Repairing Damaged Love, Best Guidelines

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson gives you a dozen better, and different than usual, guidelines for working to repair a wounded or damaged love relationship.

Love Wounds Can Heal

Love relationships get damaged, wounded, broken and in other ways harmed from time to time. The good news is, often with enough healthy real love, well delivered, they can be healed, fixed, repaired and frequently in the process made stronger than they ever were before. Here are a dozen guidelines that can help accomplish just that:

1. Have and show patience Don’t rush, push, or try to force a quick repair. Do some showing of kind, gentle love and then back off. Let mother nature have time to effect some healing and then do a little more. If you do too much, too often it probably will not be love you are demonstrating. It might be weakness, insecurity and dependence, or at least it’s likely to be seen that way.

2. Focus forward Put your attention into making things better. Focus on ‘Now’ and ‘Next’ more than on the past. Work to create new, better and more positive love-filled experiences more than rehashing, analyzing or endlessly bemoaning the past. Some mentioning of past, positive experiences and learning from the past are useful so long as it doesn’t get in the way of focusing forward toward making new, better and more love-filled things happen.

3. Have and show empathetic compassion It is important that you show empathetic compassion much more than trying to communicate explanations, defensiveness, logic, analysis or reasoning. None of those are likely to convey much love. Especially defensiveness and explanations usually just result in making things worse because people see everything so differently, and they frequently are interpreted as making excuses and attacking with blame. They may have a place but usually only after a show of sufficient and repeated empathetic compassion (empathy = to feel another’s feeling; Compassion = to genuinely care).
4. ‘Own’ your share of the actions needed for cure and healing If you ‘own’ the desire for it to get better, you ‘own’ the responsibility (Response + Ability) to take actions to make it better. This usually includes owning-up to your share of causing the problem. Avoid blaming yourself or others, judgmentalism, denial and dodging the hurtful truths involved. Never conclude that just one person caused all the problems or one person can effect all the cure.

5. Work toward ‘I win, you win’ joint victories Concentrate on ‘we’ and ‘us’ more than ‘I and you’ so as to build toward connection, acting as a team, cooperation, collaboration, bonding and unity. Remember that in a ‘one person wins and one loses’ encounter, their relationship loses. It is only in ‘I win and you win’ situations that the relationship wins and the problems lose.

6. Work to do, say and hear all things through and with love Remember it is all about a LOVE relationship, so aim to do it all with love. Well shown, healthy, real love is extremely healing. All things can be said with love. All messages, even the worst ones, can be heard with heart-centered love. Without love actions, love-filled communications, and love-based understandings, all else is likely to be ineffectual or worse.

7. Love assertively, not aggressively or passively Act to freely offer your love, not force it on anyone. While doing this, remember to assertively love yourself as you love another. With love assert your ideas, feelings, wants, understandings, hopes and everything important to you. Non-action and surrendering can be seen as indifference or a lack of strong vigorous love.

8. Practice affirmational love especially Affirm clearly and often, the high value and worth of your loved one, yourself and your love relationship. Minimize or avoid all that might dis-affirm such as criticism, demeaning remarks, blame, condemnation, put-downs, character attacks and devaluing statements about your loved one, yourself and your relationship.

9. Relate from self respecting strength Don’t act desperate, beg, grovel, play victim or helpless. Those may get you some pity but not love. Show you have the strength to admit and own-up to your failings and shortcomings, but not as an inadequate, infantile weakling. That garners no respect and without respect adult-to-adult love fails.

10. Deal from clear requests, not expectations Remember the ancient adage “expect nothing, want everything and say what you want”. Misinterpretation, misunderstanding, malfunctioning and disappointment are the common results of operating from expectations which usually go unsaid, poorly related and not mutually or sufficiently comprehended.

11. Learn about love Then practice what you learn. Yes, love is magical, mysterious and complicated. That is all the more reason to study it. Study what it is, how to give it, and how to get it. Study what it is not, what it is confused with, and study the many tragic mistakes people make about it when they don’t sufficiently understand it. Study the false forms of love and how to avoid them. Study what the ancient wisdom masters taught and what modern science is discovering about love. There is a great wealth of available, practical knowledge about love all of us can put to good use. There is also a great deal of useless and destructive trash to sort through. The more you know and practice the skills of love, the more likely you will succeed.

12. Get help Preferably together, but if not together then by yourself search for and go to love-knowledgeable helpers. There are counselors, therapists, personal and relational coaches, clerics of many faiths, teachers, mentors, sponsors and those who just love well who can help guide you as you work to repair a wounded love relationship. Use them.

The many mini-love-lessons found at this site exist to assist you with # 11.

In particular, those mini-love-lessons found in the Subject Index under Pain and Problems may be of special help. Also let us suggest that if you know of others suffering with a love relationship problem, you might refer them to this free, informative site.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What do you read concerning love? And by whom?

Special note:
It seems like most of the people who seriously start to learn about love, do so after a big love failure or a very painful love relationship experience. Most of them turn to self help, relationship books, some of which are wonderful and some terrible, and many useless. Readings in religion, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, the brain sciences and many related fields also are usual places where people start their search into “loveology”.

For those who want to go deeper and broader, there is Aristotle, the apostle Paul, Rumi, Montague, Fromm, Kierkegaard, Brandon, Hooks, Reik, Harlow, Siegel, Fisher, Chapman and a host of other authors from a wide variety of fields and backgrounds. They all can be profoundly instructive for the serious student of love and how to succeed at it. Seek and you shall find!

Related posts:

1. Forgiveness – A Much-Needed Love Skill
2. Competitive Niceness: A Love Skill 

Happy Empathy: A Love Talent to Grow

Mini-Love-Lesson  #260

Synopsis: Presented here are the many benefits of happy empathy; brain research on natural, inborn empathy; three types of empathy; empathy as a talent to grow; some important negatives concerning empathy; happy sexual and emotional, intimate empathy; and a basic how-to approach for developing empathetic skills.

The Many Benefits of Happy Empathy

Alex is a no nonsense, get the job done and on to the next task sort of guy with little concern or time for peoples feelings.  Zorba is a stop and smell the roses, enthusiasm for life and living it fully – a very feelings focused fellow.  Upon seeing a loved one smiling, laughing or just enjoying something, Alex feels and soon shows impatience and sometimes annoyance.  Upon seeing the same happiness in another, Zorba stops what he is doing and joins with that person showing them up-beat emotions similar to their own.  Then Zorba may ask questions, demonstrate happiness for their happiness and extend the good feeling time together.  This conjoint happiness is shown by Zorba for others having exuberant joy, serene pleasure, sweet feelings, pride and every other kind of happiness.  Alex sees such actions as frivolous and a waste of time and effort.

Now, consider these life quality questions about Alex and Zorba.  All else being equal, which one will be more likely to raise happier, healthier children, have more and better close friends, have a really good and lasting marriage, a more interesting sex life, more cooperative work relationships, fewer stress related illnesses and have a general healthier longer life?  Which one will accomplish more in a longer and more cooperation filled life?  Also, who may have more good opportunities come their way?  Who likely will be appreciated and respected more?  Most importantly, who probably will be loved more by others and likely have more healthy, real self-love.  In addition, who will more likely have both happy empathy and empathy for others who are suffering?  Finally, which one would you rather be like?

Natural Empathy

Do you ever yawn when you see another yawning? If you walk into a room of laughing people, do you start laughing too even though you don't know what anyone is laughing about?  If you hear a baby giggle do you start to smile?  If you answer yes to any of these questions, you likely have experienced  natural, automatic, empathetic responses including those of happy empathy.  That means, according to psychoneurological research, you probably have the innate brain circuitry for empathy along with its neurochemical processes.  Some people do not.  Many of those people diagnosed as sociopathic and psychopathic and those having alexithymic difficulties tend to have brain scans showing peculiarities, problems and deficiencies in the areas and circuits of the brain identified as processing empathetic responses.  Other brain research shows most mammals, including humans and perhaps birds, are likely to have at least basic, natural, empathetic response capability.

When happy empathy is done with someone you love, it is a part of connection joy, a natural reward function of healthy, real love (see“A Functional Definition of Love”).  This can be seen in parents who cannot help smiling when their baby smiles, proud family members at a graduation ceremony, close friends on reconnecting and the awesome joy of seeing your heartmate in ecstasy.

A Talent to Grow

Talents are innate, natural, ability proclivities you can develop and actualize with purposeful effort.  Empathy can be viewed as a natural component experience and/or companion talent of and with healthy real love.  Empathetic ability, like other inborn talents, is seen to be a thing you can work with, grow, develop and improve your ability to feel it, do it, convey it, exude it, hone it, shape the doing of it and more effectively and skillfully express it with practice.

When it is done well and lovingly communicated, both compassionate empathy and happy empathy are thought to be some of the very best and most important ways to love another, or for that matter to love yourself.  To help accomplish that, let’s do some thinking about empathy and happy empathy..

What Is Empathy?

In popular usage, empathy has to do with what generally is known as feeling another person’s feelings.  Empathy especially is a term widely used to indicate feeling similar pain for and with another person feeling pain.  If another person is sad, you are sad with them; if they are mad, you too are mad at what they are mad about.  If they are shocked, so are you, etc.  Their suffering is your suffering and, therefore, is shared suffering.  This kind of emotional empathy provides a basis for more accurate caring and comprehending of what another person is emotionally going through.  This frequently is seen as being quite therapeutic, surprisingly healing and sometimes even comprehensively curative.  However, there is a lot more to empathy.

Psychological research has identified three main forms of empathy.  They are called Cognitive Empathy, Emotional Empathy and a special emotional connected category called Compassionate Empathy. 

Cognitive empathy means mentally understanding what and how strongly another person is experiencing an emotional or sometimes a physical feeling.  It may include further understanding of the feelings cause, dynamics and possible results, along with what to do about it, if anything.  Cognitive empathy enables accurate understanding, identifying and constructive thinking about feelings.

Emotional empathy is having very similar emotional feelings to the emotional feelings another person is perceived as having, and perhaps to a similar intensity.  With this understanding, both good and bad feelings can be empathetically responded to and, thus, happy empathy is included in this category.

Compassionate empathy can include both of the above but with the addition of a caring desire to help, assist or alleviate another’s hurt or harm.  Motivated actions of support, assistance and/or rescue, if it is possible, often flow from compassionate empathy.  This especially occurs in all kinds of real and healthy love relationships.  Link “Empathy – A Love Skill”

Sympathy often is confused with empathy.  Sympathy, a much older term (sympathy from the 1500's, empathy from circa 1900) now is understood to mean feeling pity or being sorry for someone but not so likely as to motivate assistive action-taking.

Empathy’s Bad News

Some people have too much, automatic, compassionate empathy.  They can be overwhelmed by it to the point of becoming dysfunctional.  They cannot stop crying for, or being mad about another’s misfortune, or they may sacrifice too much of themselves or their resources needlessly, or their impulsive efforts of assistance or rescue may backfire and make things worse for whoever they want to help.

Compassionate empathy mixed with a lack of critical judgment sets-up many an empathetic person to be a victim of manipulators and the unscrupulous.  Without sufficient critical judgment and self-care, empathetic people often unknowingly can become well-meaning enablers of destructive behavior like harmful addictions and habit patterns.

There are people who seem to be cognitively empathetic, in that they mentally understand the happy feelings of others, but their response is to be overly envious or jealous.  Then there are those who, on perceiving and comprehending other’s bad feelings, get happy about it -- the anti-love, schadenfreude response.

What Is Happy Empathy?

Happy empathy is responding with happiness, or any other positive feeling, to happiness or similar positive feelings perceived to be occurring in another.  Relationally, happy empathy has a sharing joy-type of dynamic often very helpful with love connecting, bonding and unifying experiences.

Intimate Love and Happy Empathy

To have an intimate experience with a loved one and take high joy in their happiness, pleasure, fun, ecstasy and/or serene satisfaction, is what intimate, happy empathy is all about.  To have intense joy because a heartmate is experiencing awesome, soul-felt ecstasy, or simple serene closeness, or even laughter-filled silly, sexy fun, helps imbue a love relationship with very special, intimate, empathetic love experiences.  Empathy brings closeness and closeness circles back to intimacy which increase both.  That can happen emotionally and sexually separately or mixed together.

Intimate love, intimate sex and happy empathy all go quite well together.  That mix makes for happy couples, throuples and other heartmate partnerships.  Link “Throuple Love, a Growing Worldwide Way of the Future?”  It also can be involved in the more newly identified emotion of compersion and the loving with sexy fun phenomena of tertaliation which has to do with getting sexually and happily turned on by your heartmate being turned on to and/or by someone else, instead of being insecure and jealous (see “Compersion: A Newly Identified Emotion of Love”).

Some How-To’s for Happy Empathy Making

There are several approaches to creating happy empathy experiences.  It usually takes making several steps.  Here is one of the sundry ways one might go about it.

Usually, first comes either vividly remembering or finding a happy person to observe.  It can be a person of any age, gender or any other categorization.  Then, often comes deciding to slow any clamoring thoughts about your concerns and reduce the residual tension that accompanies them.  A bit of slow, deep breathing along with a bit of mild, slow stretching usually helps.

Next, comes really noticing, or vividly remembering, the really happy or otherwise positive feeling person.  Avoid thinking about why they are feeling good and just focus on how they are demonstrating that they feel positive.  Is it their face, or in their voice, or their gestures and posture changes, their general demeanor, is it what they are talking about or what is it that helps you know they are experiencing a positive emotion.

By the way, it can greatly help if you have in the past learned mindfulness techniques like being present in the now, having an awakening heart-mind, moment to moment awareness, emotion focusing, empathetic flowing, total otherness appreciating, etc.

It usually helps to do some mirroring movement which means to take a similar posture and make your face, body, arm and hand movements mirror, or copy, those of the happy person you are noticing.  Now, notice their voice volume and tonal qualities and copy those saying just about anything you want to say.  Keep moving like they move.  Remember that motions can change emotions and making similar motions often brings on similar emotions along with feelings of empathetic connection.

Some thinking about what is being felt, but again, not the why of it may be in order.  That is for identifying what they are feeling but needs only to be done in a broad sort of way for right now.  Getting too mentally analytical can take your focus away from your feelings which, in turn, can block the happiness empathy from happening.  Purposefully saying to yourself things like, “I’m really going to get into that person’s happiness with them, and because of them I’m starting to do that right now” while continuing the mirror movements frequently helps quite a bit.

Regard the first time you do this as a sort of pilot study or dry run and don’t expect it to work well but just orient you to the procedures.  Now, go looking for positive feeling people to practice on.  Some people do well to find stupid things on TV and, at first, turn off the sound and just copy the movements of someone who looks happy.

If, as you do these things, you hear anything going on in your head that is critical, disparaging or distracting, tell it to shut up and that you are attempting something new and different and are not to be disturbed.  Also, after you tried this system a few times, feel free to adapt it anyway you think might work better for you.  Know also that working at happiness empathy might just make some wonders happen in your life and especially in your relationship life.

One More Thing. Think about talking over happy empathy and this mini-love-lesson on it with someone you like or love.  Then do it and while you are at it, please mention this site and its hundreds of facts and ideas for improving love relating.  Thanks

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Love Success Question: How well and how often do you give your loved ones the love gift of your happiness?

Protecting Those You Love from Yourself

Synopsis: This important and possibly uncomfortable mini-love-lesson starts with explaining how real love is protective; alerts us to a common protection ‘blind spot’; explains overprotection is anti-protective; a prescription for self appraisal with self-love; and more.

Real Love Is Protective

Healthy, real love automatically involves the high valuing of the loved. Therefore, protecting that which is highly valued follows naturally.

Real Love helps us naturally to see after the safety and well-being of those we really love, safeguarding them if we can, from whatever might harm or destroy them including ourselves. By the way, false forms of love usually are not very protective.
In the Chicago slums where I spent some of my growing-up time, there was a sort of adage. It went like this, “It’s okay for me to fight my family and friends, but if you try to fight them, I’ll destroy you!” In my old neighborhood, expressions of love were seldom tender but they usually were often strong and clear, at least when it came to the love that protects. Of course, violence is not the best way to be protective; I’m just giving an extreme example of a verbal, protective attitude.

Our Protective Blind Spot

Just about everybody wants to protect their children from bad guys and bullies, but what if the bully is you? We don’t like to think about it this way, but there may be some part of how you go about your life that could be harmful to someone dearest to you. If you are going to be really effective at ‘protective love’ won’t it be good for you to start by evaluating your own, possibly harmful effects on those you genuinely love? Now, maybe you already do this kind of self-evaluation. Great! Maybe you even overdo it and worry about every single, little thing you do and how it might negatively effect someone you love. That has its own love effectiveness problems. You can be so worried about your effect on a loved one that the excessive worry will sabotage your effectiveness itself.
Let’s look at just a few of the more common ways we can be blind to having a harmful effect on someone we love.

Overprotection Is Anti-Protection!

Years ago it was discovered that lots of parents did not let their children go play in the dirt because they were protecting them from germs and the evils of dirtiness. It turned out that this was setting the kids up for not being able to fight off certain kinds of possibly serious infections. Ordinary dirt was just what little kids needed to help their immunity mechanisms develop. Sometimes overprotection has a spoiling effect. Bartley knew his parents would always bail him out of any trouble he got into, until his seventh arrest. It was only after that and six horrible months in jail that his judgment began to improve.

Of course, a lot of overprotection efforts really are self protection efforts. Here are a couple of examples. Bill would not let his wife go inside bars with her sisters because something bad might happen to her there. Actually he later admitted he was just afraid she would get attracted to somebody coming-on to her, and that person would treat her better than he did. Doris handled all the family finances and did not want her husband “to have to deal with money issues”. She died unexpectedly and he found out their accounts were overdue and all their other monetary affairs were a mess; Doris had been denying her inability to keep up the accounts – to herself and to him.

Overprotection tends to block people’s growth and their strengthening processes which makes overprotection anti-protection. Joe was vehemently against his wife taking a promotion offer. It would take her out of an all-female department and force her to mix with a mixed gender, upwardly mobile work staff. She would be part of lower-level, white-collar management and he was blue-collar with little likelihood of advancing as far up the ladder as his wife might go. It turned out that he trying to block her, cost him a lot more marital problems than supporting her job improvement would have.

Sometimes it is hard to know the difference between real protection and overprotection. It is something to keep working on, with love. So, ask yourself if you are doing things that might ‘protect’ your mate, children, family members, friends or other loved ones from the very growth challenges that might be good for them to have. Sally worked very hard at cleverly keeping her husband away from finishing his degree. She said it would take a lot of time, and cost too much money, and she was sure some of their friends would start judging him as “uppity”, and she didn’t want him to lose those friends. Then it came out. Secretly she was panicking that if he finished his degree he would start looking down on her and run off with somebody better educated.

What Are You Modeling?

Do you ever find yourself, kind of automatically, saying or doing something a loved one says or does? Or conversely, maybe they are saying or doing something you say or do? That is because loved ones kind of can rub off on each other. What we model and the examples we set can automatically get subconsciously incorporated. Some of what you are modeling may be very good and some not so good for those you love. You may want to protect your loved ones from those ‘not so good’ ones. If you are modeling fits or rage, hate, racism, abuse, neglect, addictions, poor self love, anti-love actions, etc. protection is called for.

Romantic Rage

Have you bought-into the myth that tells you love can lead to justifiable rage against those you love if you feel betrayed by them. Many murders of a spouse or lover result from this kind of belief about how love works. (No, Wrong, Untrue) Many battered mates or children, judged to be disobedient or violating some rule, also result from similar thinking. Along with this goes a sort of understanding that ‘if I love you, I own you, and because I own you I can hurt and harm you, if you don’t behave the way I insist you behave. Love give me that right.

My understanding is that healthy, real love of every kind, including romantic love, does not motivate or lead to hurting and harming those you love. It is only various forms of false love that do that. Love is protective not harming.

Protection and Affairs

Having a secret love affair, sex affair, one night stand, cheating, etc., even if you hide it really well so you “protect your mate from getting hurt”, is usually a really poor way to do protective love. We have a lot of problems with love/sex affairs in our culture, as do other cultures, but not all cultures. In some parts of the world it is understood or expected that spouses who have strong sex drives will have sex with a number of other people, and is OK as long as it is not done deceitfully or destructively to already established love relationships.

For a great many people in highly monogamous-oriented societies that seems both impossible and incomprehensible. Still, some manage to live honestly with love while swapping, swinging, doing open marriage, etc., and things go okay or even go better than good. Some even make the ‘secret affairs approach’ seem to work tolerably well. However, secrets, lies, deception, and the like, even if not discovered, tend to have corrosive relationship results. Truth expressed, even if disruptive, usually is far more protective in the long run than are lies. This is especially typical if the truth expressed is mixed well with lots of love.

Protection and Addictions

Substance abuse and addiction, and certain behavioral addictions and abuse syndromes are super-destructive to just about everybody in the addict’s or abuser’s immediate life. Spouses, family members, especially children, friends, co-workers and sometimes strangers are all harmed. The problem is the addict or abuser seldom sees how bad their effect on others actually is. Defensiveness, dodging and denial almost always reigns for quite a while, sometimes until somebody is dead.

Compounding the problem is codependency and the patterns of enabling. What is usually needed for all concerned is a loving confrontation with the uncomfortable truth. That usually is the only way to avoid causing or supporting serious harm being done. However, remember confrontation with out expressions of sufficient love tends not to work.

Self Appraisal with Self-Love

None of us is perfect. We are made so that we always can improve. To improve it often takes self appraisal, which does not mean ‘beating up’ or ‘being down’ on yourself’, or in any way being negative. In all probability there are some ways in which you have some negative effect on those you love. Just try to accurately evaluate what trends and behavior patterns you might exhibit which would be good to protect your loved ones from. Then work on it with forgiveness and tolerance, i.e. with healthy self-love for yourself.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Are there things those who raised you did that you wish they would have protecting you from, and are you perhaps subconsciously programmed to do something like that also?

Competitive Niceness: A Love Skill

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson first introduces competitive niceness; it then tells how it helps circular good things to happen in a love relationship; reviews how to develop this love skill; and addresses how to get past problems that might occur.

In a Happy Land

Most appropriately, we were in Denmark when we first heard about “competitive niceness” (Danes are the happiest people according to national comparison research). Competitive niceness had brought Phil and Gay’s long-standing marriage much good. Gay told of how one morning she was feeling puny and Phil brought her a cup of tea without asking him to do that. She thought something like “How very nice. It makes me want to do something nice for him, and I did”. She also noticed that she felt better.

Just about every morning since Phil has brought her a cup of morning tea, and has done other nice things that move her to do nice things for him – not because she has to but because she wants to. She wants to treat him as nice or nicer than he is treating her. Phil related it is a fun game they play with each other which reaps many good, loving feelings. They compete on treating each other well and it has been making them happy together ever since.

Later we met some other couples who practice another version of competitive niceness. They compete with themselves to ‘out do’ their own last loving, ‘nice’ action toward one another and toward other members of their family. That seems to work wonders for all concerned. Still others compete by keeping track of their ‘nice’ acts toward those they love. They are always working on making their list of nice love actions longer and better than it was before. Competitive niceness and kindness seems to benefit whole families and friendship networks, bringing them a lot closer to one another, not to mention having more fun with one another.

A Circular Good

If I do a ‘nice, kind, pleasant’ love action towards you or for you and you do one for me, we have created a circular event of good, positive, love-giving actions. If we repeat this over and over, we create an ‘ongoing cycle’ and a ‘couple’s teamwork habit’ of cycling positive, love-giving behaviors. That can help us grow our love bonding together and help pre-counterbalance whatever might be difficult or go wrong in our love relationship later.

Competitive niceness is an example of loving teamwork operating in a “I win, you win, nobody loses” style. It also sets forth good examples for children to model on. Done lightheartedly it tends to produce a lot of smiles and laughter together. Therefore, this is an example of the kind of love skill, and the most important dynamic, which creates successful love relationships – that of mutually sending and receiving actions that convey love. We call that a circular good.

Developing Your Competitive Niceness Love Skills

Go do something nice for someone you love, maybe as a surprise. Don’t make it a big deal or be too elaborate – short, simple and quick will do just fine. It could involve a favor, a small gift, something funny or just creating a nice little experience. Enjoy thinking it up, then enjoy giving or doing it, enjoy the positiveness it creates for your loved one, and then enjoy your loved one’s reaction.

You then could challenge them to do likewise, or talk over the idea of doing an additive competitive niceness with one another as a fun game to play, or you could just see what happens after your first extra act of loving niceness. Either way, keep doing daily actions and enjoying them. After several weeks of doing that, it is likely to become a good habit. Especially is this true if you both are having fun being competitively nice to each other.

If right now you are a couple reading this, you might want to have a little discussion to see if you want to teamwork together and experiment with creating a joint competitive niceness game. Remember the idea is not to defeat your loved one by doing better than they do, but just to enjoy the process of being competitively nice.

Problems?

If your actions seem to go unnoticed, unappreciated or unreturned you have some options. You can give hints. You also could lightheartedly say that there might be something your loved one is missing or not noticing, and they might enjoy noticing it. Then make a bit of a guessing game about it. Or you could just directly request your loved one to notice, understand and appreciate certain behaviors you are doing. Be sure to say it in a happy, upbeat sort of way. It is important not to do ‘guilt trips’, criticize or blame. If they cooperate with this, be sure to thank them, praise them and maybe hug them.

A special thanks to Gay and Phil for introducing us to Competitive Niceness!

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What is a nice thing you did for someone that made you feel good? Will you do it again or something like it again soon?

Related posts:

1. Intercourse Absent Lovemaking – a Love Skill
2. Checking It Out – As a Love Skill
3. Connection Matching – A Love Skill
4. Intimacy Creation – A Love Skill
5. Gratitude – As a Love Skill 

Loneliness and Love

Synopsis: First this mini-love-lesson covers the surprising ways loneliness harms us; then the issues of ignore, fight, escape, just get used to loneliness, or what?; doing what loneliness wants you to do; a cautionary note; Ricardo’s example and Ricardo’s results, (can they be yours?).

Surprising Ways Loneliness Harms Us

Recent research shows loneliness is especially bad for your brain.  What is bad for your brain can be bad for many of your body’s health processes and systems because the brain influences and regulates them.  Loneliness also is bad for your psychological health and that can influence everything else in your life.  One study of over 8000 men and women showed the lonely have up to a 20% faster rate of decline in mental abilities.

Those who have prolonged loneliness are seen to have more stress illnesses and a greater likelihood of having brain inflammation problems.  Loneliness can be seen as a component of love malnutrition or love starvation, which is understood to have a very negative impact on our immunity mechanisms, cancer resistance, blood pressure and a host of other physical problems.

Ignore, Fight, Escape, Just Get Used To It – or ???

Many people try to escape their loneliness by diving into their work, business or various other involvements.  Some try to escape into substance abuse or various behavioral addictions.  Others get some temporary help from antidepressants and other medications.  Another group of people try to fight loneliness seeing it as some kind of weakness or enemy.  Still others see it as just one more human emotion to be ignored.  Learning to live with it can dull the pain but the damage being done by prolonged loneliness  still can happen.  Usually none of these approaches prove to best serve our health or well-being. At best, they may provide some assistance in the short run but they can turn out to be quite bad for us in the long run, or at most, useless.

So what are we to do?  Wallow in our loneliness and just let it do all the harm it can?  Of course not, that won’t help but there is a way that will.

Doing What Loneliness Wants You to Do!

Like all emotions, loneliness was created in us to do us some good, even though it feels bad, sometimes extremely bad.  It may in fact get worse for not doing what the feeling of loneliness wants us to do.  When we follow the guidance message in loneliness, the bad feelings tend to subside.  Sometimes they begin to subside as soon as we get loneliness’s message, even before we have begun to follow that message with action.  So what is the healthful, constructive, guidance message in the feeling we call loneliness?

Basically loneliness can be seen as an emotional message telling us to go in search of love in any of its many forms.  If you can’t find love quickly, go in search of “like” or at least tolerable company first because that might be on the way to healthy, real love.

It also is important to know that it is not just about romantic love, as our culture and/or family training may have subconsciously programmed us to think.  We are a gregarious species, meant to connect with each other and especially to connect in love relationships with one another.  So, hear the guidance message of loneliness telling you to go in search of new or renewed love.

You may be de-energized from your loneliness, think searching for love is too much work, you don’t have what it takes, love is all a matter of luck anyway and your luck in love is bad, and 100 other self sabotaging negatives with which to block yourself from taking productive action.  Remember, your loneliness may just get worse if you do that.  And none of those blocking mechanisms get you to a new and better place though they might help you rest up a bit first.

A Cautionary Note

As I have emphasized before, all our emotions, even the most painful ones, were created in us to do us constructive, healthy good though they may overdo it, under do it, or mis-do it like all human systems.  If you get any kind of interpretation of an emotion’s guidance message that is destructive to yourself or to anyone, it may have cathartic value but that is all.  Acting destructively is almost always destructive to yourself and not the real guidance message of any emotion.  Unless your interpretation of an emotion’s guidance message goes toward health and well-being, probably for all concerned, it is likely not to be your best or most accurate interpretation.

Following Ricardo’s Example to Love

Ricardo was laying awake night after night, hurting badly with loneliness.  He tried various prescription medications, then alcohol and other substances but nothing seemed to help all that much.  Some people at work, including his boss, pressured and nagged him into going to a counselor, and he went along with that just to get them off his back.  He expected to have to dredge up a lot of his past which would just use up a lot of time and money, but he thought he could probably cut it short being able to say okay, he tried that and it didn’t work either.  He was surprised that his counselor didn’t want to talk much about his past but wanted him to do some immediate things that might be helpful.

After resisting and just a few sessions later, Ricardo got himself a pet dog and everything started changing for the better.  He learned that a good pet dog is perhaps the world’s quickest and surest way to get some good, healthy love.  Brain studies of canines show evidence that, in brain functioning, dogs really do love pretty much just like we do and it is not just because we feed and pet them.

In counseling Ricardo did have to do some work on his blocks and fears that had some causation from his past, but mostly it was about understanding and following the guidance messages in his emotions.  It wasn’t long before Ricardo tentatively went in search of new involvements and new acquaintances.  He went online and discovered some groups with similar interests to his own, and with reluctance got himself to some meetings.  The new acquaintances showed him that new friendships might develop and were even likely.  He then looked up some relatives that he had lost contact with and a renewed family love possibility came out of that.

Ricardo volunteered to help in a cause he believed was good, and surprise surprise, out of that came a new romantic interest.  He took a class in something he was intrigued by and that yielded some more very interesting new people in his life.  He got involved in a religious connected singles group and out of that came a sense of spiritual love that he had not known before, plus some other new friends.  In counseling Ricardo learned about healthy, self-love and that there is a lot of good that comes from that.

Ricardo’s Results

Today Ricardo has a small group of deep, close friends he feels very bonded with, a renewed family love connection, a wide network of medium and milder friends, a fine and growing romantic love relationship and a much improved, healthy self-love.  Ricardo is not lonely anymore.

Whether loneliness comes from months or years of aloneness, or the death of a mate, or from shyness or any other reason, the prescription is the same: overcome reluctance and connect with others, and grow a loving support network for your health and well being.

Can you follow Ricardo’s example if you are struggling with loneliness?  I suspect you can, and hopefully you will if you need to.  It would be a healthy act of self-love and self-care, if loneliness is pushing at you, to do something rather similar to what Ricardo did.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question

Are you willing to be a good friend so as to do your share of having a good, friendship love relationship?

Love It Is Not Boastful/Pretentious

Mini-Love-Lesson  #239

Synopsis: We start with conflicting interpretations that lead to broader understanding of what this tenet of St. Paul’s may have hoped to convey; followed by related issues of psychological dynamics; real and false self-love; self-confidence and end with the harm of self-debasement and it’s avoidance.

Translation Troubles That Help

Since we are working from Paul’s list of what love is and is not (First Corinthians 13) in the New Testament, we must enter into the translation puzzlement of what he meant exactly when in Greek he wrote love is not “perpereuetai”.  Various translations of the Bible have used quite a few rather different English words in translating this.  Some scholars suggest we may not have a sufficiently accurate equivalent word in English for this Greek word.  Hence, some translation confusion and controversy exists concerning what is meant here.

To get a broad sense of what Paul probably was meaning to convey, look at these scholarly based interpretations.

Love ... “vaunteth not itself” (King James), “dealeth not perversely” (Douay-Rheims Catholic Bible), “makes no parade” (Moffatt), “does not put on airs” (American Complete Bible), “is not pretentious”(New Catholic Bible), “doesn’t brag” (Common English Bible), “does not strut” (Message Bible), “is not conceited”, (Good News Edition), “Is Never Boastful or Proud” (Living Bible), “is not boastful” (Revised Standard Version).

As you can see there is similarity but also differences among these translations as well as with a the many others that exist.

If today Paul were writing in English he might be inspired to write something like love is not egocentric, self-aggrandizing, narcissistic or braggadocios.  Of course, those terms and their particular definitions did not exist in his day so he had to use what was available.  For help with original biblical linguistics check out Truth in Translation by Dr. Jason BeDuhn.

I have chosen to use boastful which is a common interpretation in Protestant translations with the more Catholic translation pretentious.  To me, that seems to make a decent bridge between what is coming to be understood about the nature of healthy, real love and recent biblical linguistic research findings.

What Does Boastful and Pretentious Mean Psychologically?

Boastful means excessively showing off, bragging and presenting oneself or one’s achievements, qualities etc. as superior, more excellent and more worthy of merit than is accurate or necessary.  Pretentious means pretending to have greater standing, skill, importance, sophistication, status, qualities, worth, etc. than is accurate or merited in a situation.

Psychologically, boasting and pretentiousness behaviors suggest a person who may be in need of greater self-love and more inner self worth.  Such a person also may need to find, own and/or develop their own talents, qualities, attributes, etc. so as not to need pretense.  Such a person also may be too outer-dependent and insufficiently able to be interdependent, co-functioning or team functioning which can be quite detrimental to successful love relating (see Recovering Love by this author).

Real and False Self-Love

Those who have healthy, real self-love tend to brag briefly.  Those of false self-love go on and on.  Those of real self-love tend not to do much politically correct, socially adept humility and self depreciation talk.  They avoid modesty-dishonesty as they also avoid over self-glorification because with healthy self-love they do not need it and it takes too much time and effort.  Thus, the healthfully self-loving in a close love relationship can see pretending to be more and less than they really perceive themselves to be, as deceitful and a poor way to treat loved ones (“Unselfish Self-Love”).

In false love, there is often a lot of pretense, phony manipulation, fake intimacy and a plethora of small to large deceits.  Hiding the truth about many things and other forms of secrecy frequently are common.  Many who secretly see themselves as somehow not enough attempt starting toward a love relationship with a lot of overt or covert, boastful falsehoods.  They may fake to impress and then work to hide what they have faked.  This usually turns out to be a very poor way to grow true love, trust or anything else that can be called real (“False Love Awareness”).

There is an old, silly story that says, on their wedding night she said, “I have to confess something dear” and took out the falsies from her very padded bra.  He said, “I too must confess” as he got 2 inches shorter after taking out the lifts in his shoes.  She said, “There’s more” and removed her girdle.  He remarked, “Me too” and tossed his toupee away, which was then followed by her wig.  They then continued that way until there was nobody there.

In a symbolic way, this is a true story about some marriages especially those of the trophy spouse type.  Being brave enough to present the truth about yourself, including brief bragging about the good parts along with the not so good, has been known to pay off two big ways.  One way is to either garner admiration for self-disclosure and brave, self sharing or the second way, to more quickly screen-out those who cannot relate or deal with honest self-disclosure and probably would not have worked out anyway (see “Growing Closeness – A Love Skill”).

Healthy Self-Love and Self-Confidence vs Boastful and Pretentious

Superiority syndromes or complexes long have been known to hide inferiority syndromes and complexes.  Neither of these are to be confused with healthy self-love and its strong, self-confident characteristic.  Being overly boastful and pretentious, suggests the dynamics of a person who frequently is attending to and finding importance in how others see them and how they can influence that.  Usually, the healthfully self-loving and self-confident attend to and find importance in how their world is functioning and what to constructively do with it.  This frequently is confluent with the dictum “love others as you love yourself” and, therefore, is not just focused on self gain, as are boastfulness and pretentiousness (see “Self-Love and Its Five Healthy Functions” and Real Love False Love by this author).

Avoiding the Harm of Self Debasement

Don’t ever be boastful, proud, brag, think too well of yourself, like yourself overmuch or care for yourself too much.  Instead, always be humble, modest, meek, self-sacrificing, acting with humility, put others first and self last.  For many people these concepts and others like them have been the connected and extended interpretation of the “love is not boastful or pretentious” tenant.  Add docile and obedient for a possible in between the lines meaning.  From a mental health point of view, all that has turned out to be anti-natural, unhealthy, self-destructive and really not good for the well-being of others.

This self-effacing understanding goes against the win-win understanding of the great, core teaching “love others as you love yourself”.  Those who healthfully love themselves do sufficient self-care, along with care of others, and end up doing better, longer, more creatively and more good for others than the de-powered self-sacrificing and self demeaning.  Being accurately self proud turns out to be a good thin.  Sharing what you are proud of is self-disclosure – a love action in intimate love relationships.  Socially, a brief, one sentence brag often is positively viewed as refreshing, honest and winsome self-confidence.  Three or more sentences, not so much.

One More Thing

You might want to talk all this over with others and, in so doing, create a positive, sharing experience.  If you do, please mention this site and its Mini-Love-Lessons along with the free subscription service. Thank you!

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Here And Now Love

Synopsis: Mindsets that miss out; examples; here and now "distracters"; those good at here and now love; giving here and now love; now for the future; a helper test; Joy and sorrow in the now; training yourself.

Love is best experienced with a "here and now" mind-set.  That takes focusing your awareness fully in the present while love is being given and received.  It is surprising how difficult this is for some people.  So many miss out on full, love experiences because their mind is focused on something from the past or the future and, therefore, not in the "now".

Let’s look at a few examples.  She gives him a loving kiss but his focus is on problems at the office so he does not fully feel the love coming to him.  He, ever so lovingly, smiles at her but her mind is on making sure their children clean up their room so her subconscious sense of loneliness grows a bit bigger.  Out of love the small child puts heartfelt effort into making a picture present then gleefully hands it to the parent.  However, the parent’s mind is on the issues of tomorrow and barely looks at the gift and quickly dismisses the child’s special made, love gift and the child.

The parent misses the feeling of love coming from the child and the child misses out on the receptional love the parent could have given in return.  Plus, the child may learn disappointment is what comes from trying to give love, and they might be being ‘taught by example’ how to not receive love offerings fully.  A friend gives a loving compliment but the intended recipient almost doesn’t hear it at all because that person is focused on whether or not they did the right thing about yesterday’s difficulty.  I bet you can think up your own examples and personal experiences.

So often people grow "love starved" because they are inexperienced at living in the here and now.  Lots of people need and want more love and, in fact, demonstrations of love may be coming their way.  However, they’re missing out on the nourishment of that love because they’re not good at switching into a "here and now" focus.  So many are so occupied with anxieties about the future or painful incidents from the past they don’t see the enriching, strengthening love available to them in the present.

Many have love opportunities surrounding them and all they need do is ask for a hug, or a smile, or to be lovingly listened to for a bit and they would get the love that’s available.  Then they could go about life a little better because love well received usually helps counter pain from the past and anxieties of the future.  Of course, there are appropriate times for making plans for the future, and acceptable times to be learning from the past, and busy times too.  But if love is available, or being offered, don’t miss out on it even if soaking it up needs to be brief.  This is where the "quality of reception" is more important than the "amount of time" spent.

Some people are really good at"here and now" love.  They see loving looks coming their way and fully absorb and are nourished by those looks.  There are those who delight in a lover’s hand as it warmly slips into their own, and their mind is on that and that alone.  Well loved are the ones who don’t give a rapid, perfunctory “I love you too” reply to an “I love you” statement.  Rather, they allow themselves to feel the love just sent their way and in essence digest and are nourished by it before they make a heartfelt reply.  They are more likely to say something like “Thank you, that feels so good, and I’m really glad you do” rather than giving an automatic statement without much feeling.

For some, getting and giving loving hugs spark and spice up their lives.  For others hugging is a quick, empty ritual because their focus is away from the here and now.  Here’s a question.   Do you think those who are really good at really focusing their mind on each love event, as it occurs, live better?  And if you aren’t already doing that do you want to be one of them?

Another part of  "here and now"  love has to do with not missing out on here and now opportunities for giving love.  I like to recommend demonstrating your love often and much.  Love is one of those things that the more you give it away the more you have to give, so long as you remember to give enough of it to yourself too.  To give love often and much you have to work at not letting too many distractions from the past or about the future get in the way.  Say words of love with loving tones, give looks of love, touch with love, and frequently do all the ways of demonstrating love and I’m betting you’ll be so glad you live that way.  Watch out that you don’t let the fear of doing it poorly, or the fear that it will not be well received, or things like that stop you.  When it comes to love it usually is better to make a mistake of commission rather than one of omission.

Do you know how doing well with "here and now" love improves your future and how that works?  First, when you really soak up love and allow yourself to fully ‘get it’ you change your brain chemistry for the better.  Then improved brain chemistry changes your body chemistry for the better.  This means your immunity mechanisms fight off infections better, and fewer stress hormones are produced and your aging process is slowed.  Also your improved brain chemistry produces more good feeling neurochemistry, generally helping to make you happier and more positive about yourself in life.  All this means you are more likely to live longer and enjoy life more.

That’s not all.  When you get really good at "here and now" love you store up good feeling memories that later you can draw upon to help you get through bleak and bad times.  Those who only ‘sort of’ feel loved when it’s coming their way may be much more likely to experience depression, despair, hopelessness, etc.

Those who do really well at encouraging"here and now" love to come their way are usually better at giving love.  This makes for more generating of mutual love and cycling of love in relationships.  The more love generated in a love relationship the better and healthier the relationship is likely to grow, and the closer the participants are likely to feel toward one another.  That means you and those you love will be more bonded and are likely to experience being more energized and also more loyal to each other.

Here is a little helper test.  Wherever you are right now, look around and see something you can feel, at least a little positive about, that you might not have really noticed before.  Now listen closely and try to hear some sound you didn’t notice until right now; especially listen for sounds that you can be at least a little interested in.  Now touch something, preferably pleasurable, and feel its texture more fully than you have before.  In every environment there always is more you can notice and at least mildly like in a "here and now" way.  Now, think of doing the same things with someone you love.

See something more, hear something more, and feel their textures more.  Be aware that as you do this you are more fully perceiving precious parts of your valued loved one.  With that awareness you might want to tell your loved one that you are enjoying and appreciating them right now.  After that do the same with yourself as an act of healthy self-love.  Notice that if while you’re doing this your mind goes anywhere else, to the past, future, far away, etc. yank it back.  You can force your mind to be in the here and now when finding things to be at least a little positive about and, therefore, to enjoy.

One of the best and greatest joys in my work happens when I hear couples, family members, friends, etc. say things like “I feel so loved right now”, “We are really doing our love and it’s great”, “I just have to hug you right now because I’m overwhelmed with feelings of love”, “Finally we’re all really loving each other in such good ways, and it’s the best thing in the world”, “At long last I love myself, and I know I’m really okay”.

One of the saddest parts of my work as a psychotherapist comes with those who lost a loved one like a child, spouse, family member, dear friend, etc. and I hear “I wish I would have told them I loved them more”, “We didn’t spend enough time loving each other”, “We never took enough time out of our too busy lives to love each other like we could have”.

With some work you can train yourself to pay attention to the love coming your way in the here and now and really get it.  With repeated effort you can notice your here and now opportunities to give love and you can do so.  You purposefully can yank your mind away from the future (and get back to it later) when you have a ‘here and now’ love opportunity.  Likewise, you can yank your mind away from the past when there is a "here and now" opportunity to do love, grow love, experience love, etc. (and later return to whatever you were thinking about from the past).  With some work we all can be better ‘here and now’ lovers.

Hopefully with these thoughts in mind you will do "here and now" love a bit better and a bit more often.  As you do that remember to tell yourself here and now “Good for me” and other healthy, self love statements.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question In the next 10 minutes who will you show some love to, and how will you do that?
Remember, it’s OK if your love target is yourself.

Related posts:

1. Listening with Love
2. Kissing with Love
3. Love Complaints Versus Love Requests
4. Bull Wrestling, Bull Dancing and Love Quarrels
5. Do You Start and Part with Love? 

Thinking Love to Improve Love

Synopsis: This mini-love lesson presents ways to improve love with your thinking in, about and with love.

Do you know how to ‘think love’?  Many do not.  ‘Thinking love’ simply means thinking in, with and about love – especially healthy, real love.  The more you ‘think love’ the more likely you are to do well in love and then in life.  Here are a dozen ‘helpers’ to assist you in improving your ability to ‘think love’.

A Dozen ‘Think Love’ Helpers

1.    Love thinking is appreciative!  How often do you think appreciative thoughts about those you love?  How often do you think to look for and find things to appreciate about those you love?  Is your positive, appreciative thinking more than your negative, critical thinking?  Do you give thought to how to express your appreciation of your loved ones?

2.    Love thinking is caring!  How well and often do you think caring thoughts about what your loved ones are experiencing, feeling, involved in, and what they find important?

3.    Love thinking is sharing!  Do you ponder what and how to share yourself with your loved ones?  Do you think about how to help your loved ones share themselves with you?  Do you think about what your loved ones share with you?

4.    Love thinking is kind!  Are the thoughts you have of your loved ones filled with kindness?  Do you give thought to how to show kindness?

5.    Love thinking is affirmational!  Do you focus your thoughts on what is good and admirable about your loved ones.  Do you value not only what your loved ones do but their essence as well?  Do you think about how to convey that you highly value and cheer for the success of your loved ones?

6.    Love thinking is appropriately protective!  Is safeguarding those you love part of your concern and contemplations?  Is thought given to not being overly protective?

7.    Love thinking is thankful!  Concerning your loved ones are you frequently thinking thankfully about what they do and are?  Are you good at thinking about how to express your thankfulness?

8.    Love thinking is emotional!  Do you give thought to the many emotions love brings into our lives?  Do you try to understand the emotions of your loved ones as well as your own emotions?  Are you good at figuring out the -guidance messages’ in yours and others’ emotions?  In relating with love does your thinking work well with your emotions?

9.    Love thinking is joyous!  Do you just simply enjoy thinking about your loved ones?  Does it cause you happiness to simply notice your loved ones’ way of being them self?  Do you think pleasurably about your loved ones’ idiosyncrasies, oddities, and uniqueness?

10.    Love thinking is studious!  Do you study how to grow love, make love work, improve with love, give and get love better?  Do you study your loved ones and how to best do love with them?

11.    Love thinking is inspiring!  Have you had the experience of being inspired, enriched and deeply benefited by thinking about love in the ways just described? (If not keep thinking about love and we bet you will.)

12.    Love thinking is intimate!  Do you think about love in deeply personal, emotionally close and very private ways?  Do you frequently and healthfully mix your love thinking with your sex thinking?  Can you also connect thoughts about the  passionate and the erotic with thoughts about spiritual love?

People who really think more about love often automatically do more about love.  Unless their thinking is mistaken and inaccurate, those people are the ones more likely to experience and achieve more in the arenas of love.  The reverse is also likely to be true. Those who don’t give love much thought are less likely to get good love results.  So we encourage you to think a lot about love and especially how healthy, real love can be made to work, grow and improve lives.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
With whom will you share and discuss this ‘think love’ mini-love lesson and exactly when will you do that?

Love Hugs for Health and Happiness

Mini-love lesson #182

Synopsis: This mini-love lesson, both seriously and lightly, gets the reader into some the many surprising health and happiness benefits of becoming skilled at love hugs, doing more for your loved ones, yourself and your love relationships.

Love Hugs and Their Surprising Goodies

A good love hug may surprise you with how many broad-ranging benefits it offers.  But first let’s be sure what were talking about.  Not all hugs are love hugs.  A real love hug starts with a person having and then wanting to give a gift of some sincere, heartfelt, real love.  It frequently contains a fair amount of empathy and a bit of evaluation of what the recipient will find beneficial and/or enjoyable.  Then, of course, it takes behavioral action.  It seldom contains elements of being sexual, perfunctory, manipulative or anything other than a behavioral connection gift.

The Many Types of Love Hugs

Love hugs are for everybody – friends, family, young, old, mates, kids, etc.  Hugs can be of a great many different types: tender, sweet, comforting, zestful, bold, intimate, lively, and a lot more.  Most love hugs include a lot of body contact.  Standing and laying down love hugs are often full-bodied and can go from cheek to cheek contact all the way down to the knees or even the feet.  Sitting, they usually in essence are sort of like cuddling and physically encompassing.  Love hugging frequently last a bit longer than other kinds of hugs and, therefore, can be savored better.  Love hugs can be considered a sort of pick me up behavioral vitamin.  Have at least one a day.

Most genuine love hugs benefit both the initiator and the receiver.  This group of benefits is increased when the receiver hugs back. Even without this hug back response, both people benefit.  There also are multiple person or clump love hugs with groups of close friends and family, sometimes even including pets.

The following are a dozen of the many, frequent benefits research has discovered having to do with love hugging.

A love hug:
•    triggers an invigorating, energizing, biological effect
•    sets off natural anti-depressive neurochemistry
•    starts a cascade of automatic, tension reduction responses
•    increases a sense of support and safety
•    improves blood circulation
∙    normalizes blood pressure
•    improves auto-immune functioning
∙    decreases anxiety
•    generates increases in self-confidence
•    improves digestive functioning
•    tends to increase the feeling of love connection with others
•    has a soothing effect on emotional disturbance and disruption

Two Way Benefit

Remember that both the person giving and the one getting an initiated love hug may receive the above listed benefits.  There are quite a few other benefits research has discovered but the ones listed above are some of the main ones.  Love hugs are part of the broader spectrum of tactile love which brain research increasingly shows loving touch to be very healthful and in some cases vitally necessary.

On the Lighter Side

Here is another list of love hug benefits:
Love hugs are:
•    non-fattening
•    non-taxable
•    non-polluting
•    don’t require monthly payments
•    are theft proof
•    don’t have to be insured
•    are inflation proof
•    don’t require batteries
•    don’t require refrigeration but can assist thawing
•    and the supply doesn’t run out no matter how many you give away

Give and Therefore Get More Love Hugs

Right this minute whatever amount of love hugging you already do, consider love hugging a little more often and a bit longer.  Also, when you could use a love hug and you realize it, consider directly, quickly and clearly asking for it, not hinting or silently hoping someone will sense your want and act.  With good, healthy, self love, don’t expect anybody to read your mind, just ask for what you want – you are worth it.  You also can specify whether you want a big bear hug or a sweet soft bunny type love hug or whatever else you might really want.

Anti-hug Issues?

Do you have anti-touch or anti-hug training or fears from previous life experiences?  If so, consider doing some work on that because health research is all very pro-love hug and love touch except in the case of some very rare and deplorable conditions.

Develop Your Love Hugging Skills

You can become very artful in delivering love through hugs of various types and sorts.  Think about custom tailoring your love hugs to the intended hug recipient and their current needs, wishes and wants.  Then give them what they likely want.  Don’t forget they may just want to see you greatly enjoying having a love hug, so as you give or get one show your joy.

It is okay to be a little selfish in lots of love hugs.  You also may improve the hugs you get by thinking and asking for little experiments in changing what you are getting in the way of a hug.  Maybe you want the arms a little tighter, or held differently or some other change but have you asked for it?  That can be part of healthy self-love.  You can learn more about how loving touch is important and how you can develop those skills of loving touch by going to the index at this site and looking up mini-love lessons on loving touch.  You also can get this mini-love lesson deeper inside yourself by talking about it to someone else.  So, who are you going to do that with?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Concerning the people you love, do you know for sure just exactly how they want to be hugged– more tenderly, more strongly, more softly, with or without caressing, differing hand placement, open or closed eyes, etc.?

Related posts:

1. 50 Varieties of Love Touch
2. Religion, Love and Mental-Health
3. Touching Back – A Surprisingly Important Love Skill
4. Brains and Love Behavior: Oxytocin and Other Healthful Neurochemistry
5. Here And Now Love 

Dining with Heart - A Love Skill

Synopsis: Love nourishing the heart while feeding the body; a shared and broad ethology; love infused family dining; couples dining with love; serving friendship love; love, food and Eros; love and dining with self; the dining with heart challenge.

Love Nourishing  the Heart While Feeding the Body

A loving family joyfully shares a meal together, a romantic couple share a candlelight dinner, eating birthday cake with close and jovial friends, chocolates presented in a heart shaped box, kids bringing parents breakfast in bed – all give evidence to how food can be used with the sharing and growing of love relationships of all types.  It is an ancient adage that “The best meals are those served with love”.

A Shared, Long and Broad Ethology

Sharing food as evidence of a love does not only occur in human behavior.  The animal world is full of examples of both mammals, birds and even fish bringing food-gifts to their love mates or hoped for love mates.  There also are many examples where mammals especially, lovingly provide food to smaller and weaker and sometimes sick fellow creatures.  There even are examples of cross species sharing of choice foods and of different species eating side-by-side along with affectionate muzzling, licking, grooming and other likely love-expressive actions.

The evidence suggests that if an animal brain has a limbic system it loves, and if it eats it will mix some sort of love behavior with eating behavior.  The mixing of love and food behaviors probably begins with mothers feeding babies.  Wherever it begins the sharing of food, along with various other acts of loving care and connection, can be traced all the way back into the time of the dinosaurs.  And among humans it shows up in every tribe, culture and society.

Love Infused Family Dining

Making eating together a good, constructive, positive, family love experience is a goal that can be achieved in lots of different ways.  It is interesting to note that all sorts of parents and families who have highly productive, famous offspring had mealtimes together and that those meals were treated in special ways.  Many of the children of such families learned that they were to come to dinner with something by which they could enrich the rest of the family.  Everyone brought to the table a funny story, an intriguing question, a curiosity, an item to be appreciated or perhaps even a contrary opinion.

Different families had different things to stress but they all stressed sharing and the enrichment of one another by the sharing.  In some very musical families the requirement was to sing a line or two from a song or explaining a musical refrain.  In political families it usually had something to do with news related to a cause or a conflict.  In a good many families mealtime was marked by remarks offering another family member, or guest, some sort of affirmative statement.

Praises, compliments, thank you statements and other expressions of gratitude make many families’ meal times together a more loving experience.  In some families the most positive remarks are rewarded with an extra helping of dessert.  In some there is a rule against giving negative statements like criticism, put-downs and complaining; angry or hostile remarks are certainly usually against the dining-together family rules.  The prayers offering blessings for food and thanksgiving, especially in those families where everyone adds something to the prayer, can help accomplish the making of the meal a more love-oriented event.

Sometimes families that ask everyone to hear or discuss unhappy and stressful things at the dinner table can bring about bonding when enough loving care is expressed in the process.  However, such actions may cause indigestion and might bring about an aversion to eating with others in some people who have had numerous, negative, dining experiences.  So, one must be careful about using mealtimes as a time to discuss problems.

Another important thing to remember is to really pay attention to the food and appreciating what tastes good, making comments out loud and also to verbally be thankful to whoever spent time and effort to prepare the food.

Couples Dining with Love

Did you know the romantic, candle lit dinner for two is a relatively new event and was once thought of as an indecent, radical, anti-establishment thing to do.  Typically in many ‘old countries’ the woman served the male patriarch of the family first as he sat alone at the table and she stood behind him while he ate.  Then the other males came to the table and were served, followed by the higher status females who in some lands had to eat at a different table.  Then came the children who usually had to eat in another room.

Finally,  the serving females got to eat whatever was left in the food preparation area which sometimes was outside.  To this day men and women eating together in some places is quite frowned upon.  Males and females eating together counters the male dominance in these cultures and represents movement toward female equality.  Also for a couple to dine alone together adds the chance for intimate exchanges, the sin of self chosen love, and the possibility of indecency.

The intimate dinner for two can be a love feast when there are words of love spoken in soft tones of love, with lots of loving looks and eye contact, punctuated perhaps with touches of love, mixed with loving self disclosures of appreciation and affirmation of each other, and perhaps a little sexy, under the table foot action.  A romantic meal means lots of loving sharing and good emotional intercourse while eating, with strong focus on each other and the experience being shared.  A very important element, not to forget, is making enough time available so as not to be rushed or not to have the experience cut short.

Watch out for love sabotaging actions like complaining about anything, bringing up problems of any type, being distracted by anything, not paying close attention to each other, talking about unloved others, work and other non-couple positive issues, or anything likely to be regarded as impersonal.  Especially important is avoiding unappetizing, gross and rude topics.  Generally the idea is to talk about each other and very positive pleasant things, and to forget everybody and everything else.  That way you do a good job of dining together with and for love.

If one or both of you prepared the food and/or the environmental atmosphere, lots of focus on both of these contributions with words of appreciation are definitely in order.  Focusing on the thinking and feelings of each other by asking personal questions likely to be answered with positive, pleasant words is an exquisite way to dine with love.

When I have suggested these elements of ‘Dining with love’ to some people they have said things like, “What if I don’t like the food or I’m uncomfortable in the environment?  Should I lie, or just keep quiet, or what?”.  I like to suggest that to have a love-focused dining experience with someone that you look for what you can honestly be positive about, and say so.  Then leave the rest for later, or never.

The couples’ love-focused dining experience for two is 1.  giving a couple a chance to feed each other positive, love messages, in a romantic setting, while enjoying food, drink and atmosphere together.  And 2. it is a love skill that is worth adding to your ‘love repertoire’.

Serving Friendship Love

Friends can eat together and in the process show each other friendship love.  In doing so they can substantially grow and improve their relationships with each other.  Sometimes the eating is done informally, quite often in the kitchen, sometimes it’s via a dinner party or going out to eat together in a really nice or interesting, different place.  It can be friends preparing and eating a meal together.  The most important part is the same as in all love-focused eating experiences. The food is not what it’s all about, although that’s important.

It’s the human interaction and the togetherness that are paramount.  Are the interactions of love friendly, positive, deeper than with strangers, maybe sometimes rather quite but sometimes noisy with laughter, and are they often lighthearted and sometimes deeper and quite meaningful?  The atmosphere usually is less important than in the romantic, lovers’ meals but the environment is best when it is at least comfortable if possible.  Above all is to be personable, friendly, accepting, tolerant and sincerely caring.  To joke, tell stories, tell on ones’ self, and to briefly honestly brag, to let out whatever are ones’ larger emotions and concerns, and to talk about whatever is truly important to you may be included.  Also just being able to be quiet together is sometimes a very good, friendly way to share a meal.

Love, Food and Eros

She sat him on a giant pillow and put a turban on his head.  She was dressed in a shockingly revealing, harem girl costume.  She danced back and forth in front of him, erotically bringing him delicious tidbits of various exotic foods from a nearby table.  Then with sensuous twists and turns her diaphanous garments began to disappear.  She then poured aromatic sauces over various parts of her body and offered them to his lips and tongue.  He tasted sweet and tangy juices, and he tasted her, and then she tasted him.  It was indeed the finest meal he’d ever experienced, and one of the most loving dinners she ever served.  His only quandary was how to give her an equally delicious experience when it was next his turn to prepare a love-meal for her.  Need we say more?

Love and Dining with Self

Out of healthy, self-love do you treat yourself to love-filled, just right for you, dining experiences?  When alone do you slowly savor fine tasting food and drink.  Do you think something like,  “I will take time to treat myself well with something I really like to taste?  Do you make it a lovely experience with just the right environment and accouterments.  Perhaps you might enhance a meal with a good book to read, or a special incense, or going outside with nature, or turning on background music you really enjoy.  There are many ways to be extra good to yourself by way of love mixed with food.

A Dining with Heart Challenge

My challenge to you is to be focused on the giving and receiving of love when you feed or eat with loved ones or with yourself.  The challenge also is to develop your skill at making shared eating experiences, those in which you give the heartfelt psychological nourishment of love while also taking it in.  Graciousness, artfulness, thoughtfulness and a host of other loving ingredients all can be mixed in and can become part of the meals you share with loved ones.  So, I hope you are or will enjoy developing this love skill as much as any other.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question How loving will you be the next time you eat with someone you love?  What’s your recipe for creating love-nurturing dining experiences?

Related posts:

1. Gratitude As a Love Skill
2. Checking It Out – As a Love Skill
3. Intimacy Creation – A Love Skill
4. Respect – As a Love Skill