Metaphysical Love

Mini-Love-Lesson # 289

Synopsis: Here we work to understand and make practical sense of metaphysical/spiritual love and how it may work along with how it can productively be used.  What science is discovering, modern and ancient religious suppositions, philosophical offerings and what people all over the world are doing with metaphysical/spiritual love actions are included in clear, straight forward language.

Is love itself metaphysical?  Is love the greatest of all things, as spiritual masters have proclaimed down through the ages?  Does spiritual love rely on the existence of a mind-spirit connection?  Scientific evidence supports that love heals, love connects, love protects, love nurtures, love reinforces and rewards us.  And how does it do all those things – energy forces, bio-electrically, psychically, deity intercession, … ?  It has been suspected that the collective unconscious, group intelligence, spontaneous mood emergence, superorganism cooperation and metaphysical mass influences might have something to do with metaphysical love.  The mysteries abound.    

Do We All Love - Metaphysically?

When it comes to love, almost everyone, sooner or later, behaves metaphysically.  If a loved one is critically ill and we call on a mystical source to heal them, we are behaving from love - metaphysically.  If we pray for spiritual guidance when we are in the throes of despair - we are acting metaphysically.  If we go to the grave of a loved one and talk to the loved one’s spirit - we are love-relating metaphysically.  If we send our children off to school and imagine protective love energy surrounding them - we are acting metaphysically to safeguard them.  If we fantasize sending our love energy to a distant loved one - we are projecting metaphysical love.  If we are alone and feel a love-filled presence - we may be experiencing a metaphysical love event.  It seems there are many ways metaphysical love may manifest itself and be experienced.

We need not believe in metaphysical love to do it, or at least to attempt it.  We only need to have real love in our hearts and a willingness to experiment with metaphysical love behaviors.  Exploring these manifestations of metaphysical love may lead to surprising experiences and astonishing outcomes.  

When there is nothing more we are able to do in a difficult situation, we might attempt a metaphysical love behavior.  Behaving with and from metaphysical love often can be considerably beneficial to us and to those we love.  Metaphysical love can lead to a sense of spiritual serenity and heart-filled awe.  It also might guide us to appreciate the many apparent cosmic miracles that surround and fill our existence.  Psycho-physiologically, metaphysical love participation in rituals and ceremonies can bring stress reduction, metabolic balance and feelings of energized empowerment.

Research into the healing effectiveness of metaphysical love behaviors, shows intriguing results.  When metaphysical-related actions were taken on patients’ behalf, they tended to get better more often and faster even if they were not consciously aware of the action or even if they did not believe in it.  The experimental, matched, control groups did not get metaphysical treatment and did not show similar improvement.  Some of the experiments included praying for the patient, lighting candles, doing ceremonial actions and repeating ritual words.  It was found that the mindset and emotion demeanor (serene, loving, focused) of the person carrying out a metaphysical treatment influenced the results to some degree.  It also was found that benefit accrued to the doer as well as the receiver of metaphysical actions.

Interestingly, other patients also showed significant improvements even though they were not aware of volunteers, at a considerable distance, spiritually and metaphysically acting on their behalf,.  Unrevealed, distance healing is hard to explain in other than metaphysical ways.  

Some may not want to call what we are talking about metaphysical, but rather call it by some other term like spiritual or transcendental. That’s fine! The point we want to make is that whatever it is termed, this is a class or type of love behavior which is very common worldwide. Furthermore, archaeological and anthropological evidence shows this kind of behavior presumably has been going on since very early in the development of our human species.

Right now, this very moment, out of love, millions of people are doing metaphysical, or if you prefer, spiritual practices designed to have a positive influence on the well-being of those they love. Such actions are demonstrations of real, compassionate and caring love and they deserve respect and honoring for being so.  Respect also is due for those who rigorously and methodically are searching into the many complexities and conundrums of metaphysics within the realm of love.

What Is Metaphysical Love?

Metaphysical love may seems magical, mystical, mysterious, perhaps mythical and often quite hard to fathom. This kind of love is what many people turn to in times of love troubles. Metaphysical love also is known as the love that is spiritual, transcendental, supernatural, ethereal, celestial and preternatural.

We put metaphysical and spiritual together for several reasons. One is that, behaviorally, metaphysical and spiritual love are accomplished by similar actions. Another is that both seem to operate in much the same way and obtain rather similar results. There are those who study metaphysical and spiritual phenomena and suspect they are two views of the same thing. There also are those who vehemently oppose that concept. 

We operationally define metaphysical love as a love which people attempt to access, express and communicate through the behaviors associated with the metaphysical. To love metaphysically, means to have and feel a love that seems beyond this world’s reality. It also means to transcendentally or spiritually feel a connection with who and what we love.  For example, when long-distance lovers plan to gaze at the moon on the same night at the same hour; just by knowing they are sharing the same experience, they can feel metaphysically connected.  To metaphysically love means to try to transmit our love in a way that connects with another and beneficially effects them. Metaphysical love sometimes is explained as a special form of energy that exists in and travels through the ether of the universe.  

Doing metaphysical/spiritual love is enormously popular, common and esteemed all over the world. It does have its skeptics, disbelievers and naysayers, and conversely its ardent practitioners, promoters and believers   Metaphysical and spiritual love are the focus of a great deal of research, much of which supports that it is a useful and rewarding way to do love.

Framed in this world’s reality, metaphysical love sometimes is thought of as a bioelectrical or neuro-electrical phenomenon.  It is suspected to exist in and be transmitted from the brain’s limbic system components which are associated with love. Sometimes that love transmission is conveyed through touch and sometimes may be broadcast across space much like a radio wave transmission. Some research data has been analyzed as supporting this understanding.  A great deal more investigating is required to enlighten our understanding of these suppositions.

An ecumenical, somewhat theologically grounded and spiritually focused explanation exists and roughly goes like this. There is a deity force in the universe.  This metaphysical energy is pure love. This love energy can be accessed through spiritual and religious practices and, thereby, brought to bear on the living creatures and conditions of this world. Thus, metaphysical love is the spiritual love of the deity force which can be tapped into and channeled through us to our loved ones. Probably, clerics of every religion would want to alter this explanation, one way or another. In no way is it to be considered doctrinaire.

Philosophically, metaphysical love might be said to be the love that comes through “Meta-Ta-Physika”, Greek for the reality beyond the reach of objective study but able to be, at least partially, comprehended with the help of ontology, cosmology and epistemology. Did we say metaphysical love is complicated and hard to fathom?

Hopefully, these concepts have given our readers some sense of what metaphysical love is and may be, as well as how it might be done.

A couple other mini-love-lessons to explore at this site: “Transcendental Love: Mysteries and Wonders for Your Future” and “To Win at Love, Study Love”.   

One other thing - We think this mini-love-lesson is a practical, good one to discuss with others who like to talk ideas and use them and grow with.  See if you agree.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: If, right now or before day’s end, you were going to do a set of metaphysical/spiritual actions on behalf of someone you love, what actual behaviors might you do?

Wellbeing Oriented Love And Its Many Rich Rewards

 Mini-Love-Lesson #288

Synopsis: How to understand, activate, use, develop and greatly benefit from our probably inborn drive for doing wellbeing oriented love is well presented here.  Everything from  comforting a crying baby to striving for world peace is included by this type of love for others. It is evidenced as evolving not only in our own species but perhaps in others too as we move to the hope of the future.  Treat yourself to the joys of this positive psychology filled, love force.

Around the world, there are millions of people who see suffering and feel a powerful, internal drive to ameliorate that suffering.  Millions of others observe a social problem and aspire to do something about it.  Still others perceive injustice, inequality, victimization, bigotry, persecution, prejudice, neglect, abuse or maltreatment.  Then they empathetically respond and wish to save their fellow humans from those tortures.  Furthermore, there are those who look upon the ordinary, the normal and the average and are sure “We can do better”.  There are also millions who compassionately strive to find or apply healing to the world’s ills and woes of every type.

All these people can be said to be naturally impelled to action out of a drive for Wellbeing oriented Love.  Whether it is comforting a crying baby, working to treat the sick and wounded, rescuing the savaged or bringing peace to the war weary, these efforts are beautiful manifestations of healthy, real love.  Love promoted well-being sometimes is labeled as healing love, altruistic love, humanistic love, godly love or even do-gooder love.  Whether love is focused on a single, loved person in distress or on a cosmic concern its power can be amazing.  Whatever its incarnation, this type of love exists to fix what is broken or damaged and make things better.

Love does not always appear to be gentle loving.  While the major emotions of love are those of empathy and compassion, it also can involve an intense and adamant sense of dedication.  That dedication pushes us to strive against the negatives and go all-out for the positives of life.  In this adamancy there can be anger, rage and even a hate for whatever is causing the problem in need of healing or fixing.  Nurses and doctors might be heard to voice a hatred of cancer.  Anti-poverty workers have been known to voice animosity for the greed mongers of the world.  Some climatologists cathartically may rant and rave against polluters.  Ecologists and animal protectionists have been known to exhibit extreme antagonism toward the cruel and the indifferent.  Many progressive political activists seethe with fury concerning regressive politics and avarice addicted, power-for-power’s-sake politicos.  Nevertheless, the underlying motivation of these people who work on behalf of beneficial causes can be identified as love for health, repair, recovery, improvement and growth.

Those Who Help

There are people who just seem to be natural born helpers, healers and fixers.  Their caring love urges them to gravitate toward people in need, to intervene in dire situations and even to choose careers that require serious, assistive skills.  Wherever there are ailments, afflictions, maladies or maltreatment of any sort, many people feel an impulse to do something to make things better.  We think these benevolent drives come from what we identify as wellbeing oriented love. We can find these exceptional people in the helping and healing professions; they are likely to become nurses, physicians, social workers, therapists, NGO aid workers and so forth.  Others go into work at charitable agencies, service organizations, rescue work, educational guidance or any vocation or avocation where the reparative part of wellbeing love is a major, ongoing motivation.

There are other people who live to advance wellbeing.  They tend to go into fields like education, science, progressive politics, human service businesses and the like.  These movers and shakers can be instrumental in propelling human progress and advancing civilization.   

Helpers, when asked why they do what they do, often reply, “I just had to try to make a difference” or “It was just in me to do it”.  Some will say things like “I saw someone I love suffer and my purpose in life became to fight against that evil”.

There is another group who go into research to find cures for threats to those they love or to develop instruments that aid humanity.  One subgroup of people who help are political activists who go into politics to work for human betterment and fight politicos who are only there for their own gain or a regressive agenda.  Many other helpers spend their time and energy volunteering for worthy causes which right a wrong, provide for an insufficiency or tackle a problem.  Wellbeing oriented love exists in all of these.

Many who do not seem to have an abundance of love within them, find it hard to understand why some people spend so much of their lives doing so much for the less fortunate, the downtrodden, the less able, the disadvantaged, the defeated and the victims of life’s tragedies.  In fact, many of those who help don’t fully understand it themselves.  Some will testify that it is their religion or that their God called them to service.  Others will trace it back to a time in which they were in despair or crisis and a helper came to their rescue; so, they want to provide a similar service to others.  For some, it is because they were not rescued and do not want others to suffer like they did.  In addition to those good reasons, we posit that a deep down reason is a strong, internal love drive.  Wellbeing oriented love, for whatever reason, powerfully surges in the spirits of many and they continuously strive to actualize it.

Alert!  Beware of fake helpers!  There are people who look like they are doing good but they have a hidden, self-serving agenda.  Research has revealed most people feel good from doing good but sociopathic-leaning people usually only feel good from selfish benefit.  It seems they don’t feel good when they do good.

A reinforcing reason for doing wellbeing-oriented love is that our brain is built to reinforce us with good feelings once we start to actualize love’s impetus.  Research backs this up and shows that there are significant other benefits to enacting love oriented for wellbeing, besides just feeling good.  A number of studies have confirmed that acting from altruistic motivation is a considerable benefit to the giver of those actions as well as to the receiver.  The wellbeing and happiness of both tend to improve regardless of the difficulty being faced.  Frequently, so does their social and relationship life, along with their longevity.  A deep, private sense of confident self-worth can result along with a solid owning of the knowledge that one has made a worthy contribution. 

One More Thing: might you enjoy talking the ideas of Well-Being Love over with someone? If you do please mention our website and its many brief lessons on not just feeling love but doing love well.  Thank you

As always – Grow and Go with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Question: are you a happy, hopeful, proud do-gooder riding on the wellbeing love bandwagon, or what?

Number 51: Your Super Tool for Healthy Self-Love

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

Saved by Number 51

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

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

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

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

The 51 Story

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

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

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

See Your Core Okayness

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

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

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

Who Gets to Vote in Your Okayness Election?

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

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

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

Voters from Your Past

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

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

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

51 but Not 100

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

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

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

Related posts:

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

Is a False Love Divorce A Good Thing?

Synopsis: We start with a case of happiness guilt; go on to the many differing ways marriage, breakups and divorce are seen; religious issues; and end with the quest for real love and its great importance.

A Case of Happiness Guilt

Lorenz and Selah both felt a bit guilty and wondered if they should feel a lot worse than they did.  Both felt relief and a wonderful sense of relaxed freedom they had not felt for the three years of their unsuccessful marriage.

In couples counseling they jointly had come to the conclusion that their relationship could not work, that they were in no way right for each other, and that they should give up trying to make something that was harming both them and their two-year-old daughter.  After searching deeply and broadly, they came to the conclusion that the underlying problem was they did not have a real love for one another.

What they did have was two forms of false love.  Examining major forms of false love, Selah saw that she had been fooled and trapped in the False Love Syndrome known as an IFD Pattern. Before she discovered this, the false love marriage nearly had ruined her life.

Lorenz knew as soon as he read a paragraph describing the False Love Syndrome called Spouse Acquirement Syndrome that this indeed was exactly what he had done and he had fooled him into believing that he really was in love with Selah.  He saw he wanted to believe it was real love but in truth subconsciously he knew he had to acquire a spouse because that is what men in high success careers are supposed to do.  He admitted to himself that success was all that mattered to him at that time and so he found an acceptable woman and did what it took to ‘catch’ her, then he married her.

This couple decided that ending a falsehood actually felt good and in doing so they were giving themselves a chance to find new, real love.  They were quite relieved because this decision ended their incompatibility fights, their mutual growing sense of hopelessness, and all their fake and phony efforts to pretend they had real spouse-type love for each other.  In the process they became much better, cooperating parents.  They then were relieved to see that their daughter was growing happier now that they were happier.

They both came to suspect that maybe their marriage had done what it was meant to do –  produce a marvelous child and maybe help them grow up and better understand love itself.  They came to think that they never really had a real marriage because they had never been in real love with anything like a loving psychological and spiritual unity.  Divorcing, they put their energies and time to better use not only for their daughter but for themselves and other family and friends also.

For Lorenz and Selah getting a divorce basically was correcting a serious, life path mistake giving them the opportunity to find a more real and healthful path.  As this understanding soaked in, their guilt faded and both felt the relief of stress and strife from not having to live a lie anymore.

How Others Saw It

The friends and families of this couple had a great many, contradictory things to tell them about their divorce decision.  Together they made a summary of what they heard.

“Marriages are made in heaven and, therefore, it’s wrong to divorce!”

“Marriages are made in legal proceedings, and end in legal proceedings, and the rest of marriage is whatever you think it is.”

“Real marriage is made by two people who have real love for each other and are psychologically and spiritually bonded together by their real love.”

“The legal part is just a formality and paperwork, and the religious part is just a social ceremony dressed up in religion.”

“Marriage is a cultural contrivance we all have been brainwashed to go along with so society can be organized, stabilized and controlled.”

“Divorce always hurts the children.”

“Marriage is a gift of God and a contract between two people with God.  It starts on earth but goes on for eternity.  Therefore, all divorce is  breaking a covenant with the divine and you will be punished for that.”

“Love and marriage are just fairy tales we try to make real, and they were invented to keep people together while they start a kid and that’s all they really are.”

“I suspect both marriage and divorce today are just commercial devices designed to help sell more stuff because with both marriage and divorce a lot of money changes hands.”

“Divorce is a good thing because it helps mix the gene pool, and besides that nature didn’t intend us to be with just one partner for all our life.”

As you can see from their summary, they were barraged with many views, at odds with each other, about these subjects.  So, what is your view?  Also is your view based in what you have been trained to think or is it something you have come to on your own?

Religious Issues

In my marriage and family counseling work as a relational psychotherapist, I have on a number of occasions been asked to do Catholic Marriage Tribunal evaluations for people seeking an annulment.  This was so they could have a new church-sanctioned and blessed marriage in a Catholic Church with a new love of their life.  A basic question to be answered is “Was the former marriage a real marriage?”  One of the several concepts used to assess that question is to ask “Was the marriage based in a real love, a false love or something else?”

A corollary question has to do with whether or not there was a psychological condition, problem or illness involved which impeded the marriage from becoming a real marriage?  The identified False Love Syndromes help to answer this question.  Each major pattern of probable, or possible, false love indeed can be seen as evidencing a psychological problem, condition, or be related to a psychological illness which is especially obvious in a case of Fatal Attraction Syndrome.

It especially has been pleasing to me to see various prelates of the church take the question of real and false love into consideration in their deliberations.  It also is gratifying to have various ministers of several faiths use real love and false love concepts as they grapple with various issues of marriage and divorce.

There is growing evidence that changes are occurring in various religious bodies regarding love, marriage and divorce.  Those changes show greater flexibility and more loving forgiveness, as well as greater understanding occurring in these often problematic arenas.

Many of the world’s religions, or at least branches within those religions, are quite accepting of divorce and divorcees, but many are not.  The evidence I am aware of suggests that in many parts of the world, religious institutions of many kinds are taking a less condemning, less judgmental and less rejecting approach to these issues, than they have in the past, and toward the people struggling with them.  From this mental health professional’s viewpoint, that is a very good thing.  However, no small number of others disagree with me on that.

The Quest for Real Love

More and more people around our planet want to live in an ongoing, spouse-type, partnership relationship based in real and lasting love.  Sure, there are lots of other reasons people become couples or get married.  It can be for sex, safety, status, propriety, money, custom, to feel okay about themselves, and a host of other things.  But even in those unions there usually is some hope that the relationship will grow a real and lasting love.

The unseen problem for so many is that a false love might ensnare large numbers and lead them astray into what often turns out to be a life-harming disaster.  When a breakup or a divorce happens because people were in a false love and an ongoing catastrophe, is a divorce primarily a bad thing or a good thing?  Is it the correction of a mistake or just another additional mistake?

So many have been taught that all divorce is bad, wrong, sinful, etc. but the world seems to be changing in regard to that.  Some think the importance of real love is in ascendancy over the importance of marriage.  No small number of pundits bemoan the high divorce rate in many lands, and also consider couples who breakup after living together to be equally bad.  But if the healthiest way to live is in a real love relationship, as much research points to, isn’t ending a false love in order to set people free to find real love, more positive than negative?

There are those that think there is no such thing as real love, but more and more studies in the brain sciences and in a host of other research fields indicate otherwise.  Of course, in many cases there are all sorts of other, intervening variables which affect the outcome of both a marriage and a divorce.  But all-in-all the quest for a real love relationship is being shown to have greater and greater importance.  Sometimes the quest seems to necessitate going through a breakup or divorce, and getting to the other side where real love can happen.  What do you think?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Do you know enough about what constitutes healthy, real love and what the signs and symptoms are for false love?

Related posts:

1. Adultery And No Divorce Love
2. False Love Awareness
3. Murder and False Love
4. Are Love and Marriage Getting a Divorce?
5. False Forms of Love: Thrill and Threat Bonding 

Removing Your Hidden Blocks to Receiving Love Fully

Synopsis: Your hidden blocks, need to unblock; love block defined; an example; many kinds of reception blocking; where the blocks come from; and what to do about it are all covered here.

Your Hidden Blocks

You have love blocks!  They get in the way of receiving love when love comes your way.

They once did you some good but now they are just preventing you from feeling the energizing, warm, safe joy of feeling well loved.  Your love blocks also probably are sabotaging your chances for experiencing love more fully.  Why do we think this is true?  Because having blocks to receiving love is almost inevitable and universal in most of the world’s cultures and most of the world’s families.  No one starting life as an infant and experiencing childhood is thought to escape developing some hidden, subconscious blocks to receiving love.

Actually you might not have survived without them protecting you in your early life.  Now they are in the way.  The good news is you can get them out of the way and go on to a much greater, empowering and more abundant love.  Furthermore, remember that receiving love well is extremely important for giving love well.  It also is very important for doing your share of ‘cycling love’ in a love relationship which is what keeps a love relationship going.  (See the mini-love-lessons on Receiving Love at this site)

Why You Need to Unblock

We now have an abundance of scientific research pointing to a great fact.  If you don’t have healthy, real love in your life, your biological and psychological health systems start to malfunction.  Quite commonly after that, your life may malfunction in one major way or another.  It therefore, is to everyone’s benefit that you discover and remove your major blocks to receiving love fully.

What Is a Love Block?

A love block is anything that repeatedly gets in the way of getting love, when it there to get.  Here we are most concerned with your own, internal blocks to receiving love well and fully, which thereby interferes with you doing healthy, Receptional Love.  Your love blocks likely are too deeply ingrained, non-conscious habit patterns  preventing you from being able to perceive or experience yourself as loved and valued, when love conveying behaviors are being sent to you.  There is research which suggests as much as 75% of the love conveying actions that comes to an average person is missed and, therefore, not received.  A large part of what does get received is not received fully or well.  Could it be that if we all got good at love reception, and got our blocks out of the way, the world would be 75% more love nourished?

An All Too Common Example

After making love, Cato with a big smile, sincerely said to Lacey “I really enjoy the looks you have when you’re in ecstasy, and the sounds you make are a big turn-on too”.  He meant it as a loving affirmation and hoped it would help her feel intimately good, as well as it was sharing of his own, intimate, good feelings.  However, his statement ran into Lacey’s love blocks.  She took it as he was trying to embarrass her by making fun of her, and that he was actually being critical of her in a sort of sarcastic way.  That is how she was taught to interpret straight-forward, complimentary statements in the neighborhood and family she grew up in.

She also learned to react with self-defensive, pulling away while steeling herself with cold indifference.  She further acted to get out of that situation as fast as possible because it had become so negative to her.  Cato took her defensiveness as rejection, which activated his own love blocks.  He was sure he once again had failed with a woman, probably because he was an inadequate lover although he didn’t know how he had failed.  He also once again was thinking he probably was unlovable and would never find the love he really longed for, so he concluded, why try.  He certainly would not call Lacey or try to see her again.  Lacey also decided she would not try again with Cato either because once again she thought she had run into a real, unloving jerk.

It could have turned out much better had either Cato or Lacey, or both of them, been brought up in such a way as to instead regularly think something like this.  Compliments were just compliments, and they themselves were lovable and valued.  So sincere compliments would naturally come their way, and were to be enjoyed.  It also would have helped for them not to quickly think with blame, and consider themselves okay, lovable people who can continue working together on a probable glitch in communication, or mis-perception.  But no, their conditioning and programming made sure their first conclusion was that something negative was coming toward them, and blame and guilt had to be part of it.  Therefore, they should fight or flee from the person sending the perceived negative.

So long as Cato subconsciously and secretly believes women will find him sexually inadequate and basically unlovable, he will view something that goes a bit awry in a relationship as proof that he is failing.  He will then defend himself with counterattack or withdrawal, cutting off his chances to receive love or start a love relationship.  So long as Lacey has a habit of perceiving compliments, praises, thank you’s, and affirmations as not being real or containing some hidden negative meaning, she will effectively block genuine affection, respect and the love she so desperately wants.

The Many Faces of Love Reception Blocking

Blocking love coming your way usually occurs without you consciously knowing it, and in a great variety of different ways.  Here are clues to some of them.  If you think things like the following, you may be blocking your own reception of love.

“If I have to ask him for what I want, that spoils it because if he loves me he is supposed to know and then give me what I want”.

“I’m really not important or special in any way, so no one could really want me.”

“If anybody is nice to you, nine chances out of 10 they are after something, and you’re going to get hurt in the long run if you get taken-in by them”.

“I’m too (fat, skinny, ugly, poor, dumb, etc. etc.) for anyone to ever love me”.

“I’m such a bad person I don’t deserve love”.

“I don’t know how to know or share what I’m feeling and I don’t want to”.

“Love just makes me vulnerable and gets in the way of my success”.

“I missed my one great chance at love and I know I’ll never get another.”

“Whoever I get close to, ends up hurting me”.

“It’s a lot more important to me to be powerful.  Love just makes you weak”.

“It’s too late for me”.

“Love is just a pretty word for sex”.

“When they say they love you, it’s just a manipulation”.

“If you don’t love me just the way I want you to, you don’t really love me”.

“Love means you put yourself last and everybody else first”.

“Aren’t we supposed to be humble, and self effacing, and doesn’t enjoying getting love get in the way of that”.

There are lots more, but maybe this helps you understand the basic ideas about how love blocks get you to think and act against your own best interests.

Where Do Your Love Blocks Come From?

The culture you grew up in, and also whatever subculture you are a part of, can have a lot to do with where your love blocks come from.  For instance, if you were taught that anything having to do with love may have something sexual in it, and everything sexual is bad, you may subconsciously dodge anything loving so as not to be bad.  Many girls, on having their first period, stopped being hugged and kissed by her father, and all other males in the family or neighborhood.  So, ever after, she dodges love with males because she is subconsciously sure it will end in very painful rejection. 

Many boys gets teased, laughed at, shamed and embarrassed by their peers for doing something loving.  In many subculture groups, boys get criticized when they do something loving and chastised for not being strong, cruel and tough; then they never gets over it.  In other cultural groups many girls and boys learn that loving actions are used as a phony mask to manipulate others, and so they never trust or learn to do anything real concerning love.

Families and parenting are where, accidentally, lots of mistakes are made and malfunctioning ways are unknowingly passed on, generation to generation.  In some families they still believe in the, now much disproved, concept that parents who are too loving to their children turn them into weaklings.  Back before real research taught us better, the US and other governments sent out pamphlets to new mothers saying just that, and advising mothers not to cuddle, hug or lovingly touch their children, especially when they cry.  Tough soldiers for the future seemed to be the goal.  Lots of families around the world treat children with cruelty, indifference and neglect when they need love, and so subconsciously program them to be afraid of love and its many manifestations.

Addictions are especially a big problem.  For the child growing up with an alcoholic parent, half the time they do something nice to the sober parent and get a loving response.  The same thing done to the drunk parent brings agony.  This actively, but unknowingly, trains a child to connect love with frustration, confusion, anger, resentment, guilt, pain, contradiction and failure.  Then in their later relationships, all this gets in the way when they attempt relating in love.

What Can Be Done To Unblock and Go On To Good Receptional Love?

I like to suggest that the first thing to do is start learning and practicing the behaviors of healthy, receptional love.  It is amazing how well the “fake it, till you make it” approach works for many things, and this may be a key to one them for you.  You do not have to wait until you have discovered and countered your love blocks.  The very act of trying to accomplish good, receptional love will, in fact, do some of that for you.  As is taught in some forms of Buddhism, right action will lead you to right feeling and right-thinking and thereafter more right action.  However, that might not get the whole job done.  To learn the behaviors and thinking of receiving love well, I recommend you start with the mini-love-lessons at this site that have to do with receiving love or Receptional Love and then get busy.

Then it’s usually good to add more learning about your blocks.  To do that I like to recommend an older, but great, book by Dr. William Ryan and Mary Ellen Donovan called Love Blocks.  It is super for raising into consciousness what your blocks to receiving love may be.  Another ‘red flag’ may be when you experience dysfunction in a relationship.  You might ask yourself, “Might this be caused by one of my love reception blocks”?

Working on improving your healthy, self-love often proves crucial and intricately interwoven with developing good receptional love ability.  Again start with the healthy self-love mini-love-lessons at this site and go from there.

Getting more knowledge about receiving love and the processes that may be involved for you, also can be facilitated by reading Receiving Love by doctors Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt.  My book, Recovering Love, also has very practical sections helpful to this issue.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
The next time somebody says a loving statement to you, or gives you a loving touch or look, how do you want to see yourself respond internally and externally?

Related posts:

1. How Receiving Love Well Gives Love Better 

Friendship "Like" to Friendship "Love"

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson starts by exploring who is a friend; what is friendship to you; how to better think about friendship; it the most important thing to take away from this mini-love-lesson; much more.

Who Is a Friend?

“I know a lot of people and we call each other friends but are we really?” Avery asked this as he contemplated his life. He went on to say, “I have work friends, old school friends, club friends, casual friends and now Internet friends – a surprising lot of them. But are any of them true friends, deep friends or really close, personal friends who really love me and who I really love?

I must confess I don’t think I have any of that type and I think I really need some of those. I know others who have friends they really love but I don’t think I do. How do I make that happen?” According to many behavioral health researchers Avery had a common, growing and surprisingly important problem. He had lots of friends at the ‘like’ level but none at the ‘love’ level.

Having friends at the ‘like’ level simply means you like them and probably they like you, or at least they like something about you. You enjoy their company and they yours. That is pleasurable and usually quite good for you. Having friends at the ‘love’ level is far more significant. It can literally mean the difference between a shorter life and longer life, as well as a so-so life and a deeply enriched life.

What’s Friendship to You?

I once heard a car salesman say “Hello good friend, what’s your name?” To him I guess the word friend meant about the same thing as the word stranger. In my travels around the world researching love and love relationships, I have encountered people who explained to me that they would not use the word friend, as translated in their language, unless they had known a person at the very minimum for two years, and even then not unless it referred to someone very close and highly valued. For others, they reserve the word and the concept ‘friend’ for only those most dear to them. In one large survey I read, 92% of the people surveyed thought friendship was, or could become, a type of real love. But there are those who think of ‘friend’ mostly as just another word for acquaintance.

How to Think Better about Friendship?

Our thinking can be limited if our language doesn’t give us sufficient categories to think with. The usual continuum of categories in English are: friend, acquaintance, stranger and enemy. Some languages have several categories and terms just for ‘friend’. You may be able to think better about friendship using a few more categories like: best friend, close friend, dear friend, good friend, distant friend and friendly acquaintance. As a ‘thinking experiment’ you might want to make your own list of categories and divide up the people you ‘like’ into those categories and see what it tells you about your own important interpersonal world of friendships.

Also there is understanding your friendships by way of qualities. The category list can include: loyal friend, bad friend, warm friend, special friend, so-so friend, long-term friend, new friend, friends I truly love, ‘frenemy’, and don’t forget ‘friend with benefits’. Here too, you can make up your own categories and see who belongs in which kind of grouping.

With all that in mind, you might want to ask yourself this question. How do you use the words friend and friendship and what do both really mean to you?

Do You Want More Friends, Real Friends, Better Friends, Deeper Friends?

In some parts of the world friendships are the most important of all relationships. There they are cherished and prodigiously protected. In other parts of the world it is thought that deep and real friendships are becoming rarer and almost impossible. Often this is attributed to the highly mobile, fast-paced, rapidly changing world many modern people live in. Others think that the Internet, especially Facebook’s use of “friend” and “de- friend” is making friendship an increasingly shallow and superficial concept. The perfunctory misuse of words like friendly, friend and friendship in many businesses and corporate cultures lead one wag to say, “Watch out for any use of the word ‘friend’ because it may signify the next person targeted for sacrifice”. It can be quite important not to just consider the number of friends but rather the quality of the friendships in your life.

The Growing Good News about Friendship

Good, healthy, deep, loving friendships can save your life, increase your health, add greatly to your sense of joy and your sense of safety, help you live longer, provide you with beneficial opportunities and in just about every way enrich your life. That is the conclusion of a host of researchers in cultural anthropology, social psychology, sociology, sociometry, mental health and even in animal comparative psychology where ape and monkey friendships have been studied. The friendships which grow into authentic, genuine, healthy, real love relationships can make an enormous difference in the world for those who want to live well. Even light, mild and short term friendships can do you a lot of good. Of course, friendship at the love level can be of far more and enormous benefit to all concerned.

How to Go from ‘Like’ to ‘Love’ in Friendship

When you meet a stranger and they become an acquaintance you have started on a path that might actually lead all the way to a real friendship-type of deeply enriching love. It also could lead to the romantic-type relationship because that happens too. After meeting a person it becomes an issue of ‘do you like them and do they like you’. To start on a path that could lead from the ‘like’ level all the way to the ‘love’ level of friendship here are 5 not so usual items you might want to consider:

1. Act like a buyer not a beggar. This means if you go into an encounter with a person, or a group of people, and you act like a beggar with a mindset of “Oh please, please like me, accept me, want me, include me; I’m desperate” things likely are not going to go so well. If you go with confidence that you have quality to offer and, therefore, deserve quality in return, your short-term and long-term results are likely to be far better. If your attitude is that of a careful buyer, or chooser selecting for a good fit for your personal, unique self your chances will be much improved. That is because the best people with the most real love to give, tend to gravitate toward the healthy self-loving.

2. If you like somebody help them to like themselves more. This is done by first looking for what you truly can appreciate in another instead of worrying about what are they thinking of you. You will have to study them, ask questions and really notice how they go about being themself. After you see what you truly can appreciate, follow it with brief authentic praise, genuine compliments and honest thank you statements. Don’t fake it. Keep doing that over time.

3. Brag briefly. When you make brief comments relating something about your own accomplishments, victories and other positive factors, you show you believe in yourself and your qualities and you have good things to offer. Of course, being arrogant, narcissistic and bragging too much is a ‘big no-no’, but no bragging just ‘hides your light under a bushel’. It also makes it hard and slow for anyone to get to know the best of you, and the rest of you and, therefore, impedes actually getting to love you, if that is where the friendship is heading.

4. Risk short, intimate self-disclosures. Love is much more likely to happen with emotional closeness. Closeness happens faster and better with intimate self-disclosure. When you say something that is more personal, growing a more personal relationship becomes more probable. It also shows you are sufficiently okay with your human, imperfect self, therefore, another can be the same with you.

5. Talk expressionally positive and constantly – while you quietly listen a lot. What you are saying with your facial expressions, tonal expressions when you do say something or make a sound, convey emotions by gestures, posture changes, physical touch and proximity actions (moving, standing or sitting closer than usual, etc.), almost always are more important than the words you say. Avoid attitudes and expressional language which would come across as disapproving, judgmental, condemning, disinterested, bored, superior or inferior, etc.

It is very important that you be loyal, truthful, sometimes fun, sometimes serious, be there for your friends when they need you, and a host of things like that which you can learn from other sources that tell you how to be a real loving friend.

Are You Studying Love and Applying What You Learn in Friendship?

It often has been said that to have a friend, be one. If you ask “How do I do that” I suggest that to have a friendship that grows into a deep, close, love filled friendship, study how love is conveyed and use what you learn with the people you like. It is likely that at least some of your ‘like’ friendships will grow into real ‘love’ friendships.

The most important thing you can do is to really apply yourself to learning all you can about showing, demonstrating and conveying healthy, real love. Remember, love, like food, grows naturally in the world but both love and food take a lot of skilled actions to get it to where they consistently can nourish and energize you, me and everybody else. Have love to give (?), then when it is delivered skillfully in your friendships, it is fairly likely the love bonds will grow and you will have friends who truly love you as well as you love them.

You might want to read Love and Friendship by Allen Bloom, Friends As Family by Karen Lindsey and Friendship: How to Give It, How to Get It by Dr. Joel D. Block.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
So, just how skilled are you at doing actions which convey friendship love toward those you would have as deep and true friends?

Best Practices, Parent-Love Check List

Mini-Love-Lesson  # 276

Synopsis: Here is a simple, short, yet comprehensive source for parents to use in viewing their ways of giving their children a full spectrum of beneficial love actions; it covers the 12 major ways research suggests and gives a “best practices” approach to love-filled, healthy parenting.

The Great and Grand 12

Extensive, replicated and deep probing research has revealed that love gets done in 12 different, interwoven sets of behavior.  The various patterns of successful parent love, mother love, father love and family love involve these 12 major ways of going about the doing of healthful, real love.  Each of these can be seen to have different aspects that integrate with each of the others but also have their own flavor and varying, beneficial aspects.

A Bit of Framework Information

Love is very real physically.  In the brain sciences, it has been discovered that the behaviors that are known as loving, bring about vital neurochemical, neuro-network and probably neural-electrical benefits that are essential for surviving and thriving.  This is true not only in humans but in mammals and other species.  Without receiving loving behaviors, mammalian infants and others tend to die of failure to thrive illnesses, although otherwise being well taken care of.  Those that do survive tend to be dysfunctional and maladaptive.  Those offspring that receive higher proportions of loving behaviors are much more likely to survive and thrive.  That is what the research evidence points to.

Healthy, Real, Parental Love is defined as a powerful, vital, natural process of highly valuing, desiring for, often acting for and taking pleasure in the well-being of one’s child or children.

This love motivates parenting behaviors that fulfill the five major functions of love which, in parenting involve:

1. Acting to form a deep and lasting emotional CONNECTION with your child.

2. Acting to SAFEGUARD your child.

3. Acting to NURTURE your child’s development and healthful growth (physical, psychological, social etc.)

4. Acting to HEAL and reparatively assist your child when needed.

5. Acting to profoundly and obviously ENJOY your child and your child’s unique ways of being themselves

A framing concept involved here is important to note.  It is that love feelings tend to come naturally but love relating takes learning and doing.  Only by the doing love conveying behaviors can love be sufficient and successful for fulfilling love’s major functions.  While love feelings may motivate certain, natural, love actions, feelings fall far short of what purposefully learned, practiced and skillfully improved behaviors can accomplish.

THE PARENT LOVE CHECK LIST

Here are the 12 Major Categories of doing healthful love toward your child or children.  You can estimate how well you are both doing and modeling (teaching) healthy love for your child or children by studying each category and evaluating your own actions.

Class I  Core Love Behaviors

1. Tactile or Touch Love  (includes affectionate, comforting, playful, tender, reassuring touching)

2. Expressional Love  (facial smiling, grinning, laughing; gestural open arms, thumbs-up, etc.; hand and arm motions; leaning forward, moving physically close; loving tones of voice, humming, singing, etc.)

3. Verbal love (frequently and in varied ways clearly stated messages of love)

4. Gift love  (giving object presents, experiences, doing favors and acts of service demonstrating love)

Class II  Crucial Love Behaviors

5. Affirmational Love  (first appreciating then stating and acting to express high intrinsic worth and valuing of your child’s being)

6. Self-disclosure Love  (letting your child see and know the human fallible and successful aspects of yourself via sharing your personal thoughts, feelings and actions)

7.  Tolerational Love  (being patient, understanding, accepting and forgiving of the less pleasant aspects of your child)

8. Receptional Love  (focusing on and reacting positively to your child’s attempts to show and give you love as an act of giving love)

Class III  Cardinal Love Behaviors

9.  Protectional Love  (acting to safeguard your child in small, medium and large ways without being oppressive, suffocating or overly blocking of your child’s efforts to learn to handle life’s difficulties)

10.  Nurturing Love  (kindness and care expressive ways that help a child healthfully grow, develop, improve, achieve and fulfill their positive potentials)

11.  Reparative Love  (actions that help heal wounds, cure illnesses, restore well-being, counter setbacks, mitigate sick feelings and get past blocks to wellness or, at least, make them less hurtful and harmful)

12.  Metaphysical Love  (doing spiritual, meditative, prayerful, ceremonial, ritual, contemplative or potentially transpersonal actions on behalf of your child’s well-being, health and advancement, sometimes, doing those with them)

There are other lists of love behaviors that are well worth studying and applying to the ways of doing best practices parenting.  Paul’s 16 points concerning love, found in First Corinthians 13 of the New Testament, and the 4 great immeasurable mindsets (or heart sets) of love taught in both Hinduism and Buddhism are excellent sources to study further.  The book Teachings on Love by the Zen monk, Tich Nhat Hanh, is a good place to begin for the 4 mindsets.  Consulting the works of Dr. Sue Gerhard, cofounder of the Oxford Parent Infant Project and author of Why Love Matters also is an excellent source for parents.  Also quite useful are the many Mini-Love-Lessons found under the Parenting heading of the Subject Index at this site.

Remember To feel love is natural, To do love is learned.  Therefore, to do parent love with a best practices approach, it is necessary to study, experiment and practice.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question:  Science has revealed a lot about both successful parenting and healthful love, so are you looking into and making use of science’s recent, fascinating discoveries?

Intimate Love

Synopsis: This mini-love-lessons first helps you explore your own ideas about intimate love compared to what others think about it. Then it introduces you to the fascinating world of sensorium intimacy; and ends with ideas about how you can study developing greater intimate love; more.

Your First Thoughts

What pops up in your mind when you see the words “intimate love”? Lots of people think of something sexual. Others think of something powerfully and very personally emotional. There are a good many other people who think about both ecstatic sex and various intensely pleasurable, psychological states interwoven together.

The term “intimate love” can mean a surprisingly wide range of different things to different people.
Intimacy in a love relationship can mean knowing another and being known by another in incredible ways. It also can mean a sense of wonderful closeness, fervent shared eroticism combined with a marvelous sense of loving and being loved in very personal ways.

Some people understand intimate love to mean a wondrous sense of spiritual connection and the very best of love’s many fabulous feelings. Then there are those who see intimate love as something delightfully wicked, intriguingly naughty and scrumptiously salacious. So, what are your first thoughts about intimate love? Are they similar to any of the above? And if you currently are in what you think of as an intimate love relationship, do you know what your lover’s understanding of intimate love is? Is theirs a more psychological or a more sexual understanding of what the words “intimate” love refers to? You might want to have an intimate, lover’s conversation with them about this.

Sensorium Intimacy

For many intimate love is best experienced and arrived at visually. Being seen naked and seeing another naked, viewing and allowing one’s every, intimate part to be viewed in the most up close and personal of ways, and doing this with someone you love is what achieves intimate love for the strongly visually oriented. Looking deeply into someone’s eyes while they do the same with you, sometimes called “soul” looking, and/or looking very closely at every nuance of facial expression while being only inches away from one you love are also examples of love intimacy via the visual.

For those more auditorily oriented, intimate love can come by way of soft, warm voice tones, whispers, listening to music together and spoken words expressed in deep, close emotional ways.
For a good many others the primary sensory modality of intimate love is touch. Passionate embrace, gentle stroking, cuddling, being held and hugged, holding hands, myriad kinds of kissing, the many sensations of being touched sexually, all are involved in the tactile sensations that provide a sense of intimate love.

Some people find intimacy through taste, while for others it is achieved in an olfactory way, sometimes with the help of perfumes or essential oils. There also are those that best experience intimate love via kinetics. Being joined in slow dancing, swaying rhythmically, gently rocking back and forth and other forms of moving together greatly assist the sense of feeling intimate love for those who are naturally, strongly, motion oriented.

Of course, there are many who have a combination of two or more of the above as their major sensorium modalities. It is important to know that the major way a person senses or can be assisted in sensing intimate love varies according to which of their major sensing systems has the most impact on their emotions (on their brain’s limbic system). Most people can be reached or affected, at least a little, from each of these ways of sensing but they will have a primary sense, and the other ways of sensing will be secondary or tertiary.

If you are going to help someone you love have an intimate love experience, it can be very helpful to know witch of their major ways of sensing love is primary and which is secondary, etc. Then you can use that knowledge to lovingly assist them in having great sensations of intimate love via their primary sense. While doing that you also can mix-in your own primary sensorium modalities so that you can better simultaneously share a mutual, intimate, love experience.

Communicating For Intimate Love

They both said they wanted intimacy, but one meant sex while the other meant a sharing of deep-felt emotions. Until they learned to ‘spell out’ more exactly what they meant, they miscommunicated and neither one got the love they really were seeking. The word intimacy is one of those words which is commonly misunderstood and, therefore, frequently miscommunicated. In couples love relationships few words are as important to mutually understand as the words ‘intimate’ and ‘intimacy’. Couples’ love often can be injured when one or both of a couple does not understand accurately what is being meant when the words intimate or intimacy are used.

All too often one of a couple mistakenly assumes that the other shares the same understanding, and also shares the same ideas of what helps intimacy occur. Actually it is fairly rare for two people in a couples relationship to have the same understanding of this term, at least at the start of their relationship. Therefore, talking about this in some detail can be quite helpful to a couple’s intimate life together. Especially important in couples love development is discovering and talking about the words and actions which may create experiences of intimate love.

Intimate Love Differences

For some, intimacy means revealing one’s most personal secrets. In a similar fashion for others it is mostly about becoming vulnerable and the risk of getting very personally hurt, but in a much wider variety of ways. There are those who achieve intimate love primarily through acts of tenderness and small, gentle behaviors. Others find intimacy is the product of big, brave and bold, uninhibited actions strongly revealing themselves. For the more sexually oriented it may mean lovers letting themselves be erotically wild, acting with unbridled, shameless abandonment, being unrestrained and free to be entirely impulsive while completely accepting each other’s actions.

Acceptance and toleration love, along with being totally unafraid of negative judgment is usually a part of this picture. Awesome sweetness, treating and being treated as precious, cherishing and being cherished, and knowing that what is important and unique about you is especially valued by one who loves you, these can be of incredible importance in intimate love. Experiencing and helping a loved one experience intimate love often takes having and giving unique personal information that would be insignificant to others. What’s your favorite color, food, song, etc. are very simple examples which can be expanded in quality.

It is important for people who want to have strong, intimate, love experiences with each other that they explore and involve themselves in, and with, each other’s differences as well as their similarities. Respecting and honoring diversity and how it might contribute to a couples relationship is often a great help in laying down a groundwork for growing intimate love.

Studying Intimate Love

Discussing what you and a beloved might mean by “intimate love” and what you both might want to do to grow more, bigger and better intimate love usually is a very good thing to do. You can also learn more about intimate love at this very website. Go to the Mini-Love-Lessons listed in the Titles Index called “Intimacy Creation – a Love Skill”, and “Growing Closeness – Love Skill”. Read and discuss them with those you are close to, then of course go experiment and practice the ideas you get from what you have learned.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Can you imagine a scenario of events and actions that you and a loved one carry out, in which you could feel very intimately loving and loved?

Is Feeling Love, Love Itself?

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson starts with a review of some of the many troubling contradictions and confusions that exist about whether feeling love is a feeling or not; the lesson then posits a clarifying and for some a contentious answer to the beginning question; more.

Contradictions And Confusions

“I’m totally baffled!  I don’t know what to believe. Most of my friends seem to think that love is an emotion but some strongly disagree. A teacher I respect says that true love is only the feeling of joyful compassion that leads to lifelong commitment and connection. One book I read said love is a wonderful emotion but like all emotions it is temporary and fading and, therefore, untrustworthy and relatively unimportant. Others say love is a mysterious, emotional power that makes the world go-round, and others suggest that feeling love is just part of the mating drive, while still to others love is just an insignificant but strong feeling you get when you play the ‘game of romance’.

I hear supposed experts saying things like love feelings lead to a parasitic, addictive dependency, best avoided or escaped. I also read love is a powerful, vital, natural, long-lasting and, once started, love is an ongoing psychoneurological process which mostly happens in the unconscious limbic system of the brain. That thought takes some contemplation. I understand that some historians suggest romantic love feelings were, in a sense, artificially invented and continued by Western world culture, starting with the French royals in the 12th century. But I also understand that animals probably feel love because their neurochemical, neurophysiological and neuro-electrical responses have been found to be the same as humans when they are behaving in ways thought to represent love occurring.

To make matters even more complicated my religion teaches me things like “God is love”, “love is everlasting”, “all true love (including couple’s love) comes from and is a manifestation of the Deity’s love”and consequently to think that love is merely an emotion, especially a temporary emotion, can be seen as sinful and heretical.” All those statements originated from a foreign graduate student, working hard to develop a cross-cultural, core understanding of this thing we call love.

So what do you think? Have you been taught, or led to believe, that feeling love is love itself? Is love an emotion? If love is an emotion is it impermanent, temporary, unstable and undependable or even fleeting and fickle? Is love only an emotion and, therefore, is not of much lasting importance?

The Perception of Love

One of the more common, perceptual mistakes people make is to confuse the perception of something internal with the thing itself. If I feel rumblings in my stomach I may be sensing  my digestive system functioning. But the sensing of it is not to be confused with digestion itself. In fact, my digestion mostly goes on without me being consciously aware of it – the natural process of love may work that way too. So, feeling love may be seen as occasionally accessing, or becoming aware of, an inner, ongoing, natural process which may always be there inside us once we truly love.

This understanding goes well with people who say things like “I know that I always love my child (children, spouse, family member or whoever they love)” but I don’t always feel that love”. It also is in accord with people who automatically and powerfully act to protect those they love in the split second of sensing that a loved one is in danger. Actions to save acquaintances and strangers tend to be much slower and less likely.  Does not the quick action to save a loved one tell us that the love is already there inside us and is ready to automatically motivate us to be protective. Also the tendency to risk one’s own life to rescue loved ones is not only far quicker but is far stronger than the tendency risk one’s own life rescuing others we do not love.

Another ‘evidence’ of love having an inner, ongoing and consistent component instead of being a fleeting and/or fading feeling can be seen in this example. John got up from a brief nap grumbling and griping about how hard it was to go to his second job. Later at that job a fellow worker asked him why he took and continued to hold this second job because it was so obvious that it was hard on John. John answered, “I do it to help pay my daughter’s college costs, and I do that simply because I dearly love her.”

Now, examine John’s statement. John is experiencing other emotions than the nice, warm, happy feelings often associated with feeling love. In fact, with his griping and grumbling he might be seen as feeling anti-love feelings. However, John’s negative feelings can be seen as somewhat shallow. Underlying them is a far deeper, pervasive, consistent and powerful process of love which keeps motivating John to do his love-motivated actions year after year.

Accessing Love

It seems that once love is solidly established, the people who truly love always can be aware of that love; they can access it, be motivated by it and bring forth actions that demonstrate it. Sometimes this is associated with having the feelings, or emotions, that go with the word love, and sometimes not as is evidenced in John’s example above. Whether it is felt or not, it is there. There are countless millions of other examples, especially among people  who have had long-term love relationships in which hardship or strong challenge has been faced because of their ongoing love. In sickness and in health, in adversity and stress, in deprivation and defeat, love prevails as nothing else can. If love were but a temporary emotion it would not be consistently accessible and available for motivating the great and heroic acts it does, indeed, motivate. 

Love Labeling

If someone strongly and sincerely says they love you, it would seem that perhaps they have gotten in touch with a strong, natural, inner process which may continue throughout life and actually may produce a great many other emotions along with many thoughts and life-changing actions. It is reasonable to think that it takes a lot more than a mere, temporary emotion to achieve all that.

It is true that a person saying they love you may have what can be called varying and various love feelings for you, along with that love, but there is far more to love than just those feelings. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say “I am feeling loving toward you, or for you”. Perhaps it also would be accurate for someone to say “I’m feeling loved” rather than the perfunctory “I love you too” response. After a time, two people in a love relationship may have the emotion of feeling lovable. Feeling lovable, loving and loved are all probably reasonable labels for emotions that flow out of love itself. Those feelings may come and go but the love that underlies them is probably most accurately understood as stable, dependable and consistently present, not temporary.

Evidence That Love Is More Than Emotion

Another source of evidence pointing to love being something other than just emotion comes from the research into love’s physically healing effects. Along with that is the research that shows the lack of love, or the absence of behaviors that convey love, can result in failure to thrive illnesses, psychosocial dwarfism, heightened susceptibility to disease and other physiological maladies. Serious depression and anxiety conditions also are associated with people who insufficiently receive the behaviors that convey love. Then there are the amazing incidents of the presence of a loved one having healthful effects on people in deep, comatose states. There also is accumulating evidence in the brain sciences pointing to love being a deep, usually unconscious, vital, powerful, natural process.

Research in systemic and interactional variables having to do with how two or more people, or animals, interrelate and what that interrelating does to their biological functioning, also shows interesting results concerning love. Some researchers think they have evidence which suggests that two people, or two animals, who are in what can be called ‘a love bonded relationships’ sometimes exhibit very harmonious neuro-electrical and neurochemical synchronicity which apparently does not occur in non-love bonded pairs. Lovers, parents and children, brothers and sisters, twins and others are thought to also sometimes exhibit this phenomenon. Is that evidence of love at the neurophysiological level? Some people think it is. Much more research on this has yet to be done.

Research in comparative animal psychology, social psychology, anthropology, pediatric psychiatry, and even behavioral economics tends to correlate with what the brain sciences have been finding concerning love.  Behaviors that bring about ongoing, close, caring connection, nurturing, protectiveness and healthfulness are all associated with the neurochemistry that seems to be a part of love responses, and love relationships in humans and higher order primates, as well as other members of the animal kingdom.

The Answer

The answer to the question “Is feeling love, love itself?” is no! The preponderance of available evidence from many sources points to love being far more than just a feeling.  It also suggests that when we feel love for someone, an animal or anything else, we actually are just becoming aware of an inner process which is natural, powerful and vital to full, healthful functioning. That process, the evidence also suggests, is something ongoing within us whether we consciously are aware of it, or not.

Therefore, it is sensible to conclude: Love is so much more than a feeling or an emotion.Feeling love is just a sensing of a much greater thing.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Who do you know you love, whether you feel that or not at this moment?