachings about love.  Thus, Hopes All Things connotatively may mean love automatically goes toward the well-being and benefit of the loved and, perhaps, never against them or it.

Consequently, if you get upset at a loved one and start to want, and/or to act toward hurting or harming that person, according to Paul’s teaching, those destructive feelings did not come from real love.  In fact, they may have come from love-destructive-factors inside you.   Remember, it is posited that healthy, real love always works for and not against well-being.

Not everyone believes love is so purely constructive.  When I worked with law enforcement, I found many who thought there was a strong, dark side to love that caused people to do violence and even murder those they supposedly loved.  Some quite openly saw Christian teachings about love to be wrong or at least ill-informed and incomplete.  Then there are those who see love is a sick thing.

I suggest destructive actions come more from the under-loved, miss-loved, the brain and heart wounded, and the psycho-neurologically malfunctioning than from those who have real love.  I also suggest those who would contemplate or do violence operate from non-love, anti-love and the various forms of false love.  They often manifest things like jealousy, hate, possessiveness, fear, frustration, desires to control, etc. and not the manifestations of healthy, real love.  To this concept, there is the possible exception of mercy killing.  What do you think?

What About Love’s Hope and Cultural Conditioning?

Let us not forget that along with family conditioning, many are conditioned by their culture to be either non-loving or anti-loving.  Love’s hope seems to have little conscious or collective significance for them.  In the more love-positive cultures, spousal murder, physical and psychological child abuse are rare.  Stress illnesses are much less severe and less frequent.  Generally speaking, the more love-positive a society is the more physically and psychologically healthful it is.

The people of love-positive societies are those who teach and model frequent use of the major known behaviors that stimulate love processes in the brain, love feelings in the emotions, and love actions in responding behavior patterns.  In such groups and living conditions, those people exhibit much hopefulness about many things small and large, short-term and long-term and they exhibit the evidence of having healthy and happy love relationships of a number of different kinds.  One of those kinds tends to be good self-love.  You can read about all that in Love and Survival by Dean Ornish M.D. and in The Meaning of Love in Human Existence by Ruben Fine PhD, both of which I highly recommend.  For the major behaviors of love, I proudly recommend my book Recovery Love.

For more knowledge about love’s hope and hope itself, I suggest you check out The Power of Hope: Overcoming Your Most Daunting Life Difficulties--No Matter What by Anthony Scioli, PhD and Making Hope Happen by Shane J. Lopez, PhD (which stems from three interrelated, really interesting, meta-analysis projects).

Love’s Hope Gets Results

When love and hope together work their motivating magic love, relating tends to bloom, broken relationships recover, love happiness mounts and love’s endeavors come to fruition.  Not only that but via love’s hope, causes become victorious, breakthroughs are discovered, potentials  get actualized, advances attained, wrongs righted, and even lives saved.  Of course, it doesn’t always happen that way but because of love’s hope it happens more often than it would without love’s hope.  So, with your love, hope for all things (good).

One more concept.  Some good things might happen if you talked all this over with some friendly, positive others.  If you do that, perhaps mention this source and site and, thereby, maybe help to spread some positive knowledge about love.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: If your hopes bear little action, will your life likely have much actualization?

Love Believes All Things

Mini-Love-Lesson  #250

Note: This is the 13th in our series What Is Love, a New Testament Reply based on Paul’s description of love and informed by the relational and behavioral sciences. 

Synopsis: An examination of believing in believing; looking at how different believing was in different times and places; questions about Paul’s way of thinking; introducing Heart, Gut and Head approaches to believing; and searching into “good” and “bad” for you believing are all pondered here.

Believing in Believing

Let’s think a bit seriously about believing and belief.  Lots of people do not think about this, you know.  Oh, they may think about what they believe but not so much about believing itself.  Psychologically believing has many uses, benefits, drawbacks, confusing factors, dynamics, psycho neurological effects on our bodies’ health and a whole lot more.  We will not be dealing with any of those here but you could if you wish.  We, however, will be dealing with some other beguiling belief factors concerning love and life (see “Thinking Love to Improve Love”).

Did you know, that in current popular usage, belief has become a mild and what some call a cheapened word.  Its impact does not nearly carry the weight it once did.  Nowadays, belief and believing are words rather glibly tossed around with little thought or concern, and even less emotional impact, but it was not always so.

In a number of historical times and places, what you said you believed could be of immense significance.  It even could determine whether you lived or died.  Announcing your beliefs carried considerable gravitas and could have profound influence on how people related to you.  Beliefs were weighty and serious matters which people did not speak of easily or lightly like they often do today.  Instead, thoughtful people tended to speak of their notions, speculations, conjectures, contemplations, sentiments, etc.  When they did speak of what they believed, it tended to have a connotation of passionately held, life affecting conviction.  In short, at those times and places in history people deeply believed in deeply believing.

The above has been said to set the stage for comprehending what Paul may have meant when he, in Greek, put forth “ panta pisteuei” as one of love’s major characteristics.  This most commonly is translated as “love believes all things”.

Can You Believe All Things?

Many modern, thinking people read that love believes all things and wonder what in the world could that actually mean.  Is it a prescription for being gullible, naïve, innocent, easily manipulated, unrealistic or what?  Could it be a sort of fill-in-the-blank test question?  Was it understood or meant to imply all things good, spiritual, holy, etc.?  Is it a projective technique meant to elicit your own personal understanding?  As it reads, it just is not cognitively clear.

Intellectually, to actually mentally believe in all things means to believe in things that are obviously not true, contradictory, toxic, dangerous, destructive and disastrous, not to mention perverse and evil.  Well, that is true if what you mean by belief is our modern world’s cognitive functional concept of belief.  For a great host of people a belief can be anything accepted or judged as more likely to be so than not or, for many others it can be anything desired to be so or not.  For some, believing in something requires data, proof, reason, evidence, or at least authoritative consensus.  But all that refers to conscious, intellectual belief.  It is my suspicion this is not the kind of belief Paul was talking about.  So, let us look at some additional ways to see belief and believing.

Heart, Gut and Mind Believing

It is thought that originally believing meant to hold something dear, something like a thing to be passionate about, cherished and precious.  It was dear to your heart.  That leads me to introduce you to three forms of believing here called the heart, gut and head approaches to believing.

Belief of the Heart If we hold something or someone to be dear in our heart, we can be said to believe in it or to believe in that someone.  To believe in them, or it, implies a conviction that, they are, or it is, perceived to be of positive value and possesses essential quality and significance.  It is heart judged and believed to be intrinsically worthwhile.  Whoever or whatever you believe in, heart wise, means you are genuinely for them or it, respect their or its existence and are more likely to support and strongly act in favor of them or it.  You might even fight for, defend, promote and honor or them or it because, in your heart, you profoundly believe in them or it.  That is the meaning of heart belief!

Belief of the Gut  If we believe something at the gut level, we do so because it is our hunch, instinct, intuition, subconscious reaction, unconscious proclivity, etc..  All of which probably is influenced by our upbringing, emotional history, cultural conditioning, habits and tendencies, current mood and bio-neuro-chemical state at the time (see “Limbic Love & Why You Will Do Well to Know about It”).
Depending on how competent your non-conscious processes perform, this gut belief approach can work for you extremely well, or extremely poorly or somewhere in between.

Belief of the Mind  Mind belief nowadays may be seen as requiring logical reasons, general consensus, expert opinion or perhaps empirical proof, support from a preponderance of objective evidence, replicated research, valid and reliable studies showing high statistical significance and having a lack of significant counter indicating data (see “The Three 3's of Love”). Mind Belief, in that case, is a thing of conscious cognition backed by tangible evidence.  Or at least something coming from a tolerably well-informed, cleverly thought out and well-prepared presentation.

In the past, belief from the mind largely seems to have been influenced by the wisdom masters of old, sundry schools of philosophy and theology, social movements and political ideologies, subtle slow evolution and sometimes sudden breakthroughs of discovery, existential crises or traumatic upheavals and revolutions.  All of those still have impact and influence today but more and more, these days, the guiding light for believing comes from science and technology.

How Did Paul Think?

We cannot know for sure.  From a psychological vantage point, it seems probable that when Paul spoke of “believing all things” he was most likely thinking from a framework of heart-type belief or a combination of heart and gut belief much more than from a head-type belief approach.  Evidence suggests he was intelligent and rather well educated.  However, the cultural ethos he lived and taught in was substantially different from the one we live in.  It is likely that the concept believe had a much more emotionally passionate connotation then than it commonly does today.  Also, Paul lacked the influences of the evidence-based exactitude and empiricism of our day because those had not been invented yet (see “Contemplating Love”).

From my point of view, much of the New Testament presents its truths in a more novel-like form than that of an accountant.  Its expression is more Impressionist like than Realist.  It teaches much in the metaphorical parables manner rather than in factual delineations.  Its great lessons are often global and seldom picayune.  It  reaches more deeply into the heart and gut of matters than into the conscious, rational mind.  I think that is also true of Paul’s way of conveying knowledge about love.

What about the “All Things” Part?

The languages of the New Testament are not understood to be technical languages.  It is said that Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek are all much more like passionate, loose and free Italian than precise, structured and technical German.  Using an Italian mindset, “believes all things” can be seen as an impassioned abstract pronouncement of metaphysical and inspiring grandness.  Using concrete factual German, “believes all things” might be seen as the thinking of a none-too-bright child or the illogical mutterings of a madman.

All things from a heart belief perspective (i.e. Italian like) can be seen as a way to refer to the great, the grand, the miraculous and the mystical.  Of course, that is only one of many possibilities.

Various translations of Paul’s tenants on love may shed light on the “all things” question.  Other translations and interpretations of this, Paul’s 13th precept on love, include “love trusts God always”, “love’s faith never fails”, “love never stops believing”, “love trusts in all things” (spiritual, holy?), “love never loses faith” and love (she, in the feminine) is full of trust”.  Of the 30+ translations reviewed, 18 indicated “love believes all things” to be the most used and agreed-upon interpretation.

Is Believing a Good Thing for You and Yours? 

One way of looking at it suggests believing can be a lot like gambling.  Especially is that so for believing in things which cannot be proved.  In science, one learns you can not prove tomorrow.  You only can acquire evidence of its likelihood.  Nevertheless, every day we act like we believe with certainty (i.e. gamble) that tomorrow will come, and it probably will, but intellectually that is not at all certain.

Belief comes in many formations and amounts. Some people believe (i.e. gamble) on things that turn out to be false and they become severely hurt and/or harmed in the process.  Bad divorces are examples of that.  Lots of people are sustained, strengthened and assisted through difficulties by their belief systems.  Other people believe in as few things as possible seeing life as unpredictable and irregularly dangerous.  Still others are true believers about all sorts of things that seem strange, peculiar, unproven and unlikely to others.  Then there are those that do not believe in believing.  They prefer to be skeptical, dubious and questioning while relying on their suspecting, hoping and speculating processes.  They often see going all the way to believing to be a set up for disappointment, self-deception and for creating blind spots of vulnerability.

Beliefs can empower hope and ongoing endeavor.  It is true many people have been severely harmed when who, or what, they believed failed them.  So for you and yours, will it be better to not believe but instead suspect, hypothesize, doubt, re-check, cross check, double check and question most things?  Or is it and will it be best for you to have strong, passionate, deep beliefs about many things for which you can not find proof but for which you can have heart and gut belief in?  Or will it be a dynamic confluence of both, ever tumbling and twining in your head, heart and gut? (see “Quality Love, Quality Life?”).

One more little thing: how about telling somebody about your thoughts concerning this mini-love-lesson and, while you’re at it, please mention this site and thereby help spread love relating knowledge.

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: About love, are you more of a true believer, a doubter, or a “hopey” and, most of all, are you a love activist?

Love Bears All Things

Mini-Love-Lesson  #249

Synopsis: Here we raise into awareness love’s amazing power for enduring life’s difficulties and destroyers; along with some myths about love’s inadequacy and pathology; a fuller meaning of “bearing”; love relating while bearing all things; possibly wrong and “psycho sick” interpretations and ending with thoughts for developing your own endurance-providing love strength.

Love’s Power for Enduring

Indications of the great and often incredible power of love are able to be perceived as one explores this, the 12th of Paul’s tenants on love.  Think about it.  To be able to bear all things requires monumental strength for empowering stupendous endurance.  Does love really do this?  Countless examples of exactly that are to be found in the history of what people have done with love power.  Risking their own lives, many have saved their loved one’s lives in deadly situations.  Others have ceaselessly searched for and finally discovered their long-lost beloved ones.  Still others have worked for decade upon decade to discover a cure for the disease-afflicted for whom they care deeply.  Millions of others have continued endlessly, supporting and fighting side-by-side for their loved ones who faced overwhelming trials and tribulations.  All these exemplify and offer proof of the endurance power real love gives.

In my own long career as a therapist, I have seen the brave, steadfast power of love empower people to endure seemingly impossible pain, ongoing horrendous stressors, lengthy threatening situations and lifelong heartbreaking occurrences.  Often, but not always, love brought a prevailing ability to survive and often eventually become victorious over monstrous problems.  Without the strength of authentic love, I am quite sure such outcomes would not have been achievable and those involved probably would not have survived.

The Myths That Love Is Weak, Ephemeral Or Bad for You

There are those that have proclaimed love to be a fuzzy, fickle falsehood that makes people weak and powerless.  Some have held that love is an insubstantial, puny, whimsical thing of no lasting consequence.  Still others posit that those involved in love are being entrapped by a seriously de-powering and very detrimental and destructive addiction.

I like to contrast those ideas with the health, psychosocial and animal comparative researchers who have discovered love behaviors to be crucial and powerful for higher life form’s survival and advancement.  Then there are the brain scientists who are discovering more and more about the brain regions and chemistry for processing love and finding them  to be very real and very powerful.  Add to that, the relational scientists who have found the most lasting and healthiest relationships are the ones saturated with the actions that convey love.  Lastly, we also can point to the biblical teaching about love’s power, that no one has greater empowering love than those that lay down their lives for another.  Every day all over the world there are people who, out of love, are risking or sacrificing their own lives for the well-being of others.  Sometimes this is done in a crisis and sometimes in the slow enduring way.

My suspicion is that the nay-sayers of love have not been looking at healthy, real love but rather at various forms of unhealthy, false love (see the “False Forms of Love” series).

The preponderance of evidence points to authentic and well grown love being of enormous power enabling people to survive and thrive, frequently even as they bear all things hurtful and harmful.  Countless love-active parents, comrades, love mates, siblings and strong deep friends have done courageous and long-lasting acts because of their love.  This gives ever mounting evidence to the conclusion that strong, healthy, real love can indeed Bear All Things.

The Fuller Meaning of “Bear” for Your Life

Think about what may be covered by the word Bear.  To bear means to hold up under pressure, endure that which is painful, trying, difficult, hard and/or difficult.  Also to bear is to have the power to withstand while going without adequate support or sustenance.  It can mean not to flinch, break, retreat, surrender, compromise or be crushed.

To Bear also means to carry forward, take on, take to, and deliver unto.  Sometimes to bear can indicate to resist, buck, abide, tolerate, and/or to allow.

Love, healthy real and well-developed love, is seen here as making all the above not only possible but likely when severe and long-lasting difficulties bear down upon you and you remain love-centered (see “Love Centering Yourself”).

Love Relating While Bearing All Things

One of the most important features of love is that it keeps love relationships going as they face hard times.  I saw this most clearly in my work with the parents and families of murdered children striving not to be driven apart and dragged down by this horrendous experience.  I also frequently saw the power of love in helping people endure and co-recover from the anguish of infidelity, the destructive effects of addictions, the miseries of various forms of mental illness and a great deal more.  With enough love and well developed love-relating, all these can be endured and, more often than not, overcome.  This especially is true when receiving some love knowledgeable, caring, professional help.  By the way, you also can apply these concepts to your own self-love relationship.

Interpretation Quandaries

It is always possible we are using a wrong interpretation.  I see that as a good reason to look at a wide variety of translation possibilities as we explore what Paul, in the New Testament, put forth about love.  However, remember finding the one true, right, perfect, translation of anything seems to be beyond human capability.  For constructive cognition, being open to differing ideas of new and ever widening understandings seems to work better.  It also is psychologically more healthful.  As a rule, trying for perfection often tends to block and/or slow progress and can prevent improvement.

In regard to this 12th precept of Paul’s, I explored over 30 translation efforts.  The most numerous of Paul’s Greek “panta stegie” was “love bears or beareeth  all things”.  This interpretation occurred 14 times.  The intriguing variety of other translations included love “never gives up”, “puts up with all things”, “never stops being patient”, “patiently accepts all things”, “puts up with anything”, “always protects” and “she (I like the inclusion of a feminine factor) knows when to be silent” - see my caveat below.

The most different translation I found being considered by some scholars reads something like “love covers the unpleasant in others with quiet” and “love cloaks over what is displeasing in others”.  To this mental health professional, both of those interpretations sound rather pathological and the one about a “she staying silent” quite dubious.

Hebrew issues exist concerning the type or kind of love meant by Paul.  It is suspected that when Paul taught in Hebrew he probably used the form of the word love called Ahava which has to do with very actively giving caring love.  That conveys a meaning somewhat different than using some of the other love words available.  Some of these other love word possibilities suggest Paul could have meant a more maternal type love, or a more brotherly type love, or altruistic love or even chaotic love.  Paul also may have taught in Aramaic that has its own words for love which may possess additional connotations and shades of meaning.

It is interesting that the Hebrew word Ahava sometimes has been interpreted as being similar in meaning to the Greek Agape love and Metta love in Sanskrit.  All these interpretation factors and issues can be used to inform and broaden our understanding of what might be included in the meaning of this 12th tenant of Paul’s.

“Psycho-Sick” Interpretations

Mental health professionals working in the environs of Christendom tend to get rather familiar with psychologically toxic understandings of the Bible.  Here we seem to have a passage that unfortunately lends itself to such psychopathological possibilities.  “Bears all things” has been used to justify needless and useless self-sacrifice, self-flagellation and other forms of self-inflicted bodily harm, destructive self-denial and syndromes in which people experience profound guilt over having not suffered enough.  Other interpretations such as “love puts up with all things” have been used as justification for accepting abuse.  It also can be a prescription for unknowingly rewarding and encouraging seriously abusive and destructive behaviors.

These sorts of interpretations can be seen as teaching people to become docile victims.  They also can be seen as manipulative justifications for sociopaths and psychopaths who use Bible quotes, like “love patiently accepts all things”, for their own ends and against the well-being of others.

Accepting a strict interpretation of  “bears all things” as a Christian duty has helped put no small number of wives into hospitals and/or early graves, not to mention men into jail for wife beating and murder.  It also has been ruinous for children growing up in homes where toxic religiosity, rather than religion, is manipulatively and abusively practiced.

The “she knows when to be silent”, along with the “covers”, “cloaks” or “ throws a cloak of silence” New Testament descriptions, seem perversely useful for curbing free speech, suppressing individuality, encouraging authoritarian relationships and getting away with the criminal use and misuse of the naïve, gullible, trusting and less self assertive of those among us.

It seems to me, though I am of course heavily biased, that most all scriptural passages might do well to have a psychological health commentary available or accompanying them.  Ah, if it were only so.

Developing Your Endurance Love Strength

To grow your love, healthy real love that is, is to grow your courage, your power for positive impact and your cooperation skills; it also means you are likely to grow your love bonds with others and your ability to bear all things.  Also involved here is growing your self love, your other love, your spiritual love and probably your love of life.

What do you do to grow your enduring love strength?  You exercise it!  First you do what you are doing now which is to study love and love relating.  As you continue to do that, find yourself opportunities for doing love action that are not so easy to do.  Maybe you volunteer to work with the disadvantaged or get really involved in a political action group working with or for a cause needed and helpful for the less able.  Maybe you practice giving love via volunteering at a handicapped children’s camp, Red Cross, Good Will stores, library literacy programs, etc.  Then maybe someday you can go on to children’s cancer wards, hospice, campaigns for assistance to the abused elderly or anything you think might be difficult for you.  Yes, your heart may be wrenched in the process but it also may be amazingly enriched and strengthened.

You also can learn and think more about love itself and, as you do so, you can practice giving your love as well as working to receive love and soak it up as much as possible.  In times of trouble, you can get and give caring compassionate love and in times of goodness, you can do joy and happy love as much as you can and in ordinary times, you can give out a countenance of lovingness everyday.  At least, that is how I see it today.  Now, what do you think?

I hope you will not have a great deal to Bear in your future but, if you do, perhaps what you have just read will help some.  It also might help some others you know or encounter.  So, you could tell them about what you have just read and that might help them too.  If you do, please talk a little about this mini-love-lesson and this site.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: Is love better seen as something you fall into, or something that falls on you, or as something you give?

Love Rejoices In The Truth

Mini-Love-Lesson  #248

Note: This is the 11th in our series What Is Love?: A New Testament Reply based on Paul’s description of love and informed by discoveries in relational science

Synopsis: Here is provocative help in examining your relationship with truth as it applies to issues of you and love, examining your inner and outer truth sources, the genius of truth versus wrong instead of right, and helping yourself and your love relationships through truth rejoicing.

You and Truth

What is your relationship with truth like?  Can you be truthful with yourself in answering that question?  If you can, the answers to the following queries may both help and surprise you.

Deep down in, do you usually really want the truth?  Do you usually really give the truth as best you know it to be?  Do you sometimes hide from the truth?  How are you with honestly admitting the truth when you are shown to be wrong?  Could you be one of those people who is usually quite sure you are right and others are not?  Can you face difficult truths well?

How important is accuracy to you?  What about you and revealing the complete truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth; and when is that not a good idea to you?  How are you with both giving and receiving white lies, embellishments, spin, avoiding hurt feelings and slanting the truth in your favor?  Are you good at lovingly being truly magnanimous (seeing both sides) as differing and disagreeable truths are presented to you?

You, Truth and Love

In love relationships, and especially in romantic love, truth has been largely but subtly discredited and, in a sense, quite frequently taught against.  So many romantic love stories are tales of deceit and subterfuge done for the sake of succeeding at love (see “Lies And Love”).  No small number of books exist about how to use deception to attract a mate, catch a mate, keep a mate, control a mate and even cheat on a mate and not get caught (see “Betrayal in Love and Handling It Well”).  They all tend to ignore the super important love question “can something real be built out of something false?”.

The evidence for truth in love being necessary is pretty strong and that is true not only for romance but for love relationships with kids, friends, family, comrades and even with oneself.  I know that in my long career of having counseled thousands of couples, families and alternate lifestyle relationships, I have seen significant lies and falsehoods work better than truth – maybe only four times (see “Compersion: A Newly Identified Emotion of Love?”).  I hope that you at least suspect that in the long run truth, even hard truth, mixed with love works far better than falsehood.

Let’s look at love and truth in your life.  Are you more or less truthful to the people you love?  Do you think they are mostly truthful with you?  Do you think your way of treating them encourages or discourages your loved ones telling you their truth?  Do you see giving your truth as a way of giving your love?  If you tell a hard to hear truth do you mix it with love i.e. gentle tones, caring facial expressions, affectionate touch, comforting gestures, etc.?

Are you prone to watering down some truths, making it sound better than it actually is or perhaps seeing it through rose colored glasses?  Is being unnecessarily blunt, abrupt, brutal, harsh, mean, cruel and sometimes using truth as a weapon to hurt or be harmful in your repertoire?

Paul told us to rejoice in the truth.  Do you do that?  Paul seems to indicate real love motivates us toward truthfulness and truth works against wrongfulness and toward doing right.  What are your thoughts about that?

So, even though your culture and perhaps your upbringing may have taught you against it, are you good and getting better at doing love with truth?  Do you want that skill and to be good at it?

What Is Your Truth about Truth?

Truth, for us humans, is a whole lot more complicated than a lot of people seem to think.  It would appear that about truth we all “see through a glass darkly” as the Bible says.  Arguably, for us to rejoice in truth, it will help to have a fair understanding of truth and its complications.  Here is an example.  In an area called phenomenological psychology, experiments show that no two people ever have precisely or exactly the same perception, concept, or truth about anything.  Different people mean different understandings of everything.  So, if you go far enough into exactitude, you will find diversity not sameness.  I suggest That Is a Truth To Rejoice About because it means sharing our diverse truths can be ever so intriguing, enriching, enlightening and bonding if we do it with enough love.  Otherwise, it could just mean trouble.

Who and what do you trust to give you the truth?  Where do you suppose, what you call truth, comes from?  Do you think you really have trustworthy ways to discern truth from falsehood?  It would appear Paul sees Deity as wanting us to, via love, seek the truth, find the truth, live the truth, see truth as opposed to the wrong, and rejoice with and in the truth.  I find it interesting that, as usually translated, Paul did not juxtapose right from wrong but instead used the word for truth.  In philosophy, truth often has been linked with concepts of right, goodness, justice, beauty, fairness, well-being, virtue, righteousness, etc.  Ergo, is this indicative of the truth being more important than being right?  That certainly is not true for some people.  How about for you?

In your life, do you think truth usually is easy or hard to ascertain?  Have your ways of deciding what is true and what is not worked well for you or not?  Are you open to finding new and perhaps better ways of discovering and working with truth in your life?  How about in your love life?

Inner and Outer Truth Sources

We all can be said to have available two sources of what we decide is our source of truth.  One can be called our inner source.  This can encompass our reasoning, IQ, insightfulness, gut reactions, expanse of knowledge, type and form of habitual cognition, accessibility to our subconscious, emotional proclivities and more.  Some rely on this inner source almost exclusively and others as little as possible.

Our second source can be called outer and it may include popular consensus, conformity pressure, authority figures, religion, preponderances of facts and data, science, global awareness, philosophical frameworks, historical trends, parents and family, status figures, influential charismatics, friendships, spouses, lovers and news media, etc.  Some rely on one or more outer sources almost exclusively and others hardly at all.  How about you?  Do you know yourself well enough to know what you really are relying on and how much you are counting on that as your prime outer sources?

Now, factor this in.  Some psychological research points to most people depending on a rather undependable source for deciding what is true and not true.  That source is what their subconscious impulses, conditioning and emotions nudge them toward believing about what is or is not true.  This can enable quick decisions but not necessarily good ones.

It turns out our subconscious sense often is heavily influenced by how it has been programmed in childhood to guide a person.  It also is influenced by our psycho-neurobiology.  For example, who becomes your first mate choice is thought to be mostly a non-conscious impulse driven choice for the majority of people.  Scientific research predominantly points to your prevailing gender preference, psychologically and biologically, mostly to be coming from your genetics.  This also can be true even for some of your political leanings and vacation preferences.  To what degree those things are true for individuals varies as does how much those things are affected by psycho-social factors.  Reason and facts often have very little to do with a great many of the choices we make unless we train ourselves to give them high importance (see “What Your Brain Does with Love – Put Simply”).

Right and Wrong Versus Truth

What we humans call right and wrong is very problematic.  That is because so much of what is called right in one culture is called wrong in another.  The same can be said of different times in history.  Furthermore, a great many things called wrong in one era become either right in another era or of no particular consequence one way or the other.  In certain places and times not so long ago, a member of royalty loving a commoner was considered a scandalous wrongdoing.  Actually this is still forbidden and even punishable by death in a few places.  The same is true for love between people of two different religions.  However, the prohibitions against interracial love and non-his and her standard gender love still exist but are fading or are under attack all over the world.  Love itself is becoming the truth that is important rather than the classification’s status in which that love is done.

Perhaps this is the genius of using the term “truth” juxtaposed to the word “wrong” and instead of the word “right” in Paul’s teachings about love.  One way I see this goes like the following.  If we use healthfulness as the standard for arriving at what is right, we might have a much greater possibility of developing a far wider consensus about what we view as right and wrong.  That in turn perhaps could at least reduce some of the contentious and destructive disagreements about who is and what is right or wrong going on in large and small relationship struggles all over today’s world.  Arguably and in a sort of haphazard way, that very thing seems actually to be something of a slowly spreading trend.  There is reason to suspect Compassionate Love (see “Compassionate Love, A Big Sign of True Love?”) and what is healthful, both individually and collectively, are increasingly a mutually emerging goal of people in a great many different places around our planet.  Wouldn’t that be a truth to rejoice in?  It seems likely that Paul and also perhaps Moses might concur. 

Perhaps thinking along these lines may be of help in your own personal life.  It has for me and for others I know.

A “Best” Translation?

There are well over 20 English translations of the Bible and other partial and in the works translations that exist.  Here we are dealing with what Paul wrote as “sugchairei de te aletheeia” interpreted here as “love rejoices with the truth”.  Some other translations variously read “love takes pleasure in the flowering of the truth”, “is full of joy when the truth is spoken”, “joyfully sides with the truth”, “rejoices whenever truth wins out” and a favorite of mine “forsooth it (love)  joyeth with truth”.

Eight translations read “love rejoices in the truth” and eleven as “love rejoices with the truth”.  There are others with minor variations of those two.  Remember, all translations can be used for studying and pondering what Paul hoped readers would understand from this 11th precept on love.

Rejoicing with Truths

Rejoicing, perhaps with loved ones, as you discover new truths and as you hear about others’ discoveries and understandings can be ever so enriching.  Rejoicing also can help you plant memories of what has been discovered or understood, as well as motivate further searching for more truths.  Rejoicing together with loved ones helps love bonds grow as does lovingly exploring, sharing, discussing and even disagreeing about sundry discoveries and understandings.  Yet, there are some issues and concerns to look at.

What do you do if you come across a new discovery or fact that differs from what you thought was true?  Do you get upset, deny ignore, denounce, work to disprove, or what?  Or do you get intrigued, want to look into it further, see it as a challenge for integrating into your compendium of knowledge, regard it as an anomaly to be tolerated but not unduly troubled by, or what?  Can you perhaps have fun with it?

What do you do if, from a loved one, you hear something indicating their truth does not coincide with yours?  Will you be lovingly magnanimous seeking to really understand their understandings, as well as your loved ones personal feelings about the matter?  Bare in mind, we imperfect humans seem to manage only imperfect understandings i.e. “see through a glass darkly”.  We also delightedly can learn there always is more to learn about everything, even contradictory truths.

How are you at handling bad truth and scary truth like a cancer diagnoses or your most dearly beloved doesn’t want you in their life anymore?  Do you get busy checking it out to see if it is really true, look for what you can do about this bad or scary truth, get some help in dealing with it, seek to understand it more deeply and learn from it, or instead of those ways, fall into one form of dysfunction or another and stay stuck there.

How are you and handling good and happy truth?  Do you let yourself really enjoy good truths, share them with others, linger with them, fully soak them up and let them nourish you as you celebrate positive truths?  Do you let good truths inspire, energize and motivate you?  I hope so, because that is what they are good for, along with “upper” feeling truths being able to trigger a lot of health-making responses in our neurobiology.  It turns out rejoicing is really good for you and when shared it is good for your love relationships.

One More Thing – share these ideas with some others and while you’re at it, we would be pleased if you would recommend this site to them.  Remember, it’s all about helping real and healthy love-relating and it’s free, totally free.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question – When you give your truth, do you also give your love?