Self-Love - What Is It?

Synopsis: This mini love lesson starts with the many contradictions and confusions concerning self-love; healthy, real self-love defined; the operational definition of self-love; and ends with the functional definition of self-love, plus a few important questions; more.

Contradictions and Confusions

“I’ve been told again and again I need to learn to love myself but I don’t know what that means.  I also have been told that before I can successfully love somebody else I first have to love myself, and until I love myself no one else will be able to love me enough or right.  Is all that true?  How can I figure all this out?

“As a kid I was told self-love was a bad thing.  It seemed to mean being selfish or self-centered and egotistical, conceited and even narcissistic.  Sometimes it seemed to mean doing something with myself that was sexual and bad but I never figured out what all was included there.  I knew I was supposed to put others first and myself last, and if I loved myself too much no one would like or love me.

“My religion taught me to love others and not myself, then the opposite by quoting Scripture at me telling me to love others as I love myself.  Isn’t that contradictory?  I don’t know what to think.  I’m so confused about ‘self-love’.  What am I to do?  I know I’m supposed figure all this out on my own but I don’t know how.”

This lament is echoed by a large number of people whose mental and emotional health, indeed, will greatly improve if they come to have greater, healthy, real love for themselves.  Not only that personal enrichment, but their relationship life, likewise, probably will show lots of improvement if they learn what healthy, real self-love is all about, how to do it, and practice what they learn.  But how are they to do that if they don’t know what it is?

Loving Those Who Don’t Love Themselves

There is another perplexing problem related to this confusing and contradictory self-love situation.  If you are trying to love someone who doesn’t know what healthy self-love is, who doesn’t know how to practice healthy self-love, and who even may practice anti-self-love, you possibly are going to have a very problem-filled love relationship.

If you’re trying to love someone whose healthy self-love is low, or someone who is indifferent to themselves, or who even hates themselves it is likely you are in big trouble and are going to need help.  Oh, loving these troubled people can be done and it can turn out well but it sure isn’t easy.  However, if you can encourage them to learn about healthy, real self-love, and to practice it, your love relationships with these un-self-loving people can get a lot easier and way more successful.

Getting A Sense of Healthy, Real Self-Love

You might be thinking, so Dr. Cookerly, are you going to tell us what self-love really is?  Yes I am and rather exactly, but first let’s try to get a sense of self-love before we more precisely define it.  Let’s examine several important ways to get a feel for what self-love is really all about.
First, understand that ‘self-love is healthy, real love’ going from the self to the self.  It’s sort of like feeding yourself healthy, tasty, nourishing food.  Next, be aware that loving yourself may involve some psychological actions you may not be used to.  For instance, it may involve your ‘adult self’ talking to your ‘inner child self’ in very loving ways.

The more scientific may prefer thinking of this as your neocortex sending composed messages to your brain’s limbic system in very loving ways.  Brain research shows that this positive internal dialogue accomplishes real neurochemical improvement, which you experience as feeling better and increasingly thinking more positively about yourself.  Some prefer to say it is your ‘cognitive, conscious mind’ choosing to speak lovingly to your subconscious mind.

Then there is a behavioral component.  Healthy self-love involves treating yourself well, taking good care of yourself, doing yourself favors, taking yourself into good experiences and enjoying them, being sure you surround yourself with good people, and a host of other actions which demonstrate you acting with love toward yourself.

People who do the actions of love toward themselves tend to experience the feelings of happy, healthy self-love which usually follow.  At the emotional level healthy self-love can mean feeling really good about yourself, glad to be you, feeling upbeat and positive about and toward yourself, highly honoring and highly valuing yourself without getting into the forms of false self-love like egotism, arrogance, overbearance, insolence, vanity, ostentation, conceit, self-pity, grandiosity, etc.

Awe and Joy

Healthy, real self-love can involve becoming awed, thankful and joyful about the one-of-a-kind, unique bundle of miracles that you are.  Deeply becoming aware that you are a product of a miraculous creation system that got you started, and keeps you going, and is all part of who you really are – and this, I suggest, is truly awesome.  Therefore, it is worth being joyous (occasionally or even often) about these aspects of yourself.

Regrettably, if you have been brought up only on ‘product’ valuing yourself instead of ‘essence’ valuing yourself, in response to these self-love messages you may think something like “But I didn’t do anything to earn that”.  You are much more than what you earn.  You are born with high-value and you maintain your essence-value as a part of your core whether you do anything productive with your essence or not.

Perhaps you have been trained to discount your value by thinking something like “But there are so many humans; I’m just one of the many millions.  There’s nothing special about me”.  Not true!  You are an individual work of art.  No one is exactly like you.  You are unique and, therefore,  special.  No one thinks exactly like you, has exactly the same emotions, or behaves exactly the same way as you do.  We all are just like our fingerprints –  totally one-of-a-kind, though somewhat similar to others.  So, you can value yourself, especially your essence and core self.  Consequently, the experience of awe and joy about yourself, your essence and your core can be part of healthy, real self-love.

Self  Delight

Do you delight in yourself when you figure something out?  Do you get a little spark of happiness when your wonderful, incredible memory system brings to you the memory you have been searching for?  When you appreciate anyone or anything do you appreciate yourself for a few seconds for having an appreciation system which brings you happiness?

When you fix something broken, or make something new, or cause someone to smile, or help someone in any way at all do you also take just a little bit of time to appreciate yourself for being able to accomplish what you just accomplished?  Do you ever look back on the best experiences of your life and think something like “Good for me, I got and let myself experience that, and it was good”.
Do you take joy into yourself when you see, or touch, or smell, or taste or hear something beautiful and then have a good feeling about being able to do that?  When you have a really good time with another person are you also glad about your own ability to have that good time?

All these things and much more are (and can be) part of healthy self-love.  Actually, when you were a young child you did all these sort of things naturally (baring some disabilities).  Young children around the world do ‘self delight’ unless and until they are taught anti-self-love.  Your own natural tendency to do this may be deeply buried but it’s there, and you can resurrect it.  If this ‘self delight’ mechanism is active in you, but a little rusty, you might polish it up with awareness and experience it more.

Self Care

Part of healthy self-love comes from valuing yourself enough to take good care of yourself.  Diet,  exercise,  good medical attention when useful or needed– developing a very positive, mental/emotional attitude about life and yourself with lots of healthy empathy for yourself so that you are really in touch with your inner messages – healthy, positive, strong relationships full of love of many different types (a couple relationship, friends, family, pets to name a few) – and keeping yourself psychologically growing and actualizing your potentials, all are part of the healthy self-love and the self-care picture which you can develop.

Self-Love and Other Love

Self-love involves a lot of ‘loving others’ and this is how it differs from what might be considered selfishness.  A great deal of research shows us that when you love others well you do yourself a lot of favors.  Those who are good at loving others tend to have lowered bad cholesterol, better brain functioning, stronger community connections, greater longevity, get treated better by others, and a host of other benefits.

Those who live by the great commandment “love others as you love yourself’, in fact, do the best at succeeding and being benefited in life.  Those who don’t love themselves, or don’t love others, or don’t love both themselves and others are much less happy and much less benefited in life.

Healthy, Real Self-love Defined

With all the above in mind, I hope you have a sense of what healthy, real self-love actually is.  So, let’s now define it more accurately.  We will use this site’s working definition of love, found in the left column as “The Definition of Love”.

Healthy self-love is defined as:

Healthy, real self-love is a powerful, vital, natural process of highly valuing, desiring for, often acting for, and taking pleasure in the well-being of the self.

I will now, with healthy self-love, brag that this site’s definition of love recently has been acclaimed in places as diverse as Egypt and China and the US.

Let’s take a look at the elements in this definition. Powerful, yes, healthy self-love is powerful.  It is something you can greatly change your life with, for the better and it can make you much more powerful in beneficially influencing the lives of others.  Vital, means it is important to life and for enhancing life functioning, and that’s exactly what healthy self-love can do.

Natural, demonstrates that it is part of nature and essential existence biologically, psychologically and relationally.  Process, refers to healthy self-love being an active succession of systemic changing operations, all aimed at natural well-being.  High valuing yourself in a deep, emotional sense is the key factor which leads to desiring for and acting for your own well-being and taking pleasure in your own well-being.  It is by this that healthy self-love brings you to thriving wholeness and joy.

The Operational Definition of Self-Love

One of psychology’s ways to define something psychological is to describe its operations.  This usually means to detail the observable actions or behaviors which bring it about, or which occur when the phenomenon being discussed is occurring.  For example, smiling, laughing, animated movement and other such behaviors are acting in ways called happy.

This gives us the operations or behaviors that occur with happiness.  Therefore, those actions give the operational definition of happiness.  Healthy, real self-love can be operationally defined as doing ‘to or for’ yourself ‘one or more’ of the eight major groups of behavior which operationally define healthy, real love.

These behaviors can include things like talking to yourself out loud or silently with loving words, using loving tones of voice and feeling yourself smile as you do this; lovingly caressing or holding yourself; affirming yourself with praise and compliments and accolades; exploring and, with ‘insight’, self disclosing yourself to yourself with appreciation and acceptance; tolerating your shortcomings, failures, etc.; receiving deeply inside yourself praise, compliments, thanks, etc. from others; giving yourself both ‘object gifts’ and ‘experience gifts’; and a host of similar actions.  To learn more about the operational definition of love consult the “Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love” in the left column on this site.

The Functional Definition of Self-love

Another way to define something is to give its functions, or describe what it does or what it accomplishes.  There are five major functions accomplished by healthy, real love.  There also are the same functions found in healthy, real self-love.

Healthy, real self-love functions to:

1. Connect you to yourself and, thereby, harmonize all your parts
2. Safeguard yourself

3. Works to improve yourself in many different ways

4. Causes you to act and be self-healing if you become physically, or emotionally, or relationally damaged or ill

5. Rewards you for doing any or all of the above with joy and other highly pleasurable feelings.
To learn more about the major functions of healthy, real love study “A Functional Definition of Love” found in the left column of this site and in “Self-love and Its Five Healthy Functions”.
Some questions for you to consider: Are you highly valuing yourself in a deep, emotional way?  Are you acting with the behaviors of love toward yourself?  Are you living by the functions of good, healthy self-love?  If not, are you going to learn these things and practice what you learn?  Are you going to inform and maybe teach those you love about healthy self-love?

Special Note: There are many other kinds of definitions of love and self love including poetic, biological, psycho-neurological, phenomenological, recursive, nominal, mathematical, linguistic and a great many more.  Interestingly, the word ‘definition’ in a good dictionary has a very long entry!

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Have you been trained in anti-self-love thinking and acting and, if so, are you practicing those actions and thoughts more than practicing the actions and thoughts that go with healthy, real self-love?

Related posts:

1. A More ‘Ample’ Definition of Love
2. The Definition of Love
3. A Functional Definition Of Love
4. An Introduction: What is Love Dr. Cookerly? 

Age Differences and Romantic Love

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson discusses what is too much age difference; should age matter in love; loves many battles and many victories; why some get so upset and others don’t; love against age prejudice; love theory and age difference.

What Is Too Much Age Difference?

What do you think about a 30-year-old man marrying a 15-year-old girl?  Did you know that for many years marrying at those ages, and with that age difference, used to be considered quite proper and highly desirable.  A man at 30 had had time to establish himself financially and then could properly take care of a ‘sweet young thing’ and their subsequent children.  She was freshly ready for pregnancy.  Even a 20 year difference, if the man was wealthy enough, was seen as quite acceptable.  In those days if he and she were close to each other’s age it was seen as indecent and problematic.

Also, age differences where the woman is older and independently wealthy made it quite acceptable for her to take a younger man as her protégée and lover.  Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia, can be said to have ‘set the standard’ for this by having a string of young, officer lovers.  Royalty all over Europe followed suit, as did wealthy courtesans and the wealthier members of the rising middle class.  Twenty, thirty and even forty-year differences in people having affairs with one another and/or marrying was not infrequent.

In the developed nations of the world, the acceptance of wide, age range difference varies greatly.  Nowadays, big differences in age cause many couples to be met with disapproval and condemnation in some social spheres, societies and countries.  To this day in various other parts of the world, romantic love relationships and marriages between people of surprisingly large age difference occur and meet with local acceptance and approval.  Such unions also quite often are seen in those places as working quite well.  I once worked with a Superior Court judge who on following a US supreme court judge’s example, came to love and wed his law clerk, a woman 31 years his junior.  Years later both reported being ideal for one another and their union extremely happy.  Of course, this is not always the case.

Should Age Difference Matter in Love?

Some argue that any two, single adults who profess love for one another, no matter what their age difference, should be treated with acceptance and respect as they carry out their relationship with one another.  Others argue that there is something unseemly, indecent or pathological about people of greatly varying age trying to romantically love each other.  There are those who hold a five-year difference to be questionable, an eight year difference to be dubious and anything more than a ten year difference to be reprehensible.  Still others think we should celebrate any two people trying to do real love with one another, no matter what their age or other differences are.

I once counseled a couple in which she was a vivacious 60 and he a very mature 32.  Their big problem was that their families were not able to accept the age disparity.  With love, time, work, plus a lot of family therapy they got most, but not all, of their respective family members acceptance.  I have seen other families expel and reject a family member because of who they wanted to wed and the age disparity issue.  I also have dealt with a few families in which the adult children were horrified that their widower father wanted to marry a woman younger than the father’s oldest child.  Eventually those situations also turned out okay for all concerned, with a lot of therapeutic help.

Love’s Many Battles and Many Victories

In the history of love, time and again love has battled social norms, changed customs, overcome prohibitions and altered or abolished laws aimed at restricting love relationships.  Often at great cost, love usually eventually wins.  In a great many different places and times, it has been deemed wrong and even unlawful for people to attempt to love one another and get married if they were of different social classes, religions, ethnic backgrounds, races, clans, casts, political ranks, handedness, types of disability and just about every other kind of classification you can think of.  Getting married to a redhead or someone who had too many freckles was even once considered a ‘big no-no’ and, Heaven forbid, if they should also be left-handed – all signs of Satanic involvement you see.

Royals could not marry commoners, mulattos, octoroons and quadroons could only marry others of their same or lesser classification, and Roman Catholics should never get romantically involved with Eastern Orthodox Catholics or, even worse, with Protestants.  And until quite recently, homosexuals should not marry anyone unless it was a heterosexual and part of their attempt to change into the same.  Still to this day, in some places around the world marrying someone who has a prohibited difference can get you jailed or even killed.  Age differences have been one of the few prohibitive factors to have more recently developed in certain areas of the world in the last hundred years.

Why Some Get Upset and Others Don’t

In some parts of the world a lot of people get very upset and even nauseated seeing or hearing about people of large age differences loving each other.  In other parts of the world no one thinks anything about it except “how nice, they love each other”.  What makes the difference?  There are the Freudian theorists who talk about Oedipal conflicts and mommy and daddy fixation.  Some think it is just social conditioning.  Here is another concept that seems to have considerable merit for answering this question.

Some cultures are very age integrated and others much more age segregated.  Generally the more a society or nation operates to keep its people age group segregated from each other, the more people in those age groups do not understand or do well with people in the other age groups.  In such places, age group prejudice grows, misconceptions abound, and it is more likely that differing age group cooperation and coordination becomes much more problematic.  Wherever elders are not frequently mixed with adolescents and children, conflicts between these classifications are seen as much more likely.  The reverse also is seen to be true.  The more people of different ages mingle the more they do well together, come to respect, like and love people in other age categories.  People in age integrated societies are thought to tolerate and accept age differences in romance far more readily.

Love Against Age Prejudice

If you romantically love someone considerably older or younger than the norms of those you associate with, you likely will meet with at least some disapproval, rejection, possibly ostracization, and in some instances even hate.  What can you do?  Well, actually you can do a lot.  First, you can work to understand that ‘rejection usually is a form of self protection, brought on by fear’.  Fear of change, difference, the unknown, being wrong, and a fear of deep, unacceptable forces emerging from within the self,  all are possible

Next, you can love your enemies, rejecters, nay-sayers and doubters, knowing they probably somehow feel threatened by your love choices.  Then, you can seek out and ally yourself with those who are more openhearted and open-minded.  Another thing to do is to really work hard to learn and practice the skills of love and use them to really succeed at your major, love relationship.  After that, and with love, keep showing your detractors how happy and successful you and your chosen are with one another.

In cases of family dissonance about age differences, a proficient, well trained and experienced family therapist has been known to make all the difference.

Love Theory and Age Difference

Among adults, love is not seen as being bound by age.  Once people have attained sufficient maturation, any two people can healthfully and romantically love each other.  There always are special drawbacks and challenges to every kind of difference in a love relationship.  However, that also is true for couples with many similarities.  With sufficient healthy, real love, skillfully given and received, handling age and every other kind of difference can be managed and accomplished significantly well.  When loving couples custom tailor their relationship, instead of trying over-hard to fit themselves to outside, social norms, they can do especially well if they work at it.  It does seem true that the greater the difference, the greater the need for love to be done well.  At least that is a postulated love theory position (see also “Elder Love”).
Now what do you think?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Could you romantically come to love someone a good bit older or younger than yourself, and might that actually work better than someone closer to your own age?

Related posts:

1. Does “Cougar” Love Work?
2. Marriage By Love or by Law
3. Are Love and Marriage Getting a Divorce?
4. Virginity Surpassed and Parental Love 

Limbic Love & Why You Will Do Well to Know about It

Mini-love-lesson #184

Synopsis: What your limbic system is and how it is important to your life of love and love relationships; what makes it unhealthy and how you can do three important things to make it healthier and in return get a healthier and more successful life of love is quickly covered in this mini-love-lesson.

Limbic Love: Love and Your Limbic System

Do you know that your psychological heart lives mostly in the limbic system of your brain?  Furthermore, your success at love may depend on the health of your limbic system.  Your limbic system is a big part of your deeper brain that processes love and guides your ways of doing love relationships.  It also gives you your higher more positive emotions, your ability to play and experience joy, plus much of what you do in all types of human interaction.  It sits under your conscious thinking brain, or cerebral cortex, and largely above your ancient brain.  Your ancient brain is the one which handles basic, physical functioning, simple and mostly negative emotions and rudimentary, impulsive and automatic behaviors. Thus our subject, “limbic love”.

Increasingly scientists suspect that the limbic system is one of the most important parts of our brain.  That is because it processes, motivates and guides our connections with others and pushes us toward cooperative advancements and improvements in of all kinds in all areas of life.  It is our limbic system that guides us toward who and what to get interested in, connect with, enjoy and get involved with more deeply.  It also processes our love of spouse, children, family, good friends, pets and our relationship with ourselves.  It helps us feel connected and belonging, feel compassion, intimacy, altruism and empathy –  all of which are involved in not only our cooperative survival but also in our team efforts toward mutual improvements, curiosity-based discovery and achievement.

In science, increasingly our limbic system and its love processing is suspected of being the primary reason mammals advanced and became ascendant, surpassing so many other other types of life.  Although the avian species also demonstrate love behaviors as did their ancestors the dinosaurs 200 million years ago; and many species have limbic systems.

What Makes Our Limbic System Unhealthy?

We are just beginning to learn about our limbic system’s health and what influences it.  We have learned that our psychological way of going about life can have a strong influence on the physical functioning, biological operation and neurochemistry of everyone’s limbic system.  This in return influences our psychological way of going about life.  This can create a deterioration or ascension cycle strongly influencing our all over health.  Certainly genetics plays a role and in some people a really huge role.  There are those that are born with very unhealthy limbic system functioning which then causes severe emotional and mental illness.  Such illnesses are becoming increasingly treatable neurochemically and psychotherapeutically.

Love problems including inadequate love, the failings of false love, deeply painful love loss, non-love and overt anti-love training, covert subconscious anti-love programming and non-love life modeling especially in childhood but also in adolescence and adulthood, loneliness and isolation all are thought to have very negative effects on the health of a person’s limbic system.

Unhealthy influences on the limbic system also include a number of other factors.  Undue prolonged stress, physical and psychological abuse, psychological trauma, chemical and some behavioral addictions, physical injuries to the limbic system, prolonged severe insecurity, over-reliance on reason and/or focus on power acquirement, negativism and similar psychosocial things all are suspected of being unhealthful for the neurochemistry of our limbic system and its functioning.  That is according to growing research evidence and our current, science-based understanding.

How Can We Make Our Limbic System Healthier?

Probably the biggest way to help yourself have a healthy functioning limbic system has to do with purposely going after and succeeding in attaining healthy, real love relationships.  To accomplish such “limbic love”, following three things are strongly suggested.

1. (A) Study and learn all you can about how to productively think about love.  That includes how to identify real from false love, give and receive healthy real love, detox from anti-love influences, develop multiple types of love including healthy real self-love, spiritual love, altruistic love, and the knowledge of the behaviors that demonstrate, healthfully give, create and grow love.

(B) As part of your love learning process, behaviorally experiment with using what you’ve been learning.  As you learn more, work to hone your love skills and your enjoyment in using them.  Celebrate your victories and learn from your failures realizing that love failures are best used as learning opportunities and are part of the natural love process.  Then practice, practice, practice with actual actions always.

2. As part of your healthy, real self-love, develop living via positivity.  Positivity has to do with having a realistic, positive, appreciative mindset, mood and approach to most of life and everyone in it.  All sorts of research including brain chemistry and body health studies show that the more realistically positive and real love oriented people are more the real winners in life, health and most everything else.  Negative and neutral just does not pay off in health and happiness, in most interactions with others and especially not in love relationships.  You might want to Google Positive Psychology, read Positivity by Dr. Barbara L. Fredrickson and Dr. Victor Frankel’s famous work Man’s Search for Meaning which tells how positivity saved lives even in a Nazi death camp.

3. Actively reach out to others for social connection and purposely go after building your love network with some of the people you meet when you reach out.  Don’t put all your love eggs in the lover, spouse, marriage love basket.  All kinds of love can give healthy, enriching life to your existence.  But, of course, love with a love mate or partner can be very important, and so can parent/child, family and deep friendship loves.  Be sure that at least some of your love efforts are altruistic which, by the way, is turning out to be a biologic, limbic system, natural, love drive born within us.  Positive connections with others are proving to be essential for limbic system health.  Healthy, real love connections are the most healthful.  Living like a hermit can be a prescription for love starvation.

Living healthfully physically by way of healthful exercise, healthy diet, healthy environment, healthful behaviors and good healthcare also are quite important for having a healthy limbic system.  Taking care of those factors can be seen as important ways for you to do healthy self-love as well as ways to assist your loved ones to live healthfully and happily (see  Self-love – What Is It, Self-love and Its Five Healthy Functions and Self-Affirmation for Healthy Self-Love).

So, help your limbic system function healthfully and the likelihood is it will help your love life to be more fully successful, happier and more fulfilled.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Who are you going to talk over this mini-love-lesson with because doing that helps you to better accomplish number 1. (A) above?

Related posts:

1. Brains and Love Behavior: Oxytocin and Other Healthful Neurochemistry
2. Living Well via Loving Well
3. Self-Love – What Is It?
4. Unselfish Self-Love
5. Loneliness and Love 

What Your Brain Does with Love - Put Simply

Mini-Love-Lesson #208

Synopsis: Where your heart resides in your brain and what that has to do with the many emotions triggered by love; how feeding your brain love makes you healthy are all presented and surveyed in this mini-love-lesson; more.

The Heart in Your Brain

First, in cherished tones, you hear the words “I love you”, or perhaps you feel a tender loving touch, or maybe you see a precious sweet smile on the face of a beloved one, or it could be any of the 383 other loving behaviors (so far discovered, Swenson) which can activate your sensory systems to help you experience love.  Next, as your nerves are stimulated by a love input they send electrical messages to centers and circuits of your deeper, ancient, non-conscious brain designed for receiving and processing love.

That deeper part of your brain primarily is where your psychological heart resides.  It is where you process love, being loved and loving.  It also is the part of that sends out electrical and chemical messages to other parts of your brain and to many parts of your body activating them to function more healthfully, and generally to beneficially guide you.  Then those messages stimulate your brain to make a variety of neurochemical compounds which in turn help to make you conscious of starting to feel the many, various, good, emotional and physical feelings of love.

All of that happens mostly quite naturally, automatically and also largely non-consciously at first.  But your subconscious knows and is responding.  When it comes to love, it seems that the conscious, aware and thinking mind, to a large extent, gets bypassed at first.  Some have postulated that perhaps nature does not really trust the conscious mind to handle anything as important as love, other than to be aware of feeling it after it is up and running.  Notice, people tend more often to say things like “I realized I love him (or her)”, or “suddenly I just knew I loved (so-and-so)” rather than saying things like “I can tell I love that person a little bit and maybe that love is growing”.  That occasionally does happen.  Perhaps also that is why you can not feel your love for someone all the time but it is there all the time where you can draw on it when it is called for.

You purposely can come to sense love when it exists in you and, thus, know you love someone, but this is just the awareness of love and not the love itself.  Because love neurologically is not an emotion but rather a natural, complicated, internal, deep brain process which you sometimes feel or sense.  It also is a process which can give you a great many different emotions, among which are feeling loving, feeling loved and feeling lovable.

Love and Its Accompanying Emotions

While love happens, you frequently do become consciously aware of the feelings of being loved, and/or loving, or just a sense of love itself.  You also may get a wide range of other, accompanying, positive feelings which the experience of love triggers or sets off in your brain.  When love is being experienced, there can be accompanying positive feelings of tenderness, intimacy, ecstasy, serenity, passion, emotional closeness and connection, compassion, ebullience, preciousness, empathetic care, oceanic awareness and a great many other fantastic feelings.

Identifying love as only an emotion is grossly inaccurate and can lead to mis-judging its emotional richness, nature, power, importance and functional dynamics.  In turn, that can lead to a great many missed opportunities, misunderstandings and relational mistakes concerning love.  Some of those can be quite tragic.  Remember, feeling love is natural but love relating is learned.

Blocked and Anti-Love Interference

The whole love process described above can be blocked, confounded and in essence sabotaged by other things that go on both in your brain and in your life.  For instance, a former love relationship that was too often or too severely painful can cause you to be extra reluctant and cautious about entering a new love involvement.  If you have been trained or subconsciously programmed to be more oriented to one, or more, of the false forms of love you may greatly misinterpret or overlook a current, real love opportunity.

Too much emphasis on sexuality, romance, marriage or strong personal insecurity also can get in the way of healthy, real love development.  Substance addictions, compulsive avarice and status desires, plus simply plain ignorance about love also provides lots of dangers.  These are but some of the many things that can block or interfere with processing love healthfully and doing love-relating successfully.

Love and Your Brain for the More Anatomically Fascinated

You could skip this section if you are not intrigued about knowing some of the brain/body details of love’s psychoneurophysiology and neurochemistry.

There is a lot we don’t know yet and what we do know is like everything else about the brain – complicated.  Nevertheless, here is a little bit of more technical brain knowledge concerning what your brain does with love.  These knowledge bits can be used to lookup much more complete information than is given here.

First of all, the preponderance of research evidence shows love not to be an emotion like it is so often misidentified.  Rather, love, at least in part, is seen as a natural, very healthy, systemic, brain process involving many emotions and a whole lot more than that.  Brain-wise the process of love is more similar to the biological process of turning food into energy or your body’s systems and for keeping you free from infections than it is to being just a simple emotional feeling.  Unlike an emotion, real love is not a temporary, or frequently fleeting feeling.  Rather, once real love is established it likely is going to be with you from then on, and some postulate even after death.  A relationship may end but if there was real love that will remain even though there might be many contravening variables about other aspects of the relationship.

Your psychological heart mostly is in your brain’s limbic system.   Love processing involves a good many of your limbic system’s component parts.  Thought to be included are your insula, anterior cingulate cortex, caudate nucleus and putamen, all of which show heightened activation when you come in contact with someone you feel love with or for.  Lower activation also occurs in the amygdala, posterior cingulate, and the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices in the right hemisphere of your brain.  Those changes in brain activity show love to be at least a twofold process.  One, increases good or positive feelings and the other decreases your negative or bad feelings.  Among those are a lowered sense of fear and a heightened sense of safety.  Changes in the activation rate of those brain parts also mean you become less outer environmentally aware and more internally and emotionally aware as the love process happens.  Worry decreases and as love-induced endorphins and dopamine levels increase so does your all-over sense of happiness and well-being.

Also thought to be probably involved with the love process in your brain are your hippocampus, parahippocampal gyrus, temporal lobe, orbitofrontal cortex, septal area, corpus callosum, frontal lobe, fornex, mammillary bodies and limbic cortex.  Each of those may have to do with different aspects and factors of the love process.

When referring to a couple, some may say “they have chemistry” that certainly is true.  Love makes a host of neurochemical things happen.  Chemical changes in your brain and body frequently include changes in androgen, testosterone, pheromones, serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, epinephrine, norepinephrine and phenylethylamine, and that is just what researchers have discovered, it seems so far that I know about.  Each of those helps you process different aspects of loves dynamics.  For instance, oxytocin helps you with feeling love connected and bonded with another.  Please note, these are natural, good chemicals that are produced by our bodies when love occurs.  So, those who get lots of love in their lives don’t need similar kinds of pharmaceuticals or street drugs with potential toxic side effects.

From Your Brain to Your Body

The chemicals your brain makes when it is processing love go into your blood and flow through not only your brain but also through the rest of your body.  Everywhere they go they work to have a great variety of beneficial and healthful effects.  It seems that each of the three tiers and 12 major categories of loving behavior [see “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love”] may trigger different, healthful benefits.  Some are quite invigorating, energizing and mobilizing for action.  Others are calming, soothing and make for antidepressant serenity.  Quite a few have various kinds of physical healing effects.  Others are more healing in a psychological sense.

Feeling loved from any source can sort of work like food giving you energy, sometimes a great deal of energy.  Feeling serenely loved especially is good for lowering stress and the body’s reactions to stress.  Feeling loving toward others brings on one set of physically healthful effects, while acting loving toward others adds another set of physically healthful, biophysical reactions.

Getting and giving different behaviors that convey love has a positive effect on your immune system’s functioning, can lower your bad cholesterol and can help your T cells fight cancer.  The health benefits go on and on, with research discovering more all the time.

Feeding Your Brain Love Makes You Healthy

Your psychological mind and your psychological heart are in your brain.  The brain is in your body and they are all linked together affecting each other.  Experiencing healthy, real love works like a vital health food and a rather miraculous medicine.  The more you interact with people you love, and are loved by the more your brain produces helpful responses that affect your entire body’s health.  This also seems true for those you like and those you are liked by.  More love equals more health.  That is what more and more research is showing.

The more you are absent from healthy, real love input, the more you are psycho-physically malnourished or even starved and the more likely you are to have a physical and/or psychological health malfunction.  Mixing a lot with people doing false love is like eating non-nourishing, junk food.  Even worse, is to be around and interact with negative, anti-love acting people.  That is akin to eating toxic and poisonous food.  Also bad for your health is a lack of healthy self-love, and self-hate and self negation are even worse.

If at your work, or somewhere else you spend time, involves a lot of contact with non-loving, false love or anti-loving people, you had best counterbalance that with healthy self-love and with others who love well.  Remember, it is very important to “love others as you love yourself”.  It is likely your health depends on it!

One More Thing

How about sharing and talking over this mini-love-lesson with a friend or two and, thus, spread some love knowledge into our rather love ignorant world.
As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: How much real healthy love, shown physically and psychologically, have you been feeding your brain lately?

Related posts:

1. Listening With Love and IN and OUT Brain Functions
2. A Functional Definition Of Love
3. Love in the Fridge
4. Dog Love Is Real Love !
5. Self-Love – What Is It? 

Thinking About Love, How Good Can Yours Get?

Mini-Love-Lesson #214

Synopsis: Here you get introduced to the need for and the benefits of good love thinking; ideas for bringing together your head and your heart ways of thinking about love and getting free of blocks to good love thinking are also included; more.

Do You Know How to Do Good Thinking about Love?

If you give it a little thought, your thinking about love likely can get really good. That, in turn, could produce joyously superb results for your life. The trouble is, except for a few, most people are not very good at thinking about love usefully, productively or even close to successfully when there is a love problem.  How about you?  Can you think about love in ways that are beneficial, constructive, fruitful and if there are love problems, adeptly find love-based solutions?  By the way, did you know that if there is a love relationship problem, it is thinking about the love part rather than the problem part that more likely can lead to improvements?  At least that is what some suggest.

Let’s suppose you want to fix a broken heart, get over a lost love, recover from a wounded heart or cure a sick love relationship.  Or let’s suppose you want to find real love, grow a stronger love, deepen your love or generally just enrich your life with more and better love.  Do you think you have the knowledge about love and what you can do with it to go after and accomplish what you want?  Sadly, not too many people can reply to any of these questions with a strong affirmative.  However, with a little study and practice you can, if you don’t already.  So, let’s think about thinking about love.

Start with a Simple Premise!

If you do good thinking about love, your actions about love can get better and better which likely will result in more and more love success, and better and better love feelings more frequently experienced throughout your life.

Conversely, if your love thinking is poor, inadequate, misinformed, etc. your actions concerning love are more likely to be wasted, counterproductive, inadequate, unhealthy, etc., resulting in, at best, love relational mediocrity or, at worst, considerable disappointment, failure and unhappiness in love.

Unblocking and Freeing Your Thought Process First?

Think!  Ponder!  Puzzle?  Question.  Explore.  Examine!  Speculate?  Reflect!  Contemplate.  Inquire.  Suspect?  Envision!  Hypothesize.  Learn!  And do all of them concerning love!  But wait.  Is your mind really free and unblocked for doing these things when it comes to love?  Many minds are not.

Cultural conditioning has made a great many people in quite a number of societies around the world think that thinking about love is a no-no.  Especially in romantic love you are supposed to rely on luck, magic, fate, the stars, myths, legends, folklore and heaven but, heaven forbid, not on your own thinking mind.

It seems that only in Russia, where loveology (see “Is There Really a New Field Called Loveology”) has been made an official field of study, is it okay to really think and learn about love like you would think and learn about every other subject.  That is until your lack of thinking and learning helps you get into a love relationship that sinks or crashes and gets you badly hurt.  When that happens at least some people start to really think and learn about love and its actual workings.
Luckily in recent years, scientists have begun to go against the social prohibition of researching love and are finding out marvelous, incredible, useful and practical love knowledge.  With it, you really can do good thinking about love.

Of course, family influences growing up, certain societal and religious training, love experience trauma and other intervening variables also can cause blockage and otherwise mess up your ability to think successfully concerning love in love relationships.  All of those influences might require the help of a good, love-oriented counselor or therapist before really good thinking about love could be accomplished.

Good Love Thinking, What Is It?

I suggest good thinking about love is cognition about love accomplished via a wide variety of potentially good, love-oriented, thinking qualities.

Below you will find a list of 40 such qualities.  Later you can use the list to analyze, rate and improve your own thinking about love.  However, first let’s just do some thinking about the qualities on the list.  Each of these qualities has been used to describe, in a positive way, the nature and fashion some others tend to think in when they think about love.  Would some of these words describe your thinking about love?

GOOD THINKING ABOUT LOVE QUALITIES
1. Helpful  2. Positive  3. Constructive  4. Kind  5. Knowledgeable
6. Appreciative  7. Innovative  8. Empathetic  9. Discerning
10. Artistic  11. Fruitful  12. Accepting  13. Progressive
14. Affirmative  15. Productive  16. Beneficent  17. Wise
18. Considerate  19. Inspired  20. Forgiving  21. Inquisitive
22. Seductive  23. Resourceful  24. Balanced  25. Non-judgmental
26. Sexual 27. Reasoned 28. Generous 29. Democratic
30. Romantic  31. Evidence-based  32. Reverent  33. Creative
34. Erotic  35. I win,, you win oriented  36. Awe filled
37. Informed  38. Loving  39. Insightful  40. Compersive* (opposite of jealous).
If you wish feel free to add words or terms of your own.

Now for An Intriguing Little Survey

First, think of someone you love and consistently want ongoing love from.  It could be a lover, a spouse, a child, a parent, a friend or anyone else you choose.  With that person clearly in mind, pick out two to five qualities from the above list which you suspect that person wants to be descriptive of your way of thinking about love.  You may want to write those qualities down.  Next, ask yourself what two to five qualities you hope that loved person’s thinking about love contains.  Now, ponder how this informs you about your love with that person.  You could go check that out with them and do some joint thinking about your love together.

Next, using the above list, let me suggest you pick out what may be two to five qualities concerning your thinking about love which you suspect may be your strongest and best qualities involved in thinking about love.  Ask yourself if you really are strongly or only moderately empowered in those qualities.  In either case, are there things you want to do to increase your better qualities even more?
Now, search through the list to see which two to five other qualities of your thinking about love would best be improved?  Then think and perhaps write down what you could do to make those improvements.

Last, review the list for the two to five qualities on the list which most puzzle you or just grab your attention.  Those may be the most important ones for you to attend to.
All this can be used to talk over with others, especially those you are in a love relationship with.

Using Your Cognitive and Emotional Intelligence to Think Good

The odd-numbered items on the above list are understood to have more of a connection to cognitive mental (cortex) processing.  The even-numbered items have more to do with thinking that is emotionally motivated, connected and processed (limbic).

It is important that your thinking not only be cognitively good but also be in harmony with your emotions related thinking about love.  Otherwise you may be, like the proverbial “house divided against itself” and become rather conflicted and self-defeating.  That, by the way, is another place that much cultural conditioning about love tends to lead with its heart versus head dichotomies.  Head with heart in synthesis works much better.

With that in mind, you might want to count and analyze whether the even numbered qualities or the odd numbered qualities concern you the most.  Are you better at the even or the odd numbered items and what do you think that might say about you?

Your Inner Sense of Love Needs Your Help

You may just know you love your children, parents, other family, pets, dear friend, and perhaps your deity, your country and even yourself.  You probably are quite right about all that.  However, when it comes to romantic love you can be very wrong – very seriously, dangerously and tragically wrong!  Why is that?

One science-based answer to that question goes like this.  Mother Nature, in order to assist our species survival, evolved in us lust and various forms of false love so that we more quickly would mate and have offspring while waiting for lifelong commitment love which might never happen or take too long.  Remember, that a long long time ago there were not many humans on earth and they did not live very long so, having kids before something killed us off was vital to our species survival and expansion.  Note, that several forms of false love last for about two years and then turn off.  That is just about enough time for two parents to get a child started and then go mix the gene pool with new others (see our Real Love False Love book).

For all forms of love, it is best if your head and heart work together but especially is that important in romantic love.  You may sense you have a strong romantic love for someone, a love that wants to be sexual with that person and even to have a child with that person.  These feelings can be quite real but the interpretation and conclusion you draw quite mistaken.  That is when your heart really needs the help of your head.  To help your heart, your head needs to be love-knowledgeable, and be able to do good love-focused thinking.

Good thinking about how to love a child, a parent, a friend, yourself or anyone or anything else tends to result in good, healthy, powerful loving.  Spiritual love, altruistic love, humanitarian love and every other form of love all can use the help of your good thinking mind.  So, learn to do good thinking about love and maybe put a little more successful love into our world.

Congratulations!  You already are working at good love thinking by reading this mini-love-lesson.  Keep working at it and you will get better because you can and it is important!  To help you with that, you might want to give thought to the mini-love-lessons titled “Thinking Love to Improve Love”, “What Your Brain Does with Love – Put Simply” and also review “The Definition of Love Series” at this site.

One More Little Thing

How about introducing this site and this mini-love-lesson’s ideas to someone you love and then to somebody new?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Would it be a good idea for you to make your own journal, recording your own personal “Thinking about Love”?

* See the love lesson “Compersion: A Newly Identified Emotion of Love”.

Related posts:

1. Thinking Love to Improve Love
2. Gender Diversity & Romantic – Heart-mate Love
3. How Smart Is Your Love? – A Test
4. The Three 3’s of Love
5. Gender Diversity Love 

Can Love Overcome Incompatibility?

Synopsis: We start with worst-case incompatibility getting unstuck; then go on to compatibility choices; the better other choice; some how-to’s; deal breakers; and the great importance of experimenting.

A ‘Worst-case’

Tabitha, with tears running down her cheeks, wailed to her lover, Jamail, “We’ve got to face it!  We love each other but we are just two different.  We can never make it as a couple”.  Jamail looking very distressed pleaded, “We should try anyway.  Are we not taught that love conquers all”?

Tabitha responded, “You’re deep into your religion and I am an agnostic.  You are a capitalist and I am a socialist.  You want sweet and tender lovemaking and I want rough and tough passion.  You want to live in different countries and move around a lot and I want to put down roots and stay in one place.  You want to make a lot of money and retire early and just play.  I want a lifetime of doing good to others and giving back to my community.  You want rice with everything and I am allergic to it.  You want a passel of children and I’m not sure I even want one.  How in the world can you think we could ever be compatible enough to succeed?”

Jamail, with a strong, serious look replied  “I think we could each give up some things for each other, compromise on other things and just try hard not to fight about the rest.  I’m ready to sacrifice because I love you so much, and I know it’ll be hard but I bet we can do it if we try hard enough.  Do you love me enough to do that?”  Tabitha with a sad, soft demeanor replied, “I do love you more than enough to try and I think we could make it work for a while, but if we sacrifice, later we will grow resentful and depressed because we would be denying our true selves and I don’t think that can ever work”.

Jamail retorted, “Even if that’s true, we still try and if it doesn’t work we would know that we had done what we could.  Unless we try will never know for sure. I would hate to think that if we had only tried we might’ve made it”  Tabitha said, “I guess you’re right but I don’t want to spend my life trying what you suggest.  I have seen to many others do that and they were too incompatible to make it work.  I refuse to live like them.”  Jamail then beseeched, “Give it a year, six months, even three?  Tabitha with a hint of a smile responded, “Six months with the option to renew for six more – okay?”
Jamail quickly answered, “OK, and look at what we’ve just done.

With love and talk we have arrived at a compatible, next step from our mutual incompatible positions.  Maybe that’s a good omen.”  Tabitha laughed and said, “I don’t believe in omens but you’re right, and okay we can give it a try so long as we keep showing each other love during the hard times we are going to have.  I know if we don’t mix love into the times we get upset with each other, we will never make it.”  Jamail then said, “I know I have to do a lot of work to do in that area, and that is the first place we have to grow more compatibility in to make the rest of it work.  So, when I don’t come across loving enough, just remind me, and if it’s okay with you, I’ll do the same with you.”  Tabitha added, “Sometimes we both will need timeouts, so we have to not pester each other or get more upset with each other’s timeouts like we have before.”  “Yes, and see we’re doing it again; we’re working it out, replied Jamail.  Hugs and kisses followed.

Compatibility’s Choices

Most people seem to think that compatibility is something a couple just has or they just don’t have.  One finds it or can’t find it, or just hopes it will magically show up one day because they are so in love.  Our love mythology leads so many people to think couple compatibility is all a matter of luck or fate.  So, when they don’t find it they just break up or resign themselves to their miserable incompatibility destiny.

One problem with that view is that it takes a fair amount of time to figure out whether or not you are sufficiently compatible or not.  Lots of couples caught in a False Love Syndrome, slowly or after a few years of trying, sometimes suddenly raise into their awareness how incompatible they really are.  Several False Love Syndromes seem to be particularly good at blinding people from seeing their incompatibility.  Many such couples go into denial and repeatedly struggle on, until they finally do give up.  Some of those who give up, stay in the relationship trying to just live with and tolerate the incompatibility.  Several forms of False Love Syndrome lend themselves to overtly tolerating the incompatible difference while secretly or subconsciously looking for a new love that is real, and hoping to switch to a new, more compatible, better person.  That leads to affairs, divorce, and breakups.  It sometimes does lead to a much more compatible, real, love relationship that is far better, and other times not.

A lot of people do just find someone who is sufficiently compatible and that helps tremendously.  Nevertheless, such couples later do discover difficult differences and have to work at growing their compatibility.  Lots of couples, after the so-called honeymoon period, start discovering hidden differences and incompatibilities, some of which can severely sabotage or totally torpedo a couple’s relationship unless they start doing the work of growing their compatibility.  The research shows that no matter how compatible a couple starts out, they will experience compatibility struggles.

The Better Other Choice

Here is that really good news. More and more evidence points to what ‘successful couples actually do’ is not ‘find’ but instead ‘grow’ their compatibility.  Sure it helps to start out with at least a little compatibility, but even without much there is a way.  With enough healthy, real love, the right knowledge, plus dedicated and democratic, earnest teamwork, many, even severe incompatibility problems often are able to be overcome.  You see, Tabitha and Jamail are now 10 years together and most of those very happily together years.

See if you can wrap your head around the concept of lovingly and democratically growing compatible.  This actually is what most highly compatible couples have done.  Some of them started out with extreme incompatibility.  Of course, the more incompatible a couple is the more work it probably is going to take.  It is not magic, luck or fate.  It is work, or more exactly ‘teamwork’ that makes couples grow increasingly compatible.

Some How-To’s for Growing Compatibility

To start growing compatibility, you first might want to work on your ‘Toleration Love’. Tolerational love is one of the eight major groups of behavior by which social psychologists have shown that love gets given or delivered to another.  (You can read what you likely need to know about ‘Tolerational Love’ in Recovering Love.  There are several mini-love-lessons at this site which also will help.)  While you are growing compatibility, toleration love can get you through the disappointments, aggravations, irritations and frustrations of your incompatibilities.  One exception has to do with seriously unhealthy, destructive behavior.  There, it is important that your toleration not be enabling whatever is destructive.

A democratic approach and mindset is pretty much required.  If you have a “my way or the highway”, autocratic approach or mindset, growing compatibility does not stand much of a chance.  Two people in a relationship have to be willing to try each other’s ways, hear and consider each other’s thoughts no matter what they are, and have good emotional intercourse about everything felt (See the mini-love-lesson on Emotional Intercourse).

Constantly mixing in expressions of love in words and acts as you deal with whatever seems incompatible, and doing a good job of ‘Receptional Love’ at the same time makes the work of growing compatibility easier and more likely to succeed.  Be sure you do that in the way the one you love likes to be love (You might want to consult “The Five Love Languages by Gary D. Chapman for that).

Work to avoid ‘love destroyers’ and sabotage systems.  Especially important to avoid is diminishing your demonstrations of love in frequency or strength when dealing with incompatibility issues.  Also super important is to avoid demeaning your loved one because of their differences from you.  Guilt trips, putdowns, blame, indignation, making fun of, making derogatory comments, moralizing at your beloved, etc. are in no way helpful for growing compatibility.  Sometimes ‘making light of’ and having some fun with issues can be helpful if sufficiently, mutually enjoyed.  Slowing or stopping the demonstration of love is likely to be very detrimental.

Deal Breakers

Zea broke it off with Max a few days after their fifth get-together when he lit up a cigarette and explained he really liked smoking and had for years.  She knew she could not live with a smoker, having gone through the excruciating smoking-related cancer deaths of both her parents.  Her healthy, self-love would not permit it or risk it.  It had been far too painful.  Understand that, Zea was not being judgmental or condemning Max for smoking.  Zea was just realizing and ‘owning’ what was true about herself and acting on that knowledge.  She did explain it to Max and he tried to quit smoking, but gave up the effort after a little while, so Max and Zea were no longer ‘an item’.
This is pretty much the best way ‘deal breakers’ work.

No one needs to be unloving about it.  The truth is, some incompatibilities for some people are too big or too strong.  I like to suggest that couples who think this may be true for them in some area or another, first experiment with seeing if they can find a compromise, or a synthesis, or any other way to deal with whatever the incompatibility is all about.  Couples’ counseling can be a big help here.

The Importance of Experimenting

To earnestly ‘try on for size’ what your beloved wants you to do, to truly see if you can learn to enjoy what your beloved enjoys, to work to find ways to appreciate or at least tolerate the people your beloved values, to learn to look through your beloved’s eyes even though your beloved’s understandings are so opposite and different than your own, to clearly and frequently ask for what you want and to genuinely try to weave it together with what your beloved wants; all that and much more is involved in experimenting toward growing compatibility.  Of course, it must all be done with lots of well expressed love.

It is amazing how often experimenting leads people to genuinely like and be enriched by that which they did not like or want as it first was presented by their beloved.  It’s also amazing how often a synthesis with a beloved’s ways develops a new and third better way for both.  Experimenting and working to find the value in the differences a couple brings to each other is a grand way of growing compatibility.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What do you think of this statement, “You get to have it all your way, or you get to have love”?

Related posts:

1. Is a False Love Divorce A Good Thing?
2. What Makes Love Last?
3. Ever Think Seriously about Real and False Love? 

How Love Works - 7 Basics

Synopsis: Seven major ways of understanding how love actually works and how to ‘work’ love for producing its wonders and marvels are each briefly described.

People sometimes ask me, “Dr. Cookerly, how does love really work?”.  Here is an answer that comes from recent scientific findings, discussions with learned colleagues and my own work with thousands of couples, families, individuals and lovers in various other lifestyles, plus from the work of some of the many therapists I have trained and supervised.

Those who have succeeded in various forms of love relationships can be said to have revealed at least seven basic ways showing how healthy, real love actually works.  These 7 ways can be described as follows:

1.  Healthy, Real Love Must Be Given Well and Received Well for it to fully work its wonders and marvels!
In counseling I often hear things like, “I guess my parents loved me but they never really showed it.”  (See the entry “Love in the Fridge”) Or sometimes it is said this way, “I suppose he loves me but he sure doesn’t show it very well”, Or “We are supposed to love each other but you’d never know it from the way we treat each other”.  In my practice and the practices of those I have supervised and consulted with research clearly has revealed two major reasons love relationships of all types fail.

These reasons hold especially true for couples who don’t make it.  The number one reason is ‘deficient and insufficient love communication’.  That means the people in the love relationship do not give love to or receive love from each other enough.  Love sent by verbalizations, touch, looks, tones of voice, affirmations and all the other ways love can be shown just doesn’t happen enough (For the eight major groups of behavior by which love can be conveyed see the entry “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love” ).

The number two reason is they send each other far too many anti-love messages like demeaning remarks, putdowns, criticism, hate looks, angrily intoned words, complaints, etc., compared to the number of pro-love messages they send each other such as experience gifts, hugs, praises, compliments, caresses, acts of tolerant acceptance, intimate self-disclosure, etc..  Unless actions demonstrating love and words of love are freely, frequently given and well received a love relationship is likely to weaken.  It then becomes susceptible to the stressors that may kill it, or it may just wither away and die.  Love insufficiently given and received will, at best, produce a love relationship that merely exists and does not reach anything like its full potential.

Note that Love has to not only be given well but also received well for it to best work its many miracles.  I remember Brenda who was great at giving love in all eight of the major ways love can be given directly, but she was lousy at receiving it.  She could lovingly caress her children and lover, give hugs to her friends and family, say words of love to all, give gifts, do actions of affirmation, self-disclosure, tolerance and every other form of demonstrating love.  However, if anyone tried to do those things with her she would cut it short, withdraw, discount, dodge, emotionally distance herself, deflect compliments and praises, and then later, not surprisingly, be depressed and quite love malnourished.

In childhood she had been subject to frequent, severe, phony ‘smother love’, followed by very controlling, painful abuse.  Thus, for her receiving love meant very bad things were about to happen.  It took a fair amount of therapy for her to be able to receive demonstrations of love from the many people who cared about her but she finally managed it.  Brenda exemplified someone suffered from an advanced case of poor receptional love ability.  However, there are many who block or avoid at least some of the love that is readily coming their way.  To be able to receive an expression of love without countering it with self deprecating, or fearful, suspicious or angry thoughts, or without countering it with indifference to what is happening is very hard for quite a few people. That’s almost always because love was coupled with too much pain earlier in their life.

‘Good reception’ means you focus on the love being shown to you, you purposefully appreciate and enjoy it because you’re focused on it and, if necessary, you remind yourself that it is probably real love, it’s not control, manipulation, trickery or some other negative thing that is coming your way.  Then you show that you really got it and enjoyed it so that the giver can hear and see that is really true – you really got it and it did you some good.  By doing that you give the giver the gift of good reception (See the Receptional Love Section in the entry “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love”).
2.  Love Works like an Extraordinarily Marvelous, Nutritious Food
When we do a good job of receiving well-demonstrated, healthy, real love we get energized in a way that is very similar to what happens when we eat healthy, nutritious food.  When we are deprived of well-demonstrated love we show responses quite similar to malnutrition or starvation.  The research suggests this is in fact apparently true for all mammals, birds and some other species so far studied.  Receiving love probably releases energy already stored in us, but it may be an energy that nothing but receiving love will release.

The love nurturing and nutritious factor works because our brain is built for love.  Receiving acts that show us love triggers our brains into making healthful neurochemicals which then flow through our body doing all sorts of biologically beneficial things.  And this causes us to feel really good in a wide variety of ways.  Elation, serenity, a sense of well-being, a sense of safety, giddy, feeling powerful, joy, relief and strong connectedness are all among the many positive emotions that experiencing healthy, real love may bring us.

3.  Healthy, Real Love Well-Demonstrated and Well-Received Can Act like an Amazing, Widely Effective Medicine
Love in mysterious ways, not at all fully understood, facilitates healing biologically, psychologically and relationally.  At least that is what a growing body of medical, recovery and rehabilitation research evidence points to.  Given any two people with the same wound, physical or mental illness, addiction, disability or dysfunction it is the person best-loved who is most likely to survive, repair, recover and generally do well at healing.  The unloved, the lesser loved, and those who are poor at receiving love, along with those who are not good at healthy self-love are the ones who are less likely to heal and recover rapidly, thoroughly or sometimes at all, all else being equal.

Intriguingly there is evidence to suggest the terrific healing effects of love sometimes seem to occur even with people who are comatose.  Some research supports the concept that love is just as healing for sick or injured other mammals as it is for humans.  Conversely there also is evidence that points to a lack of healing or slowed healing which occurs in those people and experimental animals who do not have love showed to them.  Furthermore, the well loved seem to have better abilities for fighting off infections, a slower aging process, a tendency to recover more thoroughly and quicker physically and psychologically than do the lesser loved and the unloved.

4.  Amazingly Giving Love Also Makes You Healthier
Imagine the surprise of the researchers when they discovered that giving love to others lowered bad cholesterol, improved blood pressure and increased the anti-infection functions of the ‘givers’ of love.  It originally was thought that the ‘giver’ might be drained, which in extreme cases did occur, but mostly giving love made the giver healthier as well as the receiver.  Sometimes the giver of love is even more helped than the receiver.  Because giving love works to enhance the factors that promote a healthier, longer life for both the giver and the receiver I suggest you give lots of love to lots of people.

5.  Healthy, Real Love Works to Motivate the Most Important of All Thriving and Surviving Actions
Because of love we protect our loved ones.  Because of love we strive long and hard for the well-being of the loved.  Because of love we work to create, improve and continue relational connections.  Because of love we endeavor to live in harmony, cooperation, and in collaboration in order to constructively live life with our loved ones.  Love even may cause us to lay down our own life for those we love.  (See the entry “Is Love the Most Important Thing in the Universe?”)  Love inspires creative efforts like nothing else, makes for perseverance against all forms of difficulty, causes people to work long and hard for social improvement, and fuels our most courageous actions along with inspiring our most awesome achievements.

6.  For Love to Work Well It Must Be Worked
While love is natural the sending and receiving, the growing, the maintaining and the advancing of love requires work.  Healthy, real, well done love takes the work of learning how to do love ever better.  It also requires purposeful application of that love learning.  Much like a farm growing natural food to get a good harvest, a lot of labor is required.  To achieve the full success potential of well done love we have to ‘work’ the major ways to show and receive love, ‘work’ the how to’s of healthy self-love, ‘work’ the ways of constructively and creatively thinking about love, ‘work’ the uses of love’s many emotions and everything else having to do with love.  Sometimes love just spontaneously and naturally flows.

However, for there to be consistency of love, being able to work at it is required.  Being able to work love also is terrifically important in times of stress and difficulty when love is most needed but least likely to flow easily.  When you know how to work at love you can do it purposefully and that does not detract from doing it spontaneously.  Do know, this kind of ‘work’ has tremendous benefits and the more you work it the more it becomes an integrated part of your life.

7.  For Love Relationships to Thrive and Make Life Fulfilled Love Must Be Cycled
To make a love relationship continue, grow and be fully actualized the people in the love relationship must cycle the love.  This is true for couples, families, comrades, or any other type of love relationship.  Cycling love means that two or more people in the relationship are mutually giving and receiving actions demonstrating love in ongoing teamwork with each other.  They receive love and digest and benefit from it, and then freely send back love to those who are sending it to them.  They keep doing this cycling of love together usually in ever improving teamwork.  They give the gift of showing good receivership of love and they jointly dance the dance of love pretty much continuously.  Love can be freely given to others who do not reciprocate with love actions.

Love given this way is a form of charity, but that does not create an ongoing, love teamwork relationship.  Likewise, a person may receive love and not give love back to the sender.  The recipient is enriched but that does not make for a healthy teamwork of equals, nor does it create a lasting, fulfilling love mutuality.  Love sometimes can be put on hold for surprisingly long periods of time and then picked up and restarted later, but during the ‘on hold’ time the love relationship is not growing because it is not being actively cycled.

Love can be stored up and drawn upon later but it is best when love is constantly cycled and, therefore, freshly generated and restored.  One of the beauties of love is the more you cycle it the more you create it and have it to give it away.  The better people learn and practice love cycling teamwork the more fulfilling their love relationship becomes.  This also tends to promote and nurture healthy self-love which also produces people who have more love to freely give to others.

Hopefully these seven points will help you better consider how love works and how you may work to create more healthy, real love in your life and in the lives of those you care about.

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Will you perhaps be talking over these ideas about how love works with a significant other, perhaps a mate, or lover, friend, or child you want to teach to think about love, and in so doing advance your own love thinking and, thereby, better your own love actions.

Related posts:

1. A Functional Definition Of Love

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