Good Time for More Love Learning?

Mini-Love-Lesson  #269

Synopsis: Making very good, helpful, interesting and possibly fun-filled use of your time while socially isolated alone or together by searching into more of the many ways love knowledge is being discovered and spread is the topic of this mini-love-lesson.  It also presents some pretty intriguing sources for the more engaged, deeper, probing students of love and love related topics.

Useful Fun Time Learning?

Might this be a good time for you, or you and yours together, to learn more about love?  There is so much that is new and wonderful being discovered concerning love and all the great things it does for us.  Exciting research into healing love, parent-child love, altruistic love, lasting couples love, love and the brain sciences and hundreds of other “loveology” topics are opening up for meaningful investigation.  They are revealing amazing and highly useful love knowledge we all can use.  At same time, other efforts are working to spread the ancient truths of love taught by various great teachers and wisdom masters of the world’s diverse cultures, societies and religions.  This is making a fresh, possible, worldwide integration of love understandings and the many ways to go about doing love well.

Love knowledge is starting to be applied in areas of life where healthy, real, love ideas and concepts were seldom applied before.  Take for example, how concepts of healthful love are beginning to be introduced into politics.  This is evidenced by the love platform candidate, Marianne Williamson, who made it all the way to several of the US, nation wide TV, Democratic Party presidential debates.  Politically minded people also are increasingly reading about politics and love, as in books like Love and Healing the Heart of Democracy by Parker Palmer and A Politics of Love by Marianne Williamson.

The Pandemic: A Forced Opportunity for Love Learning

The 2020 pandemic is forcing us to learn how to do love in spite of isolation and safe living rules about do not touch and stay apart.  Some are adapting to the new challenges and requirements and some are not, or are not yet.  Far too many are becoming increasingly lonely, depressed and essentially love-malnourished or even love-starved.  Thus, we all are challenged to find fresh ways to love one another as we love ourselves through this worldwide crisis (see “Isolated and Doing Love Anyway”).

If you are one of the millions who really enjoy learning, this can be a good time for you in that way.  You can use it for learning about the ever widening, fascinating and fun-filled world of growing love knowledge, hopefully like you are right now.  However, there are a couple of caveats.  As you may already know, you may have to wade through a lot of fact-free nonsense, misleading falsehoods and useless puff stuff about love to find the good stuff.  Then I suggest discussing what you are learning and thinking about love with others.  As you do this, maybe you will discover some blocks to learning about love in yourself or in others.

Getting Past the Blocks to Love Learning

Learning about love is probably not as easy as it should be.  There is a lot in the way.  First, of all, as the Buddhist Sage, Thich Nhat Hanh, points out, the word love itself is sick and in need of rehabilitation.  It is often used in frivolous, inconsequential and trivialized ways such as in “I love that food, hat, tune or whatever”.  At other times it is synonymous with loveless sex.  There are those such as forensic specialists that see love as something that is all too often possessive, jealous, insane and essentially as a dangerous, destructive and even deadly force in life.  A multitude of others do not look deeply into love because they see it as only a romantic myth, and/or a made up fantasy entity of no actual substance or consequence.  For others it is just too confusing and indefinite to even try to become current, or up-to-date about.

Some dismiss the importance of love in ordinary human life as too contaminated, earthly, profane and common.  For them, the word Love is worthwhile only when used in a holy, religious context.  There are other blocks to learning about love too numerous to discuss here.  Even with all that to get past, finding material on healthy, real love and its dynamics proves to be well worthwhile, but of course I am biased about the subject (see “Is Love Ignorance the Problem?”).

Until rather recently, psychiatry, psychology and even marriage and family therapy have had only a little to say about healthy, real love.  In the behavioral sciences love often has been seen as a pathology, a sub-topic of sexuality or only as being about shallow, sophomoric romance.  I find it interesting that it took an animal, comparative experimental, laboratory-oriented psychologist studying monkeys (Harry Harlow) to get the general field of psychology to pay any useful attention to love itself.  Now, the newer field of positive psychology offers love a real place in behavioral science.  Much of the best knowledge about love has come from child psychology and before that pediatric medicine.

The importance of love started to be seen by scientists with the early 1900s discovery that infants physically died when they did not receive love conveying actions, even though they were otherwise well taken care of, fed, clothed, etc.  Harlow discovered the same thing for monkey babies in the 50s.  There really is a fascinating history of love discoveries to learn about if you have a mind to search for it.  You might enjoy reading Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection by Deborah Blum.  For dramatic, engaged and intrigued learning about the early struggles for a science of love, I recommend The Practice of Love by Ashley Montagu.

The media and the Internet offer a plethora of, in my opinion, juvenile and irrelevant mishmash on love, mixed with the occasional jewel of worthwhile, usable and sometimes even inspiring information about love.  Intriguingly, it is Russia that seems to be the country where love is being taken most seriously.  It is there that loveology is an authorized, natural science complete with research grants and advanced degree programs (see “Is There Really a New Field Called Loveology?”).

In spite of all the blocks, you can find, with some effort, very useful, enjoyable to learn sources about healthy, real love and how to do it well if you look for it.  Naturally, I recommend this site for doing just that, but as I have said I am biased and probably prejudiced and opinionated too.

To Learn Love, Get Yourself to Read and Talk More about Love!

Look for some good books to read about love.  Remember, the latest book is seldom the best book on any topic so look for some of the older ones as you search.  The Art of Loving by Eric Fromm is still one of the best for many people.  A more recent one, Teachings on Love by the renowned Buddhist sage, Thich Nanh Hanh, has a lot to offer.  The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman helps a lot of people with couples love, although there are more than five major ways to convey love according to the research.  Of course, for those seeking to recover from or avoid love problems I honestly and heartily recommend our contributions Recovering Love and Real Love, False Love.  Perhaps easiest and quickest is to keep picking entries from this sites over 250 mini-love-lessons.  Some readers pick One-A-Day and report getting a lot out of that approach.  The real point is to keep seeking and gathering input about love so that your outgo about love is always fresh and growing (see “How Love Works - 7 Basics”).

With what you read while isolated, talk to others via phone, Skype, Zoom and other similar services.  Bring up love and love topics seeing what others think and, in the process, developing your own thoughts further.  If you are isolated or mostly isolated together with a Love Mate or family or friends, etc., you can learn and talk together discussing the many aspects of love as you learn about them.  For many, this is great way to develop your own understanding much further.  Some make agreements to read the same material and at regular, preset times talk about it in an online, book club fashion (see “Learning about Love - Together”).

Using whatever degree of social isolation you are practicing, you may utilize that time to ready your love abilities for a freer future.  In the meantime, you can increase your love knowledge about a great many love related things, perhaps starting with protective love as it relates to healthy self-love, family love, mate love and other love.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Love Success Question: In this pandemic time, who are you going to tell two or three things about what you are doing by way of protective, healthy self-love and for self nurturing -followed by asking them about what they are doing?

Could You Be a LAT Lover and Succeed at It?

Synopsis: How and why Georgia and Harrison do togetherness better apart; LAT– the new coupleness category; Far apart and next door apart closeness examples; Challenges; 10 ways to do LAT well; Plus the ‘not single and not married’  lifestyle look; The big, new question or solution for troubled couples.

Georgia and Harrison loved each other a lot but they weren’t even close to becoming compatible at living together.  They had married with high hopes but Harrison was a jumpy night person, a neat-nick who always had to have loud Jazz playing, and his decorator tastes were decidedly industrial.  Georgia was a calm, slow-moving, morning person, an admitted slob, and quietness is what she liked to listen to most, while frills, doilies and doodads cluttered up her living space.

After several unsuccessful attempts at weaving their lives together under the same roof they came to couples counseling.  They both were positively shocked when the idea came up that they could live apart and still be a successful couple.  It took some getting used to, a fair amount of counseling work, coordination, and tolerating their family and friends thinking they were really odd.  But now they live about a mile apart and call their way of relating a “very compatible, romantic arrangement” which Georgia says “is kind of like being perpetually engaged and married at the same time”.

More couples for all sorts of different reasons are working at their adult love relationships while living apart.  So many in fact that demographers with the US Census Bureau have invented the new category called “LAT” which stands for “Living Apart Together”.  Consider Marvin, who lives in Vancouver B.C. on the Pacific, who loves Marion, who lives in Charleston near the Atlantic, with almost a whole continent between them.  They have a home in Dallas where their pet iguana gets taken care of by a housekeeper, except when they get together for a weekend about once a month.

Then there is Sergei who gets home to Terri about once every three months from his ocean liner job.  Ella and Frank won’t even consider living together until they get their children, by former relationships, raised separately because it works better that way, although they are very much a committed couple who love each other.  And then there’s Deb and Don who occupy different sides of a duplex.  They say they find that their duplex living provides just the right degree of closeness and apartness for their relationship to succeed.

Living apart together, sometimes at great distances apart and sometimes closer, presents a fair number of the special challenges.  However, remember all love relationships have challenges but if the relationship does not work out it’s usually not so much because of the challenges.  It’s more often because the love in the relationship wasn’t strong enough or being done well enough.  LAT love relationships though sometimes do present very different and puzzling challenges needing close study and creative solutions.

LAT relating frequently is quite difficult even to think about for those raised on the standard ‘under the same roof’ couples lifestyle programmed into so many of us.  Yet, a fair number of people are doing LAT and learning to succeed at it, and some like it even better than living together.  Others do LAT out of necessity and plan to live together eventually, but in the meantime they still need to learn LAT skills.  So, here are some of the actions a number of LAT couples are taking to ensure their LAT love is successful.

1.  Calendarize everything. LAT lovers often discover they have to write just about everything on the calendar or in their PDA pertaining to their relationship – way more than do most couples.  They have to work at putting the exact times they will be contacting and connecting with each other, and exactly how that connection will be made, and what they exactly will be doing for how long during that time of connecting.  Ending times for various activities are often as important as start times.

2.  Make contact daily. LAT couples, especially those who live a great distance from one another, make great frequent use of all methods of electronically relating.  Skype connecting so they can see as well as hear each other is especially useful, but e-mail, texting, phoning each other and even being surprised with snail mail cards, packages and love letters are also to be considered.

3.  Make psychologically intimate contact. LAT couples, especially those living long distances from one another, can have many romantic and erotic encounters with one another electronically.  A Skype facilitated, candle light dinner shared over the Internet, phone sex, when talking on the phone using pet names and terms of endearment, ‘sexting’, romantic and even poetic e-mails and e-cards, shared Skype sex experiences, etc. can be common with LAT couples.  Some LAT couples even are having their “avatars” make love with each other in Second Life and other cyber locations.

4.  Use pictures. LAT couples are thought to keep more pictures of each other around, send each other more pictures including sexy ones (properly secured), and create or acquire more things that pictorially symbolized their love relationship.

5.  Read together. LAT couples often are reading the same books and articles, and then call each other up and talk about what they think and feel about what they’ve been reading.  Knowing that your beloved is reading the same thing you are can have its own special good feelings.

6.  Mini vacation together. LAT couples can add to their success by planning more vacation-like, short experiences together.  Of course, longer times also count.  A weekend at a Bed and Breakfast, meeting together in a different location, an overnight or a day long car trip together, even at one home or the other disconnecting electronics – ordering dinner delivered – putting on special music – and enjoying each other like you’re on vacation, and things like that can work wonders.

7.  Take a course together. Take an online course together or actually meet somewhere for a conference or seminar is another thing some LAT couples do together and sort of cover two bases with the same action.

8.  Engage in “I.T.” counseling. LAT couples who are having relationship troubles can by phone conference call, Skype, etc. engage in couples counseling together and the counselor or therapist can join you in cyberspace.  This doesn’t seem to work as well as face-to-face counseling but it will do tolerably well if mutual face-to-face work is too difficult to arrange.

9.  Prioritize dating. LAT couples living close, or at a distance from one another, do best if they give the highest priority to their dating times and other joint activity times together.

10.  Send lots of love messages. All couples, but especially LAT couples, can benefit from lots of different kinds of love messages frequently sent.  Naturally, it’s very important to respond with love to love messages which creates “love cycling”.

One of the big questions some troubled couples are learning to ask each other is “would we be better living as an LAT couple?”.  Along with that goes questions like: “would we do our love more healthfully, constructively and enjoyably if we didn’t live under the same roof”?  For troubled couples it’s helpful to know there’s another option to the age-old dilemma of either to get divorced or to stay married.  A surprising number of couples have gotten a divorce and then slowly gotten back together, followed by successfully becoming LAT couples, but not living as ‘under the same roof’ standard lifestyle, married couples.

It comes as something of a surprise for some people to learn there are whole societies in which couples don’t live together, though they are regarded as married and quite committed to their relationship.  In the Western world culture it seems that a number of people are choosing to be ongoing, committed to the relationship, but not living together couples.  Some are sort of forced into this arrangement such as military couples or those who have jobs in different locations.  But sometimes even after being discharged or finding jobs in the same city, a few decide to continue in a more LAT style.  A great many couples where one of them has a job with a lot of traveling live at least partially as LAT couples.  Health problems, old age infirmities, and sundry legal problems sometimes force loving couples into LAT living.  Whatever the reason, it is important to know people can succeed at a LAT lifestyle.

The biggest issue for LAT couples actually is the same one that exists for all couples, though for LAT lovers it may be bigger.  That issue is ‘how well will you actually do your love’ as a couple.  Love must be demonstrated, received and enacted, not just felt or thought about for it to succeed.  Insufficiently done love results in unsuccessful love and that is ruinous to love relationships.

Corollary questions are: ‘how well and how often will you show your love in each of the eight major groups of behavior by which love can be demonstrated’ (see the entry “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love” and the other related entries); ‘how well will you receive the love shown to you and be nurtured by that love’; ‘how well will you learn and practice the ways of love and how much work will you put into doing love well’?  For all those questions and more, let me suggest checking out all the entries at this site – especially ones about communicating love.

Now, I have a request.  If you know of anyone who is in or may be facing the issue of being in a LAT lifestyle, please refer them to this site and especially this entry so they have at least a little help in dealing with all this.

As always, Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question Have you ever given serious thought to how well you might live and love in different lifestyles and could a LAT lifestyle suit you well?

Related posts:

1. Are You A "Challenge" Lover ?
2. Returning to a Bad Lover? – A Blocking Technique
3. Does “Cougar” Love Work?
4. Say It With Love
5. Are Love and Marriage Getting a Divorce? 

Conflict, Power and Love Success

Mini-Love-Lesson   #190

FREE over 200 Mini-Love-Lessons touching the lives of thousands in over 190 countries – worldwide!

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

The Best Use of Power When in Conflict

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

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

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

The Surprising 3 Most Love Successful Ways

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Becoming  Power Usage  and Conflict Resolving Successful

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

The Big Problem of Mismatches

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

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

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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

Related posts:

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

No Hurt, Under Attack Self-Love

Mini-Love-Lesson  #264

Synopsis:  If you learn to practice what this mini-love-lesson is all about, you likely will not have a lot of hurt feelings, worries, anxieties or stressors that might otherwise impact your future life and interfere with all your love relationships.  So, start by wondering what the Sanskrit word, Upeksha, means and to where it can lead you and your relationships.  Especially is this useful if you want to more freely express yourself without fear of being rejected or hurt in the process.

Getting "Dissed" and Not Hurt

Imagine being confronted by several people severely "dissing" you (disrespecting, demeaning, and disparaging you) and it not bothering you almost at all.  In fact, imagine you even are feeling a bit sad for those people because they seem to be the kind of people who have to behave this negative way.  Also imagine, that then you go about your life as okay as you were before the dissing.   You only are thinking "was there anything those people said that might be a bit useful”.  You consider what might be practical usage, feel just fine and then mentally and emotionally fully dismiss it.

How do you get to be such a person?  How do you become able to be unscathed by criticism, serious verbal attack and even hate?  Yet, you still non-defensively can evaluate what they had to say garnering whatever is useful and then be free of it.  Here is a major way toward that.

The Upeksha Way

Let me introduce you to the Buddhist and Hindu way of upeksha love if you don't already know about it.  Among other things, upeksha is a way of healthy self-love that frees you from being hurt when you are being disparaged, put down under covert or overt attack, or facing rejection.  Upeksha is also a way that frees you from becoming trapped in useless defensiveness or harmful offensiveness when responding to negatives coming your way.

Furthermore, it is an approach which opens the way to loving others, even your enemies, as you love yourself.  Upeksha, therefore, is an "I win, you can win too" approach that not only keeps you okay but tremendously helps in assisting relationships get and stay okay.  Upeksha love fits well with healthy self-love understandings and especially with not giving your power away concepts. Furthermore, a upeksha love mindset often is fantastic for developing one’s healthy self-love.

Upeksha Difficulties

The upeksha way has some drawbacks.  It often is hard for the western mind to understand and practice it at first.  It is even hard to translate into western languages.  The closest term to upeksha we have in English is the quite inadequate word "equanimity" which leaves out the very strong love aspects of upeksha.  Equanimity sort of gets close to the cognitive aspects of the upeksha approach.

Upeksha, as a concept, has been misunderstood and mistranslated as detachment, indifference, uncaring, uninvolvement, unconnectedness, and even non-loving.  Upeksha is a way of not getting involved in the tangle of dysfunctional ways of relating to others and not being destructively influenced by others.  At the same time, it definitely is a major way of love.

Upeksha love is great for avoiding fights, emotional distancing problems, destructive relating, staying okay in spite of what others do, making and keeping peace, getting to rational thought mixed with love, and reducing unhealthy stress and stressor illness effects.

One other difficulty for many is the necessary unlearning process of old programming in order to proceed with upeksha.  Some of those have to do with more western ways of quickly taking and returning offense, a proneness to overt conflict, and the western world way of being highly vulnerable to emotional hurts.

Exploring Upeksha Love

In the East, the upeksha is known as one of the four immeasurable mindsets of real love.  It, therefore, is of tremendous significance.  Reportedly, it is called immeasurable because the more you give it, do it and live it, the more you have of it to give, do and live.

Upeksha means having the wisdom to love with a mindset that sees the world with an equality of values and importance whether or not it is for, against or indifferent to you and yours.  This mindset embodies many great teachings like "love your enemies", respect all life and life forms, the most stupid crazy incomprehensible ideas of today can turn out to be the wisdom of tomorrow, victory and loss, praise and condemnation, hate, love and even indifference all have much to teach us, and all our ups and downs are relative to the perspective of where we are looking from.  Therefore, we are to look for the merit in all things even those things we would oppose vigorously.

So, the upeksha mindset recommends when facing negatives about you coming from others, work to see them with democratic curiosity.  Think of this.  If someone handed you a piece of paper and on it was written a scathing, lie-filled, discrediting and very negative description of you and your character written by someone you did not know very well, how might you feel -- upset, hurt, angry or what?  Now, if it was written in a language you cannot read and have no understanding of, how would you feel?  Perhaps only a bit curious, certainly not upset, hurt, angry, etc.  That is an example of how it is not the words that come at you but the meaning you attached to them, in your own brain, that hurts or upset you.  Of course, you have been trained, programmed and conditioned to attach great hurtful, emotional meaning to quite a few words and terms.  So, it is your training and upbringing that make you vulnerable to more or less being easily, emotionally hurt.  However, with the upeksha mindset you can overcome much and maybe even all of that.

With a upeksha mindset and thought tools, you dispassionately detach yourself from your inner program for getting upset and from the meaning you attach to the words of degradation coming your way.  You need not detach from the person speaking or writing critically of you but you can if you need to.  Here are a few thought tools you might use.  Think "what your detractors say of you probably says a lot more about them than about you" and "who are you giving your power away to, to be your judge and why even do that?".  Remember, you always can make yourself at least 51% of the vote on your own okayness.  You also can think “is there anything useful in what your detractor is telling you and, if there is, be thankful for it and use it.

Once you get into not hurting yourself with what others think or say of you, you become more free to better understand what they get themselves upset about and then you can be emotionally empathetic in regard to your naysayers.  That is a loving part of the upeksha mindset.  You need not defend yourself by being uncaring, counterattacking, fighting to defend yourself or change their thinking, or by fearfully trying to just escape.  If you fear there may be some truth to what they are saying against you, that deserves some evaluation-thinking with equanimity.  That means having a mental calmness and composure that gives even-tempered, balanced, levelheaded, democratic reasoning to all sides of whatever is the issue at hand.  At the same time, the upeksha mindset empowers you to love the people, including yourself, and/or other life forms evolved.  It is surprising that once you get into this mindset you often find things that are humorous absurdities and well worth laughing at.  Sometimes this includes yourself.

Upeksha Love and Fairness

One of the best things about the upeksha mindset is how it helps with thinking and acting with fairness.  The upeksha approach greatly assists in nondiscriminatory thinking, unbiased judgment, broad viewing and even-mindedness.  It is teacher speak for "the wisdom of seeing many things equally" and, therefore, not being unknowingly biased, unconsciously prejudice, blinded by traditional thinking, but instead, being egalitarian and sufficiently impartial, and still being passionately caring and kind of heart.

Only An Introduction

There is a whole lot more to the mindset of upeksha love and how it can help in each and every love relationship.  We can only scratch the surface here in this introduction to the subject.  So, I encourage you to find out more.  You might do that by reading Teachings on Love by the highly esteemed Buddhist teacher/author Thich Nhat Hahn.

Also germane to this topic is the article “Healthy Self-Love and Not Giving Your Power Away”, a a mini-love-lesson which can be of considerable help. More can be found in this site’s indexes.

One More Thing:  Talking about anything you are learning helps learn about it better, broader and in new and different ways.  So, who might you enjoy talking to about the upeksha love mindset?  Not all branches of Buddhism or Hinduism stress the Four Immeasurable Mindsets of Real Love the same way.  However, if you find a Buddhist, a Hindu or comparative religions teacher to talk to about these four mindsets – quite a few good, big things might come from it.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Dealing With Love Hurts: Shared And Unshared Pain

Know that there is great value and importance in sharing your love related hurts.  When you share any of your feelings you share an important part of yourself.  This is especially true of anything that involves your hurt, and also your joy.  When hurt is shared the people in a relationship can join together to work against the harm that the hurt is trying to lead you away from.  (Remember, hurt’s purpose is to help you avoid harm – see blog entry “Dealing with Love Hurts: Pain’s Crucial Guidance”).

Hurt shared also can lead to stronger, more loving, intimate connection, thus, strengthening a love relationship.  Hurt handled alone usually takes longer to get past and may be unnecessarily worse.  Shared hurt has cathartic or ‘venting’ value and with the right loving people gives you a chance to replace it with an input of love.

Too many people try to hide their love relationship hurt and handle it secretly on their own.  Of course, it can be satisfying and individually strengthening to know that you handled it on your own.  However, that may not do much for your relationships and it may be harder to deal with on your own.  Lots of people want to tough it out and avoid the shame or embarrassment of failing at love, or be seen as weak and love-needy.  Toughing it out can be done but it’s ever so much slower, and often less curative of love hurts than when they are shared with caring others.

Sharing your hurt with friends and family, carrying counselors, clerics, therapists and helping professionals of many types, along with one’s higher power all can be marvelously assistive.  It’s important to know that frequently it is not so much their advice but the receiving of a sense of loving care coming your way that makes the difference.  Loving listening (see blog entry “Listening with Love”) can be the great healing medicine for love related hurt.  This is especially true when hurt is intense.  Knowledge and suggestions, however, can come more and more into play as the hurt reduces.  That’s where counselors, therapists and the lore master’s of love can be ever so helpful in assisting you not to repeat the actions that lead to love related hurt and to possible harm.

So, if you’re hurting because of a love relationship situation going poorly, or badly, or one that is over, think about who are you going to share your hurt with.  Probably it will be whoever you feel closest to.  Perhaps you will hear a message in your head that you don’t want to burden anyone with your hurts.  If that’s the case be sure to offer to do the same caring listening for whomever you share your hurt with if they are hurting some day.  I’m prejudiced but I like to suggest that the very best person to share your pain with maybe an empathetic, love-wise counselor or therapist.  That way you also probably can learn what you need to learn from the hurt.  A very love-centered cleric, teacher, physician or other helping professional, and those wise people who do seem to know more about love also may do quite well.

When you share your love related hurt with someone that you see as the cause of your hurt there are special things to be aware of and special things to do.  First, be aware that a person you think has caused your hurt is likely to hear what you are saying as an attack, full of blame and accusation.  They then may respond with defensiveness which will come across to you as offensive.  A fight may then erupt.  You may be able to avoid all that by starting your statements with “I feel…”, “I’m experiencing…”, “I want…” and other “I” statements instead of “You did…”, “You should have…”, “You should not have…” and other “you” statements”.

Also avoiding angry blaming looks and sounds helps sharing a love hurt to go better.  You also likely would do well to acknowledge that you probably helped or played a part in the causation of your hurt.  The way you caught, interpreted, perhaps misunderstood, and otherwise processed what the person you’re talking to said or did possibly has as much to do with your hurt as does the actions or words of the other person.  Here’s another thing to be aware of.  As you share your hurt the person you are talking to may feel guilty, inadequate, unworthy and in other ways simply bad.  None of that may help them help you with your hurt.

To get the help you want from them you may have to ask them exactly for what you want.  Do you want to ‘blow off steam’ and have them just listen with care?  Do you want a hug?  Do you want them to express empathy that you hurt?  Whatever it is, its best if you ask them clearly.  Otherwise you may not get what you desire to help with your hurt.  It usually helps a lot to say something like “I just want you to listen to me express my hurt, and I want you to show me you really care that I hurt by saying you care, and give me a hug, and not do anything else, like give me advice.  And I don’t want you to have any problems with what I’m saying if you can – OK?”.  Sharing your hurt with someone who helped create the hurt, when done well, can lead to improved loving, a closer relationship, better understanding, and an avoidance of similar hurts in the future.

The trick, of course, is doing it well.  It is important not to think a loved one who helped create your hurt will know what to do to help you get over the hurt.  It’s your hurt, you own it, and you are the one most likely to know what to do to make it better, while you’re loved one just may be confused.  It’s a mistake to think that because they love you they’ll know what to do.  So, at least guess what will help you and then request that as clearly as you can.  If you completely don’t know what will help either try saying something like “Give me a break until I figure it out” or “I want to see a caring look on your face, hear caring sounds and words, and feel loving, caring touch” because those things usually do help soothe love related hurts and help them diminish.

As always, Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question If and when you are baffled or overwhelmed by your hurt in a difficult love relationship situation how easy is it for you to share your hurt and seek help from the loved one(s) involved in the situation, or a friend, family member, or helping professional?

Dealing With Love Hurts Series
Dealing with Love Hurts: A Dozen Love Hurts to Know and Grow From
Dealing With Love Hurts: First Aid Tips
Dealing With Love Hurts: Pain's Crucial Guidance
Dealing With Love Hurts: Shared And Unshared Pain