Trust and Mistrust in Love

Synopsis: The case of the nude photos and what’s best to learn from it; a terrible, fascinating truth about romantic-love trust; and a self-strengthening approach to building great, dependable, love trust; more.

The Case of the Nude Photos

“I’m in shock and don’t know which way to turn.  I just discovered nude photos of my teenage daughter on a phone I didn’t know my husband had.

 “Horrible scenarios are running through my head.  Are my husband and daughter involved in incest?  I can’t bear to think about it.  Should I call the police, see a lawyer, file for divorce?  Can I have both of them committed to a psych ward?  Is my husband a sex addict, or is my daughter?  Is everything I believed about my marriage a lie?  Am I one of those parents who doesn’t know what’s really going on with their kids?   I don’t trust anybody or anything any more.  Am I going crazy?  Is nothing the way I thought it was?  Is there anything or anyone I can trust?  Will I ever trust anybody again?”

As you can see Helen was having a huge ‘trust crisis’.  Up to the discovery of a strange iPhone in her husband’s briefcase, life had seemed pretty much normal and OK.  Her adolescent daughter had been a little rebellious but nothing serious seemed to be going on, until now.  Lately her husband had been kind of distant emotionally but also lately his business work-load had been extra heavy.  She, herself, had been stressed with projects demanding overtime at her office but about that there was ‘light at the end of the tunnel’.  Since her horrified discovery life was all panic and gut-wrenching disaster.  Her whole family seemed to be descending into nightmarish chaos – or so it seemed.

Helen said she couldn’t face all this alone so with some help she quickly was able to arrange for her husband and daughter to meet with her and a talented therapist intern of mine that evening in an emergency family counseling session.  She came in looking pale and shaking and her husband and daughter entered looking quite worried.  With fear and trepidation Helen confronted them with the sequence of events that had lead her to the discovery of the nude photos.  She got excellent support, clarification, interpretation, and help with sufficiency and accuracy from my intern.

Slowly the truth emerged and something resembling normalcy began to return.  It was revealed that Kendra, Helen’s teenage daughter, had been taking sexy, nude photos of herself and had been sending them to her boyfriend and her closest girlfriends, who were doing the same thing, like so many other kids at her school.  She explained it was quite a fad.  Bill, Helen’s husband, caught Kendra doing this and confiscated her phone.  He said he didn’t want to tell Helen about this until Helen’s big project at work was over.

Furthermore, Kendra had gotten him to promise that he and she would handle it because they thought Helen tended to over-react.  Kendra admitted she’d sort of manipulated her father into that promise.  Kendra also said she wouldn’t be doing any of this again, especially because her best girlfriend had gotten into really big trouble over this and was being sent away somewhere and she didn’t want that to happen to her.

After a lot of anguished bewilderment, confusion, anger mixed with relief and disappointment this family began to show each other love.  Soon they were able to agree that they should and could be a lot more self-disclosing to one another.  Helen agreed to work on not being so prone to panic, and Bill and Kendra agreed not to keep secrets from Helen.  They all agreed they would aspire to greater, loving communication of their important truths to each other, no matter what it was about, and they set out to do just that.  They made a ‘no big secrets contact’ with each other and that seemed to help a lot.  They further agreed that trust was built on ‘truth mixed with love’ and they made that their family goal.

What do you suppose you would do if you made a discovery similar to Helen’s?  Would your trust in your loved ones be shaken?  Would you lose trust in your own judgment?  Would you do as well as they did in patching things up and recovering from this episode?

Let me suggest the best thing to learn from this example is when experiencing strong mistrust do not jump to conclusions.  Quick conclusions are your enemy.  I can’t tell you how many love relationship problems I have helped people get through that were started by, or made much worse by, people drawing premature, erroneous conclusions.  Related to this is a second, huge, common, trust issue problem.  It’s the problem of keeping secrets.  So many mistrust calamities could have been avoided had the people involved been able to get their truth out in the open and discuss it, even if it hurt.  In successful, love relationships it takes sharing truth and that builds trust.  Hiding, avoiding, denial, distortions and mis-representations of the truth, more often than not, work against ‘trust building’ even when they are done for well-meaning reasons.

Trust Issues and Their Surprising Complications

Trust and mistrust issues are among the biggest problems in love relationships.  Do I trust you to be faithful?  Do I trust myself to remain faithful?  Can I love you and not trust you?  If I forgive you does it mean I have to trust you?  Do I trust myself to keep being loving no matter what?  Do I trust myself to have enough ‘attraction power’ to hold you or should I secretly spy and pry into your life to make sure you’re not betraying me?  Do I trust you not to turn into my mother, or my father?  Do I trust us enough to make a go of it?  Do I trust that our love can be strong enough to hold us together and survive what the world throws at us?   Do I trust in trusting?  Yes, there are great many trust issues that many people give no thought to until they have occasion to experience very upsetting mistrust.

It’s not only with lovers and spouses that we have trust issues.  Shall I trust my kids do what I have taught them?  Should I trust myself to be a good parent?  Can I trust that my family will support me in a crisis?  Will my avowed, true friends be there for me when I need them?  Will I come through for them when they call on me in crisis?  With every love relationship there can be heavy-duty trust challenges.  So, let’s ask this question.  How does healthy, real love guide us in facing all these trust issues?

Understanding Trust Itself

To answer the above questions let’s first look at a few ways trust is understood to work. Here’s a concept about how trust operates considered to be a little radical.  It goes like this:
All smart trust is really self-trust.  There’s no such thing as trusting other people.  There’s only trusting yourself to handle what others may send your way.  If you do not unconsciously, sufficiently trust your own ability to handle what someone else may bring to your life then you consciously will not trust them.  All trust and mistrust is projected self-trust or the lack there of.  The highly self-trusting find it easier to forgive and try again, while those who have low self-trust don’t.  It’s hard for them to forgive because they secretly know they can’t handle what might be done to them, or so goes this understanding of trust dynamics.  There is some research to support this kind of thinking.

Those who come to re-trust a person after betrayal tend to trust their own ability to handle things well even if they are betrayed again. The more ego-weak a person is the less they trust in others.  This apparently is true of many people, but not all.  Those who have a high self-trust tend to either easily choose to trust or not trust, but they seldom spend much time in uneasy, anxious mistrust of others.  There also is some research which suggests that the most highly mistrusting people are not to be trusted.  The naïve and innocent also give trust too easily.  And the frequently traumatized, abused and misused tend to place little trust in anyone.

Another viewpoint on trust goes like this.  All trust is a gamble and should be seen as such.  In love when we trust someone we are gambling on the person we love and on the love in the relationship.  Intelligent people know that some of these love-gambles will pay off and some will not.  Some people gamble on love and win enormously and some lose enormously.  In gambling the saying goes “if you can’t afford to lose, don’t bet”.  However, in love and other great life experiences the truth is "you can’t afford not to gamble".  Consider the old wisdom teaching “it is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all”.  For most people that’s probably true.

Consider this concept.  The adventures of love bring people their biggest and most meaningful life experiences, even when they don’t win at love.  Some think nothing defines or develops a person so much as their love relationships.  However, those love relationships take great gambles of trust, or they are far too limited.  Whether it be love of a spouse, a child, a family, a people, a nation, a cause or a deity, to win big takes gambling on trust big.

There are important problems and exceptions to the above thinking.  Quite sadly there are far too many people who make the gamble of love with someone who will literally destroy them one way or another.  So many murders and terrible abuse tragedies are stories of love gone wrong.  So many people who die of a substance addiction were started on that addiction path by way of a poor or false-love relationship.  So many suicides, heart attacks, strokes and other sudden health failures occur after the loss of a love.

All too frequently the trust-gamble of love poorly chosen results in tragedy.  The good news is that people who learn about love and its workings make much better gambles of trust.  They, therefore, win at love more often and far bigger.  Another good news factor is that the vast majority of people win more than they lose when they gamble on love.

Romantic love, or mate or spouse love probably is the most problematic when it comes to trust issues.  Pet love and grandparent’s love of grandchildren probably are the types of love with the fewest, trust foul-ups and the most, trust related, good results.  Still every kind of love relationship can have trust problems.  Therefore, every love relationship deserves some thinking and probably talking about trust issues.

Mistrust In Love

One view of mistrust holds that the more untrustworthy you are the more you will not trust the people you love and who you hope love you.  If you are highly prone to deception you will suspect others are likewise deceptive.  Suspicion and mistrust can ruin an otherwise good love relationship.  Here’s what Marcia said, “You tapped my phone, secretly went through my things, had me followed, read my diary when I ask you not to, and now you’re asking me to trust you.  Not a chance!  I thought we had a good thing going.  Now I see how sneaky you are.  If you can’t trust me I don’t want to have anything more to do with you.  We are through, and that’s final!”  Love often demands that we gamble ‘trust in another’ and if instead we rely too much on mistrust, and the behaviors that mistrust leads to, a love relationship can become poisoned.

Romantic Love and Trust

In romantic love there is a terrible, fascinating truth.  The more we don’t trust our own worth, value, love-ability and attraction power the more we can become insecure.  The more we are insecure the more we subconsciously believe someone better than ourselves will come along and be more desirable than we are.  That "more desirable person" will steal our loved-one away from us and we will be abandoned, alone and unloved.  Therefore, we must mistrust and guard against our loved-one looking at other attractive people, talking to them, being around them without our supervision, looking at images of attractive sexy others, etc. and generally we must keep our loved-ones ‘on a short leash’ to keep them to ourselves.

That indicates we might feel like our loved-ones are our property like a dog, or a slave, who is going to run away.  With this kind of thinking any suspicious involvement with another must be punished severely and the leash shortened.  Usually the final result of the ‘short leash approach’ is to drive our loved ones away and possibly into the arms of someone better than us.  Mistrust frequently is, in effect, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

A Self-Strengthening Approach to Building Love Trust

The best way to build trust is to become ‘psychologically big and strong’ enough to handle being very truthful in a loving way.  To be big in healthy self-love so as to be able to own up to one’s mistakes and problematic behavior is a highly desirable part of the trust-building process.  It also is important to become big and strong enough psychologically, and especially emotionally, so as not to be destroyed or irreparably harmed when a loved one disappoints, betrays or otherwise dishonestly deals with you.

Furthermore, it is quite important to grow big enough to maturely and magnanimously handle the truth when it comes your way, no matter how much it hurts, bothers or scares you.  Trust is built on truth-telling, truth-hearing, truth-sharing and generally dealing from strength.  Mistrust is built on weakness, deception, inability to accept and compassionately, lovingly deal with truth.  So, build your psychological strengths, especially those having to do with love and you will be able to handle your trust challenges far better.

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ ♥ Love Success Question Are you as love trustworthy as you want the people you love to be?

Conflict, Power and Love Success

Mini-Love-Lesson   #190

FREE over 300 Mini-Love-Lessons touching the lives of thousands in over 190 countries – worldwide!

Synopsis: How successful loving couples powerfully succeed at handling disagreements, differences, opposing views and conflicts in three surprisingly different patterns is the focus of this mini-love-lesson.

The Best Use of Power When in Conflict

Sooner or later, every love relationship has conflict.  Some relationships are destroyed by it, some survive but are damaged, others repair fully and are even better than before while still other love relationships thrive on conflict right from the start.  What makes the differences?

Sooner or later, every love relationship has power issues whether they know it or not.  That is because it takes power to get anything done.  In love relationships, especially those called couples, families and comradeships, enormous amounts of hard to do things get done.  In the doing, conflicts arise and harmonious, effective teamwork power often is not easily achieved but when it is, everything is better and everybody usually is benefited.

Sooner or later, every couple has love issues because the giving, getting, growing and cycling of love effects and is effected by every couple’s way of handling conflicts and power issues.  It is the successful ways loving couples use power to handle conflict and differences with each other that concerns us here.

The Surprising 3 Most Love Successful Ways

Couples research into what works along with clinical analysis, has discovered three main ways or patterns of successfully dealing with power issues and conflict.  They are rather different from what the experts have previously thought and taught.  The titles, descriptions and details vary from study to study and presentation to presentation.  Here these three couple patterns of successfully dealing with conflicts and power issues are introduced and synthesized, summarized and given the following descriptive names.

The first one I call the Avoid and Finesse pattern, the second is the Volatile and Confronting pattern and the third is the Validating and Affirmational pattern.  Each of these patterns has its own benefits and advantages as well as its own drawbacks and dangers.  All three patterns involve couples who have been evaluated as healthfully having real love for each other.  They also have been measured as relationally positive in various ways such as being generally happy, stable and constructively functional.

1. Avoid and Finesse  When difficulties arise the successful couples using this approach work hard at avoiding directly confronting and conflicting with each other over the issues involved in the difficulty.  They tend to bring up that which is positive about their relationship and about each other more often.  They only very indirectly address the areas of possible contention, if at all.

At first they seem to, sort of, non-verbally agree to live with whatever is the source of this dissonance or disagreement perhaps to see if time alone will help solve the problem.  However, with close observation over time they can be seen to be gently, with finesse, handling the difficulty individually and then as a couple.   It is interesting that this can be done completely nonverbally by some couples using this system.  Eventually any lasting areas of possible dissonance and discord are verbally dealt with gently, in little bit segments, often starting with the easiest parts first.

Avoiding and finessing couples tend to be quite patient, kind, very seldom rude and genuinely nice to each other.  They highly value being in harmony with each other which is far more important to them than being right, defeating or winning over the other one.

It is not that the areas of continuing disagreement are forever unattended to.  Rather they are slowly and much more indirectly, subtly and carefully handled.  Compromise and synthesis-evolving-solutions are grown rather than openly confronted and decided.  In this system there is much less strong, negative, emotional expression.  There also sometimes is more strongly expressed positive emotion leading up to, during and after dealing with areas of oppositional disagreement and dissonance.

These couples usually are very comfortable with each other and see no reason to change this Avoid & Finesse style of dealing with conflicting opinions and opposing points of view.  If one person does get negative, the other frequently empathetically listens longer and then just counterbalances the negativity by being more lovingly positive.  That usually brings the other one back to a more love-positive way of interacting.  Sometimes the more okay-feeling spouse or love mate will directly but kindly ask their beloved to start returning to a more positive state and that clear, direct request usually is accepted.

Fairly good, healthy self-love seems to underlie this process for both people in the couple’s relationship.  In areas involving personal weakness, poor functioning and low competence leading to difficulties these couples tend to be very mutually supportive and cooperative with very little blaming or demeaning.  Gentle challenging for desired improvements does occur.

One big drawback and danger to the Avoid and Finesse style has to do with dealing with difficulties demanding quick resolution.  Another has to do with intractable problems that cannot be improved on without conscious, direct, interactive discussion.  Also some unsolved or unimproved conflict areas result in individuals repressing or suppressing negative feelings for a time, which then is followed by cathartic explosion.  At such times, these couples may distance themselves overlong from each other but usually then come back together, make up and go on.  There is also the danger that some couples get stuck in just avoiding and never get to the finessing improvements and resolution part.  This can be deeply destructive if it leads to a growing lack of self-disclosure loving and the closeness that brings.

Sometimes such couples, for various other reasons, go to family or couple’s counseling and meet with a therapist who thinks direct confrontation is the only way to go.  That might result in more harm than good being done.

2. Volatile and Confronting  Successful couples prone to using this style of dealing with difficulties and disagreements quickly become intensely, persuasively and assertively emotional.  They appear to enjoy arguing, teasing and provoking each other as they each combatively argue for their own case.
However, angry sounds, looks and gestures frequently are accompanied by occasional shared laughter, clever remarks, witty comebacks and even compliments when a point is well made.  Vigorous and heated debate is treated rather like a game and sometimes leads into passionate, aggressive style sex.  To outsiders including counselors and therapists, this style can look like purposeful, harmful fighting and destructive dysfunction.

It is important to note that couples using the Volatile & Confronting style, though arguing passionately, usually are doing three very positive things.

First, they are avoiding being seriously demeaning, personally insulting or trying to tear down each other.

Second, both are doing a good job of what is sometimes called owning their own okayness.  Therefore, they are not letting a sense of personal okayness be robbed from them by anything the other one says or does.  Thus, by way of strong, healthy self-love they both remain independent and free to clash vigorously.

Individually, both count on the other to remain emotionally okay during this fight style interaction.  If anyone’s feelings do get hurt by taking something the other one said too personally, they usually quickly convert to reparative, comforting interactions.  Later they go back to vigorous, confrontive sparring rather more carefully than at first.

Third, Volatile & Confronting couples tend to occasionally punctuate even the most volatile of their arguments with love-positive messages.  Not infrequently, this is done with brief, loving smiles, gestures, touches or words of love, respect and high valuing of each other.

Surprisingly, this often results in a final synthesis of opposing views and arrival at a solution to the difficulties better than either one of them could have individually devised.  Harmony between them usually then quickly follows.

Counselors not familiar with this kind of love-successful-interaction sometimes label such couples as high risk and dysfunctional.  In truth, they usually are among the most stable, happy and generally successful of couples.  They also tend to be among the more highly romantic, sexual, playful and lively of couples.

Drawbacks include sometimes having difficulty achieving serenity, patience, tenderness and understanding people who take offense easily.  They also can be misidentified as intolerant, combative and difficult.  They also may get in trouble handling relationship rivals or threats too aggressively.

    3. Validating & Affirmational  Successful couples who deal with relational dissonance issues in the Validating & Affirming style tend to be much calmer and more easy going while handling disagreements openly and directly with each other.  They fairly frequently are prone to intersperse oppositional statements with affirmational messages delivered with positive, upbeat tones and happy, loving looks.  They are more prone to active-loving-listening to each other longer and asking interested questions for further knowledge and clarification.  They tend to do this at some length before undertaking the teamwork of attempting solution building.  It is obvious that they usually treat each other quite kindly and with mutual respect.

This style leads to them being happily comfortable with each other as they face differences and difficultly.  Praises and compliments, with an openness to each other’s ideas, helps them to be very co-functional and positive as they mutually process oppositional points of view.  Occasionally they can become rather argumentative but, even there, they are reciprocating positive looks, gestures, facial expressions , voice tones, etc..  They definitely have a democratic approach but if they do fight they make up easier and quicker with more forgiveness than do many other couples.

Couples using the Validating & Affirming system are very consensus prone.  They have an approach characterized by unless we both win, we both lose and our love relationship loses.  Seldom, if ever, is there a one of us has to win and the other loses orientation.

Good-natured humor and increasingly growing to accept each other’s influence characterizes their relational growth over time.  Like the other successful, happy and lasting couples, expressions of love-positive words and actions occur more frequently than anything that could be called anti-love or love-negative, even when conflicting with each other.

Of all styles, couples using the Validating & Affirming approach are the best at conjoint (team) functioning.  Counter-intuitively, the tendency of this joint way of operating is seen as highly contributory to both partner’s individuality and personal actualization.  Also this system seems to make such couples quite proud of each other and their union.

Couples who tend to be Validating & Affirming are the happiest and healthiest of our three kinds of successful couples but there is one big danger.  If one of them gets unusually unhappy or negative about something, the other member of the couple may also automatically get unhappy rather than remaining more emotionally-up and able to help.

That especially can occur with a lack of understanding or self-disclosure about what is wrong.  In turn, that may give rise to the growth of various suspicions and magnified fears.  This, in turn, can lead to considerable misunderstanding and discordant miscommunication along with pronounced anxiety.  Serious escalation of difficulty may result and become quite destructive.

This is a situation which Volatile and Confronting couples tend to handle quicker and best, and one which Avoiding & Finessing couples usually dodge.

Becoming  Power Usage  and Conflict Resolving Successful

With the help of arriving at a good conflict handling system, individuals and couples can change, improve, repair if needed and can go on to bigger, better, healthy real love.  This includes couples working at learning to much more successfully deal with conflicts, disagreements and discord in their relationship.  This, of course, takes well-informed conjoint (team) effort.  With such effort, couples can become conjointly, harmoniously and wonderfully powerful and, thus, successful in the ways described above.  That is the challenge facing you and all of us.

The Big Problem of Mismatches

When, in a couple’s relationship, one partner uses one of these three styles and the other uses another style, big relational problems can result.  It is like one of them is playing football, and the other basketball and both can’t understand why the other one doesn’t play right.  Both are likely to try getting the other to do it their way, but not know how to achieve that goal.  Couples counseling with love-knowledgeable counselors and therapists can help.

I recommend checking out therapists credentialed by their countries’ marriage and family therapy professional accreditation organizations, and especially those trained in the well researched Arts and Science of Love (ASL) approach created by Doctors John and Julie Gottman, and those trained in the Emotions Focused Couples Therapy (EFT) of Dr. Sue Johnson.  Information to do so can be found online via standard search engines.  The above, as well as others and my own considerable clinical experience, have contributed to the research and clinical views informing this mini-love-lesson.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question  Which of the three styles of dealing with opposing views and conflicts in a couple’s relationship (or other close relationship) may fit you best?

Related posts:

1. Communicating Better with Love
2. Listening with Love – Are You Good at It?
3. Talking Styles That Hurt and Help Love
4. Empathy – A Love Skill
5. Cycling Love for Lasting Love 

Self Talk for Improving Love

Synopsis: This mini love lessons starts with the surprising importance of self talk; then goes to what is self talk; what is positive and negative self talk; some things to do about better self talk and love relationship improvement; more.

The Surprising Importance of Self Talk

Self talk is very important in all sorts of ways.  It can be especially useful in improving love relationships.

Recently researchers were surprised to learn just how important self talk could be to our physical, mental, emotional and relational health.  Negative self talk can lower one’s immunity, cause destructive stress hormones to flow in the body, and increase a whole lot of other physically, unhealthy things.  Mental efficiency is decreased, anxiety mounts, and self confidence can take a dive, all because of negative self talk.  It is thought that couples who practice negative self talk tend to fight more, and breakup more and are far less happy in their relationships.  The allover happiness in families seems to decrease if there is an abundance of negative self talk.  Certain kinds of positive self talk have produced the exact opposite results in individuals, and couples, and families and friendship networks.

What Is Self Talk?

Self talk has to do with how we talk out loud, or silently to ourselves about ourselves.  It includes what we think about our own thinking, our feelings and our behavior past, present and future.  It expresses our attitude toward who we are, how we are, and what is best and worst about ourselves.  Self talk is seen as ‘setting us up’ for future success or failure.  Self talking can encourage or discourage us when facing difficulties, help us feel weak or strong, and many other similar things depending on whether self talk is negative or positive.

What Is Positive and Negative Self Talk?

If the way you talk to yourself, about yourself and your life is mostly critical, judgmental, full of putdowns, punishing remarks, demeaning, derogatory, fearful, guilt ridden, hopeless, deficiency-oriented, etc. then it is negative and very likely quite unhealthy.  If, on the other hand, the way you talk to yourself is realistically balanced toward the positive, affirmative, laudatory, self rewarding, encouraging, challenging; if it is toward improvement, includes recognition of limitations without bad feeling, is more proud of attributes than unhappy about shortcomings and is in awe of the many miracles that make up a self, then it is likely to be very positive and quite helpful and healthful.  The inclusion of mild self depreciatory humor coupled with pride of qualities and achievements, and the ability to enjoy one’s own idiosyncratic ways also can be seen as part of the positive picture.

Where Does Our Self Talk Come From?

Originally most of our self talk comes from the way we were talked to is a child and the way we heard others around us talking when we were young.  If we had a highly critical parent we are likely to talk to ourselves about ourselves in highly critical ways.  If, on the other hand, our parents were more realistically prone to appreciative affirmation, praise and compliments and thankful statements, we are much more likely to talk to ourselves about ourselves in the same way.  Some therapists like to explain this as ‘your incorporated copy of your parents’ or your ‘inner parent self’ talking to you from your subconscious.

Self talk can come from how you choose and teach yourself to talk to yourself about yourself.  That can replace old messages with new and better messages.  And, of course, this re-training takes a fair amount of work but usually it is quite worth it.

How Does Self Talk Effect Love Relationships?

Self talk has a number of important positive or negative effects on our love relationships. One of them works this way.  If we are talking continuously critically and ‘down’ to ourselves, it may help us to tend to try only for love relationships with those who are less than we see ourselves to be.  This can lead us to repeatedly get involved with ‘losers’.  If we do achieve a love relationship with someone better than we see ourselves to be, that negative self talk can assist us in feeling insecure, suspect our love mate will find someone better than we are, and abandon us for that person.  Thus, jealousy, possessiveness and fear-based relating can come to dominate our relationship instead of healthy, real love.

If you continually put yourself down in self talk, you are likely to go down emotionally, making you less fit for good, love relating.  You also can make yourself very suspicious, mistrusting and unbelieving when affirmational  love comes your way.  That can help you end up love-starved.  Those who have adequate, healthy self-love are better at being nourished by the love that does come their way.  When you do realistic, positive, self-affirmation self talk, you have more to give and you are more likely to go around in your world more friendly and more loving.  That generally attracts other people who want to be friendly and loving to you.

By the way, coming across egotistical, stuck up, superior, etc. does not represent a person who actually loves themselves healthfully, but rather someone who is trying too hard but in self-defeating ways.  So, it is okay to brag briefly, which many people find rather charming because it shows you believe in yourself and are confident about yourself, but remember – briefly.

Self Talk for Healthy Self-Love

It turns out that realistic, positive self talk can be super important for the development of healthy self-love.  Being able to encourage yourself through a challenge with “You can do it” and similar affirmations, can make a huge difference as to whether you will succeed or not.  Healthy, loving self talk can help you to be proud of yourself for accomplishments, attributes, qualities, etc..  And loving, positive self talk generally can help you be more effective and happier with yourself and with your life.

Talking to yourself hatefully or in any other way negatively, or just indifferently, tends to have a weakening effect which can lead to increased anxiety and depression.

The Importance of Positive, Future-Oriented Self Talk

One of the best ways for self talk to help a love relationship improve, works like this.  Imagine saying to yourself, “Hello John (or whatever your name is).  I’m your inner self and I want to tell you to give a lot more physical affection and praise to your wife today.  You really can make her feel especially good, like no one else can, so get busy and start right now.  You want to become a more loving person and this will help you do just that, and it will keep you getting better at it.”  You can talk, challenge and orient yourself to love improvements by encouraging yourself to learn and practice getting good at the major love skills taught in the mini-love-lessons found at this site.  Encouraging self talk is often a big help in going forward with just about everything.  Clearly, discouraging self talk has the opposite effect.

Be and Do Self Affirmation

Do you ever tell yourself you are worth loving?  Do you own-up to the fact that you are a wondrous bunch of miracles and that is the nature of your being?  You don’t have to do anything but recognize that, and feel good about it because it is a ‘being’ thing rather than a “doing” thing.  You are a unique work of art that also can get something done.  Both your being and your doing make you worthwhile, not just your doings.  You can see yourself by one or both of two ways.  Either your being is a wondrous work of God or of millions of years of evolution.  Either way, you are a bundle of miracles – own that!

Self Love’s Relationship to Other Love and Self Talk

Have you heard it said “you have to love yourself in order for other people to love you”?  That is not exactly true but it hints at an important idea.  It does seem to work out that the more you healthfully love yourself the better others will love you too.  A lot of love-filled self talk often seems to result in more love coming your way from others.  That is probably because you become more lovable and probably more loving by that kind of self talk.

Some Things to Do for Better Self Talk and Love Relationship Improvement

Try writing down some statements you would like to hear you tell yourself.  Then do it.  Tell yourself statements you want someone else to tell you, and then ask them to do so as you also tell those statements to yourself.  Make a list of ‘100 Good Things’ about yourself – small, medium and large things; then talk positively to yourself about how each of those things is true and be happy about it.  Then get someone you love to do the same thing.

Then say things from each other’s list to each other.  Give yourself praise and be glad about how you are unique and different from others, instead of being a dull, normal copy of other people’s standards.  Work to be more ‘up’ on yourself than down on yourself every day, and do that with the words you say to yourself.  Also you might want to get a copy of the June, 2015 issue of Psychology Today, which has as its main feature article, a rather good presentation about Your Inner Voice.  It touches on recent discoveries and what is known, useful and important about self talk.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What do you think of the idea that says your self love determines how much and how well others will love you?

Related posts:

1. Can You Talk about Sex – with Love?
2. Listening With Love – Are You Good At It?
3. Additive Talking – A Love Skill
4. Critiquing without Criticizing 

Anti-Love, Non-Love & Real Love

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson begins by addressing highly important questions concerning each of the three love action states people operate in; then goes on to describe those three love action states and their outcomes so you can evaluate yourself and others in regard to each; and ends with a discussion of quality and quantity issues related to the three states.

Three Love Action States – and Super Important Questions

How much of your life has to do with acting from love, demonstrating love and receiving love? How much of your life essentially is non-love oriented? Are there parts of your life which might be described as containing anti-love actions?

Let’s go into this a bit further by asking some related questions. If much or little of your life has to do with love (see love definition entries) what does that make your life into? If much of your life might be called non-love involved what does that do to your life? If there are important episodes in your life in which your actions are anti-love what does that turn your life into? How does all this effect those you love, or those you hope to love, and those you hope to be loved by? Do those who are important to you perceive you to be largely anti-loving, or non-loving, or quite loving and lovable?

Descriptions of the Three Love Action States

If you are, or often are seen as indifferent, uninvolved, unconcerned, apathetic about others, impersonal, perfunctory, inattentive, passive, negligent, robotic, unimpressionable, aloof, impenetrable, distracted, or unemotional – you may be living too non-love oriented.

If you are or are perceived as being deceitful, verbally or physically abusive, aggressive as opposed to assertive, offensively defensive, demeaning, degrading, deprecating, greedy, emotionally cold and rejecting, betraying, cheating, purposefully destructive, hostile, brutal, anti-caring and uncaring, hateful, negatively prejudicial, vengeful, mean-spirited, judgmental, combative, punitive, controlling and authoritarian, dogmatic and overly self-centered and selfish to the detriment of others – you may be having an anti-love impact in the way you go about at least certain aspects of your life.

On the other hand, if you are or are seen as caring, kind, compassionate, generous, friendly, personally warm, endearing, benevolent, congenial, fair and democratic, positive about and toward others, friendly, cordial, welcoming and inclusive, thankful, rejoice-full, affectionate, beneficent, of goodwill, empathetic, appropriately protective, appreciative, understanding, powerfully passionate about life in many of its aspects and about the rights and well-being of others, philanthropic, altruistic, patient, magnanimous, considerate, thoughtful, giving, merciful, as well as loving and lovable – you are likely to be going about love in your life rather well.

Outcomes Of the Three States

People who are too often anti-loving are seen as tending to destroy their love relationships. They also tend to seen as being harmful to those they would have a love relationship with.

People who too often are non-loving are seen as having their relationships slowly erode away and they are thought to often experience abandonment. They also can be seen as instrumental in the love malnourishment and love starvation of those they would have a love relationship with.

People who are sufficiently to abundantly, healthfully loving are seen as getting the happiest, healthiest and generally the most successful life and relationship results.

Quality and Quantity Issues

One way to evaluate a love relationship, be it with a lover, spouse, child, friend or family member, is to think about the quality and quantity of love experienced in the relationship. How much time is spent in actions that convey quality love? Also how much can be called non-loving and how much can be called anti-loving? Are the anti-love actions more impactful than the loving actions? Are the non-love actions more important, powerful and dramatic than the loving? These are important questions that few people seem to know to use in understanding their love relationships, including the love relationship they have with themselves. Thinking with these questions may lead to considerable improvement in how healthy love is accomplished in your life. Conversing with loved ones about these questions also may lead to “love team” improvements.

As always, Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Who will give you honest, accurate feedback on how you come across as to being loving, non-loving or anti-loving?

Related posts:

1. Anti-Love Myth # 1: True Love Means You’ll Know What to Do
2. The Anti-Love Forces Are Out to Get You
3. Pro-Love and Anti-Love Talking
4. Touch Only with Love: an Anti-Violence Tool
5. It Might Be Healthy, Real Love … 

Love Bids and Their Astounding Importance

Synopsis: How pitching and catching love bids makes an enormous difference starts our discussion; followed by what love bids are; and finally ending with the super significance of well caught and well returned bids; more.

Pitching and Catching Love Bids Makes All the Difference

Across the crowded room Michael glanced at Grace, then briefly smiled and nodded ever so slightly in her direction.  Grace coyly smiled back as she gave a slow subtle return nod.  Such a small, quick interaction but it made both Michael and Grace feel slightly elated and a bit more emotionally connected.  Both thought about how good their love relationship was and how glad they were to have it all these many years.

They both then moved through the gathering toward each other and went happily home earlier than they had planned, enjoying each other all the way.  Because Michael had ‘pitched’ Grace a little behavioral “bid” for love connecting and Grace ‘caught’ it well and pitched one back, this couple had one of their many, excellent, loving evenings together, feeling close and intimately connected.
Nan and Buck did not fare nearly as well.  Buck was eating an early lunch at work when Nan called and said, “Let’s go to lunch together”.

Buck, lost in his work, said a rather abrupt, “No, I’m already eating here at my desk.  Is there anything else?”.  Nan feeling discounted and rebuffed mumbled a goodbye and ended the call.  After work, Nan decided to get a drink with some of her fellow workers and went on to spend the evening flirting and dancing, and then got home rather late.  Waiting at home, Buck felt lonely, a bit worried and then a bit angry.

When Nan came in he greeted her with a very critical, parent-like, “Where have you been. You should have called if you were going to be late”.  Feeling criticized like a child, she lied saying she had to work late and she was going to bed because she was really “wiped out”.  Now both of them felt lonely and rebuffed.

Had Nan pitched her bid for love connecting in a much more clear fashion like, “I really want a little personal, close, ‘us’ time together.  Let’s use today’s lunch time for that.  Okay?”.  Had Buck been more aware and ‘caught’ and understood Nan’s ‘love bid’ for what it was, a chance for a love connection experience, they might have done as well as Michael and Grace but sadly they didn’t.
Research is showing that the ‘pitching and catching’ of love bids may be crucial to the success or failure of many love relationships.  This is true not only for couples but also parents and children, family relationships, deep close friends and even with pets.  There even is evidence that love bidding also may occur in the animal world, especially among mammals.

What Are Love Bids?

Simply put, a love bid is any action aimed at initiating an experience of mutual love connection.  It can be as simple as a wink, an intimate tone of voice, a tender touch, a welcoming gesture or an inviting smile.  It can be a bid for love connecting by way of showing and sharing humor, ideas, affection, excitement, fun, silliness, conversation, empathy, affirmation, self-disclosure, caring, support, catharsis or just time together.

Love bids often are subtle but they also can be quite clear and obvious.  They are accomplished by both verbal and expressional (non-verbal) behaviors.  They help fill one of love’s major purposes, that of healthful connection (see mini-love-lessons “A Functional Definition of Love”).  Love bids, well pitched and well caught, and then returned again help us come together, get happy together and help bring about the best and most important of love nurturing and emotionally nourishing experiences.

Love Bids and Love Success

There is research from the pioneering and famed Gottman Institute that shows successful couples tend to connect and interact 86% or more of the time when one partner or the other makes a bid for love relationship connection; success here is defined as a couple being together six or more years.  Failing couples, those who break up or divorce in less than six years, connect after a bid for connection is made, on average, only 33% of the time or less.  That is only one of an increasing number of findings from a growing body of large-scale, long-range, ongoing research efforts in a wide number of fields working to discover what succeeds in love relationships.

A considerable amount of growing evidence points to this conclusion.  Love bids and love connecting experiences are vital for maintaining and growing healthy, real love relationships.  The maintenance of ongoing relationships, the healing of damaged relationships and living balanced and healthfully in active relationships is crucially affected by how well people in these relationships ‘pitch and catch’ their bids for love connecting.

Subtle Bids for Love Connecting

Jennifer looked up and in whispered tones said, “Aren’t the clouds beautiful”?  She was making a small, subtle bid for her husband to briefly connect with her in a sharing appreciation, love experience.  She was purposefully making it small and subtle because, to her, it seemed more intimate and romantic that way.  Perhaps it also seemed safer protecting her from being obviously rejected if he didn’t catch it or reacted somehow negatively.

If Jennifer’s husband made absolutely no response to her bid she might see him as being insensitive, not valuing her, perhaps upset with her, or even evidence of him not loving her.  If Jennifer’s husband responded with something like, “No, I actually don’t like those clouds, they look like a storm is brewing and that’s going to ruin our barbecue plans for tonight”.  That would have been better than no response at all.  Even though it presents disagreement, it involves replying and interacting with her about what she said, and that is more of a love connecting than not responding at all.

If he added to his disagreement statement, terms of endearment like Sweetheart or Darling, along with pleasant tones of voice, it could be considered quite loving.  That might have met Jennifer’s desire to be dealt with, and connected with, as someone who is loved by her husband.  It, therefore, would have been a love nourishment and bonding experience, better by far than silence.

If Jennifer’s husband responded by putting an arm around her, and pulled her closer as he also looked at the clouds and then kissed her on the cheek, that would have given her the love connection that her bid actually was aimed at producing.  If he had added words like, “I feel so close to you when we see beautiful things together”, that might have made for an intimate moment of superb, love connection.
The pitching and catching of subtle love bids sometimes can be something of an art form.  It may involve all sorts of intriguing and enjoyable variations.  It also can be quite spontaneous and even unconsciously done.  Without even knowing it, a sad look can be a bid for supportive, caring, love connecting.

Obvious Bids for Love Connection

While subtle bids for love connection are considered more romantic and safer from embarrassment, obvious bids are much more likely to be clearly understood and successfully enacted.  However, when they are lovelessly rejected, the ‘ouch’ factor usually is much stronger.  So, unless your self-love is quite strong, having your obvious bids for love connection turned down may result in you feeling really hurt.  The healthfully, sufficiently self loving can sincerely think “their loss” and go on feeling okay.  Others, not so much.

Obvious bids usually are accomplished through the use of words requesting specific behaviors.  “Let’s cuddle on the couch for the next half-hour and just be close, okay?” is an example of an obvious bid for love connection.  A well pitched, obvious love bid includes four elements: (1) the behavior desired –  to cuddle, (2) the desired place where the behavior is to occur – on the couch, (3) the desired time – the next half-hour, and (4) the desired emotional mood – closeness.  A good, obvious love bid usually is stated in loving tones of voice with loving facial expressions, gestures and perhaps some loving touch.  If delivered in written form, it usually is good to add some additional words expressing love directly.

It also is good to be careful about making a clear difference between a bid for sex and a bid for love, or a bid for both together.  It is important that you and your intimate love partner both be sure you have the same understanding.  If you say, “I want to hug” and it means “let’s have a raunchy, good time together, miscommunication problems are highly likely.

Well Caught and Returned Love Bids

Responding to love bids is crucial for having ongoing, love success.  When couples, or families, or friends reduce their pitching, catching and return pitching of their bids for love connecting, as one might expect, connection reduces.  Reduced love connecting sets up a love relationship for all manner of problems.  Love malnutrition and love starvation may occur.  This especially is dangerous for the health and well-being of young children.

Vulnerability to couples having affair problems becomes greater.  Friends and family members can grow distant with reductions of love bids.  And all sorts of other maladies become more likely when bids for love connection are markedly reduced or absent.
Frequently and, if possible, artfully pitching your bids for love connection, receiving other’s bids, and responding with a return pitching leads to love cycling.  This in turn tends to grow love and make it stronger, as well as healthier, not to mention more enjoyable.

To do all that requires several things.  It is just like the game called “catch” when the ball is thrown back and forth.  (Notice the game is not called “throw”).  First you have to be aware that something is being thrown or pitched to you.  Otherwise, what is pitched may fly right by you.  Once you notice what is coming, you have to try to catch it.  This requires some understanding of what it really is, or might be, and a receiving response, followed by an awareness of whether you got it or not.

Misinterpreting or misunderstanding is like fumbling the ball.  Next you have to come up with how you are going to make a return pitch, followed by aiming and sending it.  Each of these steps can be handled artfully with practice, clumsily, or not at all.  The research suggests everybody totally misses some of the time, fumbles at other times, but with practice, sometimes with coaching, they can get better and better at this astonishingly important love skill.  So, the more you study and practice both your pitching love bids and catching your loved one’s bids for love connection, the better the relationship likely will be.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What kind of bids for love connecting are you good at making, and what kinds are you likely to miss or misunderstand?

Related posts:

1. Lying to Protect Those You Love ???
2. Connection Matching – A Love Skill
3. Wall and Catapult Love Destruction & How To Avoid It
4. Anti-Love, Non-Love & Real Love
5. Cycling Love for Lasting Love 

Love Is Patient

Mini-Love-Lesson #237

Synopsis: Loving Patience, what it is, its psychology, many benefits, disadvantages, the dynamics of impatience and ways to develop greater Loving Patience are very helpfully presented here starting with an ancient Indian teaching tale truth.

An Ancient and Crucial Truth!

To journey together in love, we have to walk at the slowest person’s pace.  That is what the Dakota medicine woman’s campfire tale taught one night before we guest scouts retired to our tepees when I was an impulsive youth.  This ancient, tribal wisdom is just as true today as it was then.  It echoes Paul’s first of 16 tenets on love – Love Is Patient.

In Paul’s ancient, biblical Greek it is “He agape makrothumia” which includes the concept that love is repeatedly forbearing of others and their frustrating ways.  Versions of this truth can be found throughout the teachings of various world religions and more positive philosophies.  “Impatience shows no love, “If patience is absent, real love may be absent too” and “With patience, love withers not” are examples of sundry, sage’s precepts I have encountered.

What Is Loving Patience?

Patience is the ability to calmly wait while enduring ongoing, negative stimuli.
Loving Patience is the ability to calmly wait while remaining loving (good-natured, kind, helpful, tolerant, accepting, non-judgmental, etc.) in the face of the slow, tedious, frustrating, annoying, aggravating, disappointing and/or unloving behaviors of others, or even of one’s self.

The Psychology of Patience

I think the best thing psychologists have discovered about patience is that it is obtainable by those who attempt to acquire it.  It also is teachable to trainable pets and children who have reached certain stages of development.  This mostly is accomplished by using positive rewards and reinforcements for incrementally increased waiting.

Studies suggests patience comes in three forms.  The first is Interpersonal Patience which has to do with calmly dealing with others who are unhappy, upset, angry or in other ways exhibiting negative and unwanted behavior.  The second can be called Severe Situational Patience which has to do with calmly dealing with life’s more arduous and ongoing hardships, setbacks and difficult situations.  The third can be termed Annoyance Patience.  This has to do with the ability to take-in-stride life’s more minor annoyances, irritations, delays, diversions, distractions, worries, hurts, hampering events, nuisances, harassments, vexations, etc..

To learn more about all this and the psychology of patience, I recommend checking out the Association for Psychological Science (APS) reports on patience studies.

All three types of patience have to do with what is sometimes called owning one’s power and not giving it away, being proactive more than reactive, and remaining inner and self-directed instead of other and outer directed.  Those, in turn, have a great deal to do with healthy self-love (see “Self-Love and Its Five Healthy Functions”).

The Many Benefits of Loving Patience

Practicing Loving Patience is an immense help to the health, well-being, improvement and fulfillment of love relationships of every type.  Perhaps that is why Paul put it first in his list of real love’s characteristics.

In a love relationship, practicing patience can build empathy and that, in turn, decreases interpersonal hassles while communicating acceptance and non-judgmentalism of a loved one or one’s self.  Patience often leads to long-range understanding and a fuller comprehension of what to do about disharmony.  Plus, it aids in the development of general positivity.  Patience, well demonstrated, helps block other’s misinterpreting you as angry or upset at them when you actually are being only concentrated, serious, worried, concerned, etc.

Showing loving patience helps others identify you as a person not to fear, avoid, manipulate or keep secrets from.  Therefore, Loving Patience assists people to be authentic and more fully self disclosing in a love relationship.

Demonstrating impatience can greatly harm and even ruin what would otherwise be loving and bonding, interpersonal, good experiences.  Repeated demonstrations of impatience may increasingly turn people against you, exclude you, or subconsciously passive/aggressively attack you.

Showing love through patience when someone is not functioning as you would wish may take longer and reach fulfillment later than you expected.  However that assists in developing higher and greater, mutual, team functioning and achievement along with increased emotional closeness, plus the likelihood of return patience when you need it.

Loving Patience is often wonderful for avoiding intolerant and destructive sudden reactions, incomplete understandings, wrong conclusions, mistaken impressions and impulsive anti-loving habit behaviors.  In every type of love relationship, Loving Patience is much more likely to lead to more constructive, accurate, comprehensive and harmonious interactions than is impatience.

For all concerned, having Loving Patience is far more healthy than impatience and its accompanying stress illness dangers.  Patient people usually live healthier, longer and happier than impatient people.  Most of all, they tend to have much better and longer, lasting, love relationships.  To learn more about love and health, check out Love and Survival by Dr. Dean Ornish.

The Dynamics of Impatience

In interpersonal impatience, one person wants one or more other people to change to operating at their own rate and/or in their manner of behaving.  It is, therefore, an imposition of one’s own standards on another.  Acting impatient often sends a message of “do things my way, not yours”.  It also can be a communication of “you’re operating in a way that is inferior to mine” and “my ways are more important than yours”.  Relationally, it frequently is disharmonious and can have a strong emotional divisive effect.  None of this is loving, democratic or as pragmatic as simply lovingly requesting someone to change something more to your liking, such as “hurry up a bit please”, “I’d like you to try doing something in an alternate way if that’s okay with you”.

Impatience often has a short-term gain and long-term loss, interpersonal dynamic.  If being impatient gets other people to do what you want more immediately, that is the short-term gain.  If it makes them resent you and act against you when they can, that is the greater and longer-term loss.

The Disadvantages of Patience

Like all things human, even Loving Patience is not perfect.  Having patience at the wrong time or for too long may lead to missed opportunities, too slow a reaction to a crisis and being misidentified as uncaring, indecisive and unassertive.  Worst of all, you may, through patience, accidentally reward and, therefore, reinforce some bad behavior.  Patient people also can be more targeted for deception and manipulation by the sociopathic.

How to Develop Greater Loving Patience

Learning to calm yourself while waiting longer and longer is the essence of practicing and developing patience.  Learning to make patience loving, requires loving thinking and loving self-talk while you practice the behavior of positive waiting.  Positive waiting requires breathing slowly and deeply, purposefully relaxing tense muscles as you also focus on being loving to yourself and whoever else is involved (see “From Self-Love to Other Love and Back Again”).

If worry or fear has triggered impatience, reassuring self-talk and distraction actions usually are helpful.  Becoming more mindful and self-aware of what you let trigger your impatience also can be quite useful.  Purposefully spotting when, where and why you are impatient and choosing those times to practice more Loving Patience is often hard but necessary.

Talking all this over with those you love (children included) to see if they will reveal their deeper feelings when you are both patient and impatient with them usually helps tremendously.  Remembering that two of the 12 major ways to demonstrate love are supported by developing patience.  Those two are Toleration Love and Self-Disclosure Love.  For more on this, check out Chapter 5 (How Do We Grow Intimate Love) in Recovering Love by yours truly.

One More Thing

Talking all this over with others can help you and them implant the knowledge and develop it further.  When you do that, we would like it if you would mentioned this site and our free subscription service.  Thank you.

As always – Go and Grow with Love
Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

This Week's Quotable Question: If we don’t lovingly ask our loved ones to be more patient with us when we desire that, how can we expect them to ever lovingly respond?

Love Your Brain - Why and How

Mini-Love-Lesson #210

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson tells about how you can help your brain help you do love and do life better, healthier, happier, more knowledgeably and more successfully via limbic system health acts.

Better Brain Health for Better Love Health and Everything Else Too

WOW, is your brain tremendously important to absolutely everything important to you, including your love life.  Are you aware that the better you treat your brain the better your brain can help you with everything important to you.  All your thinking, all your feeling, all your doing, all your health, all your work, all your fun and especially all your love and love relationships are affected by your brain and can be affected by its health.  Do you know that if you help your brain be healthier, your brain can help your love relationships be healthier, happier and more successful.

Maybe you are asking “how can I help my brain be healthier?”  Then maybe you are also asking “how does a healthy brain make for healthier love”.  To answer those questions we need a little brain and love background knowledge.

Knowing Your Loving Brain

Your conscious thinking mind and your loving heart are actually in your brain.  Your thinking brain resides largely in your brain’s cerebral cortex and your loving heart in the circuitry and components of your limbic system.  Your cerebral cortex is thought to be your more recently developed, outer layer brain.  It wraps around and covers your limbic system which is a deeper, older, inner layer brain system sitting atop your more basic functions and oldest brain system known as your “reptilian” brain or brainstem.  It is mostly in your limbic system where love, loving and feeling loved are understood to be primarily, non-consciously processed (see “What Your Brain Does with Love – Put Simply”).

The more you can help your limbic system operate healthfully the better it can process love.  Then your limbic system can to a better job of sending its electrical and chemical messages throughout your body and the rest of your brain where they do lots of health-making good.  Those messages from your limbic system also help you feel and become consciously aware of the many different positive emotions associated with love.  When that happens you can add conscious thinking about love and use whatever you have learned and understand about love to influence your love relationships behavior.

If your knowledge-base about love is weak, poor, misinformed, contradictory conflicted, etc., as it is with so many, your actions concerning love  likely will be the same.  If instead your knowledge base about love is strong, rich and well-informed, love success becomes much more likely.  That strong knowledge base also will help you with raising into conscious awareness your subconscious bad programming about love and how it works to sabotage you.  Almost everybody has at least some bad love programming.  However, making improvements only may work well if your brain’s limbic system is healthy and operating well.  The more your thinking brain can know and work well with your limbic, non-conscious, loving brain the better.

What Your Loving Brain Needs from You to Be Healthy

Not only can your loving heart’s limbic system help you with your love relationships, it also can help a great deal with your all over health, not to mention your general happiness, creativity, energy, efficiency and life spirit.  To help your brain accomplish all that, ponder the following closely.
Your limbic system is made healthier by healthy, real, love stimulations coming into it.  That is what the research evidence increasingly points to.  So, associate and interact a lot with those you love and those you are healthfully loved by.  Then do the same with those you like and are liked by because that helps too.

Include pets and perhaps those special experts on love known as dogs.  Horses and cats are quite good too as are just about any mammal and also some birds especially parrots.
Be actively involved with an adamant love (see “Adamant Love – And How It Wins for Us All”), altruistic love, spiritual love or a passionate purpose where you are focused on doing some kind of good thing.  One of the great surprise discoveries in love research was the finding that giving love makes your body healthier in big important but different ways than does getting love.

Learn about and get good at healthy self-love (see “From Self-Love to Other Love and Back Again”)  Those who are good at healthy self-love are better at loving others and far better than the love malnourished, love starved and false love addicted (see “Does ‘Feeling in Love’ Come from Real or False Love” and our Real Love, False Love e-book).  Remember, you can live the great admonition “Love Others as You Love Yourself”.

Limit your time with the unloving, non-loving, false loving and anti-loving.  Such people can be quite harmful to your relational and psychoneurophysical health.  If you choose or have to work with or be around the less loving or those who seem to be just plain negative, counterbalance it by being with those of love as much as you can.  Nothing seems to be as good for your limbic system health as having a personal life full of getting and giving love and just being around love.  You likely will live happier, healthier, longer and be so glad you did it that way.

Negative to Yourself? Take the Cure!

If you suffer from what is known as automatic negative self thoughts, know that you probably are dosing your limbic system and maybe your whole brain with toxic and brain harming neurochemicals.  Know also this could cause your limbic system to malfunction.  And that likely would negatively influence the way you behave in your love relationships.  Also, that probably would sabotage your self love too.  So, if automatic, negative thinking about yourself is a problem, you had best learn to counter those negative self thoughts and negative self talk by replacing them with accurate, self positive thinking and talking (see “Love Positive Talking”).  It is amazing what we are discovering about how we think and feel about ourselves changes our neurochemistry and influences our body’s physical health and our brain health.

The faster cure for automatic, negative, self thoughts is time with a good counselor, therapist or personal coach along with a good bit of self positive homework practice.

Reshaping Your Brain with Purposeful Love

With the help of brain imaging technology, we can see your limbic (loving heart) system’s neural networks activate, or light up, when you do certain thinking things concerning love.  We also can see your brain circuitry begin to change as you keep doing that.  Furthermore, we also can analyze your blood before and after you do those certain love-focused, thinking things and measure the chemical changes that have occurred.

What has been discovered is astounding.  If you train and become able to do certain kinds of love-oriented meditation focused on those you love (which can include yourself) your limbic system lights up, circuitry changes occur in your brain and the neurochemical measurements get healthier.  The more you do that sort of thing the more your limbic system perhaps seems to be practicing love and getting healthier as it does so .  That in turn is thought to influence you to act more lovingly, which then in turn results in better love relationship functioning.  The work of the neuroscientist, Dr. Richard Davidson, in his studies of loving kindness and loving compassion meditation, and the research into love by ethnologist and brain researcher, Dr. Helen Fisher, are particularly impressive here.

All that is what recent and ongoing research is pointing to.  Lots more has to be learned and confirmed but that is the way it looks so far (see “What Your Brain Does with Love – Put Simply”).

A tentative conclusion is the more you focus on love, meditate on love, learn and think about love and practice the behaviors of love the better.  Most likely your brain and especially your limbic system will function better, your body will be healthier, you will live longer, you will live happier and more effectively and all your love relationships will improve, even if they already are good.
So, you meditatively might want to send your loving heart limbic system a message from your thinking self that says you love it, you are in awe of it, you respect it and are very thankful for all it does for you.  You also might want to send it the message that you are going to treat it as good as you can learn to do.

Other Big Ways to Help Your Brain’s Health

Eat for wellness.  Your loving heart limbic system does best with whole grains, vegetables, fruits, nuts, lean meats and especially with just about anything having omega-3 in it.  Particularly do not act against your loving brain’s health by eating saturated fats and all those other things they tell you are not good for you.  For the good of your brain, you might want to check out the Mind Diet, the DASH diet, the Mediterranean Diet and also check out the colorful plate eating approach.  Limit your alcohol intake.  That is because alcohol gets in your blood and circulates through your brain where it can damage and kill brain cells including those in your limbic system.

Breathe for wellness.  Your brain needs a lot of oxygen – clean uncontaminated oxygen.  Without good oxygenation, your brain including your limbic system functions poorly or worse.  If your life is pretty sedentary, you probably are going to do better by doing short, deep breathing exercises every day unless you live where there is a lot of air pollution.  Yoga breathing exercises often are recommended.  If you are a good swimmer, you might do a lot of that using all of the different stroke styles (even if you are not a good swimmer, swimming is a good, full body, respiratory stimulating exercise).

Any kind of exercise that gets you breathing more is worth considering.  Aroma-therapy combined with deep, slow, calm breathing also is proving to be quite helpful to the brain.  Lavender and chamomile scents for relaxation and distressing, citrus and mint scents for action, energy and mental sharpness often are recommended.

Sleep for wellness.  7 to 9 hours of sleep is about right for most people.  A 30 minute, siesta nap and power napping seems to help a lot for many.  Lowering the temperature and raising the humidity has been known to improve deep, restful sleep.  Make your sleeping environment good and you are likely to be helping your loving brain to rest well.

Exercise for wellness.  Your brain including your limbic system does best with a lot of good blood circulation.  That happens with good exercise.  For figuring out what is the right exercise for you it is best to consult with those who might know.  Exercise specialists, physical therapists, sports physicians, personal trainers and of course other medical doctors and nurse practitioners who may have special positive brain health care knowledge.  Walking is widely recommended, unless there are physical prohibitions.  Many health care professionals suggest a 30 minute walk wearing good, supportive shoes most days of the week for possibly tremendous mental and physical benefits.

Do Positivity Meditation for wellness.  For at least a few minutes every day, go where things are calm and devote yourself to meditating about that which is positive.  This can be done with positive focused prayer, slow gliding movement exercise, positive visualization exercises, uplifting melodic music, any kind of beauty appreciation and most of all love focused meditating.  Fun, stimulating, challenging brain games and brain exercises can be found free and in abundance on the internet for another way to love your brain and promote brain health.

My love and I record the TV quiz show, Jeopardy, then watch an episode each day; we have great, relationship fun while not being upset when we do not know an answer and congratulating each other when we come up with the right answer.  Readings in the newer field of positive psychology also can be assistive.  To learn more you might want to read The Compassionate Brain by Dr. Gerald Huther, The Brain in Love by Dr. Daniel Amen and The Neuroscience of Human Relationships by Dr. Louis Cozolino.

Remember the song line that says “what the world needs now is love sweet love”?   Ergo, are you doing your part by being about love?  You must be at least somewhat about love because you are reading this mini-love-lesson.  Consequently, I suggest you congratulate yourself for that and do some more.

One More Thing

Perhaps you know someone you would enjoy sharing and talking to about this mini-love-lesson and this site where there is so much knowledge about healthy, real love and the how to’s of love success plus remember all these mini-love-lessons are totally free.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Do you feel good learning about love? (If so, your limbic system is probably helping and do some more.  If not, you might want to figure out what will make that better as an act of healthy self-love).

Related posts:

1. What Your Brain Does with Love – Put Simply
2. Listening With Love and IN and OUT Brain Functions
3. Limbic Love & Why You Will Do Well to Know about It
4. Brains and Love Behavior: Oxytocin and Other Healthful Neurochemistry
5. Thinking Love to Improve Love 

Love Goals and How They Can Help You and Yours

Mini-Love-Lesson  #192

Free Over 200 mini-love-lessons touching the lives of thousands in over 190 countries – worldwide!

Synopsis: The Love Goals approach, which reportedly is helping many couples, is introduced and explained, along with answers to its critics, examples of how it is used and a step-by-step prescription for putting it into your bag of love tools for improving your love relationships.

What They Are Saying about Love Goals

“Learning about setting and achieving love goals made our marriage twice as good as it was before and it wasn’t all that bad to begin with” said Mike, a ten-year married aeronautical engineer.  ”Susan, a 16 year married with three children, public health nurse told us, “Our family life and our romantic life both went to a whole new level when we started using the Love Goals approach.  It’s such a great way to teach children how to love but it’s teaching us adults a lot too.  ”Esther and Roberto both told us that using the Love Goals method was instrumental in saving their marriage, and Sophia and Jacob spoke of how having love goals got them through a very hard time.  Larry and Terry related how using love goals got them into really knowing how to succeed at doing their love and not just feeling it.

So, how would you like your love relationships to get you and yours similar, improvement results even if what you have now is really very good?  If so, be curious and read on.

What Are Love Goals

Love goals are specific love giving, conveying, sending and demonstrating behaviors that people decide to make happen so that their love relationships will be more filled with healthy, real love.  Stronger love, happier love, higher, broader and deeper love, bigger love, healthier love and more lasting love are all part of what love goals aim to achieve.  Individuals, couples, families, etc. can use them to make love happen better, bigger and more often.

Love goals can be as simple as deciding to say thank you more often and more sincerely than you usually do when talking to a loved one.  Making a goal of giving a better good morning hug to a beloved with a loving look and loving words every day for a month would be another good example of a specific love goal.

Love goals also can be a lot more comprehensive.  An example are the couples who work with Paul’s New Testament, First Corinthians list of what love is and is not (love is patient, kind, not rude, etc.) and jointly create specific goal behaviors to put into their life.  Here is a sample.  “I will make a love goal to tell myself to act with loving patience and smile lovingly at you [spouse/mate name] whenever I think you are making us run late.  I will do this instead of getting mad and critical which I now see ruins some of our time together for a while and just makes us even more late”.  Those couples work their way through all of Paul’s 16 points making specific behavioral goals to implement each of the points.  They report big improvements from doing so.

Mutual Love Goals and the Wonders They Can Work

In The Science of Happily Ever After, Dr. Ty Tashiro reports that couples who mutually make an inviolate rule to spend short periods of time together giving each other a “love fix” with words and touch every day no matter what else is happening, do far better at handling the rest of life and are physically, emotionally and relationally happier.  Dr. Carla Naumburg, author of Parenting in the Present Moment, tells of research that shows having dedicated, behavior goals of brief, daily, child involvement (and in that time making love connecting actions occur too), it results in producing healthier, happier children and better parent-child relationships.  Parents doing the same thing with each other also produce better parenting and better couple relationships.

When couples freely and jointly act to achieve mutual goals aimed at making their interactive behaviors more love-demonstrative, their relationships can be expected to move up several levels no matter where those relationships start from.  That is the conclusion of people working with the Love Goals approach.

Going from Abstract to Concrete Love Goals

Most people start with abstract ideas for love goals like being more appreciative, a better listener, more affectionate, etc.  That is good for a start but it is not going to help if you stop with that kind of broad concept that can be behaviorally enacted in too many, unspecified, different ways.  Those abstract, broad ideas have to get converted into specific, or concrete, exact behaviors before they can become exactly enacted actions.  Otherwise, they usually are just nice ideas that do not become goals that actually get achieved.

If your goal is to be more affectionate and feel closer together, you both might have to decide something like: curl up in each other’s arms, on the couch, cuddling with each other, saying only words of love, for 15 minutes, allowing no distractions or interruptions, between 7:00 and 7:30 PM Monday, Wednesday & Friday, every week for eight weeks before you evaluate the results of your love goal actions.  If this is mutually decided and agreed upon, that is an example of a well stated love goal that actually might get accomplished.  You also will need a way to calendarize, tally and track your love goal actions.  While you are at it, make it fun and enjoy it!

That is an example of what it takes to make a behavioral goal that is sufficiently clear enough to be mutually understood.  By the way, it also is good to add an alternative date and time if a cuddle time gets missed.  Then if you add an additional reward for accomplishing your goals, it is even better.
Without those kinds of specifics, most couples and families find their efforts just fade away and their love goals are not reached even though they were sincere about setting them.

In families, kids especially need these kinds of specifics in order to keep their parents on track for goal attainment which is something they are prone to do when they get really involved in love goal work.  That also is something a lot of kids are prone to do too in our experience.

Answering Love Goals Criticisms

“Why do we have to do all that?”  “Don’t we know we love each other and isn’t that enough?” “Isn’t love just done automatically?” “Doesn’t making it such an organized thing take all the fun and magic out.?” “Who has time for all that?”– These are among the criticisms leveled against the love goals approach.

The answer for all those questions goes like this.  Love works like a healthy, nourishing food.  Just think of all the purposeful, planned and organized disciplined effort that goes into getting good, healthy food from what mother nature provides all the way to fueling your own health and well-being.  It is the same for love.  Love takes behaviors to grow it, deliver it, skillfully prepare it and the actions of partaking of it.  Both food and love do not just automatically keep showing up in your life.  Somebody has to DO a lot of stuff to make that happen.  The better you can skillfully DO the actions involved, the better both food and love are.  The less you do, the more the quality and the quantity are likely to suffer.  A young client of mine once said, “I’ve learned it’s like when I don’t do enough about love, love doesn’t do enough about me”.

A Love Goals Prescription

Here is our prescription for putting love goals into your life and using them well.
Start by reading our site’s “The Definition of Love”.  Then read the mini-love-lessons that have to do with the major behaviors found to convey love “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love” .  After that, preferably jointly, decide on which of the eight categories of direct love behaviors you both might want to start with.  Then choose a single, exact set of actions to take that likely would improve the way you and your love partner show each other love.  Remember to decide where, when, how often and for how long (at least a week and preferably several months) you will work as a team to practice putting that love action into your life.  Be sure not to avoid having an end date for your goals so that they do not just fade away and so that you have a chosen time to evaluate your progress.  It is then you decide to keep going or not, or what changes to make in your goals.

Here is another way to go about using love goals for growing and improving a love relationship.  Together pick any area of your relationship that you both would like to see get bigger, better, stronger, or occur more.  Or you can, pick a more specific something that you just happen to want to be different than it is.  Then make your choice as to what exact actions you will take to go toward your love goal as described above.

You can look at things you might like to see happen less or not at all.  However, then you will need to choose what exact actions you will use to put something else in its place.  Without replacement actions, it is very hard to stop whatever has been happening and which may have become a habit.  Even then, it may be a back-and-forth battle between old habit behavior and desired new replacement love goal actions.

You can do all these things individually, even secretly, but usually it works better when your love goals involve a team effort.  Of course, having individual even secret love goals is not at all a bad thing.  After all, this is about being more loving – and that’s a very good thing.

Lots of couples, families and friends use regular love goal meetings to help themselves keep benefiting from the love goals approach.  Others keep coming back to it every so often more irregularly.  Either way, see what you might want to do with purposefully putting love goals into your awareness and into your life.

Help spread love knowledge – tell someone about this site!

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: How exactly might you want to, or need to, become more loving and thereby become more lovable?

You might also want to read: “The Definition of Love”, “A More Ample Definition of Love”, “Behaviors That Give Love – The Basic Four”, “How to Make Love Improvements Permanent” & “Learning about Love Together”. Also for the best description of the eight classes of behavior that directly show love, see Chapter 5 How Do We Grow Intimate Love, Chapter 6 How Do We Make Love Really Show & Chapter 7 What Connects Your Love with Mine in my book Recovering Love.