Intimacy Fears and Love As the Cure

Synopsis: This mini-love-lessons starts by discussing fears and confusion regarding intimacy; and then gets into the question of why intimacy; the yea’s and nay’s of psychological intimacy; and the importance challenge of studying intimacy further for growing great love; more.

Fears and Confusion

“Let’s be intimate!”  Does that statement scare you?  Does it confuse you?  Does it excite you?  Do you wonder if the word intimate means you are being asked to do something sexual, or something emotional, or both?  If someone were to say to you “I feel so intimate with you” would you hope or fear that person wanted to have sex with you, make love with you, or were experiencing emotions of closeness and personal connection focused on you.

When you use or hear the word ‘intimacy’ are you puzzled or quite sure about what is meant?  Are your emotions usually more apprehensive or more positive.  Or perhaps you are just neutral or confused.  ‘Intimacy’ can be just another polite euphemism for being sexual or it can have to do with becoming especially emotionally close and connected with someone.  Many fear that it means they will be asked or required to make themselves vulnerable and exposed, and they fear they will either do that poorly or they will self reveal things that will get them hurt and rejected.

For you, is intimacy about sexuality, or emotional closeness or both, or is it something else entirely.  Whichever way it is for you, is it more of a positive or a negative?  For many people it is one of the most wonderful parts of a love relationship.  For others it is very threatening and to be avoided if at all possible, sometimes both sexually and emotionally.

Many love relationships grow strong and healthy largely by way of intimacy.  Many other relationships fail to thrive because of too little intimacy.  Still other relationships are wounded or ended by way of intimacy poorly dealt with.  All this means that if you want a successful love relationship, understanding and being able to operate well intimately may prove essential.

Why Intimacy?

It is by intimacy that we more fully give the gift of ourselves to those we love.  It is by intimacy that we more fully receive the gift of much more completely knowing another.  It is by intimacy from and with those we love that we more fully experience the joys possible with them.  It is then through intimacy that we can better give those we love, love’s precious acceptance, tolerance, affirmation and the special joys of shared, intimate love.

It is by intimacy that we let others more fully know us and open those more private parts of ourselves to their love.  It is by intimacy that we much more fully and richly experience each other.  It also is by risking intimacy that we show we are brave and strong enough to let ourselves be loved where we fear we may not be lovable.  That is the ‘why’ of intimate love.  It also is why it is best that we strive to overcome our fears of intimacy.

The Yea’s and Nay’s of Psychological Intimacy

Psychological intimacy has to do with close association and personal connection, usually mixed with affection and love.  It implies both a deep and broad knowledge of someone and letting oneself be known deeply and broadly.  Becoming emotionally intimate with another means relating to that person’s essence and core being, and letting them do likewise with you.  If things go well, it can mean developing a sort of close harmony with another’s inner character and most genuine, innermost, true self.  When deep intimacy is joined with love there can be a sense of the fusion of souls connected in profound and wondrous, love-filled, abiding serenity and joy.

If in attempting intimacy things do not go well, it can mean feeling pains of rejection, inadequacy, negative judgment, criticism, disapproval, exclusion, loneliness, emptiness, failure, condemnation and feeling threatened.  Intimacy in friendship love usually includes feeling a very warm, personal attitude toward someone who is feeling a very similar way toward you.  When that occurs a sense of cherished unity with another can occur.  Feelings of intimacy in a couple’s relationship often brings on an amazing, combined, simultaneous sense of serenity and elation.  Feelings of intimacy in a family may include the above and be accompanied by a sense of happy familiarity and safety.

The Role of Risk

Intimacy is feared mostly because usually it requires the risk of self-disclosure.  With self-disclosure one’s inadequacy, insufficiency, ugly parts, failings, areas of ignorance and all other ‘not okay’ factors may be seen and known by another.  With that could come being shamed, demeaned, rejected and abandoned to live a loveless life.  To the contrary, one could also meet with loving acceptance, understanding, inclusion and the joys of intimacy.  Psychological Intimacy often requires considerable and repeated risk-taking.

Are you strong enough and okay enough with yourself to handle attempts at intimacy not turning out well.  If you have sufficient, healthy self-love, risking self-disclosure and being more real and exposed to another can be okay even if it does not go well.  If you are sufficiently, healthfully self-loving, and you ‘own’ it so it can not be taken away from you, taking the risk of self-disclosure can be easier.  Nevertheless, intimacy still can lead to you getting severely hurt emotionally but hopefully not irreparably.

Intimacy Betrayal

When you have an intimate relation with someone they get to know all sorts of things about you.  You may give them intimate knowledge about your secrets, your areas of weakness, your vulnerabilities, your misdeeds, your private ways, along with your peculiarities and your idiosyncrasies.  You also may reveal your secret riches, your private joys and the taboos you relish.  All this they can tell to others who may use this knowledge against you.  Perhaps even worse, they themselves may use this knowledge against you.  Embarrassment, shame, disadvantage, various types of loss, personal defeat, blocking of opportunity and a great deal of emotional hurt might result.  Thus, it behooves you to be very careful about who you become psychologically intimate with.

Cherishing Intimacy

In a love relationship when someone lets you know them intimately, it is very important that you cherish your intimate knowledge and experiences with them.  Cherish means to appreciate, honor and hold special and private whatever has been intimately shared with you.  Unless you are given specific permission to share an intimacy – don’t!

No small number of friendships, romances and family relationships have been irreparably ruined by someone revealing and exposing instead of holding private someone else’s intimate secret.  Sometimes it is because the revealer thinks it won’t do any harm, or it might do some good, or it is just too funny not to reveal.  I know of at least one case in which such a betrayal of intimacy got the revealer shot and another in which a person was jailed, not to mention a passel of breakups and divorce actions.  The unintended negative consequences of revealing private and personal intimacy facts can be enormous.

Cherishing intimacy well often leads to someone becoming much more emotionally close, growing trust, sharing very special joint joy, and feeling preciously and especially uniquely, strongly, personally connected.  Those feelings can be so powerful and wonderful it makes the dangers of psychological intimacy well worth the risk.

Tiny Intimacy

A lot of love’s intimacy gets achieved by tiny actions.  A certain kind of glance, a wink, an ordinary word said in a special tone, a slightly sexual touch quickly done, a word or term with special private meaning, a facial expression that says “I understand and care”, a whispered private nickname, all these and many more tiny acts of intimacy are often used by highly successful couples, friends and family members to achieve and sustain intimate connection.

Sexual Intimacy

Really good and full ranging sexual intimacy involves emotional intimacy.  This may include letting someone explore both visually and by touch every reachable inch of you while you do the same with them.  It also may involve letting yourself be seen as you experience a vast array of uninhibited, different physical and emotional feelings while you appreciatively and intensely do the same with them.

Intimate sexuality may involve tiny, little, extraordinarily precious and awesomely tender movements and moments.  Intimacy in sex also may include amazingly strong and powerful sensations arrived at through wild abandonment resulting in oceanic ecstasy and a sense of cosmic, spiritual connection.  Sometimes for some people the loss of inhibitions and the enacting of actions they have been taught are forbidden, naughty, nasty, filthy, wrong and sinful, etc. are what opens the door to joint, incredible intimacy.  For others sharing actions that are extremely loving, preciously pleasuring, and delicately tender brings forth a sense of miraculous intimacy which is for them magnificently and enormously love-filled.

Sexual intimacy also can be achieved in simpler ways, like just doing a few easy actions of what a love partner wants and seeing that has brought your loved one pleasure.  Once sexual partners know each other well, lots of sexual intimacy is achieved by using that knowledge in simple pleasure-giving and receiving.  This is sometimes done with a kind of sexual laziness and easy-going familiarity resulting in a more serene, further love-filled, intimate bonding.

Curing Intimacy Fears with Love

If you have healthy self-love and a healthy real love of another, or of friends and family, you can use that love to work past your intimacy fears.  To do so, focus on the fact that love can make you brave and, therefore, able to take the risks involved in going psychologically naked, or very self-disclosure-prone with those you want to do love with.  Yes, it will cost you maybe embarrassment, awkwardness and making some blundering mistakes, but remind yourself for growing bigger, better, stronger love it is likely to be worth it.  Just with someone you love, you can say things like “I feel ashamed to tell you this but…?, and “Doing what you want is so utterly embarrassing, let’s go ahead and do it”.

Can you show that you are not good at something yet with someone you love?  Are you brave enough to act and look silly?  Are you strong enough to reveal your weaknesses?  Will you let your real flaws and foibles be seen?  Will you let yourself experience your emotions, and both talk and show them fully.  Doing so often is the price that must be paid for intimate love to occur and grow.

If you center yourself in love, come from love on purpose, and do what you are afraid to do you might be able to reveal yourself to a loved one and then love’s intimacy may result.  With inner, loving, self talk you can tell and show your fears and by doing so move forward, perhaps carefully into greater self-disclosure and the intimacy it can bring.  If you let your fears stop you, you probably will not.  Keep reminding yourself, LOVE CAN DEFEAT FEAR.  Remember also that you can ask those you love for loving tolerance and acceptance as you go.

Study Intimacy

Like most things, the more you study intimacy the more you may do it well.  This mini-love-lesson is designed to help you move at least a bit forward in improving your love relationships via intimacy.  The hope is to get you to consider, and study, and then experimentally practice what you have learned about intimacy.  Those who do well with intimacy tend to extend and strengthen their love relationships.  So can you?  Therefore, it is recommended that you talk with your loved ones about what intimacy is, read about it, carefully experiment and explore, and then discover intimacy more fully and experience its many outstanding marvels and wonders as you go.  Recommended reading Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway by Dr. Susan Jeffers.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
If you were going to go to a loved one, and do something or say something rather intimate right now, or very soon, what would it be?

Related posts:

1. Intimacy Creation – A Love Skill
2. Sex Fears Mastered with Love
3. Intimate Love
4. Willing and Ready for Love?
5. Growing Closeness – A Love Skill 

Protective Love

Mini-Love-Lesson #287

Synopsis: The courage of those who love protectively; our species reliance on the protective love of the cooperative; the 4 cardinal points and formulas for understanding protective love and its psychology; the protective usefulness of fear, worry and anxiety; avoiding over-protective love, plus empowering your own protective love are all concerns of this mini-love-lesson.

Among the stories about us humans, there literally are hundreds of thousands of verified accounts which tell of mothers, fathers, other family, friends, comrades and even humanitarian strangers who bravely defended and tried to save loved ones and others. No one knows how many gave up their lives in these actions of courageous love.

Many nobly give their lives in other ways. Those who defend the downtrodden, the disadvantaged and the persecuted are great practitioners of protective love.  Included in this esteemed group are those who search for cures for illnesses, maybe out of love for a lost or suffering victim of that illness.  Also of note, are the many who watch over and give care to those unable to take care of themselves. Then there are the troops who stand guard, ready to defend and protect.  Many are the others who care about safety and protection and work on better safeguarding devices and procedures.  There are so many more who devote their lives to protective love in large and small ways to the betterment of us all.

Love, real love, is protective! False love seldom is heroically protective but only pretends to be so. Protective love is of cardinal importance to the survival of our species.  Not too long ago, humanity was viewed in a survival of the fittest framework which emphasized conflict and competition.  More recently, our existence has been seen as actually more dependent on cooperation, mutual protection and on love itself.

Protective Love is understood to be hardwired in our brains and has been evolving over millions of years.  There is anthropological evidence that this protective drive predates human existence.  A great many species exhibit protective behaviors (which look like love) not only for their young but for others of their own kind and even for other species.

Cooperative, group, protective behavior also has been observed by naturalists studying higher order animal families, tribes and pack’s defensive actions in the field. An example are the musk ox under wolf-pack attack, who form a circle around their calves; they face outward with their horns lowered ready to gore any wolves hungry or brave enough to attack their circled wall of horns. Another observed example was larger male apes that worked together by standing between predators and the smaller young and females, and even threw stones and tree limbs at predators driving them off. Then there is man’s best friend and the many authenticated stories of dogs saving their master’s lives by attacking threatening bears, lions and tigers. Sometimes these dogs, even when severely wounded, continued to defend their masters even to their death.

Protective Love Is a Cardinal Love

When we shine a light on the meaning of cardinal, we see it indicates immense importance, essential influence and the highest order of significance.  When we combine cardinal with love, we see it points to love’s most potent aspects.  Then, if we add the element of protection, we have a formula that leads to the survival of our species.  

Protective love has the high standing of being a cardinal love because of four major reasons: 

1.  Love motivated protection and rescue has ensured survival throughout the ages.  If it were not for protective love, none of us would be here.  If that is not a cardinal principle, we do not know what is.  Arguably, the survival importance of protective love is true for all higher order species as well.  Protective love is essential to our continuing existence and advancement – protecting self, others, nature, and all that makes life worthwhile is our challenge.  

2.  Another reason protective love is cardinal has to do with our brain.  Our brain is essential to life and our way of being human.  Our brain is built for processing protective love.  That is evidenced in our neurophysiology, neurochemistry and neuro-electrical functioning.  Thus, our brain is central to our behaviors of giving and receiving love.   

3.  Protective love is cardinal because it encompasses many of our grandest, human actions.  Protective love has been the chief, driving force motivating millions of life-saving actions, courageous rescues and heroic defenses.  Steadfast and enduring, safety-focused actions done on the behalf of those we love epitomize the cardinal nature of protective love.  The altruistic and humanitarian efforts which bring safety to the endangered, healing to the wounded or sick, along with relief to the beleaguered are other manifestations of the cardinal essence of protective love.

4.  The final reason protective love is considered cardinal involves how wide ranging and broadly influential it is. Every way love can be conveyed can be done for safety’s sake. Every love relationship, at times, can need some protective and safety-oriented help.  Every time there is an absence of protective love action, where it might be useful or needed, damage to a love relationship may occur.   However, every time protective love is expressed or enacted it is likely to make a love relationship better.  Every time we are doing protective love, we are doing love relating.

The psychology of protective love is fairly simple. Love involves the high valuing of who and what we love. Therefore, it is natural to want who and what we highly value to keep existing, to function well, and be present in our lives.  Furthermore because of love, we want for the well-being of who and what we love. So, we act to be protective of who and what we highly value.

Protective love not only is an inherently powerful force, it also is empowered by some of our other strong emotions. One of these potent influencers is fear and its cousins worry, anxiety, apprehension and sense of threat. Those emotions can guide us to be cautious, watchful, on guard and safeguarding in our actions so that we can see danger coming and do something about it before it reaches us. Wisely handled, our fears can be self-protective and help us be protective of our loved ones. It is only when fear becomes too big or goes on too long that it becomes a damaging stressor. Fear, worry and anxiety can be our friends providing us with warnings we need to keep us and our loved one’s safe.

Another source of empowerment for protective love is our desire for our loved ones to do well, advance, grow, prosper, actualize and be happy. Anything that might be a threat to those positives, we tend to protectively act against. In short, we want the best for who and what we love and we can be quite powerfully protective about that.

When protective love becomes our dominant guide for how we go about love, danger lurks there. Protective love, even as wonderful as it is, has a focus on the threatening negatives of life and love relating. It is about defending against what can go wrong and shielding us and those we love. Healthy, real love works best when it is dominated by a positive focus on what can go right.  Doing love well usually requires a positive focus.  Protective love, therefore, must be secondary and assistive and must only be the primary way to go about love in times of distinct threat, marked danger and eminent distress. When protective love takes up too much time, energy and effort, it can crowd out the great, positive joys of love. 

As always – Grow and Go with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: Do you know somebody you might like to tell about, or talk over with, these ideas?  If so, you probably will grow from doing that and so will they.  You also might tell them of our free, mini-love-lesson website.

♥ Love Success Question: Who could use some more of your protective love attention?

Number 51: Your Super Tool for Healthy Self-Love

Synopsis: A salvation and success case starts this mini-self-love-lesson; the 51 story follows; core okayness; okayness voters; voters from your past; and the importance of 51 not 100 are all explained here.

Saved by Number 51

Until Cally learned to use the simple, number 51, super tool  her head was often filled with painful thoughts that others were looking down on her, seeing her as inadequate, ugly, stupid, not good enough, socially inept and generally inferior.

What others thought of her she was sure was always negative, disapproving and probably correct.  She was quite sure that no one could look at her or listen to her without having good reason to criticize her.  Her self-esteem, self-confidence, self approval and worst of all her healthy self-love all were nearly nonexistent.  This was true even though, by objective measurement, at most things she was at least average, or a little better, and sometimes even good to excellent at some things.  When people pointed this out to her she felt embarrassed and she thought, not only were they mistaken, but she worried that they were making fun of her, or lying to her because they wanted something.

Cally tried to do everything as good as she could, but it was never good enough to compare to how good other people did.  She always was comparing herself to others and coming up short.  Worst of all she was quite sure no one would ever love her or want to be in a love relationship with such an inferior person.  Cally lived with a pervasive sense of agonizing inferiority, almost constantly torturing herself with her own self-critical thoughts.  If she did hear some critical remark, or something she could interpret as such, it was like knives piercing her.  If a person frowned in her direction, she would try to leave as quickly as possible to escape the terribly tormenting looks of disapproval.

One day by accident Cally ran into Charles.  She remembered him from high school as the boy she kind of liked because he seemed so like herself, but he had dropped out after his serious suicide attempt.  Charles seemed happy to see her and was quite upbeat.  That was so unlike the boy she remembered.  He asked her to go to lunch and she shyly agreed.  He told her his story of once being sure he was a total loser and how he had become a real winner at life, starting with group therapy in the psychiatric hospital.  Then he learned about the magic of number 51.  This is the story he told her about that wonderful tool he used almost every day.

The 51 Story

Every day you are in an okayness election.  If you let what others think of you, or what you believe they think of you, have over 51% of the vote, you are doing a terrible disservice to yourself.  You are letting others determine your okayness.  When you were a child your parents, or whoever was raising you, had over 51% of the vote on how okay you were.  If they voted you were not okay, they could spank you, scream and shout at you in all sorts of disapproving ways, take your toys away, send you to bed without supper, and by doing things like that at worst they programmed you to subconsciously disapprove of yourself.  Your parents, or whoever, also could reward you, let you do what you wanted to do  and give you things that you could not give yourself.  Your okayness, therefore, was dependent on your parents.

When you were starting into adolescence, mother nature insisted that you give importance to your peer’s opinions of you.  It was vitally important to learn to fit in and hopefully get the approval of your ‘in group’ so that you too might become accepted and perhaps even one day be popular.  Some think this is now genetic because when peers did not approve of you, in caveman days, you could be thrown out of the cave, or the village, and the wolves or tigers would get you.  Fitting in meant survival.  Many people get stuck for their whole lives at that adolescent dilemma level.  They never learn that as an adult you can have 51% of the vote on your own okayness everyday.

Thus, both in childhood and adolescence you were learning to give your vote and your personal power away.  But now you can become a full adult and keep everyone else’s votes down at the 49%, or less, level.  If all the world thinks you are terrible but if you vote for yourself, you win the election and feel okay.  If all the world thinks you are marvelous but you, as an adult objectively and realistically can prove that to be untrue, you win that election too, and you are not quite okay just yet.  However, that only means you have some improvement work to do.  You have to be careful here.  It could be subconscious programming from the highly critical, or the  nay sayers of your earlier life that are trying to steal your ‘I’m okay’ vote from you.

See Your Core Okayness

Do you see that the fact you can read this mini-love-lesson proves that you are a miracle of the universe.  Not only that you are a one-of-a-kind, unique, bundle of miracles and even if you have a twin, no one is exactly like the incredible and individual work of art that you are.  Even a rock is a miracle but you are so much more than that.  You are born with miraculous, intrinsic value which you can appreciate, honor and own.  Therefore, you have ‘being’ value.

What you do may or may not add a lot of ‘doing’ value or ‘product’ value” as you go through life.  Think about it.  Newborn babies do not do anything except eat, sleep, poop and perhaps cause difficulty and yet they are regarded as having great importance, or in other words ‘intrinsic value’.  You continue to have that intrinsic value all your life.  Just because there are a lot of us on the planet it does not diminish that.

Now, your job is to ‘own’ your intrinsic and unique value, and be in awe of it, and then be delighted to know that it is ‘the core essential you’.  Thinking that way is a suggested startup focus for growing your self approval, and going on to a full sense of realizing you are okay enough to vote for yourself, every day, 51% or more.

Who Gets to Vote in Your Okayness Election?

Are you like Cally who used to let everybody and anybody vote in her okayness elections every day?  If you are frequently worried about ‘what do others think or say about you’, ask yourself this question.  “Can the people who you worry about thinking negatively of you have any tangible, real effect in your life?  If they do not, and are not likely to effect your health, or those you care about in any major way, why give them many or even any votes?  Likewise, if they do not, or are not likely to affect your wealth by which you buy your own and your loved one’s lifestyle, why let them have many votes?  Also if you are concerned about what others think, and they do not and are not likely to affect your major opportunities in life, or the opportunities of those you care about, why should they get lots of votes in your okayness election.

Maybe you would like to give them a few votes so you can consider their input but certainly not anything close to 51% or more.  If you care about what the neighbor down the street thinks about you, and they have no likely major effect on your health, wealth or opportunities, you can start saying to yourself things like “Neighbor, I will give your input a little consideration but not much.  I’m the one who effects my life the most, and so if you approve of me and my doings that’s nice, and if you don’t, you get no vote in my feeling okay about myself”.

If a policeman is giving you a ticket, care a lot about what he thinks for a short time because he may carry a gun and can affect your health in a really major way.  Care about what your boss thinks because he signs your paycheck and can effect your wealth, and the lifestyle it buys, for you and yours.  Just as the people who live in another nation do not vote in your nation’s elections, do not let those who are not going to really effect your life have more votes than you have for yourself.  You can, in fact, give them no votes at all.

Voters from Your Past

Do you have a ‘committee in your head’ that is constantly criticizing you for one thing or another?  Do you have, living in your head, copies of critical parents or other family members who were negative or abusive to you when you were growing up?  Are those subconscious copies talking against you or putting you down, still telling you, you are not okay today?  Do you worry about what ‘they’ say, or ‘they’ think, and do you know who the ‘they’ really are?

Usually ‘they’ turn out to be people no longer in your life, like those in your teenage years when ‘fitting in’ and peer acceptance seemed so vitally important?  Sometimes ‘they’ are a sort of vague understanding of what you have been taught to believe is ‘everybody’.  Whoever that is in your thoughts, the truth is there are lots of other humans not thinking, or doing, and not even concerned about what you were taught that mattered and was ‘normal’.

It may take some work but you can disenfranchise all these subconscious voters.  Cally and Charles both found that emphatically saying to themselves things like, “You high schoolers in my head, who did not include me in your popular ‘in group’, you no longer matter and you get no more chances to vote in my okayness elections”.  Charles also found saying similar things to the memory of his father, who had physically and severely emotionally abused him, made him feel strong and happy. He said, “Growing up I dared not ever talk back, but now I can, and I finally have been able to completely silence my father’s horrible voice in my head”.

51 but Not 100

One cautionary note, it is important to hear the input of others and especially give those you love both freedom of speech and significant votes in your okayness election but still retain 51% for your own okayness.  Giving 100% to anybody would be too much.  We do best with multiple and diverse views being taken into account.  Now use the ‘51′ tool and vote for yourself!!!

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Right now, can you powerfully say to yourself something like, “I vote myself okay!  Even if the rest of the world votes I am not okay, I still win the election!  I will listen to what the rest of the world says to me, about me, but because I have healthy self-love it will only count up to 49% or less of the vote on me.  I also will work to keep improving, taking in suggestions, but never giving all my power away to what others think or say.”

Related posts:

1. Validation Love Stamp Giveaways
2. Self-Love and Its Five Healthy Functions
3. Forgiveness in Healthy Self-Love
4. Healthy Real Love -or- Toxic False Love
5. Getting Healthy, Real Love in Your Life 

Talking Styles That Hurt and Help Love

Synopsis: We start with how talking styles matter; and go on to understanding your talking style; can attracted opposites talk?; making improvements; and more.

Talking Styles Matter

You have a common style of talking whether you know it or not.  You actually may have several styles dependent on situations and who you are talking to.  Talking styles come in many forms or patterns of speech. They can be lively or dull, submissive, assertive or aggressive, interesting or boring and a whole host of other things.  Your talking style can greatly harm or help your love relationships and you may not even know that is happening.

A dictatorial style will usually promote passive/aggressive resistance or overt rebellion.  A submissive talking style  accidentally may reward mistreatment, and a matter-of-fact talking style can assist emotional distancing and abandonment to occur.  On the other hand, a democratic talking style assists a sharing partnership to occur, while an appreciative and affirmative talking style promotes emotional closeness and bonding.  The good news is you can improve your talking style by working on it and, thereby, improve your love relationships.

Understanding Your Talking Style

Most likely you got your main talking style from the style of verbalizations occurring around you as you grew up.  It also is likely you modeled your speech patterns to some degree on whoever subconsciously seemed to be the most effective person in that childhood environment.  Your larger environment also had a great influence.  Urban or rural, more or less educated, ethnic, nuanced or unambiguous, refined or rustic – they all could have influenced you.  And they all influenced how you have influence on others, including those you love.  Probably if you are like most people, you never have really given much thought to your style of talking (actors and announcers excepted) or how it effects those you care about.  But now let’s think about it.

Is your style of talking working for or against your own important love relationships?  Is your common or most usual way of talking seen by others as frequently insensitive, angry, dictatorial, demeaning, defensive, aggressive, generally negative or what?  If it is any of these or other ‘negative’ talking styles, it is likely to be doing more harm than good.  That especially can be true in your romantic or spouse-style loving.

Negative talking styles also can have a great influence in the love of your children, family, friends and even yourself.  On the other hand, if you usually are perceived to be talking with a mostly ‘positive’ style, that is highly likely to be helping all your love relationships flourish, grow stronger, become more resilient, be more enjoyable, more healthful and to generally prosper.  If others perceive your style of talking as commonly affirmative, friendly, sensitive, democratic, appreciative and especially loving, or in any other way generally positive, your talking style is helping your love relationships even more.

Your style of talking also can be perceived as generally neutral.  A neutral talking style may result in you being viewed as colorless, vacillating, indifferent, bland, disinterested, remote, ineffective, uninvolved, uncaring and worse.  None of these interpretations will help your love relationships’ health and well-being.

Can Attracted Opposites Really Talk?

Jesse Lynn was from and very much a part of the deep southern USA where talk was often slow, graceful and gracious.  However, at times it also was honey coated, full of hidden innuendos, diplomatic carefulness and polite but demeaning and insidious commentary.  Joe was from the New York Bronx where talking styles tended to be heard as aggressive, brash, harsh, fast, full of criticism, sprinkled with abrupt discounts and punctuated by crude put-down humor.  Both Jesse Lynn and Joe were very attracted to those who seemed to be quite opposite to themselves.

On meeting each other they immediately found each other refreshingly different, then got very mutually attracted, and quickly grew ‘electrically’ enamored of one another.  To Jesse Lynn, Joe was rough, tough, and primitive making him a surefire, big, sexual turn on for her.  To Joe, Jesse Lynn was a gorgeous ‘Babe’, southern flower ready and eager for deflowering.  Both could be said to be strong candidates for a ‘Shadow Side False Love Syndrome’ involvement.

After a great deal of passion-filled months, they got to a time where soft, tender, intimate, reassuring talk would have done Jesse Lynn a world of good.  Joe sort of tried but his efforts just didn’t match what was wanted by Jesse Lynn.  Had Jesse Lynn been able to clearly ask Joe for what she exactly wanted, he probably could have done better than he did.  But trying to work with her innuendos, hints and many confusing nonverbal clues just got him frustrated and mad.  Her lack of simple clarity and his loud anger clashed and before long their relationship was over.

As is usual in these abrasive talking style altercations, they both blamed each other and found themselves to be largely innocent of any causation of the demise of their affair.  Jesse Lynn came to view Joe as a disgusting, brutish, barbarian and wondered how she could have ever been attracted to him.  Joe now saw Jesse Lynn as a cloying, saccharine, impossible and deceiving “slut/ bitch” and concluded he was lucky to be rid of her.

What Went Wrong?

From the point of view of a linguistic sociometric analysis, Joe and Jesse Lynn never had a chance for a lasting love relationship.  Their talking styles were far too incompatible to handle the challenges of deeper, relational communication and the work of ongoing, real, love relating.  However, they did feel like they learned some important things, acquired some great “hot” memories and also had gotten some things out of their systems that needed to be experienced before they could go forward.  Later on, they both also figured out that just because two people use the same verbal language it does not mean they know how to adequately communicate with each other for ongoing real love.

Most couples’ talking style problems are not as clear-cut as Jesse Lynn’s and Joe’s.  However, talking style differences are thought to hamper but also to help just about every love relationship.
If you can figure out what is helpful about your talking style and what is causing some difficulty, you could make corrections and come to understand each other much better.

Switching Styles

Everything in Franklin and Janie’s relationship got better when Franklin, a Chief Master Sergeant in the military, learned that when he came home from the base he had to remind himself he had a fine wife in a wonderful partnership marriage, and he must not keep talking in the commanding, bossy style he used all day at the base.  Every day he parks in the driveway and talks to himself for a minute about making the switch in talking styles before going into the house and greeting his wife and children.  Several times he had forgotten to do this and he started giving orders and everything got bad real fast.

Things got even better when he and Janie learned a little schema.  The schema says, with your love mate you have to know whether you are talking head-to-head (thought, logic, reasoning, etc.), heart to heart (love), gut to gut (emotions) or genitals to genitals (sexuality).  When one person is talking from one of those symbolic centers and the other person is coming from a different one, they miscommunicate.  So Franklin and Janie learned to identify and switch to talking from the same center.  Thereby, they got what people call “on the same page” much more often.

Do You Have An Improving Loving Talk Style?

It often is extremely important to develop a loving style of talk and to use it frequently throughout a love relationship.  Lots of people talk rather lovingly in the ‘courting’, early phases of a relationship and then that fades away.  Remember, love works like a nurturing food, and talking lovingly gives that food to those you love. That especially is true if someone’s best way of being loved is through talk.  So, don’t let your loved ones go love-starved or love-malnourished.

Ask yourself what characterizes your main style of talking and is it helping or hindering your love relationships?  You might want to ask loved ones for their honest answers to the same question.  You also might want to ask what is the best and the worst about the way you communicate when interacting with your loved ones.  Can you hear their answer lovingly?  After that you could follow it up with questions about what they want to hear change, add or eliminate in the way you come across.  At first they may not have answers.  In that case you can ask for feedback when they get ideas about this.  Be sure to ask for positive feedback about what they do like when talking with you.  Then use that information to make improvements.

Dare to Check!

When listening to others tell you how they hear you come across, check to see if you hear any common complaints regarding your talk style.

Here is a list of such common complaints: doesn’t listen; is always trying to tell me what to do; doesn’t care about what I think; is too judgmental, close minded, controlling, dictatorial, critical, condemning, blaming; is too authoritarian, too pollyanna; twists what I say all around; talks too long; doesn’t talk – instead lectures; makes light of what is important to me; doesn’t show feelings.
And a few more: thinks they are the only one that’s right; can’t listen without getting upset, angry; guilt trips me; all complaints and no praise; never gives compliments, appreciation or thanks; only looks for what’s wrong; is too laa laa or frou frou; too serious; can’t see other’s viewpoints; won’t allow differences of opinion; gets threatened and defensive too easily; gets hurt too easily and too often; is insensitive, bossy, wishy-washy; just doesn’t show much love .

If any of these comments get said to you, or anything even close to the above statements concerning your style of talking, know that you must be doing something right because someone is being bravely honest with you and thinks you are okay enough to hear these harsh truths.  If you do not get told any negatives, you probably are not getting the whole truth and you may need to come across more friendly and receptive.

Hopefully your self love is strong enough for you to hear negatives about your talking style, and then just go on to make improvements.  If you do not get any positives about what they like in the way you talk, ask for them.  You also might lovingly suggest they need to learn to be more balanced in their critiques.  Remember, you can use both negative and positive comments to improve.  With a negative try some changes.  With a positive work to make it even better.

Very important is not to get offensively defensive, be in denial, try to explain how they are wrong, or just feel bad about the negatives.  Another point to remember is that their evaluation may not be wholly accurate and you always have at least ‘51% of the vote’ about yourself.  Of course, if they are willing, you can ask your loved ones to hear how you hear their talking styles.  Remember to do that with love.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What is your guess as to what is ‘best’ and ‘worst’ about your main talking style?

Related posts:

1. Dealing with Love Hurt: Diagnosing Love Hurt Accurately
2. Love Positive Talking
3. Additive Talking – A Love Skill
4. Are You Talking About Love Enough?
5. Talking to Feelings First, Then Topics – A Love Skill 

Monogamy for Love & Monogamy for Sex

Synopsis: Two real-life, sex and love faithfulness dilemmas starts this mini-love-lesson; followed by the question ‘why monogamy’; ends with concepts and information about how monogamy dilemmas get resolved; and more.

Faithfulness in One and Not the Other

“I keep having this struggle,” Lacey said with an anguished look.

She continued, “I sincerely love my husband and I certainly don’t want to do anything to mess up our really good marriage.  However, every so often I have to have sex with somebody new and different.  My sex life with my husband is good and I know he deeply loves me, and not only that, but he always turns me on.  I wouldn’t change any of that for the world.  But then I get really attracted to other guys and sometimes gals, and I end up in bed with them.

“Sometimes I go back to the same person if we develop a real friendship, but usually the sex part slowly fades out and then we’re just friends, even good friends.  I don’t want my husband to find out because he would be really hurt and I never want to hurt him.  I’m still in love with him and think I always will be.  Outside of sex, he definitely is the one and only for me.  I mean as a life partner he is definitely the one I want to spend my whole life with.

“I struggle and keep trying to become sexually faithful and sometimes I manage it for maybe six months.  In my work I get to go and come as I please, and make my own schedule, and meet a lot of interesting people.  Some of those I bed and have a really erotic, passionate, exciting and very different experiences with.  It’s different from what happens with my husband.  With him it’s more about love with sex.  With the others it’s just about sex but it is usually great sex.  I guess my heart is monogamous but my body is not.  What’s wrong with me?  What am I to do?  This has been going on this way for years.”

It was rather the opposite for Lowell.  He came into counseling saying, “I’m in love with two women and I can’t break it off with either one.  Both of them say I’ve got to choose one of them and let go of the other.  I’ve tried that with each of them, more than once, and it never lasts.  One way or another we just get back into the same three-way thing.  It’s not a sex thing.  Sex with both of them is good.  A few times all three of us tried sex together but neither of them wanted to keep doing that.  I am really in love with both of them.  I am told I can’t really love two women at the same time so it must not be real, but I think it is.

“After all, I love my two parents, and my two children by a former marriage, and both my brother and my sister, so why can’t I love two women at the same time?  They both have tried breaking up with me but then they both have come back, and we start up again.  What am I to do?  I hate to see both of them hurt.  I tried breaking up with both of them at the same time so I wouldn’t hurt them anymore, but that didn’t work for any of us either.  Is there something wrong with me because I can’t choose?  I so don’t want to keep hurting them”.

Why Monogamy?

For ages in many cultures marriage was about the four P’s: procreation, progeny, privilege and property.  Custom ruled at first, and later religion, and then the law.  At certain times in history, love in marriage was even considered embarrassingly wrong and sinful.  In many places and times, monogamy was something married women had to do but not husbands.  That was to ensure progeny or that the man’s official offspring was actually the man’s offspring and not some other man’s.

Love had nothing to do with it.  It was with the rise of the democracies that monogamous love, sex and marriage began to get intertwined and eventually melded together in the minds of many.  Since then more and more, the idea of having a special, monogamous, life partner for love and sex and maybe for offspring has been becoming the desirable way to do things.

Around the world and throughout history that has and is, by no means, the only way.  Nor has monogamy proven to be all that successful a way.  There are those that argue that especially ‘sexual monogamy’ is anti-natural, and attempting it causes more personal and societal harm than health.  There also is evidence that the ‘monogamy of the heart’ tends to work better than the monogamy of the genitals.  In this day and age, many, perhaps most, people have to deal with the issues of monogamy or non-monogamy of sex and/or of love.

The Two Monogamies, Apart and Together

Of course, the two monogamies  do get very mixed up together and are seen as inseparable in a fair number of people’s minds.  Making love is not just having sex but is doing both love and sex simultaneously and, therefore, is one thing as many see it.  It is hard, or nearly impossible, for some to separate the two.  Therefore, to them monogamy means both marital loving and having sex with just each other.  However, it seems for a great many people, they may be monogamous in their spouse-type love but not in their sexuality.

For a large group of others, they come to have romantic or spousal love for more than one person but they remain sexually monogamous with their official spouse.  They have ‘affairs of the heart’ but not of the body.  In those social spheres, countries and cultures where love and sex is supposed to be only with a spouse, this presents many heart wrenching conflicts and dilemmas.  Those dilemmas frequently destroy relationships and even lives.

These dilemmas and their destructive outcomes don’t happen all that much or all that severely everywhere.  Monogamy related dilemmas, to a fair extent, have been resolve in a number of social spheres, cultures and countries.  Historically, polygamy, polyandry and other ‘poly’ approaches have prevailed and worked rather well for at least a sizable percentage of people.

Some cultures or sub-cultures developed a system where a person has a main life partner who is dearly loved but there are also other lovers and even in some places ‘sub-spouses’, or people who also are loved and in which sex relationships occur in an ongoing manner without there being much conflict about it.  Of course, in the monogamy-emphasizing societies, people are not raised to think or operate that way, and so most live either in faithful love and sexual monogamy or in deceit, deception, angst, ongoing conflict and guilt.  A small percentage go ‘outside the cultural box’ and make alternate life styles like polyamour and swinging succeed.

How Do Monogamy Versus Non-Monogamy Conflicts Get Resolved?

For a great many people in the monogamy stressing cultures, resolution comes at great cost.  Heart ache, agony, anxiety, depression, anger and a host of other bad feelings occur, along with breakups, divorces and fractured families.  The final resolution also frequently comes with very emotionally wounded survivors of all that.  For others they go through the same agonies but come out stronger and wiser.  Sometimes those people are much more able to discern how to create and grow real love while avoiding the traps of false love.  Still others just repeat the same, unsuccessful pattern again and again.  For those who go to a good counselor or therapist, there can be repair and improvement along with quicker resolution.

Let’s look at what Lacey and Lowell managed to do for the resolution of their monogamy dilemmas.  Lacey got interested in going back to college which she had never finished.  In doing so, she got really interested in a new career, got fascinated with advanced learning, finished her degree, went on for a Masters and entered her new field.  As she accomplished these achievements she did have sex with several men and a woman but her interest in doing so faded.

Her interest in living honestly and doing love with self-disclosure grew, and with it, a desire to risk her husband knowing a more complete truth about her.  Still, she did not want to hurt him so she remained quiet about her sexual involvement with others.  Then on a trip to Sweden where they met a number of people who practiced what might be called ‘open marriage’ he got a little drunk and let it be known that he knew about her affairs or at least some of them.

He also told her he had known for some time that she had to have others occasionally, and if that is what it took for her to be happy, and their marriage to continue being good, he decided long ago to accept it.  He did wish that she had trusted him enough to open up and tell him about the affairs ages ago.  He then confessed that he had a few involvements with other women of his own but had not wanted to hurt her or risk disrupting their marriage by telling her about them, because those involvements were quite unimportant.  In reaction to that knowledge, Lacey experienced a great, tumultuous, bundle of mixed feelings.

Relief mixed with jealousy, irony mingled with anger, confusion was contradicted by a long desired, beginning sense of closure.  Most surprising was a greater sense of intimate closeness with her husband.  All these feelings went up and down, and around and around like a merry-go-round in her heart and gut.  That was followed by long, emotion-filled talks, lots of hugging, crying, laughter and tenderness, finally ending with a fine sense of mutual serenity.

They both made the agreement with one another that if they got a strong desire to have sex with anybody else, they would talk with each other first and figure it out, sort of on a case-by-case basis.  Most importantly they would not hide anything from each other anymore.  Then together they got very involved as volunteers teaching English to disadvantaged immigrants.  The whole thing about sex with others became a sort of ‘been there done that’ and ‘might do it again, but probably not’ resolved dilemma.

Lowell came to a very different solution.  In counseling, he came to view his problem as one of ‘giving his power away’ to both women.  Like a good ‘male hero’ is supposed to do, he was automatically thinking he had to do what his two ‘damsels in distress’ wanted him to do to alleviate their pain.  He came to the point of view that ‘the difficulty’ actually belonged to ‘those who owned the hurt’.  He could be empathetic, sympathetic and even more loving to them both, but it would be acting against himself to quit either relationship.

Since the women had the pain, they owned the pain and, therefore, owned the responsibility of doing something about their own hurt and dissatisfaction.  He saw that with this approach, one or perhaps both of them eventually might go away, or they might just go on in this three-way relationship for, heaven only knows, how long.  However, as he now thought he didn’t have to sacrifice himself and what he wanted, to solve what was essentially their problem, not his; his resolution was to do nothing different.

Kindly and tenderly he talked all this over with each of them.  Both women got extremely upset, furious, threatening, crying and emotionally thrashed about hysterically, at first.  Then when that didn’t change anything, they both calmed down and they all went on as before since they both were getting some good things from the relationships.  Eventually one of the women became involved with another man, and that led to some very sad goodbyes.  Lowell and the remaining lady then went on lovingly together.

Lacey and Lowell found resolutions, perhaps different than you might want to find if you were in their place.  What I have seen in dealing with a great many of these kinds of situations, is that each individual, or couple, or threesome, with heartfelt love and careful work can find their own, unique, healthy solution.  Those solutions vary greatly but they are solutions.  Being open to multiple outcome possibilities helps tremendously.  Avoiding ‘my way, or no way’ approaches, being pressured into cookie-cutter solutions, making anybody the enemy, doing guilt trips, blaming and judgmental-ism, getting lost in feeling negative, or inadequate, inferior or at fault, clears the way for constructive and sometimes surprisingly creative solutions.

As always – Go and Grow with Love!

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Which is more important to you, monogamous love or monogamous sex, or perhaps non-monogamy for either or both?

Related posts:

1. Multiple Sex Partners and Love
2. Sex Fears Mastered with Love
3. Do You Want To Say ‘Love’ When You Mean ‘Sex’?
4. Making Love OR Having Sex?
5. Can You Talk about Sex – with Love?