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Dealing with Love Hurts: A Dozen Love Hurts to Know and Grow From


It is wonderful that those who know how to learn from their love related pain do in fact come to do love far better than many others.  It seems such people give and get far more healthy, real love and have far more love related joy.  To understand how this works let’s look at some of the standard guidance messages associated with a dozen different types of love related hurt.

It’s important to know that there are many more types of love related pain than the 12 covered here.  These just are some of the more common ones.  A usual consequence of learning how to successfully deal with a type of love related pain is that one or more types of love related joy becomes more available to you.

Number One: REJECTION  For many people the hurt of rejection involves a secret, subconscious self rejection and a secret suspicion that their rejecters and detractors may be right concerning their flaws.  Learn to love and believe in yourself enough and you tend to be protected from the hurt of others’ rejection.

Number Two: LONELINESS is usually guiding you to get and keep more loving people in your life.  It also may be pushing you to overcome your fears regarding love relating.

Number Three: FEELING DEMEANED is likely to be telling you to stand up for yourself better, and also examine how you might be accidentally rewarding and reinforcing people for treating you badly.  Asking yourself how well you are insisting on good treatment may be essential here.

Number Four: BETRAYAL usually says learn to be much more careful about who and how much you gamble your heart on.

Number Five: JEALOUSY is best understood as requiring you to deal with your own insecurities from which your jealousy rises.  The cure for romantic jealousy almost always involves looking at how you secretly and subconsciously don’t trust yourself as being adequately attractive, worthwhile, desirable or sufficiently love competent to keep a loved one.  When you have enough self love you usually don’t let insecurity morph into jealousy.

Number Six: ENVY tells you to go after something like you see others have.

Number Seven: DECEPTION AND DISHONESTY PAIN both given and received sometimes means you must get much more comfortable with truth and honesty.  Generally the more you are dishonest the more you won’t trust others because they may be deceptive like you.  The underlying guidance message usually is something like “grow strong enough to handle displeasurable truths”.  Learn to be strong enough to face truth, give truth and require truth.  Some professionals think that only the love-weak feel they need deception and dishonesty in love relationships.

If you are dishonest and deception-dependent why not work at growing your ability to live with, and mix your truth with your love?  If the pain of discovering dishonesty and deception has come your way look at how you may be accidentally helping others think they need to deal with you deceptively.  You may be seen as too critical, judgmental, etc. or you may come across as too weak to be able to handle the truth.  If you are, or appear to be, rather naïve you may be inviting unethical people to use and abuse you with their dishonesty.

Number Eight: BOREDOM in love relationships can be seen as a guidance message to do something different and probably something more lively than you have been doing.

Number Nine: ANXIETY in a love relationship gives you the message “search for what may be going wrong or threatening your love life, love network, main love relationship, etc.”.  Then if you discover something destructive take corrective action.  Carefully begin to do something to lessen or eliminate whatever threatens your love situation.  Don’t let the fear of doing something wrong, or making it worse, totally stop you because doing absolutely nothing is very likely to make it worse in most situations.

Number Ten: DEPRESSION in a love relationship, and possibly depression in general, may be telling you you’re not getting enough healthy, real love.  Depression gets you to stop everything and inventory what’s wrong, what’s missing and what’s needed.  This usually has something to do with the quality and quantity of love and the love dynamics in your life.  Don’t forget to inventory and count love from and for yourself, love from multiple sources, and what may be referred to as higher power love. (See blog entry “Is Depression Love Starvation?”)

Number Eleven: TURMOIL related to Love And Sex usually is sending you a message about how well, or not well, you do emotional intercourse, and how you may be subconsciously programmed to not let yourself be fully lovingly sexual.  You and a partner may need to work on doing lots of sex with love in teamwork and in team play.  Sex and relationship therapy may be needed.

Number Twelve: FEAR in love dynamics is usually trying to tell you that you or someone important to you may be harmed.  A sense of fear is to be honored but usually not allowed to dominate or overwhelm.  Moving carefully forward into areas you fear, in small steps, is often the cure.  If your mind tells you that you may be hurt, but not harmed, the cure may be to feel the fear and do it carefully anyway in many circumstances.  It’s also very useful to examine ‘if the worst happens’ how will you handle it, before that ‘worst’ happens.

Thus, if what you fear involves possible physical or psychological damage to yourself or others, major lifestyle damage to yourself or others, major opportunity loss to yourself or others, then extreme caution and probable escape from the fearful situation is likely to be indicated.  Fear that causes you to panic or freeze means you may be dealing with something eminently dangerous and you may need the protective help of others as soon as you can get it.  Love relationships  that involve the frequent, repeated experience of strong fear are often destructive and indicative of false love rather than real love occurring.

Each of these twelve pains can be  associated with love going wrong in small, medium or large ways.  As such they constitute warning signs that improvements are to be made if your love relationship is to be protected and continue.  Each of the understandings of these love hurts and possible actions to take are just sample possibilities.  The specific guidance message you receive from a love related hurt, or pain, may be different than the usual or common understanding given above.  Your pain may be pointing at very different messages or lessons which you will do well to search into.  Note, a fair number of people report that when they learn a guidance message from a love related hurt the pain frequently diminishes or disappears.  However, if you don’t act on what you’ve learned it may come back.

Working with your love related hurt instead of fighting it, or denying it, or just medicating it can involve hard psychological and emotional work.  However, in the long run that kind of work is a lot easier than making the same love mistakes over and over and feeling the same love hurts over and over again.  It’s also better than just trying to exist love-defeated.

Talking things over with loving friends and family often can help, and working with a love-oriented counselor or therapist can do wonders in dealing with love related hurts.  Meditation, prayer and what is sometimes known as ‘universal love work’ along with higher power work has been known to help many enormously.  Remember, you must do your own share of the love work.  That seems to be an essential part of your own love health and healing.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly


Love  Success Question
Can you identify and label the type of love related pain you are most vulnerable to?  If so are you working to build a better, healthy, self loving defense against that type of love related hurt?


Image credits: “Know Grow” by J. Richard Cookerly.

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