In the Garden of Love

In the Garden of Love It Is More Important to Grow Flowers Than to Pull Weeds!

If you only pull the weeds out, all you will have left is a garden full of holes — into which new weeds will likely grow.
If you plant and nurture flowers, add grasses, crops and trees, also nurturing them — they will push out all but the toughest of weeds.
Those you can pull.  JRC

Think about it.
Is your way of dealing with a love relationship more about pulling weeds than growing flowers? Are you more prone to work on what is wrong or work on making things improve? If you are more prone to focusing on problems, deficiencies, faults etc., than focusing on creating and extending attributes, benefits, advancements etc., then your love relationship is not likely to be like a garden that you or anyone else wants to be in.

Are you watering your love relationship’s flowers, or its weeds? Do your praises, compliments and expressions of appreciation greatly outnumber your gripes, complaints, and expressions of disapproval? Sincere ‘thank you’s’, a soft touch of appreciation, a genuine offer to help with a chore, etc. water the flowers. The gripes, etc. tend to water the weeds.

In your garden of love are you doing the necessary work of being a good gardener. Growing and tending a healthy, good, love relationship takes a good deal of work just like growing and tending a healthy, good garden does. Nature only does so much, and then we have to do the rest.

Are you and your love ones spending enough time together in your garden of love, letting it nurture you by your shared mindfulness of its beauty and wonder? Are you soaking up the beauty of your garden of love’s flowers and deeply, fully appreciating them, holding them in awe, letting them inspire and nurture you?

As always – Go and Grow in Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
What kind of new and wonderful flowers might you plant in your garden of love? Would you do well to plant and grow more flowers of kindness, forgiveness, affirmation, lightheartedness, spiritual connection, appreciation or …..?

Talk With The People You Love

Mini-Love-Lesson # 278

Synopsis: Talking With versus talking At; positive word choice; head talk or heart talk; risking authenticity, listening well; and the importance of studying how we talk with those we like and love is quickly, easily and informatively presented here.

Talking WITH Versus Talking AT

Sometimes we get so busy and distracted in our everyday lives that we don’t pause to really attend to and talk with those we love.  It is personal talk that makes a real connection.  To stay current with those you care about, taking little chunks of time away from doing to just being, strengthens and maintains relational bonds.  When we spend time talking with someone it demonstrates they are important to us.  Talking with older people, children, friends and others we care about contains and conveys compassionate love.  The subject matter may be mundane but the process is what is important. 

There is a big difference between talking with and talking at someone; this especially is true when talking with loved ones.  Officers tend to talk at the troops rather than with them – not a style to be emulated at home.  With is a two-way process, at is one-way. 

The Importance of Positive Word Choice

Some word choices are more loving than others.  Have you ever encountered a person who habitually starts what they say with the word No?  Starting with a negative can be self-sabotaging.  Too many negative words can be toxic to a love relationship.  When love-filled words are sprinkled into our interactions, the relationship system strengthens, becomes happier and more effective.  Using more positive and loving words even has physical, health benefits like improved immunity function.  So, choose your words carefully.

Head Talk Or Heart Talk?

There are words or phrases that can interfere with love transmission.  The word Why is an example.  Have you ever said, “I love you” and been met with the reply, “Why”?  Have you then been confounded or confused?  That’s because why seeks an intellectual, concrete, historical and compartmentalized answer.  Love has to do with feelings experienced holistically in the present.  Why asks you to think instead of feel.  Why takes you away from your heart and leads you into your mind.  Why appropriately can be asked and answered but usually only after emotions have been dealt with.  A question like “Why are you crying” sometimes can bring on emotional discord.  Change it to “I care that you are crying” and a loving closeness is the more likely result.

Risk Being Authentic!

To those who fear using words of love may be Pollyannish, unrealistically positive, phony or may be interpreted that way, we recognize those worries.  A solution to this conundrum often can be found in being genuine.  If you can identify your love feelings, you authentically can give them voice.  When you are worried about how you are getting interpreted, bring it up and talk about that, lovingly.

Listening Well Is a Big Part of Talking Well – with Love

Focusing on your listening skills (yes, there are learnable skills for good listening) is a big part of talking WITH as opposed to talking AT those you care about.  Helping those you love feel really well listened to can be a major way to show them they are genuinely loved.  It also is a major way to improve communication, cooperative functioning, compatibility, sense of connection as well as avoid misunderstandings and a great deal of conflict (see “ Listening with Love”).

Study How You Talk To Those You Like and Love

Remember that love feelings come naturally while love relating takes learning.  Learning takes study, experimenting with improvement and practice.  If you want to do successful and high quality love relating, looking at how you do Verbal Love is a good place to apply yourself.

Let me recommend that you check out the list in “Communicating Better With Love: Mini Lessons”.  There you will find a dozen mini-lessons for talking well with love.  It contains a dozen very important things to know about communicating love when talking with your loved ones.  You’ll find widely diverse things listed from a lesson on Emotional Intercourse to How to Nag with Love.  Each brief lesson has been known to be highly helpful to a great many others according to the feedback we get.

One more thing: To help better implant what you just read in your mind, consider talking over these ideas with one or more others.  If you do that please mention this site and its many mini-love lessons learned, and help spread love relating knowledge to others – Thank You.

As always – Grow and Go with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: Do you put some love into every time you talk with a loved one?

Anger and Love

Synopsis: This mini-love-lessons looks at what anger does to love; love constructive, destructive and neutral anger; internalized, suppressed and repressed anger; the Teakettle understanding; anger’s deeper dynamics; anger’s big secret; and ends with “love over anger” and other things you can do about anger problems.

What Anger Does to Love

Anger can destroy your love relationships! It can and often does bring an end to what otherwise could become healthy, lasting love. This happens with marriages, families, lovers, parent and child relationships, truly love-filled friendships and all other forms of love relationship.

Furthermore, it can sabotage a person’s healthy, constructive self-love. Those love relationships which are not fully destroyed by anger are often damaged, reduced, made more limited, hobbled, slowed, wounded, made more emotionally distant and generally made less than they could have been, at least for a time, sometimes for a long time.

On the other hand, there are love relationships which handle episodes of anger quite well and even make improvements in the relationship by way of anger. Sometimes, in anger, things are brought out that need to be dealt with which would not have been revealed but for the participants getting angry. Sometimes the venting of anger leads to a useful reduction in stress and strain in a love relationship. It is anger that sometimes gives people the power to face and deal with the hardest and most difficult problems effecting a love relationship.

Even in those cases where anger is assistive, it still can be harmfully tension producing and dissonance causing. Some people think there are almost always better ways to handle difficulties than with or through anger. Learning and practicing non-angry, powerful and productive ways to handle difficulties, solve problems and make advancements in a love relationship usually takes a concentrated and sustained mutual effort. Most of those who make that effort are very glad they did because they appear to get far better results in their love relationships than do those who behave with frequent or intense anger.

Love Destructive, Love Constructive and Love Neutral Anger

Ask yourself these questions. When you get angry with a loved one, do you aim your anger at that person? Do you do anger by way of demeaning, degrading, denouncing, condemning, putting your loved ones down, calling them derogatory names and otherwise acting to undermine their sense of worth and value? If you do, you are likely to be engaging in strong, anti-love and love destructive behavior. When you are angry with a loved one, do you engage in threatening behavior? All forms of threatening usually are very love destructive. When angry at a loved one, do you become physically hurtful, harmful or controlling? If you do, the result may be extremely love destructive. A general rule is ‘never touch a loved one when angry’ and, therefore, ‘make all touch love constructive’.

Love relationships only can withstand so many strong, anti-love actions. Are you aware that showing intense anger at a loved one is, more often than not, an anti-love action? Are you also aware that frequently showing anger at a loved one, and infrequently showing love, can be just as destructive. Both the frequency and the intensity of anger must be considered. If the number of anti-love actions exceeds the number of pro-love actions for too long, the love relationship is likely to be seriously damaged or destroyed. With each anti-love anger episode, relationship recovery become less likely. Anti-love actions, born of anger, can be among the most destructive of all anti-love actions. If the anti-love actions, born of anger, are more powerful than the pro-love actions the love relationship is almost sure to be badly damaged.

Not all anger is love destructive in a love relationship, but a much more of it is destructive than most people realize. There are ways for anger to be love-constructive in love relationships, and also for anger to just not have much effect on the love in a love relationship. Actively demonstrated anger against a loved one often can easily become one of the most love ruining kinds of behavior a person can do. Some people vent their anger at the universe, or at substitute targets, but do not use it to attack or act against a loved one. That type of active demonstration of anger sometimes can look quite frightening, but might not be otherwise harmful to the love relationship itself.

Most acute anger in a love relationship means that, prior to the anger, someone experienced strong, emotional hurt, possibly considerable fear and probably mounting frustration. One or both people also may have a desire for those feelings, and the things that brought them on, to go away or change and for things to be better. Contradictory though it seems, it also is likely the angry person hungers to receive a dose of well demonstrated, healing love despite their current anger. That can assist the ‘making up’ process.

Internalized, Suppressed and Repressed Anger

Outwardly expressed anger, frequently causes or triggers arguments, fights, retaliation, desires for vengeance, emotional distancing or debilitating fear and physical distancing and escape. Does that mean that you should hold your anger in and not let it show? No, because repressed, suppressed and internalized anger can be even more love destructive than outwardly expressed anger.

Anger held in can turn into or exacerbate stress illnesses like strokes and heart attacks, or cause neurochemical imbalances resulting in irrational swings in mood, irritability, sleep and appetite disorder, and even serious depression and anxiety problems. Anger held in also tends to result in anger leaking out in the form of passive/aggressive retaliation. That tends to insidiously poison love relationships. To not let anger damage or destroy your love relationships it helps to understand how anger works and what can be done about it.

The Teakettle Understanding

One way to understand anger is to think of a teakettle full of increasing and expanding pressurized steam. If the steam does not vent the teakettle will explode and be destroyed. People who do not vent their strong anger may one day blow up and spew their anger in all directions, and then break down and be very dysfunctional. If people hold in their anger to well, for too long, it may turn into serious depression. That is something like the teakettle blowing out its bottom and collapsing. Another thing that happens to people who hold in there anger too much and too long is they develop a stress related, physical illness. That is a little like a teakettle developing metal fatigue and structural failure at the molecular level.

Arguing with an angry, venting person often is like feeding the fire under the teakettle. It just makes the teakettle have more to vent. Frequently trying to reason and explain to an angry, venting person also just can feed their fire.

Another thing not to do is go stand in front of the venting teakettle spout. If you do you just will get scalded and, therefore, hurt a lot. Likewise, getting right in front of an angry, venting person just may get you hurt or even harmed.

Of course, lots of people faced with an angry, venting person let the teakettle dynamics take them over, and it becomes like two teakettles venting at each other which, of course, does nobody any good.

The best thing to do is to stay out of the stream of steam, and see if you can find a way to turn the fire off, and let the teakettle cool off. Getting the teakettle away from the fire and then cooled off also can help. Then you may be able to deal with it. To help an angry person get away from a ‘fire’ source, let them finish their venting and after that cool down which usually works pretty well. Until then they may be like a teakettle that’s too hot to touch. Loving listening, and not adding anything but supportive caring words may help them cool down faster.

Anger’s Deeper Dynamics

When you get angry it means you felt powerless or insufficiently powerful first, if only for an instant. That triggered your emergency power system which gave you the emergency power we call anger. If you were sufficiently powerful in a situation from the start, you would not get angry. You would handle the situation in an ordinary way, using an ordinary amount of your powers and methods for handling situations in which you desire some change. It is only when you perceive your ordinary powers, skills and methods as insufficient to make something change, that your emergency power comes on and gives you the power of anger.

The power of anger can be very big and incredibly quick. The problem is that it often is very clumsy and full of backfire potential, plus it is not useful for fixing things that are intricate and delicate. Anger is somewhat like a sledgehammer. You would not want to use it to try to fix a broken watch. Thus, anger frequently is counterproductive for fixing love relationship problems which often are intricate and delicate.

Anger’s Big Secret

Did you know that the more often a person feels angry the more powerless (weak & inadequate?) a person feels in their own life. The truly powerful seldom get angry because they just don’t need the clumsy, emergency power called anger very often. Sometimes the truly powerful use fake anger because it is much less clumsy and more manageable than real anger. Otherwise, the truly powerful use their other strengths to get things done and to make the changes they desire. Thus, it is that anger can be seen as indicating pre-existing or underlying weakness. The samurai warriors knew this when they put forth the principal in their code “first to anger, first to die”. They understood that excellence in fighting required being free of the clumsiness and blindness that occurs with anger.

Love Over Anger

The more you develop your skills in using the incredible power of love, the less you will need anger to provide power in your life. The more you develop any and all other skills for human relating, the less you will need anger. Anger will always be there, available if you really need it, sort of like a spare tire, but it best not be something you rely on or use frequently.

If you have a chronic anger problem make an act of healthy self-love and get yourself into an anger management therapy program with a good therapist. If you and a spouse or other loved one keep having destructive, anger episodes interacting with each other, get to a good couples or family therapist who can help you with the teamwork that replaces anger interactions.

There is a lot more to learn about the relationship of anger and love but hopefully this will give you a good base. Other mini-love-lessons having to do with love and anger can be found at this site. You might want to look at “Bull Wrestling, Bull Dancing and Love Quarrels”, “Destroyers of Love – The 7 Big D’s”, “Difficult Topics: A Love-Centered Way to Approach and Broach Them All” and “Touch Only with Love: an Anti-violence Tool”.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Who taught and/or modeled how to be angry for you, and do you really want to be like them?

Starting And Parting Love

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson explains the importance and effects of both good and bad ‘start’ and ‘part’ love actions with short, real-life examples.

How Are Your Start and Part Dynamics?

Sheila and Kim both were looking forward to getting home after work and being with each other.

Sheila had a really hard day and was desiring comforting love.  Kim’s day was pretty boring and Kim was all geared-up for more exciting love.  Soon after they met each other everything seemed to go wrong.  Sheila had imagined a soft, tender, slow start to their evening.  Kim had fantasized an exciting greeting, active playfulness and behaved accordingly right away.  Then Kim saw that Sheila’s face looked disappointed and with displeasure responded with sour tones of voice.  The evening was ruined for both of them.

How could things go so wrong when both started toward their time together with thoughts of love?  What could they do to stop this from happening again?  How could they both get what they wanted with one another when they were in such different emotional places?

Starting on the Same Page

As you can see from the above example, how you start and also how you part can have a great amount of influence on how loving people spend time together.  If you have been away from each other, even for just a few hours, you may both be in very different, psychological places when you come back together.  If you re-enter each other’s space without lovingly greeting and coordinating with each other, you may clash and crash, or at least miss-out on what might have turned out to be good time with each other.  Like singing a duet together, you both have to start by singing the same song or you just make noise, not music.

Love Connecting Actions

Sheila and Kim learned they have to start with ‘lovingly checking-out’ how the other one is feeling and what the other one is wanting, before they start acting from their own agenda, even though both agendas might be love-oriented and generally good.  A good hug and kiss, and saying things like, “hello sweetheart”, “what are you feeling, and what are you wanting” when first encountering each other are good ‘checking out’ strategies.  Then a truthful response and acceptance if there is a difference in a loved one’s psychological place.  Next comes working to synthesize desires.  Maybe for Sheila and Kim they plan an hour of rest and cuddling, after which something more playful might occur.  Maybe they try flipping a coin to see who gets their desires met first.

There are lots of other ways they might proceed after starting well with lovingly checking-in with each other.  The trick is to start with love and good connecting actions.  Good, loving connecting actions can take less than a minute but often determine how the next several hours, or more, may go.  Connecting actions allow you to express your feelings and desires, and find out about the feelings and desires of your loved one.  That allows for coordination, synthesis, and ‘I win, you win’ outcomes.

The Dangers of Unloving Ruts

Lots of couples, family members and friends fall into unloving ruts, in which they are unknowingly expressing indifference to one another, in the way they start and part their encounters.  Couples that once passionately kissed hello and said goodbye the same way, too often get distracted by life’s many ‘to do’s’, and then they barely say hi or goodbye to each other as they come and go.  Thus, they miss-out on the energizing influence possible from their love.  Yes, it may take a tiny bit more time to say hello and goodbye with more love in the message, but doing so helps avoid relationship deterioration, and keeps putting ‘emotional gas’ in each other’s tanks.

The Importance of Parting with Love

When two people who love each other, take about 30 seconds or less, to really hold and kiss each other goodbye when they go off to work or wherever else they may be going, they are likely to come back together sooner and better.  This is true even when they may be gone from each other for relatively short periods.  Parting love also tends to make whatever they are doing next, done better.  Remember, love works like an energizing, healthy food.  Parting without a love-conveying-action is like going somewhere after skipping a regular meal.  You may do okay enough, but with a dose of love nourishment you will be stronger.  Without it, you may become easily irritable, annoyed and aggravated.

Saying goodbye with a really good hug and a genuine kiss, rather than something brief and perfunctory, sets up your next time together, and is more likely to be a time of mutual enrichment.  Beware of saying the same words every time; they can loose their meaning and power.  Be creative with hello and goodbye words; you may see a surprised response which probably will show that your love words have been soaked-up better.

Of course, if the time you are likely to be apart is going to be longer, bigger doses of love may be in order.  Good loving goodbyes also tend to help ensure your love bond with each other will stay strong while you are apart.

As always Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question: If you think you don’t ‘start and part with love’ well enough, have you figured out what might be stopping you, and what you are going to do about that?

False Love Awareness

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson first gives you three quick examples of what can happen with false love; then tells of how false love is a lost and re-found concept; next touches on usual, common false love disasters; followed by some ways to protect yourself and loved ones from such disasters.

Has Something Like This Happened to You?

Enthusiastically, and to everyone she met, Audrey professed her love for Bobby saying, “I know I will love him forever”. Six months later she broke it off to pursue a relationship with CJ. Dietrich and Elizabeth both absolutely knew they were in true love with one another because their feelings for each other were so strong and not like anything they had ever experienced with anyone else before.

Two years after their marriage they were in divorce court wondering why those feelings had vanished. Faith and George had fallen in love with each other at first sight. Their first months together were so very ideal, romantic and oh so passionate. They were totally certain true love had finally come their way.

A few years later neither one of them understood how Faith could have become so involved in a torrid affair with Harold, a married man with children. Now after much anguish and struggle, followed by reasonably good counseling all these couples came to the same answer as to why things went the way they did. All of them, independently, discovered they were led astray by one form or another of highly deceptive and destructive false love. They all then went to work on how not to do that again, plus how to grow and get into healthy, real love.

The Lost and Re-Found Concept

At various times in history, it has been common knowledge and common practice to consider the issue of true or real love versus false love. Not so very long ago there were magazine articles, books, lectures, panel discussions, sermons and many late-night, private, intimate discussions about this very topic. When this was a common focus people seemed to have been more careful about deciding whether they were in a state of real love or something else. Lots of different terms were used to indicate that easily and quickly concluding that one was in love might be unwise and even dangerous – terms like enamored, moonstruck, smittened, love sick, having a crush, a dalliance or fancy (still used in the UK), and my favorite, twitterpated. All of these, and others, at least seem to have helped open the mind to the possibility that something other than true, lasting love could be occurring.

Perhaps because of the modern tendency to quicken, shorten and simplify everything, or perhaps because the ‘love’ word came to be a synonym for sex, or because it became popular to say that love was indefinable and, therefore, false love was indefinable too, these terms and related topics dropped from common usage and consideration. Once in a while one still hears the word ‘infatuation’ and newer terms like ‘main squeeze’ and ‘significant other’ which can imply that the existence of love is still in question. Some think it would be quite good for the older terms to come back so that we would have more categories to think of besides just ‘in love’ or not.

Thanks to modern science and much improved understandings and definitions of love, the subject of ‘real love’ versus ‘false love’ is once again something that can be productively considered (See Definitions of Love).

False Love Disasters

False love can be seen as the cause of many divorces, many ‘broken hearts’, many addiction relapses, many betrayals, many deceits, many violent abuses, many wasted efforts, many neglected children and spouses, many severely hurtful episodes and no small number of love relationship-related suicides and murders. It has been common to see all these kinds of problems as stemming from individual mental illnesses, personal inadequacies, character flaws, personality disorders and the like.

Increasingly research into relational dynamics shows that interrelational syndromes and mutual patterns of maladaptive interaction, influenced by certain kinds of relationally triggered, bad brain chemistry may be more the root cause, or at least a strong contributor to what is happening in these personal disasters. False love syndromes seem able to happen to mentally healthy individuals as well as others. The well-adjusted, do indeed, also have love disasters, as do the highly intelligent and otherwise successful people.

False love Protection

If you develop a good awareness of how the various forms of false love can seduce, trap and harm you, and an awareness of how healthy, real love is different from false love, you may be able to protect yourself from false love relationship disasters and their accompanying, considerable agony. If you teach your children about the possibilities of false love, you may help protect them from false love disasters. If you go to the trouble to learn about ‘real love’ and ‘false love’, you may help protect yourself and others from relationship calamities. If you talk-over with friends and family what you are learning and ideas about ‘real love’ and ‘false love’, your understandings and awareness are likely to grow considerably. By doing these things you can protect yourself and help protect your loved ones.

See mini-love-lessons concerning various forms of False Love below.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Who would be a good person you know to have a discussion with concerning ‘real love’ and ‘false love’? Will you initiate that discussion?

Related posts:

1. False Forms of Love: Thrill and Threat Bonding
2. False Forms of Love – Imprint Mating Syndrome
3. False Forms of Love: Unresolved Conflict Attraction Syndrome
4. Healthy Real Love -or- Toxic False Love
5. False Forms of Love: Shadow Side Attachments