Why Love Problems Hurt So Bad

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson starts with a discussion of before, during and after love problem hurt; tells how love problem hurt works; what all the hurt is for; what to do about the hurt; and how not to misinterpret hurt’s very important guidance messages.

Before, During and After Love Problem Pain

Breakups, divorce, rejection, betrayal, abandonment, indifference, repulsion, omission, demeaning, repudiation, intolerance, banishment, disavowal, dis-affirmation, spurning, loathing, and a host of lesser, negative treatments coming from someone you hope loves you can all really badly hurt.

In fact they can hurt so badly and for so long that the hurt can sometimes drive people into a deep depression and then to suicide just to escape the pain.  But why?  Before whatever it was that brought on the pain, we were probably doing okay, maybe even good.  Unless there was physical abuse, we are not bleeding or even bruised.  We are still the same person who is just as physically okay as we were before the breakup or whatever it was – aren’t we?  Why should this hurt so much?  Why can’t we just shake it off and go on as we were before?

The truth is, we are not the same physically.  After we have experienced an intense love problem related hurt, parts of our brain become micro-damaged messing up our brain chemistry and our neural-electric functioning.  This can happen whenever we have love relationship problems.  Love loss problems can cause serious neurological dysfunction which we feel as emotional pain. This in turn negatively affects our thinking and then our behavior.  Any problem involving love disconnection or reduction of nurturing and nourishing love experiences can set off several kinds of brain malfunctions.  Whatever affects our emotions is affecting our brain, our thinking and how we subsequently behave.

This means our brains are physically not operating the same as they did before the hurt.  For many people the hurt caused by these love/brain problems are much greater than any physical pain they have ever experienced.

The good news is as we heal emotionally we also heal physically.  The return of love coming our way from the person or people related to the problem can do worlds of good in the healing process.  New love pouring in from old or new sources, and healthy self-love also can do wonders.  ‘Time’ by itself doesn’t really heal much. It is very slow but time in which you do healthy self-love can be very curative.  Spiritual love involvement also can be outstandingly helpful.  Interestingly, pouring your own love into others who need love or help of some kind, such as a worthy cause, a creative endeavor, important productive projects or a major new love interest also works to be very therapeutic for healing from love problems of all sorts.

How It Works

When we experience love problems, especially those that affect or threaten our important psychosexual connections (i.e. love relationships) our neural circuits misfire the same way they do when they are processing physical pain.  The parts of the brain called the Insula and the Anterior Cingulate Cortex, along with the Somatosensory Cortex, try to process the love-related pain just as they do with physically caused pain. For love problem pain, though, there is evidence that it is sometimes harder and takes longer for these parts of our brain to do this processing.

We sense this processing problem as increased emotional pain.  This frequently is called “heartbreak”.  Strong hurt emotions connected to a love problem result in us having a “ broken heart”.  There is evidence that actual physical heart damage may be possible in some people when this happens.  This actually may occur in everyone to some small degree at least.  Then if the love problem and it’s hurt continues, our biological body starts to have other malfunctions which can result in the cascade effect of crashing our immune mechanisms and bringing on stress induced illnesses, including strokes and, yes, even heart attacks.

Our Cerebral Cortex can get affected and then we don’t think as efficiently or effectively.  Before long our metabolism may malfunction and our energy reserves may become severely drained. That is only some of what can go wrong when there is too much love problem hurt for too long.

Since the Neural Pain Matrix of our brain handles both physical and psychological pain in pretty much in the same way, both psychological and physical health problems can develop.  Therefore, both physical and mental health issues need to be addressed, along with love relationship problems themselves whenever there is severe or long lasting love relationship pain.

What Is All The Hurt For ?

Basically, our hurt is a natural system attempting to protect us from harm.  Our pain gives us guidance messages, telling us to change something so that we can avoid being harmed.  The trouble is our pain system can overdo it, as well as under do it, and mis-do it.  It is just like all our other natural systems in that respect.  Our love problem hurt may be interpreted as telling us go make up, patch up and reunite with whoever is involved in the love problem.  Then again it can be, in the case of severe and repeated pain, telling us to escape whoever is involved in the love problem.  Love problem hurt can also be interpreted as telling us to change the way we go about a love relationship.

We can learn to do love in some new way that is much better and much more healthful.  Another interpretation is to go search for someone with whom we can develop a better love relationship.  Another worthy interpretation for many people has to do with reconnecting with other love sources like friends and family members we have been out of touch with.  A frequent, more broadly useful interpretation may be to learn to love ourselves a lot better, and not get into another false love, high agony relationship again; and instead learn to identify and search for healthy, real love.

All those can be a part of the healthful messages coming from our love problem miseries.  The trick is to learn to listen to what the guidance message is, and then do something in accordance with the guidance.  There are other mini-love-lessons at this site which focus on understanding love problem pain (“Dealing with Love Hurt: Diagnosing Love Hurt Accurately”, “Dealing with Love Hurts: Pain’s Crucial Guidance”).

Love problem pain can drive us into withdrawal and isolation which if handled well is like going into our cave after being wounded.  This allows us time to heal and get it all figured out as we do some healthy self-love.  The issue here is not to stay too long in that isolation.  Love can also drive us toward reconnection or to new connections where fresh, healthy love can heal and nurture us.  We are a gregarious species and do best when we are love-connected with loving others.  More and more recent research shows us we humans are built to live in love-connection with one another.  Often it is the pain of love loneliness that gets us to go back to attempting love connection repeatedly.  Not many of us, if any, can do well living like loveless hermits.

Some clinicians and theoreticians think that love problem pain may get more intense or last longer as a way to get your attention if we are ignoring, dodging or denying it.  It also can be a guidance message saying that you are not getting the full message it is trying to send you.  It may keep coming to you, in essence, telling you that you have more to learn from this pain and it won’t let you alone until you have learned what you need to learn.  The unconscious or subconscious can be pretty clever in the ways it tries to help you.

It is interesting that for many people I have counseled, as soon as they get an interpretation of what their love hurt is trying to tell them, that feels right to them, their pain begins to alleviate.  Then, of course, they have to act in accord with the message or the pain returns.  However, when they act on the message that pain seems to be trying to give them, they tend to improve more rapidly and more completely.  I must admit that this works very well for me too!

What to Do!

I like to suggest that the first thing to do, when you are hurting a lot from some kind of love problem, might be to give yourself a hug and tell your inner-self that you are going to figure out what to do– that you are going to do it.  Then you have to go in search of what your inner love problem pain, guidance message is.  People use lots of different techniques to accomplish that searching.  Sentence completion exercises, meditation, self hypnosis, impulse writing, journaling, prayer and of course just talking it over with a good listener-friend often works quite well.

Good counselors and therapists usually have several different, potent techniques to help you look inside yourself and find out your own inner answers.  Remember that once you get the love problem hurt’s message you probably have to follow its guidance and act on it.  If you can’t seem to get just one message, gamble on one and go with it.  I like to suggest you start doing a lot of healthy, self-love behaviors as you begin this process.

Interpretations To Be Avoided

Love problems related pain are often destructively interpreted as telling us we just have not found the right person.  That may have some truth in it but don’t stop with that.  Also likely is the interpretation that says we have to learn more about love, and we have to improve ourselves and improve the way we are going about love relating – maybe a lot.  Another fairly common misinterpretation is to give up on love entirely, or at least give up on human love and live without it.  Many who try that become so love hungry they jump at the first relationship chance that comes along and, therefore, having not learned anything new, they make the same mistakes they made before. Those that do live without love of some type or another often suffer some serious malfunction eventually.

Some actually do quite well with multiple love relationships which can include several lovers and, of course, friends, family, pets, causes and a higher power love relationship.  Escaping the love problem pain by getting into various forms of life-ruining addictions, relapsing, etc. is also a very poor understanding of the natural, healthy message love problem hurt is trying to tell us.  Guidance messages that tell you to hold it all inside, act like you are fine, just be tough, etc. are not healthy and do not allow for healthful catharsis (i.e. crying it out, non-harmfully acting it out, blowing off steam, getting it off your chest, etc.).

Love problem pain’s worst misinterpretation is to kill yourself or your lover or somebody else.  If you hear a message in your head like “just die and you won’t hurt anymore” or “I can’t live without him or her” that is a child level or child-self interpretation which needs adult level reinterpretation.  The usual adult-self interpretation is something like this: “kill off the way you are going about a relationship” or “going about a part of life, and give birth to a new way”.

Any interpretation which is unhealthy for anyone is probably an unhealthy interpretation for you too.  Therefore, interpretations guiding you toward revenge, destructiveness, harm to self or others, retribution, ‘getting even’, attacking somebody or something, etc. are best regarded as not coming from your drives for health and well-being, or from the best in you and for you.  More likely, they may be coming from a self-sabotaging something in your subconscious.  Remember, healthy, real love is constructive, not destructive.  That is true of healthy, real self-love as well as love for others.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
If you have unresolved pain stemming from a love relationship problem, are you going to actually work with the ideas presented above to see if you can get to a better place?

Related posts:

1. Dealing with Love Hurt: Diagnosing Love Hurt Accurately
2. Dealing With Love Hurts: Pain’s Crucial Guidance
3. Returning to a Bad Lover? – A Blocking Technique
4. Dealing with Love Hurts: A Dozen Love Hurts to Know and Grow From
5. Dealing With Love Hurts: Shared And Unshared Pain 

Tolerational Love

Mini-Love-Lesson # 283

Synopsis:
Tolerational love is full of benefits.  It can bring acceptance, leniency, the possibility of forgiveness, flexibility, the allowance for imperfection and the maintenance of connectedness in bonded, love relating.  Tolerational love is great for avoiding arguments and other conflicts over inconsequential and less than serious areas of dispute. Tolerational love also is responsible for keeping a great many couples, families and friendships together, for facilitating reconnecting of those disconnected and for getting past troubles which otherwise would split up relationships.  Tolerational love also clears the way for much more appreciation, enjoyment and the teamwork of constructive love relating. All the time and energy spent in stupid, little disputes, contention over minor factors, unimportant slights and all the other small stuff is freed up for happier and more constructive interaction when there is sufficient tolerational love.

Love adds a lot to tolerance.  Love motivates all the behaviors that show and demonstrate toleration.  By adding the kindness and empathy that is so representative of love itself, toleration is amplified.  When we love someone special, or some group like a family, or even when we love altruistically and for humanitarian reasons, toleration is empowered by that love. When we have healthy, real love for someone, we tolerate their less pleasant aspects -- unless that tolerance supports harmfulness, as in tolerating a physical or substance abuser.

Toleration without love, never-the-less, is a positive attribute.  Often it is more like putting up with something or enduring and just getting past a negative.  Tolerance by itself can be part of being fair and just, minus the feelings of kindness and empathy that love brings.  None the less, sympathy, empathy and pity sometimes may be present within tolerance.  Another difference between tolerance and tolerational love is tolerance, by itself, frequently is short range focused.   For example, we may tolerate loud music for a short time but not day in and day out.  Tolerational love tends to have a longer range focus.  For instance, tolerational love is exemplified by the forbearance given in the long term care of a loved one with a chronic illness.  In short, tolerance lacking love can be done without one’s heart being in it.  Tolerational love, in contrast, magnifies the quantity and quality of the benefits involved.

Intolerance is antithetical to love.  Intolerance sets the stage for disharmony and conflict, robbing us of peace and security.  Intolerance communicates rejection and exclusion.  Intolerance can be seen as narrow minded, prejudiced, biased, dictatorial and unforgiving (“Parenting Series: How To Love Your Child Better” see #6). Intolerant people often are lonely people because their actions tend to exclude and push away others, or they mostly associate with the like-minded and consequently have a narrow societal experience.  A concept to consider about intolerant people is that they may come across as egotistical and arrogant but, in fact, they may lack healthy, real self-love.  It is clinically thought that if intolerant people become healthfully loved, their ability to be more tolerant grows.

Walking in another’s shoes, seeing through another’s eyes or empathetically feeling what another is feeling all speak to understanding, both mentally and emotionally, where another person is coming from.  Having a tolerant, heart-felt approach to humankind, especially to our loved ones, is a best practice in love relating.  

If we can fend off taking things personally, wearing our heart on our sleeve or easily taking offence, we can avoid a great many interpersonal battles.  Tolerational love helps to keep the peace and grow our chances for mutual harmony.

There are some modern enemies of Tolerational Love to watch out for.  Feelings of entitlement can foster intolerance, so can any form of authoritarianism.  Cancel-culture mindsets and behaviors can be filled with intolerance.  That is where meanness and hypercritical blaming are filled with intolerance   Anything that inhibits or censors free speech may involve intolerance.  Intolerance can be seen as imposing one’s own values on another.  Tolerational love can require learning to lovingly listen to things you do not want to hear, at least for a while.  Too long can be detrimental if it is abusive.  Usually, this kind of listening gets easier with more self-love and really owning our own OKness (see “Listening With Love”).

The development of appreciation helps make toleration easier because the more things we appreciate about another the less we focus on the negative.  If we look for what to appreciate in the many ways we are different instead of looking for what to criticize or disdain, we can improve our lives and the lives of others.  An appreciative, love environment fosters everyone’s well-being and happiness.

One more thing

If you talk-over the ideas in this mini-love-lesson with another, it will help to implant them in your own head and maybe in their's which is a good thing, we think. If you do that, please mention our site as the source of a whole lot of ways love can be done and done better. Thank you.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love success question: Can you listen to intolerance long enough to try to lovingly affect it?

Cycling Love for Lasting Love

Synopsis: Here you learn the ‘why’ of love cycling; how thinking about love cycling takes a different kind of thinking; what love cycling really is; the benefits of love cycling; what can go wrong; and what to do next with this knowledge.

Why Love Cycling

Do you want your love relationships to last?  Couple’s love, parent-child love, family love, friendship love and even healthy self-love all become much more likely to be long lasting if you, and your love ones, become good at cycling love.  Not only that, but those who are good at love cycling are likely to enjoy more love, and get more of love’s many emotional and physical health making benefits.  Without love cycling, love relationships tend to be either puny, compared to what they might become, or they are more likely to wither and die.

Thinking about Love Cycling Takes a Different Kind of Thinking

Many people aren’t very good about thinking systemically.  They know how to think about individuals but have trouble wrapping their minds around the systems people operate in.  Here some examples to help you think this different way.  Five mediocre basketball players, who have a really good system of fine teamwork, often can defeat five star players whose teamwork system is poor.  It is the system of interacting that makes the better team, rather than individual ability.  This became abundantly clear to me when I was involved in some research that discovered psychologically healthy, okay individuals could have bad marriages, and people with certain kinds of mental health problems could have good marriages.

Coaches, of every kind of team, have to know how to think systemically about their teams, as a whole, and not just about its individuals, though that too is important.  People suffering from addictions, criminal pasts and certain kinds of mental health problems, who move back to old neighborhoods or their old family, often get sucked into the toxic system that continues to exist in those environments.   That, in turn, triggers their old problems to recur and again they become part of the old system.  Going to live in new and different living situations, with new and different interaction systems, often works far better.

Couples joint counseling and family therapy are much better at getting interaction systems to improve than is individual therapy.  Especially in couples therapy, those who cannot think and operate systemically may not improve.  Listen to Alexander.  “For the longest time I could only think, if my wife would just make a few improvements everything would become okay.  Then I decided it was only me who needed to make the changes.  But both ways of thinking, (she needs to change) (no, I need to change), never helped.  Then I learned that when one of us got unhappy it almost immediately triggered the other one into unhappiness.  It was simultaneously, therefore, both of us in a bad joint system”.

He continued with, “Our system started triggering each other’s frustration, upsetness, anger, fear and mutual defensive dysfunction.  We were, in unison, making an ever escalating, circular system which was destroying our relationship and spiraling us down into failure.

It wasn’t until we replaced that bad, old circular system with ‘love cycling’, that we together created a new system spiraling us up into the happy love we have now.  Whatever either one of us did individually to try to fix our relationship problems, did not work.  It wasn’t until both of us were trying, at the same time, and in the same way, that we worked as a cooperating team.  It wasn’t until we both jointly were using the same, better system, that things improved.  That’s what fixed us”.

Think of a football team and a ballet troupe.  If half the team are running one play and the other half is running some other play; or half a ballet troupe are dancing one dance and the other half a different dance, dysfunctional chaos and confusion will result.  In both, the team and the troupe, one half is likely to be telling the other half that they should be doing things their way, and arguing about it.  The members of the team and the troupe are all doing what they think is the right thing to do, and in fact they are right, from their own perspective.  None of them are doing anything really wrong or bad.

They can be running the play or dancing the dance they think they should be running or dancing quite well, but not in coordination with the other half of their own team or troupe.  That is what so often happens in couples and families when they are not all interacting in the same system.  No matter how well they do individually, until they are in a mutual successful system, the best they can do may not be good enough.

Now, let’s see if we can use this kind of systemic thinking to understand love cycling.

What Is Love Cycling?

In its simplest form, love cycling means this systemic process.  Person number one says or does something that conveys some love to person number two, who then sends love back to person number one.  Then they keep doing that, which forms a circular, feedback loop of giving and getting love actions.  But there’s more to it than that.  Person number two has to notice the incoming love action and actively take it in, and then let themselves feel at least somewhat loved.  Person number two must let, or choose to let, themselves feel loving back toward person number one.  Person number two then has to choose to do some action or words conveying love in return to person number one.

After that they actually have to do what they choose to do.  The two of them, together, have then created one complete turn of a love cycle.  If person number one and two repeatedly keep operating in this receiving and sending, circular fashion, they can be said to be ‘love cycling’.  If this becomes their common way of operating and interacting, they will have created their joint, love cycling, systemic pattern of interacting with mutual interacting love.


What Are the Benefits of Love Cycling?
The existence of that circulating pattern of loving interaction, tends to have a very bonding together influence on couples.  This then frequently results in a lasting love relationship.  Not only that, but the cycle tends to wonderfully generate increasing and more powerful, growing love.  Think of an electric motor going round and round, generating more and more power.

That is how love cycling often works.  Then if a couple adds occasional doses of pleasant surprises, playful variety, exciting sexuality, comforting tenderness and the many other ways of giving love, they are, in effect, feeding each other a rich, healthy diet of nurturing love in an ongoing cycling system.  That cycling pattern is likely to keep them healthfully functioning as a couple for a very long time in spite of whatever adversities may come their way.

What Can Go Wrong

All sorts of things can get in the way of cycling love.  Here are just a few of the major ‘monkey wrenches’ that can be thrown into the love cycling machinery.  If either one of a couple thinks, or has been brought up to subconsciously think, that it is the other one’s job to take care of the love in the relationship, failure is likely.  That is like half a team expecting the other half to do all the work.  Almost as bad, is one person thinking that they themselves must do all the work.  That means they never get around to the essential teamwork of couples love.  Both partners in a couples love relationship have to communicate what they want the next ‘play’ or ‘dance’ to be, and have a way of mutually choosing a joint course of action, and then carrying it out, with each doing their part.  When one, or both, just expect the other one to know what to do, according to how they themselves think, it is likely to go awry.

Some couples are like two performers attempting to sing a duet but they are singing different songs, so all they make is noise.  Until they are using the same song, i.e. system, it is not going to work.  There are hundreds of other things that can go wrong, and about those I suggest you are going to want to read the mini-love-lessons listed in the Subject Index under the “Pain and Problems” heading at this site.  I also, egotistically but truly, highly recommend our new e-book Real Love, False Love, exclusively available at this site, and our older, but still proving to be super useful to couples, book Recovering Love.  That one is especially useful for couples who face addiction issues and is available at www.amazon.com .

What to Do Next

The next thing to do probably is start thinking about how what you do, or say, may trigger someone you love into saying, or doing, what you don’t want them to do or say.  Then also think, how you let what they say, or do, trigger you into doing things, or saying things, they do not want you to say or do.  Add to that, thinking about what you do, or say, that also triggers them into doing saying things you do like, and vice versa.  By doing that, you will begin to have some ideas about your ‘joint system’ with that person you love.  Just about every couple has both negative and positive cycling going on, but they don’t know to think of it as a ‘joint interactive system’.

After that thinking exercise, it might be very good to talk to a beloved of yours about all this, and perhaps get them to read the same things you are reading.  Then start talking about how you want to work as a team in joint, coordinated action.  There is a mini-love-lesson at this site called ‘Competitive Niceness’.  I recently heard from the couple who invented that ‘game’ (or positive interactive system).  Going toward retirement, they moved both their offices into their home, which has accelerated their competitive niceness rivalry, and made for all kinds of new, happy, loving, competitive niceness events in their life together – to the point of each trying to sneak into the kitchen first to do the dishes, to surprise the other, and other hilarious and loving behaviors. Maybe you and yours can do the same.

Hopefully this will help you have a good, starter understanding of love cycling and how to use it in your life.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Do you ever think with the question “What am I doing, that triggers you into doing, what I do not want you to do”, or the question “What am I doing, that triggers you into doing, what I do want you to do”?

Related posts:

1. Listening With Love – Are You Good At It?
2. Listening with Love
3. Wall and Catapult Love Destruction & How To Avoid It
4. Learning About Love – Together
5. Anti-Love, Non-Love & Real Love 

Removing Your Hidden Blocks to Receiving Love Fully

Synopsis: Your hidden blocks, need to unblock; love block defined; an example; many kinds of reception blocking; where the blocks come from; and what to do about it are all covered here.

Your Hidden Blocks

You have love blocks!  They get in the way of receiving love when love comes your way.

They once did you some good but now they are just preventing you from feeling the energizing, warm, safe joy of feeling well loved.  Your love blocks also probably are sabotaging your chances for experiencing love more fully.  Why do we think this is true?  Because having blocks to receiving love is almost inevitable and universal in most of the world’s cultures and most of the world’s families.  No one starting life as an infant and experiencing childhood is thought to escape developing some hidden, subconscious blocks to receiving love.

Actually you might not have survived without them protecting you in your early life.  Now they are in the way.  The good news is you can get them out of the way and go on to a much greater, empowering and more abundant love.  Furthermore, remember that receiving love well is extremely important for giving love well.  It also is very important for doing your share of ‘cycling love’ in a love relationship which is what keeps a love relationship going.  (See the mini-love-lessons on Receiving Love at this site)

Why You Need to Unblock

We now have an abundance of scientific research pointing to a great fact.  If you don’t have healthy, real love in your life, your biological and psychological health systems start to malfunction.  Quite commonly after that, your life may malfunction in one major way or another.  It therefore, is to everyone’s benefit that you discover and remove your major blocks to receiving love fully.

What Is a Love Block?

A love block is anything that repeatedly gets in the way of getting love, when it there to get.  Here we are most concerned with your own, internal blocks to receiving love well and fully, which thereby interferes with you doing healthy, Receptional Love.  Your love blocks likely are too deeply ingrained, non-conscious habit patterns  preventing you from being able to perceive or experience yourself as loved and valued, when love conveying behaviors are being sent to you.  There is research which suggests as much as 75% of the love conveying actions that comes to an average person is missed and, therefore, not received.  A large part of what does get received is not received fully or well.  Could it be that if we all got good at love reception, and got our blocks out of the way, the world would be 75% more love nourished?

An All Too Common Example

After making love, Cato with a big smile, sincerely said to Lacey “I really enjoy the looks you have when you’re in ecstasy, and the sounds you make are a big turn-on too”.  He meant it as a loving affirmation and hoped it would help her feel intimately good, as well as it was sharing of his own, intimate, good feelings.  However, his statement ran into Lacey’s love blocks.  She took it as he was trying to embarrass her by making fun of her, and that he was actually being critical of her in a sort of sarcastic way.  That is how she was taught to interpret straight-forward, complimentary statements in the neighborhood and family she grew up in.

She also learned to react with self-defensive, pulling away while steeling herself with cold indifference.  She further acted to get out of that situation as fast as possible because it had become so negative to her.  Cato took her defensiveness as rejection, which activated his own love blocks.  He was sure he once again had failed with a woman, probably because he was an inadequate lover although he didn’t know how he had failed.  He also once again was thinking he probably was unlovable and would never find the love he really longed for, so he concluded, why try.  He certainly would not call Lacey or try to see her again.  Lacey also decided she would not try again with Cato either because once again she thought she had run into a real, unloving jerk.

It could have turned out much better had either Cato or Lacey, or both of them, been brought up in such a way as to instead regularly think something like this.  Compliments were just compliments, and they themselves were lovable and valued.  So sincere compliments would naturally come their way, and were to be enjoyed.  It also would have helped for them not to quickly think with blame, and consider themselves okay, lovable people who can continue working together on a probable glitch in communication, or mis-perception.  But no, their conditioning and programming made sure their first conclusion was that something negative was coming toward them, and blame and guilt had to be part of it.  Therefore, they should fight or flee from the person sending the perceived negative.

So long as Cato subconsciously and secretly believes women will find him sexually inadequate and basically unlovable, he will view something that goes a bit awry in a relationship as proof that he is failing.  He will then defend himself with counterattack or withdrawal, cutting off his chances to receive love or start a love relationship.  So long as Lacey has a habit of perceiving compliments, praises, thank you’s, and affirmations as not being real or containing some hidden negative meaning, she will effectively block genuine affection, respect and the love she so desperately wants.

The Many Faces of Love Reception Blocking

Blocking love coming your way usually occurs without you consciously knowing it, and in a great variety of different ways.  Here are clues to some of them.  If you think things like the following, you may be blocking your own reception of love.

“If I have to ask him for what I want, that spoils it because if he loves me he is supposed to know and then give me what I want”.

“I’m really not important or special in any way, so no one could really want me.”

“If anybody is nice to you, nine chances out of 10 they are after something, and you’re going to get hurt in the long run if you get taken-in by them”.

“I’m too (fat, skinny, ugly, poor, dumb, etc. etc.) for anyone to ever love me”.

“I’m such a bad person I don’t deserve love”.

“I don’t know how to know or share what I’m feeling and I don’t want to”.

“Love just makes me vulnerable and gets in the way of my success”.

“I missed my one great chance at love and I know I’ll never get another.”

“Whoever I get close to, ends up hurting me”.

“It’s a lot more important to me to be powerful.  Love just makes you weak”.

“It’s too late for me”.

“Love is just a pretty word for sex”.

“When they say they love you, it’s just a manipulation”.

“If you don’t love me just the way I want you to, you don’t really love me”.

“Love means you put yourself last and everybody else first”.

“Aren’t we supposed to be humble, and self effacing, and doesn’t enjoying getting love get in the way of that”.

There are lots more, but maybe this helps you understand the basic ideas about how love blocks get you to think and act against your own best interests.

Where Do Your Love Blocks Come From?

The culture you grew up in, and also whatever subculture you are a part of, can have a lot to do with where your love blocks come from.  For instance, if you were taught that anything having to do with love may have something sexual in it, and everything sexual is bad, you may subconsciously dodge anything loving so as not to be bad.  Many girls, on having their first period, stopped being hugged and kissed by her father, and all other males in the family or neighborhood.  So, ever after, she dodges love with males because she is subconsciously sure it will end in very painful rejection. 

Many boys gets teased, laughed at, shamed and embarrassed by their peers for doing something loving.  In many subculture groups, boys get criticized when they do something loving and chastised for not being strong, cruel and tough; then they never gets over it.  In other cultural groups many girls and boys learn that loving actions are used as a phony mask to manipulate others, and so they never trust or learn to do anything real concerning love.

Families and parenting are where, accidentally, lots of mistakes are made and malfunctioning ways are unknowingly passed on, generation to generation.  In some families they still believe in the, now much disproved, concept that parents who are too loving to their children turn them into weaklings.  Back before real research taught us better, the US and other governments sent out pamphlets to new mothers saying just that, and advising mothers not to cuddle, hug or lovingly touch their children, especially when they cry.  Tough soldiers for the future seemed to be the goal.  Lots of families around the world treat children with cruelty, indifference and neglect when they need love, and so subconsciously program them to be afraid of love and its many manifestations.

Addictions are especially a big problem.  For the child growing up with an alcoholic parent, half the time they do something nice to the sober parent and get a loving response.  The same thing done to the drunk parent brings agony.  This actively, but unknowingly, trains a child to connect love with frustration, confusion, anger, resentment, guilt, pain, contradiction and failure.  Then in their later relationships, all this gets in the way when they attempt relating in love.

What Can Be Done To Unblock and Go On To Good Receptional Love?

I like to suggest that the first thing to do is start learning and practicing the behaviors of healthy, receptional love.  It is amazing how well the “fake it, till you make it” approach works for many things, and this may be a key to one them for you.  You do not have to wait until you have discovered and countered your love blocks.  The very act of trying to accomplish good, receptional love will, in fact, do some of that for you.  As is taught in some forms of Buddhism, right action will lead you to right feeling and right-thinking and thereafter more right action.  However, that might not get the whole job done.  To learn the behaviors and thinking of receiving love well, I recommend you start with the mini-love-lessons at this site that have to do with receiving love or Receptional Love and then get busy.

Then it’s usually good to add more learning about your blocks.  To do that I like to recommend an older, but great, book by Dr. William Ryan and Mary Ellen Donovan called Love Blocks.  It is super for raising into consciousness what your blocks to receiving love may be.  Another ‘red flag’ may be when you experience dysfunction in a relationship.  You might ask yourself, “Might this be caused by one of my love reception blocks”?

Working on improving your healthy, self-love often proves crucial and intricately interwoven with developing good receptional love ability.  Again start with the healthy self-love mini-love-lessons at this site and go from there.

Getting more knowledge about receiving love and the processes that may be involved for you, also can be facilitated by reading Receiving Love by doctors Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt.  My book, Recovering Love, also has very practical sections helpful to this issue.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
The next time somebody says a loving statement to you, or gives you a loving touch or look, how do you want to see yourself respond internally and externally?

Related posts:

1. How Receiving Love Well Gives Love Better 

Self-Disclosure Love

 

Mini-Love-Lesson  #282

Synopsis: How emotional intimacy is achieved and closeness improved through self-disclosure of our inner and most private self; the importance of verbal and behavioral self-revealing for going psychologically naked together; the heartmate satisfaction that can result from sharing our deepest feelings; the best of our selves and the worst of our secret selves are required for profound and close love to grow.

A major pathway to intimate love is disclosing to another who we really are.  Self-disclosure may involve letting another honestly know our thoughts, our emotions, our body and our behavior.  It also can entail relating our private and personal history as well as who we are in the existential now.  

If we do not disclose our true self to our loved ones, they deal with a phony us.  If our phony self is given love, our true self can go love-malnourished or even love-starved.  In some manner, we probably sense the love coming toward us is for our act and not for our essence.

A best practice to getting really close to one another is to become naked.  To become physically or psychologically naked one must take off one’s wraps.  We also must be willing to deal with another’s nakedness.  The psychologically naked may be seen with warts, scars or unhealed wounds.  To show these elements of oneself, is a vulnerable and brave act.  To accept such elements without personal negation, rejection or attack, is a fine act of love.  To uninhibitedly show one’s emotions through expressions, words and touch, are potent ways to self-disclose.  To reveal our true thoughts, our moods, our fears, hang-ups, shame, joy, self-worth, or childlike qualities often are what is hungered for in intimate love relationships.  

Loving Self-Disclosure As A Key To Relationship Fulfillment

Research reveals that self-disclosure is a major key in forming strong relationships, in increasing cooperation and in the growth of mutual emotional intimacy.  When we self-disclose, we often cultivate a sense of bonded closeness.  An imperative for long-lasting and enduring relationships appears to be the inclusion of honest, loving self-disclosures.    

The lack of self-disclosure has been found to highly contribute to agony-filled breakups.  Infrequent self-disclose can impede relational growth.  Relational stagnation, consequently, is too likely a consequence.  Deterioration of a relationship when self-disclosures are absent, or too few and far between, may produce loneliness, isolation and a sense of futility. 

Self-disclosure tends to correlate with high couple and heartmate satisfaction and relational health and functioning. Because self-disclosure helps us know each other more fully and more accurately, trust is enhanced and teamwork is smoother and more effective.  Through self-disclosure, those who love each other often experience a greater sense of unity and contentment (see “Catharsis Empathy - A Love Skill”).

Behavioral Self-Disclosure

In ongoing love relationships, behaviorally showing how you are and who you are is a fundamental necessity.  Revealing your private and personal behaviors may be more important than what you tell about yourself. For instance, the behavior of crying at a sad story may garner more empathetic intimacy and closeness than merely telling about feeling sad for a story’s protagonist. Likewise, actually dancing for joy over something is more potently revealing and sharing of yourself than just announcing that you are happy about the same thing.

In intimate, sexual loving and relating, sharing your body behaviorally usually is vastly, emotionally more important than just talking about it.  Behaviorally demonstrating your love shows a great deal about you that words may never be able to express.  The look on your face, the kindness in your caress, the tender tones of your voice, your playful movements all can give disclosure to the special ways you do love (see “Difficult Topics: A Love-Centered Way To Approach and Broach Them All”).

Positive Feelings and Self-Disclosing Love 

Relational research is beginning to shine a light on the positive feelings involved in emotional relating, especially those having to do with love.  Recently Positive Psychology has contributed a focus on positive feelings like joy, ecstasy, serenity, awe, tenderness and the like. When positive feelings like those are divulged, love relationships tend to be strengthened and deepened.  If I say, “I feel so safe with you” or “Wow, I feel our connection just went up a notch”, or “When we cuddle, I feel truly cherished”, I potently act to reinforce our bonds.  Sharing our significant feelings often can be the glue that holds relationships together (see “Say It With Love”).

As always – Grow and Go with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: What might you not bear to share or bear to hear shared and what if you could?