False Forms of Love Series

False Forms of Love – Imprint Mating Syndrome

False Forms of Love: Limerence and Its Alluring Lies

False Forms of Love: Love/Lust Confusion

False Forms of Love: Meta Lust

False Form of Love – Nympholepsia

False Forms of Love: Relational Dependencies

False Forms of Love: Shadow Side Attachments

False Forms of Love – Spouse Acquirement

 Syndrome

False Forms of Love: The Devastating IFD Syndrome

False Forms of Love: Thrill and Threat Bonding

False Forms of Love: Unresolved Conflict Attraction

Syndrome

The Huge, Hidden Reason So Many Fail at Love?

FREE Love Lesson #175

Synopsis: Rediscovering a ‘becoming invisible’ cause of our huge number of love relationship failures starts this mini love lesson. It then is followed by a listing of 12 major love failure syndromes; the best source for learning about all this; more.

What Used to Be Understood

Did you know that 50 and more years ago there was a widely accepted but mostly now forgotten reason for failing at love.  This reason was commonly understood and very helpful in protecting people from many of the traumas and tragedies which now beleaguer masses of those struggling to make their love relationships work.

What was that reason and its accompanying solution?  Before we get to that, let’s give a couple of clues to see if you can figure it out.  Clue 1. Are you aware that once upon a time the most popular magazines list included titles like “True Love”, “Real Love”, “True Romance” and “Real Romance”?  Clue 2. Have you heard these terms: twitterpatted, smitten, having a crush, amentia, bewitched, gaga over, enamored, beguiled, stupefied, calf love, puppy love, spellbound, infatuated, gone dottie over, and love crazy.

Clue number 1 helps us see there was a widely accepted implication that untrue love, unreal love and/or false love really and frequently existed.  The words and phrases of Clue 2, and others like them, were all terms used to indicate various versions of that same thing – false love.  They also were widely used to help a person not jump to the possibly, disastrously, mistaken conclusion that one was entering into a state of true or real love.  In other words, false love was seen to be a reality of perhaps multiple types, and everyone had best beware of false love because some of its forms might be highly misleading, very painful and quite destructive.  It would seem, that was the common mindset.

Somehow, strangely, the subject of real versus false love is not much looked at these days.  For many that means the protection this concept gives is no longer acting as a safeguard.  Typically now, too many people quickly conclude if “it feels like love, it must be love” and in fact it must be real, true and therefore, highly desirable and dependable, healthy love that will last.  More times than not, this conclusion can be flat out wrong.  So what is happening and what can be done about it?

The Secret That Is Re-Revealed

Perhaps the reasons for a 50% or higher divorce rate and an estimated 75% love relationship breakup rate in many countries may be due to false love.  The solution to false love, of course, is real love, learning how to tell the difference and how to stay away from the false thing, and instead, do the real thing.

Couples whose relationship is based in a false rather than a healthy, real love are bound to experience one kind of love failure or another.  It seems this used to be well understood and broadly recognized.  It also seems those who worked with this conceptualization better protected themselves from the many failures inherent to false love.  It likely is that such couples who do this now can be much more successful in finding, developing, creating and growing real love and, thereby, attaining its many healthful and more lasting benefits.

With this thinking, would it not be wise for those who teach and write about love to once again contemplate, do research and put forth information and ideas about false versus real love?  Isn’t it time that once again we shed light on that which has slipped into the shadows and has become again a sort of secret.  It seems like a mysterious truth is being kept from the vast number of people who dearly need to avoid or escape from the living disasters of love going wrong.  Shouldn’t it be proclaimed that there is healthy, real love but there also are toxic forms of false love that can harm and even destroy your life?  Isn’t it also true that the more we look at love relationship problems in this light, and the more we learn how to recognize the differences between real and false love, the better off we all will be?

Below is a list of a dozen forms of destructive, false love patterns or syndromes thought to exist by investigators, researchers therapists and others of notable expertise.  It was compiled from work done in a broad array of fields by a wide variety of those who give serious thought and effort to these issues.  Each is accompanied by a very brief hint about what some of these false love forms have to tell us.

12  MAJOR  FORMS  of  FALSE  LOVE

1. The IFD Syndrome
    (Hurts and harms most people at least a little and many a whole lot)

2. Spouse Acquirement Syndrome
    (Peaks as graduations approach)

3. Thrill and Threat Bonding
    (Rescuers, victims and excitement junkies beware)

4. Unresolved Conflict Attraction
(Why we marry our abusers – again and again)

5. Limerence
(No matter how great it feels, it’s over in 2 to 4 years)

6. Love And Lust Confusion
    (Great sex/romance and then more great sex and then “see ya”)

7. Imprint Mating
(How odd that I should desire who I desire and so strongly)

8. Relational Dependency & Codependency
(Take care of me so I don’t have to grow up and do it myself)

9. Meta-Lust
(I want you totally so I can discover all of me and then – we’re done)

10. Shadow Side Attachment
    (Why we fall for ‘bad’ boys and ‘bad’ girls)

11. Nympholepsia
    (Can you really fall in love with a ghost and what about a sprite?)

12. Fatal Attraction Syndrome
    (This one actually can get you killed – really!)

The Best Source

In my long practice as a relationship focused therapist, I discovered that hundreds of individuals, couples and families benefited greatly by working with the concepts involved in the real love versus false love issues.  My international work showed me the real love versus false love factors were applicable worldwide.  From my extensive experience, every kind of love relationship problem bears at least some examination viewed from the perspective of real love versus false love issues.  Especially is this true for every individual and couple wanting a romantic relationship or involved in one, as well as those recovering from a failed love relationship.

It is with that background and the reasons involved, that my ‘40+ years, love mate/partner, Kathleen McClaren, RN’ and I wrote the e-book REAL LOVE, FALSE LOVE: Answers and Solutions (currently exclusively available at this website).  This book covers the above named and listed 12 Syndromes, complete with amazing and inspiring case histories and the how to’s of avoiding, escaping and recovering from false love, along with, and when possible, how to change false love into real love.  Yes, of course, that is a plug.  But it really is a fine book presenting highly engrossing and useful information you will not find all together anywhere else.  And from the feedback we are getting, REAL LOVE, FALSE LOVE is doing lots of deep good for its readers.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Do you know and can you tell the differences between healthy, real and toxic, false love?

Related posts:

1. Love Against Blame And It’s Hidden Harm
2. Removing Your Hidden Blocks to Receiving Love Fully
3. False Love Awareness
4. False Forms of Love: Limerence and Its Alluring Lies
5. Unselfish Self-Love 

The Anti-Love Forces Are Out to Get You

Synopsis: Extreme questions, What the anti-love forces are, Definition, People in your life, A great big example and others, Anti-love’s two major forms, Three ‘right on’ books, and Your anti-love question.

Will the forces of anti-love destroy you and those you love?

Will you be caught, corrupted and controlled by the sinister and insidious evil forces of anti-love?  Are you already in their clutches and don’t know it yet?  Will those you love and care about fall under the domination of the proponents of anti-love ways?  Will anti-love ruin your sex life, steal your friends and make your family cast you out?  Are anti-love’s practitioners destroying your ability to love and be loved as we speak?  Will anti-love destroy civilization as we know it and bring upon us a new dark age?

Sounds a bit extreme you say?  Wondering if we’re practicing fear mongering and unnecessary scare tactics?  Or maybe you think this is just a Halloween message, which it might be.  Or could it be that there are important truths revealed in what might seem like overstatement?

What are the forces of anti-love?  Well, of course, there’s hate and the many horrifying acts of terrible destruction that come from it.  However, love has an even greater enemy than hate.  It is the great enemy called “Indifference”, the true opposite of love.  Time and again it is indifference that defeats love, and sabotages the growth and maintenance of love relationships.  It is indifference to love itself, to existing love relationships, and to the people and creatures of this world which leads to destruction.  This is because indifference leads to insufficient actions demonstrating healthy, real and especially compassionate love.  From insufficient love actions, love malnourishment and love starvation grow, then the death of love relationships occurs.

Indifference, and its offshoot –  taking people and things for granted, leads to not noticing what needs to be noticed and not attending to what needs to be attended to until it is too late.  “Ignorance” of how important love is to our personal and collective health, well-being and survival is another anti-love force in our world.  Greed, intolerance, power for power’s sake alone, fear-based living, worshiping the false gods of authoritarianism, status, control and a dozen other similar things, all can be considered anti-love forces working against our true well-being.  If you think about it I’m sure you can add some others to the list.

Let us ponder the term “anti-love” just a bit.  What might it really mean?  Anti-love is understood to be anything that works against healthy, real love.  Any behaviors, philosophy, teaching or ways of living that work to counter, inhibit, divert, supplant, negate, weaken or destroy healthy, real love is anti-love.  Anything that works against the creation, development, growth and maintenance of healthy, real love is to be regarded as having anti-love elements.  (See the “Definitions of Love” in the left column of this page for a more complete understanding)

If you have people in your life whose thoughts and actions demonstrate a low regard for love, the forces of anti-of love may be subtly and negatively affecting you.  If you have people in your life who live more by hate than love, who are more fear-driven than love-driven, who make money, power, control and status more important than love, or people who just don’t spend much time and energy on love, then anti-love forces may be at work corroding your life.  Of course, if you surround yourself with people of genuine love the opposite can be true.  If you work at being truly love-centered (see entry, “Love Centering Yourself”) and grow your ability to love large and well, you can defeat the forces of anti-love in your own life and perhaps in the love lives of those you hold most dear.

Let’s look at just one, big, broad example of where anti-love forces often prevail in our world.  This example can be called the ‘world of business’.  Many people go about their business life in very unloving and anti-loving ways.  That the ways of business and the ways of love can mix well comes as surprising news to quite a few.  Even more surprising is the concept that mixing these two together can be good for both.  Fair-minded partnership, ongoing mutual benefit, profit through ethics, egalitarian cooperation and shared truth’s collaboration are all concepts that fit well in the context of love mixed with business.  Greed, deceitful practices, unfair dealings, destruction of competition, the ‘only winning’ matters attitude, avarice mindsets, and ‘cheating is okay if you don’t get caught’ are all anti-love and unfortunately far too common in today’s world of business.

If you think applying the common sense of love to the world of business is far-out or pie-in-the-sky thinking please consult Tim Sander’s hard line book for business leaders and managers, Love Is the Killer App.

Love in business is long-range oriented.  Anti-love is short range oriented.  ‘Loving others as you love yourself’ is a strategy for mutual and repeated benefit that works in both personal and business life.  A business attitude involving “the killer instinct” and “dog eat dog” approaches only suggest that one day, perhaps soon, you will come to an end meeting a bigger dog with a stronger killer instinct.  Including a love focus as part of your business strategy can lead to treating your workers and your customers fairly, looking after safety concerns sufficiently, and having a cooperation and harmony milieu in the workplace.  All this has been proven to aid company survival and long-range profitability.  Having a business strategy based in “only the bottom line counts” makes your workers seem like just easily replaced or interchanged cogs in your business machine.

Considering that workers and customers are real people, this approach loses their loyalty and may make them enemies out to destroy you.  If your business strategy is oriented to the idea “do whatever it takes to make your bundle quickly, and get out before they catch you” you are definitely taking an anti-love approach and they will be out to catch you.  A compassionate love for your fellow human beings philosophy in business is ethical.  Every anti-ethical deceit and deception-filled approach is an anti-love approach.  The research finding that college business and MBA students cheat on exams more than students majoring in any other subject tells much about how unethical and anti-love ways have come to infect the business community.

Anti-love forces in business practices really hit home when it’s your child who dies of a poisonous pollutant that a “business person” allowed into the environment because it was cheaper that way.  It also hits home when it’s your spouse that is denied the cancer treatment that works best because your insurance company finds it too expensive and lies by mislabeling it “experimental” and, therefore, not covered.  It’s an anti-love act when the broken parts of your car are replaced with cheap, foreign steel parts that won’t last but will endanger your safety when they fall apart.

Then there is the example of the clever banker who hacked into health records, then foreclosed and called in the loans of his sickest clients to capture quick money before hospital bills got it, or before they died and it was tied up in probate.  Many are the forces of anti-love at work in the world of business.  Of course, there are huge numbers of people who do their work honestly, and fairly and with sufficient and even abundant love for their fellow human beings.  Many are the businessmen and businesswomen who pride themselves in running their businesses ethically, fair mindedly and compassionately, but are their numbers increasing or decreasing?

Lots of other areas of life besides the business world could be used in examples here.  In sports good sportsmanship fits with a pro-love approach, however, these days it seems to receive less and less attention in the sports’ world.  Replacing pro-love approaches is the anti-love saying “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” which, of course, justifies cheating, harming, and corruption of the games.  Medicine in the USA used to be considered a “higher calling” and, therefore, an expression of deity-inspired love.  Now increasingly it’s seen as just an ordinary business which often is controlled by greedy, unscrupulous, loveless health insurance companies.

In religion there are the love-based people working to help and heal wherever they can.  Then there are the “right belief”-based people who compete with and even go to war with those of even slightly varying beliefs than their own.  Take note that in all these examples, and in many more, the behavioral practices of anti-love in the workplace often are carried over into personal relationships with family and friends with ruinous consequences.

Anti-love can be said to come in two major forms, the ‘overt’ and the ‘covert’.  Here is an example of overt anti-love. I once had something to do with a case in which a man murdered his daughter, her boyfriend and almost managed to kill his wife at the same time.  It was argued that he did these things because he loved his wife and daughter but they would not submit to his authority as they should, so he had to take action.  If he had not loved them, so the argument went, he would have been indifferent to them and let them live on in their sinful ways .  Real love always makes us want and strive for the well-being of those we love (see “The Definition of Love” in the left column of this page).  Murdering people you supposedly love is a totally clear example of overt anti-love.

Covert anti-love is insidious, often well disguised, and often quite sneaky.  Here’s an example.  After she was diagnosed HIV-positive she continued to have unprotected sex with the men she dated.  She later explain she did this because using protection interrupted spontaneous romance, and if she insisted on protection the men might think she wasn’t innocent and not want to love her.

In his book, The Meaning of Love In Human Experience, Dr. Rubin Fine, a famous psychoanalyst, spells out with many examples how hate-based, anti-love oriented societies eventually ‘crash and burn’ while the more love-based cultures thrive far longer.  Dr. Dean Ornish in his book, Love and Survival shows the scientific evidence pointing to couples, families and individuals pretty much doing the same thing – thriving with love or crashing and burning with anti-love ways of living.  Then again for the business-minded there is that wonderful, little book by Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo, and Fortune 500 executive’s consultant, Tim Sanders, who wrote Love Is the Killer App.

So, Dear Reader, are you going to let the forces of anti-love get you.  Are you among the indifferent and the susceptible to being ambushed by anti-love?  Have the sinister, anti-love forces been crafty enough already to convert you to their dark-side ways?  Is love so unimportant in your life that you cannot possibly succeed at it?  Or have you joined the pro-love people who science tells us tend to live long and prosper?  Will you be more a person of good heart or a person more heartless?  It’s up to you, is it not?

As always –Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Do you tend to model yourself more on the people who seem full of being good-hearted or the heartless?

Related posts:

1. Anti-Love Myth # 1: True Love Means You’ll Know What to Do
2. Touch Only with Love: an Anti-Violence Tool
3. Anti-Love Myth # 2: You Will Have Eyes Only for Me
4. Pro-Love and Anti-Love Talking
5. Anti-Love, Non-Love & Real Love 

Satan's Love Plan

A Halloween Story of a Different Sort

Synopsis: This mini allegorical love lesson starts with the story of a Satanic problem; then goes on to the devil’s success; how Satan defeated science; hobgoblin brain scrubbing; Satan’s biggest trick; and Ends with you and the satanic forces.

A Satanic Problem

Satan had a big problem.  How was he going to keep love from making everybody happy, okay, and life very good?  Then one of his little devils came up with a genius of an idea.

The little devil said,  “Let’s make everyone get love confused with sex, and sex confused with love.”  “Tell me more,” said Satan with an evil gleam in his fiery eyes.  The little devil said, “If we make the word ‘sex’ too embarrassing but the word ‘love’ an okay substitute, everybody will get to thinking about sex when they hear the word love.  Then everybody will forget about what real love means, and they will go get lost in sex, and will end up loveless and miserable.”  “Great idea,” said Satan and he sent out his minions to confuse the world, and to get everybody neglecting love and failing in their love relationships with lots of destructive conflict and unhappy consequences – just like he wanted.

The Devils Success

Thus, it came to be that men said, “I love you” when they wanted sex.  Women said, “He loves me and tells me so, and so it’s okay to make love with him” when they couldn’t admit to themselves that they wanted sex.  Mothers and fathers came to secretly worry that if they loved their children too much it might mean something sexual, so they cut back on loving actions, and made countless children live love-hungry.

Friends would not say “I love you” to their best friends because it could be interpreted as wanting to have sex with their friends.  Consequently friends didn’t talk about their love for one another which curtailed friendship love considerably.  Lots of loving touch stopped happening because everybody thought any touch might be sexual.  Consequently, everybody became touch-deprived.  However, some people interpreted touch as being a sure sign of sexuality and that caused no end of embarrassing and shameful events to occur.  Some of these people even got arrested and hauled before judges for committing sexual harassment.

Countless couples got married because they confused lust and love and then many later divorced.  Endless books were written with the word ‘love’ in the title but they were all about sex rather than real love.  Movies and TV shows followed in the book’s footsteps so just about everybody got sex and love all mixed up with each other.

How Satan Defeated Science

It probably started with schools of theology which stopped giving all but superficial attention to love, and turned to focusing on belief, faith and scaring people.  That was in spite of Scripture saying “love is the greatest of all”.  Pediatrics took up the idea that acting in loving ways toward your children spoiled them, and for years preached against touching, holding, rocking, cuddling, hugging and every other form of loving touch being given from parents to children.

Psychiatry came along and said “yes indeed, love really meant sex”.  Psychoanalysis added the idea that love was just a word to disguise the fact that everybody wanted to have sex with one or more of their parents.  Psychologists got into the act by studying two abnormal populations obsessed with sex – white, laboratory rats and college sophomores.  Therefore, a little attention was given to romantic love but most of the studies concentrated on sex, and almost nobody thought much about real love.

This in spite of being bawled out for avoiding love research by one of psychology’s greatest scientists, Harry Harlow, who did manage to do love research and write the incredibly influential book Learning to Love which was about monkeys, human love still being mostly ignored.  Most scientists in the life studies fields, even the human service and health fields, wanted to sound very scientific so they avoided the subject of love because it sounded too arty and like something only people over in the fuzzy thinking, humanities might talk about.

Many academics took up the idea that love was just a mechanism for procreation and survival of the fittest, or it was just too poetic or romantic or impossible to understand, or just a silly emotion or nothing but a manifestation of the mating drive, or it was too feminine or, one of the worst of a lot of bad reasons, it was too unmanly.  Yes, there were some studies with findings indicating love actions were incredibly healing to all sorts of physical and mental illnesses, and love was getting some notice in fields ranging all the way from anthropology to zoology and even in strange places like behavioral economics and psychoneuroimmunology.  Nevertheless, in the more established fields, love mostly was to be ignored except by rock singers.

Hobgoblin Brain Scrubbing

Satan added to his anti-love success by propagandizing everyone into thinking that love could not be known, was too confusing to understand, was best left not understood, and if anyone really studied love it might disappear or be broken down into a lot of little, dull, boring, biological and mechanical components.  Then all of love’s mystery and magic would be robbed from us (never mind that every scientifically discovered fact leads to more and greater mysteries).

Everybody was sure that demythologizing love might happen, so no rational person dared touch subject of love with anything approaching good sense.  In essence, for a time it was totally taboo.  That brainwashing did a great job of getting the understanding of love left alone, except by artists and poets and the occasional rebel philosopher.

This worked so well that Satan’s little devils even got a US senator by the name of Proxmire to try to bar funds for love research from being granted because he was sure that if love really did exist the people of the US didn’t want to know about it.  This in spite of a 50% divorce rate, and ‘love gone wrong’ arguably being the number one reason for spousal and family member murder, child abuse, suicide, drug and alcohol relapses, and a lot more of the world’s miseries – just like Satan wanted.

Satan’s Biggest Trick

Satan’s biggest trick was to have his devils convince almost everybody that although successful marriages took work, families that loved well did well, self-love was essential, and that love connects and motivates like nothing else, the little devils reinforced the idea that love must remain mysterious ‘to keep it romantic’.

Thus, keeping it unexamined and unknowable and, therefore, hiding the fact that the lack of love knowledge was a real, destructive danger.  God forbid, that we should come to know how to make love work better, grow love bigger and better, get love to be more universal, learn how to avoid love failure and cure the ailments caused by false love and love deficiency.  By all means, love must be kept romantically unknowable or people might get to live happy and okay.

You and Satanic Forces

In keeping with our little allegorical story we must ask, are you perhaps under the influence of “Satanic forces”?  More accurately, how influenced do you think you are by the cultural programming that might divert you from coming to better understand and, therefore, succeed at love?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Do you know a little, a fair amount, or a lot more about healthy, real love this year than you did last year, and what will your answer to this question be next year?

Related posts:

1. False Forms of Love: Love/Lust Confusion 

Is Love Ignorance The Problem?

Synopsis: Examples of how reducing love ignorance solved some real-life love problems starts our mini-love-lesson; and ideas about being on the trail of new love knowledge and less love ignorance; more.

Solutions From Love Knowledge

Ponder these three brief statements from people who solved their love relationship problems by discovering and reducing their basic love ignorance and how love really works.

Is Love Ignorance The Problem?

Andrea: “I so wanted to believe love was all made and managed in heaven, and when it was right it would all be just right and that would be all there was to it.  I guess I believed it was magic.  Thinking that way led me into excruciating romantic failure after failure.  It was not until a friend cajoled me into reluctantly going to a workshop on ‘love skills’ that I woke up to the truth.  There I discovered I knew precious little about how love gets given and received.  That knowledge about ‘how love requires actions’ started me on the path to having a love life that actually works.”

Brock: “It was in college, when I had to write a paper on Rumi – the great Islamic love poet, that I was introduced to thinking about love and how it gets lived.  Then my girlfriend got me to really study Paul’s great message in the Christian New Testament about what love is and is not.  There I was surprised to learn a whole lot about what to do and not to do when you love someone.  After that I went with a buddy to a Buddhist study group and learned the incredible truths of compassionate love.  Now I’m into Hindu teachings about love and then I’m going to start on what modern science is saying about love.  It’s amazing.  There’s so much great and useful knowledge about love and every time I learn some of it my life gets better as well as all my relationships.”

Colette: “Dagan, my lover, and I were having all sorts of trouble getting along.  It was getting so we fought every day.  Our sex life had taken a nosedive.  Jealousy and possessiveness were making us miserable all the time.  We were a total dysfunctional mess and about to breakup.  We tried working with two different counselors but we don’t think they knew what to do with couples because they kept wanting to see us individually, and that just made things worse.  Then we found an AAMFT* therapist who did know what to do with us as a couple.

“Our new therapist mostly saw us together, had us interact with each other more than with him, and used a form of therapy that focused on our ‘love languages’ and ‘love giving behaviors’.  He also had us learn about recent research discoveries into what makes successful love relationships.  Now we are getting along so much better.  We always felt love for each other but we sure didn’t know how to ‘Do’ love.  Learning the ‘do’ part has made all the difference.”

Love Someone Who Is Too Love Ignorant?

Since you are reading this mini-love-lesson, we can assume you have at least started on reducing your love ignorance and becoming more love knowledgeable.  But what about the important other people in your life?  So much of love is best done by two or more people in teamwork with each other.  To do good teamwork the team members have to share similar, functional knowledge plus interaction knowledge.  The teams called ‘couples’ and ‘families’ and also friendship and comrade networks do better when they operate from similar love knowledge.

Note that Colette and Dagan learned about love and how to be love successful in teamwork with each other.  That is one of the best but not the only way to become love knowledgeable.  They got to practice what they were learning with each other and that tends to speed up the improvement process considerably.  So, one question is “do you have someone learning about love with you?”  Will your main love interest join with you in reducing love ignorance?  Perhaps you would like them to read this mini-love-lesson and then talk it over together.

What’s In The Way?

When it comes to love, a lot of people are all for staying love ignorant.  That can be seen in comments like “I don’t want to learn about love that might spoil the magic”, “there’s nothing to learn about love, it’s just fairytale stuff” and “isn’t love just a big mishmash of a whole bunch of different things, mainly sex?”

There are other mindsets in the way.  For instance, the idea that love is something women take care of and the corollary idea that it is not manly to be concerned with love.  Then there is the widely accepted idea that love is just something that happens or doesn’t happen and there is nothing you can do about it. Notice historically, that is the same idea that used to prevail concerning getting sick and still does in some very primitive places.

So, you might want to ask yourself what kind of mindset has gotten in your head concerning love, and maybe consider where it might have come from?  Could it be a mindset that is diminishing your ability to succeed at love as much as you could?  Could it be one that actually sabotages your chances of having lots of healthy, real love?

Where Knowledge Leads

In just about every area of human endeavor, becoming knowledgeable leads to improvement, better than anything else.  The path is often erratic, full of wrong turns and pitfalls but eventually improvements result.  Why should love be any different?

What is called the scientific method, turns out to be the most consistent and reliable source of factual truth.  Indeed, in what some have started to call “loveology” the scientific method is leading to practical and highly useful improvements in many people’s love relationships.  But this is not the only source of knowledge.  Becoming knowledgeable can be derived from and involved in wisdom, insight, creativity, sagacity, enlightenment and experience.

Historically, the wise have known this all along.  Socrates and Plato held forth on love (not just sexual love) in the late 300s BC.  Ovid in the years 1 and 2 AD wrote his famous books on love skills which are only partly about sex.  Paul, Rumi and Buddha have already been mentioned.  Some Jewish love teachings go back about 3000 years.  There are also Hindu love teachings and ancient Egyptian teachings about love that may go back more than 4000 years.  Much of that archaic love understanding correlates well with what the sciences are discovering today concerning love.  Therefore, when considering love, I urge you to be open to all sources.

How They Did It

Note that Andrea had to give up, or ‘unlearn’, how she first viewed and understood love.  Notice too, Andrea’s original reluctance to going where there might be a different understanding of love.  So many people are so strongly attached to a toxic and destructive fairytale understanding of love that, even though they keep experiencing “excruciating” pain, they hold on to the old ways.  That lead her repeatedly to failure and pain.  Usually it helps a lot when people find out that real and healthy love knowledge is available and it is even more wondrous than the fairytales, as it was for Andrea.

In the above examples, notice what Brock, a student of love, became.   Though his first sources of knowledge about love were ancient, they were good ones for him.  Until rather recently in human history, religions were and still are to this day for millions, a major way to learn about love.  Brock was able to open himself to those sources and see past the misleading myths of our medieval, romantic notions.  To search for, find and use good sources of love knowledge is not so easy but it can be done.

In the past 75 years or so, many research fields have begun looking into and discovering truly wonderful things about love and its dynamics.  Slowly, more and more people are availing themselves of this knowledge and with it moving forward into bigger, better and more lasting love experiences and relationships.  Like Brock, you may have to do a fair bit of study but it is worth every bit of effort.

Now, let’s pay some attention to Colette and Dagan’s story.  One thing they did right is not playing ‘strike one, they’re out when they went to a counselor who didn’t help them.  Sadly, it is true that a great many therapists who are pretty good with individuals are not good with couples or family counseling, and they too are often quite ignorant about love and the many recent discoveries concerning it.  Another thing that Colette and Dagan did right was to really work at applying their new understandings of love and how to make it work in their lives.  Woefully, so many couples do not avail them selves of these new understandings.  They are like ‘the proverbial people who keep trying to invent the wheel’, not realizing it already has been invented and available for their use.

On The Trail Of Love Knowledge

You can never know enough about love but you sure can know a whole lot more than what the average person seems to know.  Since you are reading this mini-love-lesson and maybe others at this site, congratulate yourself because you are already on the trail of becoming more love knowledgeable.

On this trail, be careful about mis-knowledge or mis-information.  There is a great deal of mis-knowledge, mis-understandings and ideas about love that are just flat out wrong but readily available in the world.  It pays to be discerning.  Many books with the word love in the title have absolutely nothing in them about real love.  Many love stories or self-help case examples are not about love at all but about some form of false love.  Then too, there is a great deal we just do not yet know about love.  The good news is lots of research into love is starting to happen.  The more we learn the more important and fantastic love is turning out to be.

Amazing discoveries are being made, marvelous and delightfully surprising good things are being revealed, and with a little work you can find out about them all.  Getting on the trail of becoming evermore love knowledgeable is not only immensely practical, it also can be quite intoxicating and a whole lot of fun.

* AAMFT (The American Association for Marriage & Family Therapy)

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What is your latest or newest idea or understanding about love, and where do you suppose your next understanding about love will come from?

Related posts:

1. Murder and False Love
2. Satan’s Love Plan
3. False Forms of Love: Limerence and Its Alluring Lies 

Interview: Real Love vs. False Love: Which One is Yours? with Dr. Richard Cookerly

This is a new interview with Dr. Richard Cookerly about the new ebook, Real Love, False Love: Which Is Yours? Answers & Solutions. He was interviewed this week on the Pushing Boundaries podcast at BlogTalk Radio.

-Wade Watson, webmaster

[UPDATE: The link to that BlogTalk Radio interview seems to no longer be valid. If you happen to run across the interview on the web we would love it if you let us know so we can place a link to it here.

-Wade Watson]

False Forms of Love: Unresolved Conflict Attraction Syndrome

“Lord have mercy I have done it again.  For the third time I’m in a relationship having the same problems I had with my parents.  I vowed to never let that happen again but here I am once more.  What in the world makes this keep happening to me.”  This type of lament and others like it are all too common in the world of romantic love.

What keeps going wrong unfortunately is a common form of false love which keeps getting in the way of people’s chances for developing a healthy, real love relationship.  Those who don’t know about this form of false love may be especially vulnerable to its influence.  Here it is called the Unresolved Conflict Attraction Syndrome.

One of the most problematic forms of false love is Unresolved Conflict Attraction.  In this syndrome a person is subconsciously attracted to having a false ‘fall in love’ experience with people who will come to present the same problems they had with one or more parents, or significant others, in their childhood.  This can happen in a wide variety of ways.  If they had a highly critical mother they are likely to date or marry someone who will become highly critical, just like her.  If they had an abusive father they may date or marry someone who is or becomes abusive in the same way.  A woman who had a very love-stingy father may keep falling in love with love-stingy men.  A man who had a suffocating mother may date or marry someone who in time becomes emotionally suffocating.  Those who had cold and distant parents may be attracted to cold, distant lovers or those who turn into ‘emotional icebergs’ later.  The children of raging alcoholics may date or marry people who turn out to be raging alcoholics.

These specific scenarios are endless in their variations but the underlying dynamic is the same.  You can be mysteriously and strongly attracted to the people who will present you the unresolved love problems of your youth.  Sadly for many people the never fixed, love destroying or love blocking difficulties of childhood and adolescence reappear in adulthood.  The good news is knowing about it can help protect you from it.

You may wonder, “Why does this happen”?  Here’s one way to explain or understand it.  Your subconscious may make you want to get a copy of your problematic parent so that finally you can win their love, get the love you never got, fix the unfixed love problem of childhood, and resolve the unresolved love disappointments of youth.  Another understanding is that subconsciously we are drawn to what we are familiar with at a deep subconscious level without ever knowing it consciously.

Even if consciously we want nothing to do with repeating our childhood disappointments, a computer-like program in our head pushes us toward repetition of the familiar.  Apparently it is as if something inside us says, “Here is someone unloving just like Mommy (or Daddy, or whoever) was, so maybe this time I can get her (or him) to love me if I just try the right way and hard enough.  So, I am in love with this person, and I have to have them for my own”.  Rarely does this work, but when it does work we then ‘fall out’ of false love with them because that relationship has no more purpose or attraction power.

An additional view of this phenomenon suggests that subconsciously we teach our spouse or lover to treat us in the less-loving ways we experienced in childhood or adolescence so we can have a chance to win the love we didn’t get earlier in life.  We do that by responding most strongly to our lover when they act the most like our most unloving parent.  That emotional intensity, in a strange way, rewards our love mate’s actions, and rewarded actions increase even when they are negative.

Theoretically people can be, and often are, subconsciously attracted to those who embody the unresolved conflicts of their own earlier life.  Psycho-dynamically such people may be compulsively driven to find and form relationships with those who can help them re-experience the love deprivation, conflicts and difficulties which robbed them of the love they unsuccessfully sought as children.  Consequently we unknowingly are attracted to those who can give us our unresolved conflicts all over again.  Thus, in this syndrome ‘adult love attempts’ mirror ‘childhood love attempts’ and usually get no better results than occurred in childhood.

A question you might want to ask is, “Can this attempt to fix the past by repeating it ever really work”?  The short answer is probably not.  There are several common outcomes of this syndrome.  One is for a person just to keep going from one unsuccessful, conflicted lover or marriage to another with lots of love related agony and with nothing ever getting fixed.  Another result occurs when a person just gives up on love relationships entirely.  They then may live love-malnourished the rest of their life.  A third outcome is when a person figures it out (often in therapy), grows sufficient self love and resolves the internal conflict, freeing themselves to go on to a healthy, real love that works. 

Thus, if you think you may suffer from an unresolved conflict attraction syndrome the best thing you probably can do is seek the help of a love-knowledgeable therapist or counselor.  You also can explore romantic relationships with people you are more consciously attracted to because of their obvious good characteristics, rather than operating from your subconscious impulses and what seems like intuitive desires.  Be very wary of anything that smacks of the ‘falling in love’ or obsessional, romantic fascination with near strangers phenomenon.

Taking lots of time to get to know someone and letting the relationship grow slowly also may be very important.  Just knowing that this syndrome exists has helped some people avoid it or its repetition.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Can you identify an unresolved or unfixed love related problem you had with a significant family member when you were growing up?  If you can what you identified may represent your vulnerability to experiencing an Unresolved Conflict Attraction possibility.  Knowing that may help you work it out and prevent its destructiveness from occurring or reoccurring in your life.

False Forms of Love Series
False Forms of Love: Limerence and Its Alluring Lies
False Forms of Love: Meta Lust
False Forms of Love: Shadow Side Attachments
False Forms of Love: The Devastating IFD Syndrome
False Forms of Love: Unresolved Conflict Attraction Syndrome

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False Forms of Love: Thrill and Threat Bonding

Synopsis: Fire on the mountain doesn’t mean it’s love; the two big answers; if it’s good for our species is it good for you?, thrilling but not threatening experiences; social thrills and threats; what you can do to protect yourself from this false form of love; okay thrills and threats.

Fire on the Mountain

Tears slowly started to descend Jill’s suntanned cheeks as she told her story.  “I just don’t love Brandon like I thought I did.  Our romance started in such a crazy way.  We met on a trail trying to escape a forest fire when we were wilderness camping on different parts of a mountain in the Rockies.  The fire came up suddenly and separated both of us from the people we had been camping with.  If I hadn’t run into him I probably wouldn’t be alive today. 

“For a day and a night we hiked and climbed to escape the fire and finally made it to safety above the tree line.  Two days later we were rescued.  Through it all Brandon was my super-hero, knight in shining armor and Prince Charming, all wrapped up in one, who had come to save me from the Fire Dragon.  I couldn’t help falling madly in love with him.  I just knew we were meant to be together forever.  Cuddling together for warmth that first night we just sort of magically melded into making love over and over on that dangerous mountain.  It was so thrilling with the light from the blaze less than a mile below us making our naked skin and everything around us have a magical glow to it.

“It wasn’t very long until we moved in together, and a year later our precious baby came along.  We tried hard to make it work but now I know it can’t.  We are just too different.  I love nature and he wants to conquer it.  I am a modern, progressive Democrat and he is a disgustingly regressive Republican who would like to take us back to living like we did in the 1800’s.  About the future I’m Star Wars and he is Road Warrior.  Worst of all, I am a liberal Protestant, equal rights, feminist and he is a reactionary Catholic, secretly all about white male supremacy.  How could we have gone so wrong?”

Two Answers

Jill deserved an answer and with some work and study she got two.  She discovered the fact that when people experience threats and/or thrills with each other their brains produce a host of chemical reactions.  These chemical reactions are strongly conducive to causing people to feel emotionally attached or bonded.  Often they feel both romantically and sexually attracted to each other whenever they are experiencing thrilling or threatening circumstances.  One of these chemical hormones that can flood the brain is oxytocin which can powerfully enhance people feeling strongly connected and bonded together, especially in times of excitement.  Another chemical hormone is adrenaline which gives people energy and can help everything a person is experiencing seem more vivid, intense and important.

In thrilling and threatening experiences all this occurs automatically regardless of compatibility, evidence of healthy or real or lasting love, or almost anything else.  These feelings of attachment or bonding lead many to falsely think they have suddenly fallen deeply in true love with their rescuer, or the victim they are rescuing, or the person with whom they are co-experiencing some exciting, dire or dangerous circumstance.  The problem is when life gets normal again brain chemistry goes back to normal and living in regular reality takes over.  It is then that the issues of day-to-day living and factors related to healthy, real, lasting love come into focus.  Subsequently false love feelings change and diminish.  Sure, once in a while healthy, real love grows in an ‘adventure started’ relationships but usually it does not, as Jill discovered.

Jill also discovered the second set of reasons for her falling so deeply into this form of false love.  All her life she had been delighted by romantic, rescuer, love stories full of threats and thrills.  In early childhood fantasies she was the ‘damsel in distress’ rescued from the ‘evil wizard’ by the ‘hero Prince’.  Later she was Lois Lane rescued by Superman.  Still later she was the erotic, slave girl liberated from the sadistic sultan’s harem by a handsome Naval officer.  As a young adult her favorite sexual fantasy involved her being a debauched harlot, trapped in a life of sin and submission to an evil vampire count but then saved by a heroic, libidinous master warlock.  Jill saw that in romantic and erotic stories from her past she had, in a sense, been subconsciously programmed into vulnerability to the ‘thrill and threat’ romantic scenario.  Now Jill saw it was going to be her job to re-program herself for adult, real love.

If It’s Good for the Species Is it Good for You?

Some think many forms of false love have their roots in our brain chemistry, and that out of such chemistry grew much of our misleading love lore and our destructive romantic mythology.  This chemistry probably was a good species survival mechanism.  It makes ‘species survival sense’ for the victim and the rescuer, or two people going through and surviving a dangerous experience together, to bond and, therefore, better help each other through the difficult experience.  It also makes survival sense for them to make a baby before the next disaster wipes out one or both of them.  But after a child is born the couple may discover they don’t have lasting love, and then break up, and later form new relationships which helps mix the gene pool and genetically make things better for future generations, or so the theory goes.

Thrilling but Not Threatening

Sharing thrilling but not necessarily really dangerous experiences can produce very similar results.  Paul found his first wife while on a very thrilling, singles white-water rafting trip.  He met his second wife while skydiving, and now has a third wife he met at a mundane, church function and she looks much more promising as a real love-mate. You might want to take notice of how ‘thrilling experience’ is hinted at in romantic terminology like “swept me off my feet”, “head over heels in love”, and the ever present “falling” in love.  Unfortunately all of these may have more to do with short-lived, false love forms than lasting, real love.

Social Thrills and Threats

Thrill and threat bonding experiences can happen socially as well as physically.  People have been known to feel they are romantically bonded together when they have gone through highly threatening legal occurrences, thrilling sexual adventures, fought in potentially dangerous and exciting political situations, and worked together in high action campaigns for economic and social change.  The challenge is to explore whether the bonding feelings generated are short term, false love or more long term, healthy, real love.

What Can One Do?

What can one do about not getting fooled and trapped by a thrill and/or threat false love, bonding experience?  The first thing is to understand this phenomenon.  The second is to abide by St. Paul’s pronouncement that love (the healthy, real kind) is patient.  Take your time after the thrill and/or threat experience and get to know each other in regular, living situations.  It’s OK to experience and enjoy, if you can, the strong feelings of adventures and other thrilling, and even threatening experiences, but wait until normalcy returns before making any commitments.

One also can raise into consciousness and examine one’s subconscious programming.  Have the love stories of your culture and upbringing subconsciously programmed you to be vulnerable to this false love syndrome which can occur when exciting, thrilling and threatening situations occur?  If so, start working on what healthy, real, lasting love looks like and how you can create, promote and adapt yourself to that which actually works.

OK Thrills and Threats

It is to be noted that not all shared, thrilling and exciting events in a relationship give evidence of false love occurring.  Healthy, real, romantic love often is repeatedly thrilling in many ways.  Couples who plan and carry out thrilling adventures together just may be making their very real love more interesting.  Thrilling and even threatening experiences, of course, can occur in long-term as well as short-term relationships.

I know a physician couple who for their 25th year together sailed a schooner around the world.  Then there’s the CPA and teacher couple who in their third decade together joined the Peace Corps and went to an isolated, poor, African village to help.  A long-term rancher couple I am familiar with now lead adventure tours in the Amazon.  You just have to watch out for the false love type of ‘thrill and/or threat’ attachment bonding.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What are your favorite thrill and threat fantasies, and do they have a love or sex relationship element which may have a programming effect on you subconsciously?

Related posts:

1. False Forms of Love: Unresolved Conflict Attraction Syndrome
2. False Forms of Love: Shadow Side Attachments
3. False Forms of Love: Limerence and Its Alluring Lies
4. False Forms of Love: Meta Lust 

False Forms of Love: Shadow Side Attachments

Too often bad guys and gals seem to win in the love arena, and good girls and nice guys seem to lose.  Why is that?  The considerate gentleman gets dropped for the brute.  The ‘girl next door’ type loses out to the girl with the bad reputation.

Sometimes the examples get a bit extreme.  Ruth dropped out of her seminary’s Sacred Music and Choir Director degree program and ran off with a guy in an outlaw, motorcycle gang.  Wallace abandoned his very sweet wife for a woman with an obvious ‘slut pride’ tattoo.

Jen used to be her upscale, suburban neighborhood’s popular ‘princess perfect’.  Now she flashes her intimate piercings jewelry and only goes out with misogynist, tough guys who play in bad boy bands.  After 20 years with his socially acceptable, almost ‘trophy wife’ Marvin left her and now lives with a Goth girl whose main fashion accessory is a whip.

Many shadow side relationships are not so extreme.  The wife of a popular and successful husband leaves him for a seemingly ordinary, so-so guy.  The single guy turns down the popular, ex- beauty queen and instead goes out with chubby, plain looking, social isolates.  The preacher would be better off with the polished, socially adept woman who really wants him but he hooks up with a nonconformist, political rebel whose abrasive ways are bound to cause trouble in his church.  The examples of the shadow side romance phenomenon are nearly endless.

To explain all this let’s look at one of Dr. Carl Jung’s postulates.  He was the most famous pupil of Dr. Sigmund Freud and he put forth the concept of the shadow side personality.  According to Jung’s thinking our shadow side can be that part of our personality which is the opposite of our more socially acceptable self and our more usual, overt way of presenting our self.  The shadow side self can yearn to break free from having to be ‘good’, proper, constrained, and ‘fitting in’.

In the depths of many people the shadow side secretly desires not to live up to anyone else’s expectations, not to conform to standards or live by society’s rules.  The shadow side is repressed but it wishes to break free of that repression, to go wild, to try everything forbidden and to live a ‘who cares what anybody thinks or says’ existence.  The freedom to have low standards of conduct, run on impulse and not have to repress or suppress the usually unacceptable can be powerfully attractive.  Sometimes the shadow side self breaks out and takes over.

It is thought one of the most common ways the shadow side self emerges is through a particular form of romantic attraction and attachment.  It seems to work something like this.  The conformist, repressed, good girl meets someone who represents all her repressed desires and characteristics, and it is ‘fascination at first sight’.  The ‘live by the rules’, always a nice guy meets someone who helps him bring out his selfish, lust driven, secretly barbarian inner self, and off he goes to a life of wild abandon.  Miss (seemingly) ‘prim and proper’ can only indulge her masochistic side after finding just the right dominating and sufficiently sadistic lover.Mr. ‘Upstanding Citizen’ can only let out his ‘down and dirty’, hidden self after he hooks up with a blatantly naughty and nasty femme fatale.

Sometimes things work the other way around.  The ‘outlaw’ rebel becomes intensely attracted to the ‘good to everybody’ nurse.  The outcast, loner prostitute falls for the popular and proper priest.  The ‘bad boy’ converts himself into acting good so he can be with the ‘good girl’.  These examples and similar others happen less often but they do happen.  Which ever way it emerges a shadow side attraction offers a reversal of the usual, and an overt exploration of what was previously covert and perhaps even was entirely out of conscious awareness.

Shadow side false love brings up many questions.  Do these relationships really work?  Do they last?  Why do seemingly reasonable, balanced, OK people reject the ‘good ones’ for the bad?  Is there the possibility of real, spouse type love in these relationships?  What’s the probability of healthy love developing in a shadow side romance?

To help answer these questions let’s take a look at what a shadow side romance is thought to do for a person.  When we get involved in a shadow side romance we give our self the chance to travel into our own unexplored regions.  Shadow side, false love really may be about learning to discover, to know and to love the rest of one’s self.  By way of the intimacies of romance and lust we can tap into our own worst, weirdest and sometimes most wonderful traits, tendencies and talents.  Shadow side, false love attachments are frequently filled with uninhibited actions, some of which are great fun, and occasionally quite creative, as well as frequently awful.  They also often are filled with episodes of spontaneous, emotional combustion and near total abandonment of restraints.

Therefore, shadow side lovers feel more free to explore and experiment with many more ways of being themselves than is true for the usual common and correct couple.  Shadow side, false love is frequently exciting, adventurous and sometimes quite dangerous.  When your shadow side lover manipulates you into addictions, crime, a cult, radical politics, crazy religion, violence, etc. the results can be negatively life altering and even life ending.

Shadow side romance also can be life changing in very positive ways.  Think about these quotes:  “My bad boy lover got me into music and he’s ‘over and done’, but today music is how I make my living, so I’m thankful for that escapade in my life”.  “I would never have known what real, sexual pleasure was if I had not gone across the tracks and lived on the wild side for a while.”  “She was both the worst thing and the best thing that ever happened to me; and, thank God, the good ended up out-weighing the bad, but oh what a trip it was.”  “I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for what you call my shadow side lovers.

They are part of what makes me who I am today, so I’m glad for everything we did and, no, I don’t ever want to do any of it again!”  “First, I was too good and my lovers were bland and blah.  Then I rebelled and was far too bad and my lovers were beasts and bozos.  Then I chose a third way, not too good and not too bad, and my lover now seems to be just right.  I see that it took all three to get where I am today, and life feels good and right”.

Sometimes a person feels drawn to a shadow side lover only to spend a brief time ‘visiting’ in that dark and difficult world.  Then they return to their regular life, often more worldly-wise, stronger and more mature.  At other times a person is caught up in shadow side, false love and takes up life-long residence in a sort of slavery to the opposite of what they knew or how they behaved before.  When that happens they usually seem to go from one shadow side lover to the next in an endless string.
The best outcomes usually occur when a person synthesizes their two opposing sides and creates an integration of both, keeping the best and jettisoning the rest.

Then they find a lover or spouse compatible with their new, integrated self.  The results of this kind of synthesis and integration sometimes are spectacular.  Of particular help in achieving integrated synthesis is a form of psychotherapy popular in Europe and South America called Psychosynthesis.  It uses specialized techniques for bringing opposing parts of the self into healthy integration and it works well with Dr. Carl Jung’s conceptualizations and form of psychotherapy.

Once in a while shadow side, false love gives rise to healthy, real, lasting love with a shadow side lover but most think this is extremely rare.  More often shadow side, false love can be a prerequisite to a later lover who is more compatible for growing a new lasting love.

One appeal of shadow side romance has to do with relaxing inhibitions.  Tiffany said, “It was always easier to go naked and do crazy things when I was around Smittey because he was scum.  I could act like a crazy bitch around him because I knew he was worse than me and if I lost him, so what.  If he stayed around I could abuse him as much as I wanted.  It was great!  Then I got tired of all that, and went into therapy and learned to love myself.  Then I had to find somebody really fine because I learned I was worthy of real love.  I’m not so carefree as I was, but my life is way better now.”

Shadow side, elicit affairs are thought to be one of the more common kinds of extramarital involvements that married people sometimes get into.  It’s not uncommon for some marriage counselors and relational therapists to hear things like, “I can’t understand why my wife picked such a loser to have an affair with” or, “My husband’s choice in lovers is so low class.  I just don’t get what he sees in those women” and “It’s so embarrassing to discover my lover wants those trashy freaks more often than he wants me.”

The people who say these sort of things don’t understand that dealing with difference and deviance, without having to live up to higher standards, is the attraction.  The wayward mate can find out what their bad side is and get, if not real love, acceptance and participation.  Living up to higher standards is not required and that is such a freedom for many, especially heavily repressed individuals.  When love is done ‘in the light’ the presence or absence of quality becomes important because it easily can be seen.  Affairs ‘in the shadows’ can hide a lot and that is exactly what the shadow side lover sometimes hopes to do, hide from the glaring quality issues and, therefore, be free to not care.

The shadow side dynamic is a false love because it is not lasting and it does not provide several of the major functions of healthy, real love (see “A More Ample Definition of Love” entry).  Nurturing love, protective love and healing love usually are not much a part of shadow side love involvements and, therefore, shadow side attempts at love usually come to an end with a fair amount of agony.  The good news is that quite often the agony is not very long lasting because the love was false.
One of the benefits of exploring your own shadow side (often with the help of a knowledgeable, love-oriented therapist) is you may come to acknowledge and integrate deep parts of yourself and consequently may be able to avoid the entanglements and problems that can come from having a shadow side, false love experience with another.

As always – Grow and Go with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What do you know about your own shadow side and where it might lead you in affairs of the heart?

False Forms of Love: Limerence and Its Alluring Lies
False Forms of Love: Meta Lust
False Forms of Love: Shadow Side Attachments
False Forms of Love: The Devastating IFD Syndrome
False Forms of Love: Unresolved Conflict Attraction Syndrome

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False Forms of Love: Relational Dependencies

Synopsis: This mini-love lesson looks at relational dependencies as unneeded crutches; explores how dependency does not mean love; lists seven major relational dependency characteristics; looks at co-dependency and its five main symptoms; then goes into disguised relational dependencies, dual dependency and the cure of this false form of love.

Unneeded Crutches

To understand relational dependencies think of a person with two perfectly good legs walking around using crutches and thinking they can’t walk without them.  Sometimes the person uses the crutch so much that a leg atrophies with lack of use, and then that person really can’t walk without the crutch, unless of course that person gets rehabilitation therapy.  Thus, it’s the same with relational dependencies which can operate like a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Now, think of a person who keeps using a crutch until it breaks, and a painful fall occurs, and then they go get another crutch and do it all over again.

Dependency Doesn’t Mean Love

Some people just don’t feel OK unless they are in a dependency-based, romantic type relationship.  For some of those people any kind of romantic relationship is better than no relationship, no matter how bad the relationship is or how destructive it gets.  They often misidentify their dependency relationship as true love.  Frequently they say things like “I’ll commit suicide if I lose him (or her) because I can’t live without them”, “He’s (or she’s) all I’ve got”, “I don’t have anywhere else to go” and “It’s bad but being alone would be worse”.

Sometimes a relational dependency isn’t that awful, and for some it rocks along fairly well but the full potential of love is not realized.  Sometimes there is relational dependency and a real love grows in the relationship slowly replacing the dependency, but not often.  Relational dependencies come in a great many varieties and some are more psychologically ‘heavy-duty’ than others.

Let’s look at a few mini-examples.  Martha seems addicted to getting married so she’s on her eighth trip to the altar.  Jason is so afraid of being without a woman he always is cheating on his current, main squeeze just in case she leaves him.  Clara can’t leave Mike even though the authorities have taken her children away because he violently abuses them, as well as her.  Kristen is desperate to get married because she firmly believes marriage is the only thing that makes a woman OK.  Thomas cannot feel he is really a man without a ‘trophy wife’ on his arm who is always instantly available.

Sally panics if she doesn’t have a date for the weekend, and gets very depressed if they don’t have sex at least once by the end of the date.  Clancy needs his wife to treat him just like his mother did or he completely malfunctions; he can’t go to work or do much of anything else.  Georgia has to have a lover to take care of, pamper and baby and she has anxiety attacks whenever her lover does anything the least bit independent of her.

As you can see, relational dependencies take on many forms.  There are, however, certain basic similarities they all share. Here are seven characteristics of this false form of love known as relational dependency.

SEVEN  MAJOR  RELATIONAL  DEPENDENCY  CHARACTERISTICS

1. Dysfunctionally Dependent

    Being emotionally over dependent on a relationship and not being able to function without it; also not being able to emotionally feel sufficient, adequate, safe or generally OK about one’s self and one’s ability to handle life without being subordinately, personally connected to another person, or being in a particular type of relationship situation i.e. marriage, romance, having an ongoing sexual connection, being continuously wanted, sought after, etc.

2. Fear-based

    The dependency relationship is more fear-based then love-based, i.e. the fear of not having the relationship, being rejected, abandoned, unwanted, or the fear of being without the desired relationship situation governing, motivating and directing actions, thoughts and feelings more than healthy, real love does.

3. Destructive

    The dependency relationship becomes more destructive than constructive in a variety of important ways for one or all parties involved, and there is a blocking or hampering of healthful, personal growth and improvement for at least one of the participants.

4. Low self-love

     There is an insufficiency of healthy self-love which includes low self-esteem, low self approval, low self dependency and low self-confidence in at least one participant, and the relationship does not work to produce sufficient, solid, healthy self-love, thus, the destructiveness in the dependency is continued and worsens.

5. Unhealthy Self Sacrifice

    The well-being of at least one participant is frequently unhealthily sacrificed for the sake of peacekeeping, being the prime important source of care-taking, pleasing and pleasuring of another participant, or to obtain and maintain a desired relationship condition or situation i.e. stay together, stay married, keep an acceptable status or appearance to outsiders, etc.

6. Outer Locus of Control

    The locus of one’s own life control is not ‘within the self’ in at least one of the relationship participants but rather is in another participant, or in obtaining and maintaining an outer-oriented relationship condition or situation to the detriment of the inner well-being of at least one relationship participant.

7. Childhood Dependency Repeated

    The dependency relationship subconsciously repeats childhood-dependency and is related to fixated-immaturity and often to unresolved, insufficient, imbalanced and/or traumatized love relationship dynamics in childhood resulting in emotional neediness and an underdeveloped ability to love healthfully and maturely.

Co-dependency

Many people have thought that co-dependency may be the most common and one of the most destructive forms of relational dependencies.  For a time co-dependency received a lot of attention, and for a while it seemed to be the popular, fad ‘psychological problem of the day’.  It still is a much dealt with issue in the 12 Step Community and in certain other therapeutic circles. As such it does deserve special consideration in understanding false forms of love.

Originally co-dependency referred to a problematic, relationship dynamic in which a person was dependent on a lover, who in turn was addictively dependent on an addictive substance or an addictive behavior.  The most common substance was alcohol and, thus, co-dependency was seen as a big part of many alcoholic’s ‘package of problems’.  Narcotics and prescription drug addictions, gambling addiction, sex addiction and a host of others also became part of the co-dependency, psychopathology picture.  Consequently the co-dependent person depends on an alcoholic (or another addict), therefore, in a way, also is dependent on alcoholism which influenced and governed both their lives.  Hence, the term co-dependence.

The term has since been applied to all sorts of other dependency dynamics and factors in love-like relationships.  Many diagnostic and therapeutic approaches, techniques and programs have been invented to deal with it.  There are those who think the term co-dependency has been applied far too broadly and capriciously and, thus, it has lost both its meaningfulness and its usefulness.  Others disagree and are working with many patients and clients in the context of co-dependency.

Today co-dependency usually is seen as having  five basic symptoms.  Briefly stated, they can be described as follows:

1. Difficulty in having sufficient, healthy self-love

2. Difficulty in setting and keeping sufficient, self-protective boundaries leading to being vulnerable to personal invasion, abuse, misuse, and being destructively influenced by others

3. Difficulty in knowing oneself, what one wants, what’s good for oneself, what one really needs, what’s going wrong or right, and what is one’s purpose in life.  Consequently, there is a danger of being taken over and misused by more manipulative, deceptive, sometimes seemingly needy persons or by a more dominant, authoritarian who offers a sense of safety and ‘right answers’

4. Difficulty in self-care and being self-directed, therefore, the co-dependent often is manipulated or directed by others into needless self-sacrifice which benefits others at the dangerous expense of self

5. Difficulty in self-control, especially in healthful self-moderation and, thus, excessive and extreme emotionality, irrational cognition and unsuccessful behavior occur which have a destructive effect on individuals and relationships

To understand co-dependency more fully I egotistically  recommend my book, Recovering Love, Part One which has to do with going from co-dependency to co-recovery and which is now available hardback, softback and in e-book form.

Disguised Relational Dependencies

Sometimes relational dependency gets quite well disguised and is hard to identify.  Here’s an example.  Ellen finally developed enough self-love to confess that she was faking being a sickly invalid in order to keep her husband in their marriage.  Repeated hospitalizations, many doctor’s visits, treatments of all sorts, health crises and thousands of dollars were spent, usually in response to Ellen feeling she was again in danger of losing her man.  Ellen felt completely inadequate compared to her husband who was outgoing, charming, extroverted and popular.

She decided being sick and helpless was the only way to keep him around since he was so highly ethical he never would abandon her, so long as she remained weak and infirm.  With self-love development Ellen saw that she no longer needed to live in a dependency role, that she was not well suited to her husband or he to her, and by her choice and his agreement they divorced and she went on to a much healthier life.

Sometimes sex plays a big role in the false form of love known as a Relational Dependency. Here’s an example. Vince knew he had to keep up with his highly sexed and very attractive wife or he would lose her to someone far more masculine than he saw himself to be.  Therefore, he went along with her demands for getting into swinging, bondage, S&M, orgies and other bizarre, dangerous sex practices.

He lived in fear that one day she would find a better sex partner than he was, so he put up with anything and everything until one day he was surprised to hear her say she was burned out on sex and wanted to try celibacy.  She was puzzled by how easily he agreed and by how relieved he seemed to be.  That led to honest self-disclosure of real feelings and exploring all sorts of new ways to relate to each other. When last seen in counseling, they were excited about getting into boating and spelunking together, and their sex life had come back in a much more simplified form.

Dual Dependencies

Some relational dependencies are mixed with substance abuse or addiction, behavioral addictions and other forms of destructive dependency.  This dual or multiple dependency problem seems to readily occur in some highly dependent people.  Being overly dependent on other types of relationships such as being too unhealthily connected to one’s parents, or children, or family, or religion, or authoritarian political movements, or any group that seems to offer unrealistic safety and security.  All those can exacerbate and complicate the problems of relational dependency.

No small number of people feel they are too inadequate to be independent or live as self-dependent adults.  Consequently they may be drawn into dependency relationships of various types including those that supposedly offer romantic love and security.  It is intriguing that many people who are cognitively challenged in one way or another, or who have some form of dysfunction due to injury or illness, fully believe and rely with confidence on their own judgment and are the best directors of their own life.  At the same time other people who actually are more fully mentally or physically capable may operate with far too little self-dependency.  It seems to mostly be a matter of the programming people receive as they grow up.

A number of people have been raised to believe the right way to live is to be highly dependent on some ‘outer’ authority.  Consequently self-dependency and democratic, egalitarian relating comes hard for them.  Learning to depend on one’s own reasoning, intuition, feelings, judgment or inner wisdom and at the same time live in relationship to others doing the same can be quite a struggle.  People who have not learned these things seem to be extra susceptible to romantic, relational dependency and the false forms of love that lead away from healthy, real love.

Another common category are those who can be called overly socially dependent.  Often these are people who are in a love-like relationship, mostly for safety reasons, but their secondary dependency has to do with living far too afraid of what others may judgmentally say or think of them.  Sadly they live far too fear-based and conformist-confined.  These can be co-dependents that may tend to stay in empty and unfulfilling marriages.

Another very important special category of relational dependency involves finances and with it material and lifestyle dependency.  In more traditional, some would say ‘old-fashioned’, relationships one person is the ‘earner’ and the other the ‘homemaker’; both are contributors to their relational life but their status and respect is unequal.  There’s a similar type of division which also is quite common among the very well-to-do.  Financial dependency on a romantic or marriage partner can lead to, or add to, emotional dependency.

People who are not financially able to be self dependent often live with a sort of background fear that if they don’t sufficiently please their spouse they will be abandoned and destitute.  That can lead to secret resentment, passive aggressive attacks and a host of related difficulties.  Whenever there is a ‘two earner’ arrangement things usually seem to work better in regard to co-dependency issues unless one ‘earner’ makes a lot more money than the other.

The Cure

The cure for relational dependency forms of false love usually involves two major things.  First is the development of healthy, self-love and with it increased emotional self-dependency.  From that flows the courage to communicate one’s ‘scary to reveal’ truths.  The tools of love and the tools of truth have to be integrated and well used often to defeat many forms of relational dependency.  That frequently involves considerably hard work.  However, with that work relational dependencies change into reliance on real love, and for healthy living that’s what really works.

Remember Ellen.  Had she, early on, been able to tell her husband the truth about feeling too inadequate to hold his interest and his alliance (except through feigned illness) it might have saved them ever so much misery, not to mention time, energy and money.  Had Vince been able to ask his wife to try other couple involvements besides just those that were sexual, they might have had a much broader, and more fulfilling, and certainly less fear-based and compulsivity-based love life together sooner.

Some relational dependencies in some people cure easily and quickly.  Others take considerable effort and longer stretches of time.  The more destructive forms of relational dependency require talented therapists who are well educated and experienced in both treating dependencies and the knowledge of how to help healthy, real love grow and be maintained.  If you suspect you or someone you care about may be suffering from a relational dependency, false form of love you may want to think about finding a love knowledgeable therapist.

Perhaps the best way to do that has to do with checking out those therapists that hold the credential ‘Clinical Fellow’ of a national association for marital and family therapy or a similar credential, or those who are Professional Members of the International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors.

As always, Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
How good do you see yourself at self-dependency emotionally and every other way, and are you also good at the teamwork of democratic, egalitarian interdependency?

Related posts:

1. False Forms of Love: Limerence and Its Alluring Lies
2. False Forms of Love: Love/Lust Confusion
3. False Forms of Love – Imprint Mating Syndrome
4. False Forms of Love: Shadow Side Attachments
5. False Forms of Love: Thrill and Threat Bonding