Trust Recovery and Love

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson begins by introducing the surprising side of recovering trust in love relationships; continues with the re-trust gamble of love; re-trust and anti-love; and ends with the good news about re-trusting.

The Surprising Side of Recovering Trust in Love Relationships

In an individual counseling session I asked Daniel, which was he the most upset about, his wife’s affair itself or her dishonesty and deception in keeping it hidden from him?

He thought for a few moments and then said, “It’s hard for me to divide the two but I can forgive the affair itself.  After all I drove her to it with my loveless neglect and by being a mean alcoholic.  What I cannot yet get past is all her many outright lies, and complete and apparently easy total phoniness.

Once she was calling me to come to bed with her and at the very same time she was texting him a love message.  I don’t know if I ever can get over that one.  I feel stupid, weak, and very vulnerable to it all happening again.  That makes me fear I won’t be able to handle the pain if it does happen again.  It might make me relapse which could kill me because it nearly did before I got into AA and recovery.”

I then said to Daniel, “So, maybe it’s yourself you don’t trust also?  You don’t trust that you will be able to handle what your wife might again present you with – deception and betrayal?  Daniel thought about that for a bit and then replied, “I guess that’s true because she is doing everything that can be done to show me she loves me, and she is sounding really dedicated to living a life of truth and never cheating again.  Consciously I mostly believe her.

What I see now is that I don’t trust or believe in myself.  If she had another affair and I found out about it, the pain could drive me into a relapse.  If I survived that, it still could turn me back into that mean alcoholic again, driving her away from me and maybe into another man’s arms.  I fear I also could hound her with angry accusations and suspicions, spy on her, and withhold my love so much it might do the same thing.  To trust her again I have to be able to trust myself, and I don’t.  Now I see another thing.  Way down deep inside I think I don’t trust that I have what it takes to keep her loving me and be enough for her.  So, naturally I think I could easily lose her to somebody better than me.  Way down deep that’s what really scares me!

In the next couples, conjoint sessions, Daniel shared all this with his wife.  She responded with love and reassurance, and together they went forward working on not only healing their relationship but also worked on each of them growing their own healthy self-love and the sense of strong worthwhileness which that brings.  Now years later, they are together still working on growing their love even more.

The Re-Trust Gamble of Love

Trust recovery and rebuilding after an affair, or any other kind of being seriously wounding occurrence in a love relationship, takes making some big gambles.  None of us knows the future for sure, and the past often does tend to repeat itself.  We can say we do, or do not believe our beloved will do something that acutely hurts us again but that is not truly knowable.  I suggest trust is not so much about belief and certainty, as it is about gambling.  We have to gamble on our loved one treating us with truth and abiding by their pledges.

We have to gamble on our own ability not to sabotage their ‘recovering trust efforts’, or our own efforts to recover trust.  We have to gamble on our own love-worthiness and love ability.  We have to gamble that as a couple (as a loving team) we can win together better than we may have done in the past.  We have to gamble on each other and on our own strength to survive the hard spots.  Let me also suggest that trust is something ‘we live’ much more than it is something we believe or feel certain about.

If we decide we don’t have what it takes to make the gamble of re-trusting, or it just is too dangerous and unlikely to work, then we probably have to part ways as best we can.  If I don’t believe in my own ability to be of high value and worth enough to merit faithfulness, then perhaps I am likely to set myself up for betrayal.  It is not just a matter of re-trusting someone else.  It also is a matter of trusting yourself to handle what may come your way.

Re-Trust and Anti-Love

If you want to be sure to destroy your chances of growing, repairing or rebuilding trust in a love relationship, obviously start by suspecting and saying something negative about every little thing that can be interpreted as ‘maybe he or she is doing something you would not want them to do’.  Then add a lot of accusations, blame, insults, guilt trips, judgmentalism, angry rejection and general rudeness, and to top it off play the role of the ever suffering martyr.  Or you can switch to the role of the righteous wronged victim, followed by being emotionally cold and distant.  You also can do a lot of invading privacy, spying and do a lot of actions trying to catch your beloved doing something wrong so you can attack them for it.

For love’s sake, I hope you do not choose any of these anti-love behaviors.

It is not that you should avoid talking about what anyone did or what happened.  However, talking about it in the ways just mentioned can be regarded as anti-love actions, more likely to destroy than rebuild trust or love.  Honest, straightforward work to understand and learn from what happened so that in the future you both can do better is a healthier way to go.  Then mix that with honest, emotional expression but also with some restraint so as not to cause more harm.  Remember, all things can be and are best said with love (see entry “Say it with Love”).  Ask for and freely give lots of love-filled reassurance and forgiveness to each other and to yourselves.  That is usually what it takes to go forward together, rebuilding trust and stronger love.

The Good News about Re-Trust

The majority of committed couples sooner or later face an affair, cheating or an unfaithfulness issue.  Concerning infidelity, research results I have seen vary from about 52% of marriages up to 80% of marriages, and it is just as high for unmarried committed couples.  The majority of those couples stay together, work it through, often making their love relationship better than it was before and, thus, make their life of re-trusting work successfully.  It often takes a great deal of joint teamwork and of course lots of love well shown.  In my opinion this work is best done through couples conjoint counseling, mixed with some individual counseling.

I once did some research that showed individual counseling leads to individual results, not joint results, thus, individual counseling alone may not produce the couple results you hope for.  Nevertheless, in the developed nations, the preponderance of recent research results suggests that in the majority of cases infidelity does not lead to permanent breakups among committed couples – unmarried or married.

As always, Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Do you regard yourself as strong enough to forgive?

Related posts:

1. Trust and Mistrust in Love 

The Fourth Key Is Love

Synopsis: First we introduce the four wondrous, summation keys for a full long life; then we talk about ‘Aiming’ your love; unlearning issues; the biggest love lie; a great truth about love; and finally, paths by which to love more.

Four Keys to a Good, Long Life

Are you Interested in living a full, long, healthy life?

There are four keys, according to Dr. Dean Ornish, a much noted physician whose research and many publications, including his excellent book Love and Survival, focuses on living healthfully longer and having a high-quality, enriched life. After reviewing a huge number of studies, he concluded that living well and longer can be boiled down to four major areas in which your actions can make an enormous difference. There are two big areas to do more of and two other big areas to do less of.

For people in the developed world, the number one key is eat less, the number two key is move more, the number three key is stress less and the fourth key is love more! The next issue to ponder is how to do well in each of those four, big, key areas? There are lots of subcomponents you can learn about from many sources concerning diet, exercise and stress management. But what about love? Well, if you have been reading many entries on site you know that there are many components, factors and applications you can learn concerning love, and that is what we are focusing on here.

Aiming to Love More

Loving more is probably going to take you thinking more about love, actively studying more about love and, most of all, practicing love actions more. It also helps to have a lot of love questions to ask yourself, and maybe talk them over with others. Questions like: Who and what are you going to love more? How much do you know about all the actions that convey love? What do you do about receiving love? What is your involvement with altruistic love? Are you good at love adventures? How much do you know about the differences between real and false love? Indeed, there are at least 1000 more questions to get excited about, and enriched by, as you search and find answers. You might want to start by thinking of where is it best for you to begin to aim your love efforts? Also, exactly how will you increase your love studying and learning?

Unlearning May Also Be Necessary

Unfortunately, there are many false teachings, destructive cultural messages, misleading traditions and counterproductive societal norms which may have gotten into your head concerning love. All those may lead you to fail at love. It seems we are just now beginning to start understanding what makes healthy, real love. Interestingly, down through the ages there are many ‘wisdom Masters’ who seem to have known all along what science is just now discovering. Then there is false love and its several syndromes lurking there to lead you astray. You may have to examine what has gotten into your head that you might need to unlearn. Without unlearning the falsehoods you can’t go freely onto the better knowledge about ‘loving more’. (To help you with that, look at the entries on this site, in the Subject Index under Love Myths).

The Biggest Lie About Love

One false teaching or understanding about love deserves special attention. It comes in lots of different variations. Basically, it is the myth that says “love is all done by mysterious, perhaps supernatural magic which is out of your control and, therefore, there is nothing you can really do about love. It is all done by luck, fate, the stars, one deity or another, or who knows what. If you are a ‘star-crossed lover’, or just unlucky at love, well too bad, you lose, and that is all there is to it.” However, I suspect you don’t really believe that or you would not be reading this right now.

If you even subconsciously or semi-consciously sort of think that big lie might be true, you can be in danger of that belief (or suspicion) becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even worse, that myth might guide you away from learning all the many, wonderful things there are to learn about love which actually work, and which can help you grow your own great love successes.

A Great Truth About The Fourth Key

Love is natural but how to get it, give it, grow it and share it is learned. Some people are lucky enough to grow up in a very loving family, and they subconsciously learn all this at an early age because love-success actions were repeatedly modeled for them throughout their upbringing. The rest of us can consciously work to learn how to love well and love more, much like we learn everything else important. We purposely study it, and we explore it, and experiment with it to find what works for us, and then we practice, practice, practice! Both modern science and the wisdom of the ancients point to this truth about love.

Love like food is natural but there’s a tremendous amount you can learn to do about it. Teaching how to love better and more is a major component in the great religions of the world. The natural phenomenon of love is increasingly becoming evident in the brain and other medical related sciences. Learning to love well and more also can increasingly be seen in the behavioral sciences. Even in behavioral economics, love is being studied so it can be understood and accomplished better and more. (Read The Psychology and Economics of Happiness Love, Life And Positive Living by Prof. Lok Sang Ho, head of the Department of Economics at Lingnan University, Hong Kong).

Paths to Loving More

First of all you can do what you doing right now, and that is read. There is a lot written about love and some of it is pretty worthwhile. Another thing you can do is join with other people who have a love-centered orientation or involvement. That could mean a really deep, loving, friendship network; a voluntary effort trying to lovingly assist some group of people who need one sort of help or another; joining with those involved in a life betterment cause and for which love provides a method or some form of real “ministry”.

Meditation and prayer have provided many people with a sort of core loving approach which then stretches out to all they contact. Applying yourself in multiple kinds of love, of which there are quite a few, works well for many. You can start by reading entries at this site on kinds of love which is found in the Subject Index. Learning to center yourself in love, and come from love toward each major area of your life is another kind of path toward loving more.

Deciding to enlarge the number of ways you show love, choosing to magnifying the intensity of your demonstrations of love, and refining and elaborating the quality by which you do love actions, all can get you on a path toward loving more. Some people keep expanding their number of love targets, but remember one of your love targets needs to be yourself. Part of healthy self-love can be striving to eat less, move more and stress less and, thus, you will be using all four keys to a good, long life.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Of all the people, creatures and other entities you personally have involvement with, which would be your best target for loving more first?

Friendship "Like" to Friendship "Love"

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

Who Is a Friend?

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

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

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

What’s Friendship to You?

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

How to Think Better about Friendship?

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

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

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

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

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

The Growing Good News about Friendship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

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

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?