Lying to Protect Those You Love ???

Synopsis: Understanding ‘protection lying’ starts this mini-love-lesson; which flows into the usual destruction issue; then a fundamental principle; the question of good lies; two kinds of lie; how lies cause distancing; lying as an act against yourself; and then ends with the good news.

Protection – Really?

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to hurt your feelings”.  In my work with couples and families I think I must have heard this 1000 times.  Once in a while it is totally true, but usually there is more to it than that.  “I did not tell you because I wanted to save us both from the horrible feelings we would have to go through once you knew the truth”.

That kind of statement is often more real.  “I lied because you would punish me and I hoped to escape that punishment”,  “You would not let do what I wanted to do, so lying to you was the only way to get to do it”, “If I told you the truth, you’d think it meant I didn’t love you”, “You would not love me anymore, so I had to lie to you”, “You would leave me if I told you the truth, so I had to lie”, “I was afraid you’d hate me forever, and I wasn’t brave enough to risk that, so I lied to you a lot”.  These are often deeper truths that sadly often go unsaid, until it is too late.

So often the protection is mostly, or only, for the one telling the lie, and not really for the loved one, but that is not always true.  Sometimes it is for both.  When we think of telling a lie to protect a loved one, making sure it is not a lie we are telling ourselves gets to be very important.  So, be honest enough with yourself to check that out with yourself.

The Usual Destruction

Jesse angrily said, “Why did you lie to me about your smoking again?”.  Robin replied, “I’ll stop and never do it again; I promise”.  With dismay Jesse said, “That’s not the point.  Smoke if you must, but don’t lie to me about it.  Your lying makes me think you’re not going to be able to be truthful to me about – about anything, for all I know.  Maybe you don’t even mean it when you say you love me.  Is that a lie too, or is it that you just don’t have the guts to be real with me?  Maybe you’re just a coward, or a fake, and not the person I thought you were!”.

In this interchange between Jesse and Robin, you can see their whole relationship is starting to be undermined and perhaps destroyed, and all because of a fairly unimportant lie.  Lying, not the smoking, is the far bigger, destructive issue.  That is so often the destructive problem in so many love relationships.

A Fundamental Principle

Telling the truth may indeed cause trouble, and lying might dodge that, but lying often risks much greater trouble.  Deceit, deception, things left out, minimizing parts, magnifying other parts, purposeful distortions, and out-and-out lies, all risk damage being done to the relationship that exists between the one attempting deception and the possibly deceived.  All forms of deception may harm the love and the love relationships you have, sometimes irreparably.

Are There Good Lies?

The agonized and sobbing mother stated, “If only I had lied to him.  I told him our daughter was pregnant by her boyfriend, and he flew into a rage; I know he didn’t really mean to kill her, but he did.  If only I had lied”.  Yes, if it would have saved her daughter’s life, she should have lied, but under the intense stress and threat of the situation she did the only thing she knew to do, tell the truth.  Lying to protect life and avoid serious danger is sometimes the only safe thing people can figure out to do.

If you are dealing with a person prone to violence and inflicting serious damage to others, safeguarding health and well-being, even with deception, is the greater good.  However, if the only thing that is likely to happen is a lot of emotional discomfort and dissonance, truth can be the upsetting but safer thing to present.  Now, if you’re lying to pull off a surprise birthday party, or something like that, sure, that’s OK.  But if you are lying just to avoid your own discomfort or disadvantage, lying probably is not OK, and it can be dangerous to your relationship.

Two Kinds of Lies

There is lying or deceiving to avoid, and lying to acquire.  Each can be harmful to a love relationship.  The avoiding kind of lying seems to be more common.  Lying to avoid hurt (i.e. harm, displeasure, getting caught, punishment, restriction, deprivation, time consumption, struggle, stress, etc.) probably is the most common type in love relationships.  Lying to acquire advantage (i.e. illicit pleasure, forbidden fruit, unequal treatment, undue privilege, secrecy, manipulation of others to their disadvantage, ego boosting, unearned respect, envy, status, undeserved position or wealth, etc.) can be just as disastrous, and sometimes even more harmful than lying to avoid.  Some lies and deceptions are simultaneously both ‘lying to avoid’ and ‘lying to acquire’.  Here is an example.

Geraldine didn’t want to be caught cheating on her husband because she feared a divorce would result, their children would be harmed, and her lifestyle substantially reversed.  So she lied and practiced all sorts of other deceptions.  At the same time, she wanted the feelings of being loved more and better, she also wanted the wilder and kinkier sex, a greater sense of adventure, and the more frequent ego boosts she experienced with her lover.  So her lies and deceptions were both to avoid and to acquire.  However, the cost was great.

Stress and stress illness, anxiety, guilt, secret shame and sheer time consumption increasingly ruined her life.  After her stress-induced stroke she entered self-examination counseling and discovered that keeping up the lies, telling more lies to cover the old ones, keeping everything straight, constantly having to create new ways of deceiving were what really caused the most stress, and did her in.  In couples and family therapy she learned her husband was willing to do much more in those areas and eventually all was fixed.  With truthful living she recovered into a real and loving marriage.  However, it took years.

How Lies Cause Distance

‘Making love naked is usually making love more and better than making love with clothes on’ is both a physical and a psychological truth.  When you lie you make part of you covered, disguised and unavailable for intimate knowing.  Therefore, that part of you is unavailable for love.  It goes love-starved and divided off from the rest of you and from those who love you.  Do that a lot, or in really big ways, and you may find the real you is not even there anymore.  You have so ‘covered the you’ that needs love the most, and it is all alone, and maybe someone you love is very alone too.

Lies tend to distance us from one another, and an otherwise workable love relationship becomes a role-played fake.  That does not always happen, and some people manage to pull it off pretty well, but never without some damage.  The distancing caused by lying and deceiving can lead to love starvation which brings on a great deal of depression and anxiety, even when one gets away with the deceptions.  Relapses into addictions are also common.

Lying As an Act Against Yourself

We lie to do or get something we want, or that we do not want to experience.  Maybe what we want is, indeed, to protect a loved one from some hurt or harm.  If the lie repeatedly succeeds that can bring on a habit to deceive.  Maybe our deceptions keep working but then later we know we are lying to someone we love.  That can cause us to dislike and demean ourselves.  In doing so, we can grow a sense of unworthiness and self disgust which in turn becomes self-destructive, as well as relationship destructive.  Lessening your self-respect and healthy self love does not help anyone or help any love relationship.

The Good News

The good news is you can make amends.  Now, it may be that your lies if revealed will do more harm than good.  Be careful there.  It is so easy for that to be a lie we tell ourselves.  But if it is true you can figure out a way to make amends in some alternate, unrevealing fashion, then you can work to grow your inner strength to the point of being able to live truthfully.  Lying, even to protect others, can weaken us.  Grow strong with healthy self-love and you can be brave enough to live in truth.  Truth and love work together so much better than do love and lies.
As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
When you lie to a loved one, if you do, what are you most usually trying to avoid or to acquire?  And do you truly need those things whatever they are.  And could you be brave enough to handle some unpleasantness instead of lying to someone you love?

Related posts:

1. Lies And Love
2. Respect – As a Love Skill 

Holding Hands with Love

Synopsis: This mini-love-lessons starts with questions you may not have thought of concerning holding hands; then works to help you examine your own inner programming concerning hand holding and love; and what you can do with this knowledge; and more.

Questions of Holding Hands

Have you ever given thought to how you hold hands with someone you love?  Do you know how you want your hand held by someone who loves you?  Do you, like many, want your hand held differently depending on how you feel at the time?  Are you good at conveying love via holding the hand of a loved one? Are you good at letting yourself feel loved when your hands are held by someone loving you?  Do you hold hands quite frequently, just every so often, or rarely?  Why?

Are there people, family members, dear friends, etc. you love that you would not hold hands with?  Why?  Did you grow up in a family, neighborhood or culture where there was a lot of the holding of hands going on, or the reverse?  Do you hold a loved one’s hands more or less for the same amount of time as what was going on around you when you were growing up, or do you know?  Would you, or the one you are most likely to hold hands with, desire more frequent or different holding hands experiences?

You might wonder, why ponder all these questions over such a simple thing as holding hands.  The reason is, holding hands is a major way to show and share love, and there is a lot more to it than you might think.

Hands: The Great Tools of Artful Love

Our hands are incredible!  Our hands have millions of nerve endings capable of receiving a vast array of stimulations, both physical and psychological.  Through the hands the emotion centers of the brain can be triggered into feeling a great many different things, including feeling loving and loved.  With touch, including the holding of hands, we are capable of giving messages of love that can vary from delicate and tender to strong and powerful.

Holding hands can convey comfort, support, security, connectedness, shared joy, playfulness, cherishing, enthusiasm, sensuality and, of course, with these emotions hands can convey love itself.  Holding hands, therefore, can be part of the way people come to experience the many emotions of love together.

The artful lover can vary holding hands by greater or lesser palm pressure, intertwining fingers, squeezing or giving very soft touch, and many other subtle, small movements.  In making these variations, different emotions may be felt and conveyed or triggered.  There is some evidence to suggest that people who love each other may experience a neuro–electrical interchange and harmonizing phenomena when holding hands.  That, in turn, may have something to do with feelings of being bonded together or feeling deeply united.

The Many Ways of Holding Hands with Love

Holding hands side-by-side, two hands holding one hand, two hands holding two hands, holding hands walking together, holding hands sitting side-by-side, holding hands in the moonlight, holding one hand as you lay back and relax after making love, holding hands as you pray or meditate together, holding hands at times of mutual excitement and exultation, holding hands at times of sorrow, holding hands at times of celebration, holding hands when one is in pain, and holding hands during day-to-day ordinary life: all these, and many more, can be times of hand holding with love.  Each of those times can be moments of cherished, precious nurturing and united loving by way of holding hands.

The Importance of Place and Situation

Frequently holding hands in special places and situations enhances the sharing and connecting of those who love each other.  Hand holding also assists in generating more love and more lasting love.  When needed, hand holding also can be very helpful to love’s healing influence.  This healing effect often can facilitate the repair of a wounded relationship, or aid a troubled person, or even be assistive to physical healing.

Holding hands while looking at awesomely beautiful, natural wonders frequently is said to double the pleasure of the viewing experience.  Also often reported, hand holding assists the people who are holding each other’s hands to connect, not only to each other but to the transcendental, the universal and the divine.  Whether they are holding hands while looking at the natural wonder of a gorgeous mountain range, or a newborn baby, or are looking into each other’s eyes, this metaphysical or spiritual sense of connection is enhanced by their hands connecting.

Holding hands in the hospital, in a place of worship and reverence, at a funeral, in a court room, at a graduation, in a place of danger, or in any other place or situation of special significance, hand holding has been known to make major differences in how people feel in those experiences.  So, if you are going to make good use of holding hands to give, receive and generate love, give some thought to place and situation.

Examining Your Holding Hands’ Program

Around the world people grow up with different hand holding customs and cultural training.  In some countries, societies, cultures and subcultures, and also in some families, there are strong social rules governing the do’s and don’t’s of holding hands.  In some, the rule is ‘no public showing of physical affection’.  In others, the rule is ‘no public male with female physical contact’, including the holding of hands; but in some of those female with female public hand holding is acceptable, and in some not.

In some communities it is quite common and acceptable for men to hold hands and in others it is forbidden.  In still others, men holding hands is considered homosexual and okay, and in others it is just friendly.  Then there are those places where any signs of affection between men is forbidden, and in a few countries even illegal and could lead to imprisonment, public flogging and even execution.

Almost everywhere these rules are under attack and are slowly changing.  These changes, however, are meeting with a great deal of resistance in various localities.  Anyone holding hands, other than a child’s hands, may be scolded by local elders and authorities in some places.  Fathers and grandfathers holding teenager’s hands is considered quite inappropriate and suspicious in some lands.  The more conservative religious leaders of a number of faiths preach and teach against holding hands, except with one’s legitimate spouse and only in private.  In other religious settings holding hands is accepted, or encouraged, or actually is part of certain ceremonies.

In many places, a sort of new rule seems to be being offered.  It is something like ‘holding hands, and lots of other physical affection between any two or more people, in any place is a good thing because it helps make our world a more loving world’.  All of these rules, standards, customs, etc. have a programming effect in the subconscious of many people, perhaps including you.

If you have not already, we urge you to raise into your conscious awareness, the training or programming effects of your own upbringing and cultural influences.  Then see if you are unknowingly abiding by that programming and, if so, do you consciously wish to alter it?  Will making some changes regarding holding hands improve the giving, getting and generating of love in your love relationships?  That is how you might use this knowledge.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Are you now going to experiment with more holding hands with someone you love?

Kissing with Love

Synopsis: We start with a kiss puzzle; then address a kiss learning question and give steps you might want to take along with some important things to consider about love-filled kissing; then we go on to great kiss reception; and some thoughts about what could get in the way; then we end with a personal challenge question.

A Kissing Puzzle

“His kisses are so filled with love,” Angela sighed.  “There’s something about the way she kisses me that makes me feel like I am really loved and really special,” Brad affirmed.  “The way he kisses me is totally hot and sexy, and it really turns me on.  But I don’t feel any love in it,” Claire protested. 

Donald moaned, “my lover is such a romantic kisser.  The trouble is it’s just romance.  I don’t feel any love in it”.  “Evelyn sighed and said, “I wish when I kiss or get kissed there was something more to it.  It’s nice but it’s always kind of blah; no sex, no romance and nothing I’d call kissing with love feelings”.

What is going on or not going on for the people who made those statements about kissing?  Is there a problem in the way they kiss or the way their partners kiss?  Is it that love’s magic is sometimes in the kiss and sometimes not?  Does it have something to do with the way they saw kisses done in the families they grew up in?   Does it have something to do with the mood or attitude at the time of kissing?  Is the answer in their neurochemistry?  Were they, as children, somehow traumatized with kissing?  Do some people have good kissing teachers and some not?  Are all of them in some type of false love and so they just can’t feel any real love?

The answer to the above questions is – maybe all of these things and other answers too. Biochemistry is likely to be part of it because the saliva in people who are feeling love and the people who are not feeling love is perhaps rather different.  There also may be tiny neuro-electrical differences sensed only in the non-conscious mind.  Definitive research on this has yet to be done.

Can We Learn to Make Our Kisses More Love Filled?

I think the answer to this is probably yes, and you really have to put your heart into it.  Here are three ways and some additional things to think about that may help you do the giving, the getting and the growing of real love through kissing.

∙    First, before you do anything else, take a few seconds to center yourself in your love for the person you are about to kiss. (See mini-love-lesson “Love Centering Yourself”).  You might want to use mental imaging, or something similar, and fantasize your love pouring up from your heart and across to your loved one through your kiss.

∙    Along with love centering yourself, mentally see yourself putting everything else out of your mind except your love.

∙    As a you start to kiss purposefully, tell yourself you are opening yourself to letting your love out and your loved one’s love in.  You are filling with love and pouring love into your beloved.  You both are wonderfully saturated with love.  Focus on those or similar thoughts as you begin the kiss.  Then just feel what you feel.

Here are some additional things you might want to give thought to.
Kissing with love often begins with the eyes and the facial expressions of love. Sometimes looking at someone with love, especially if they are looking back with love, is done at some distance and sometimes it starts just inches away from each other.  These looks may be of tenderness, may be intense, may be caring, or may be a sweet happy smile.

∙    How you move toward someone to kiss them is important too.  The movement toward starting a love-filled kiss often is a bit slow but very direct.  The slowness helps the other person mentally and emotionally start to psychologically connect with you before the physical kiss actually happens.  The directness helps them mentally and emotionally feel that energized intimacy is starting to happen with you.  Fast surprise kisses also can convey love but usually not with the precious, cherishing feelings of the kisses that are approached more slowly and directly.

∙    Closing the eyes first on the part of the recipient, and then the initiator, often helps.  This allows a fuller focus on the feeling of the kiss and the emotions that come with it, without visual distraction or interference.

∙    Touching with hands, arms and body are also important to creating a love-filled kiss.  With a loving embrace, the kiss becomes a total body experience.  Caresses, so long as they are not too sexual, holding hands, and light fingertip gliding touches on the back, neck, cheeks, arms, etc. can assist a person feeling this really is about being loved.

∙    The length of time the kiss takes also has importance.  Usually lingering a bit, and truly savoring the experience, and not darting away too soon helps to both convey love and receive love feelings.
∙    Be aware of lip pressure and movement.  Kissing can be very light and tender, or more firm and passionate.  It kind of depends on what a person likes and wants to feel.  In the love-filled kiss, there may be some lip movement but again it is important for it not to be too sexual so that it can be really about love first and most.

∙    Parting from the kiss is the next important part.  After lips part, it usually is important to keep looking into the eyes of the person you have just kissed and continuing to lovingly touch them with your hands for a bit, then slowly pull apart while really savoring the experience.  That often is very enhancing to the love feelings possible.

Those are pretty specific instructions.  What I want to convey is for you to make kissing a love-filled art.  You may prefer eyes open – fine.  Your partner may not like the face touched much, that is OK.  Talk about your kisses, then give and ask for what you really like, as long as ‘love’ is the main ingredient.

Receiving a Love-Filled Kiss

How well do you think you receive a love-filled kiss?  Do you respond in kind?  Do you really focus on opening to the love coming in?  Do you let yourself feel fully and really loved?  Do you think things like “I’m really being loved at this moment”?  Do you think you really savor, digest, absorb and let yourself intensely experience the kissing with love you are receiving?  Are you able to be ‘in the here and now’, and nowhere else as you are kissed and kiss back?  Remember, receiving love well is a major way to give love.

What Can Get in the Way

Lots and lots of things can get in the way and block love being given, received and generated in a kiss.  Fear and its cousins, apprehension and anxiety, can do it.  Self-doubt, self-consciousness, feeling unworthy, insecurity and allowing distraction can operate to deprive you of the love experience in a kiss.  Coming from habit instead of love may dilute the kiss for both of you.  Worry about anything, trying to impress, focusing in the future or the past, guilt, duty, work, embarrassment, shame connected to anything, feeling clumsy, awkward, inferior or superior, all can take you away from fully experiencing the kiss and the love that may be coming with it.

Letting any of these things occur can crowd your mind and prevent you from fully feeling a love-filled kiss.  That can make the experience far less than you both might want it to be.  It also can have a negative effect on the person you are being kissed by.  Any of these things might make you pull away too soon, or make you move in some less than loving way.  Such movements can be interpreted as rejection, repulsion, discomfort with intimacy, valuing the person kissing you as relatively unimportant, or in some other way sending an anti-love message.

So, as you think about these things, how are you doing at giving, getting and growing love through love-filled kissing?

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Who are you going to kiss next, and how are you perhaps going to make it a truly love-filled kiss?

LOVE As Your Word Guide

Free Mini-Love-Lesson #282

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson gives a way to remember a little listening-well formula using a meaning for each letter of the word LOVE.

Listening With Your Heart

It has been said that listening is the first duty of love. To listen to another person, with love, is an action-filled event. It is a mistake to think of it as a passive or non-moving thing. No, listening with love means constantly communicating you are with the person who is talking and letting them know your emotional feelings about what they have just said. You do this through expressional (nonverbal) communication -- good eye contact, nodding your head, making small arm and hand gestures, smiling, frowning, sad looks, looks of curiosity, interest and care, wide-eyed, leaning forward and sometimes touching.

Small sounds of care, surprise, interest and the like, and once in a while giving a single, affirmative word like "yes" are all involved.  Showing expressions on your face and with your hands and tones of voice that demonstrate you are emotionally in-tune with the emotions of the person you are listening to and that you are feeling care for that person is crucial.

Observing Through Another’s Eyes

Really try to see what they see and understand what they understand in the way they understand it.  Suspending your own ideas, evaluations and judgment; just see what they see as much as you possibly can -- that is part of loving them.  You can add yourself later.  Be able to reflect back to them anything they say at any given point.  That also helps you not to do rehearsal thinking about what you are going to say next instead of really hearing them.

Valuing The Positives

As you listen, look for what is positive about this person and what might be positive in anything they are saying.  Don't ignore the negative but rather focus more on the positives.  From time to time as you listen, you may include some brief comment on a positive.  Later you can say more.  If you say things about anything negative, make it shorter than what you say about the positives.  Be sure to put more energy into your tone of voice when you are talking about the positives than the energy you put in saying something about a negative.

Enact Love with Empathy and Energy

Empathy is the skill of having similar or corresponding feelings to the emotions someone else is experiencing.  It establishes heartfelt connection and communicates you are, at a heart level, more deeply and truly WITH another.  To enact your empathy is to show it as well as state it.  If you cry for the pain of someone you love as they cry, if you laugh for the happiness of someone you love who is laughing and if you frown or look puzzled when someone you love is struggling with a puzzle of their life, you are enacting your empathy.  If your voice tones contain the sound of care when you say you care, then your voice tones empathetically communicate probably more than your words. 

Vigorously, tenderly, serenely, lovingly and with every other corresponding emotion they experience, be actively with those you love.  Then maybe add some hugs or any other action that conveys your feelings are similarly connected with their feelings.

Remember, feeling love is only part of the love experience.  Doing love is the rest.  So, the next time you are with someone you love, you might want to remember the word LOVE and do what each of the letters stands for, according to this word guide.  Then, sequentially do them and see what happens.

One more thing

If you talk-over the ideas in this mini-love-lesson with another, it will help to implant them in your own head and maybe in their's which is a good thing, we think. If you do that, please mention our site as the source of a whole lot of ways love can be done and done better. Thank you.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love success question: Are you a student of good listening skills?

Replacement Fear in Love Relationships

Synopsis: We start with the case of the off-target surgeon; and then go on to what replacement fear really is; three places it comes from; and we end with what can be done about it.

The Case of the Off-Target Surgeon

With confused anger and dismay the surgeon told me how his wife had insisted he rid himself of his best nurse because she was just too personal with him.

She also insisted that he get a male massage therapist to replace the female one he had been getting massages from for years.  Not only that, but his wife had begun to complain about his female accountant who had been doing a great job with his rather complicated financial situation.

All this had led to several big fights and one really hysterical episode where his screaming and crying wife threatened to leave him.  He emphatically stated nothing had been going on that was inappropriate with other women, and he had tried with much logic and reason to explain that his relationships with these women were entirely professional, and though friendly were not at all intimate or personal.  The evidence, logic and reason he presented, along with copious explanations he attempted, only seemed to make things worse.

Exploring the surgeon’s view of his marriage, led to his conclusion that for quite some time he had not paid much attention to his wife’s emotions or shared much of his own feelings with her.  He admitted romance had faded from their relationship, and their sex life was declining and perfunctory.  Sheepishly he confessed he had forgotten her last birthday and their previous wedding anniversary.   He said he did try to make up for those ‘misses’ by belatedly getting her several very expensive presents.  That did not seem to help either.  I asked and was not surprised to hear that the birthday he missed was her 50th.

It was then that I shared with the surgeon my guess that his wife was suffering from replacement fear, and a lack of empathetic love-based emotional intercourse (see “Emotional Intercourse”).

What Is Replacement Fear?

Replacement fear in love relationships is the fear of being replaced in a loved one’s heart and life by someone else, often someone new and possibly in some important ways better.  Some older siblings experience this when a new baby or adopted child comes into the family.  It can occur in the life of a youth when a single parent seriously dates or marries someone new.  It sometimes occurs more with men, but also some women, experiencing physical disability, vocational identity setbacks, sexual dysfunction and severe financial loss.  It sometimes occurs in women, but also some men, as they get older, especially if their self-valuing depends on looks and being young.  Replacement fear is thought to be most severe among those who have poor self love and those who have highly dependent false love relationships.

Replacement fear can trigger big problems with anxiety, depression, jealousy, possessiveness becoming critical, negative, easily agitated and irrational, and also with addiction relapses.  Replacement fear also can be very bad for love relationships.  Strong replacement fear can cause a person to push a loved one away and into the arms of someone else.  Therefore, it can be a very tragic, self-fulfilling prophecy fear.

Where Does Replacement Fear Come From?

Replacement fear has at least three, big, main sources or origins.  First of all, it can come as a reaction when love is not actively and frequently enough sent to a loved one. (see Definitions of Love, “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love”).  If you do not feed love to a loved one often enough, they may become love malnourished or even love starved.  They then may began to suspect you don’t really love them and that you might want to replace them with someone else.  The surgeon I mentioned before readily came to admit this was true in his case, before he began to do something about it. He saw that he had for too long taken his wife for granted, neglected actively loving her, and operated on the concept that love somehow would take care of it without his participation. (see Love in the Fridge).  He immediately set out to learn and show his love more actively and more often, with good results.

A second common cause of replacement fear comes from a lack of healthy self-love.  If you do not sufficiently love yourself, and have confidence in yourself, and at least have the suspicion that you are rather lovable, you perhaps subconsciously will suspect you are not good enough to hold your beloved in a relationship.  Therefore, you may begin to suspect that your beloved will be looking to replace you with someone better.  This too can cause you to act in ways that psychologically push your beloved away and maybe toward someone else.

Many an otherwise okay love relationship has been ruined just this way.  Some people feeling this way, test and punish their beloved irrationally and severely by acting as difficult as possible.  Becoming unresponsive, judgmental, controlling, passive/aggressive, dictatorial, etc. only serves to usually make things worse.  Until a person has sufficient healthy self-love, it is very hard for them to believe someone can see them as wonderful, desirable and of great worth.

A third way that replacement fear happens is when a love relationship or marriage is grounded in a false love.  She professed her love for him but secretly married him for his money.  He professed great love for her but actually married her for her high ‘trophy wife’ attributes.  He feared being replaced by someone richer and she feared being replaced by a younger ‘trophy wife’ type than her.  Both were right.  Both went on to repeat these patterns with new spouses, followed by new divorces.  Someday they may discover what healthy, real love is all about, but then again maybe not.

What Can Be Done about Replacement Fear

To do something about replacement fear in yourself ask yourself these three questions.

1.    Do I, or are we, actually and frequently showing our love for one another in varied and quality ways?

2.    Do I, and we both, healthfully love ourselves, and see ourselves as being of high quality, and our essence being worthy of being loved and receiving real and abundant love?

3.    Is our love real and healthy for us both, or are there parts of it that may be false, sick and destructive?

Naturally, those questions are not to be easily and deeply answered without good self honesty and strong work.  You also can study what you find at this site concerning healthy real love, and read some of the really good things available concerning real love.  Let me egotistical recommend Part Two of my book, Recovering Love, our e-book Real Love, False Love, what Paul says about love in first Corinthians, the Buddha’s teachings on compassionate love, Rumi’s love poetry, The Five Love Languages, and The Anatomy of Love, for starters.

Talking with loved ones in depth about all these things, journaling your own love learning, and meeting with love-oriented others all can be of great help.  If you are suffering from fear of being replaced in the heart and life of a loved one, ask, talk and request reassurance in exactly the way you would want them to demonstrate and talk that reassurance to you; be specific.Then work at accepting the reassurance.  If problems persist see a love-oriented, experienced counselor or therapist.

If someone you love or care about seems to be suffering from replacement fear, remember empathy well expressed is more reassuring than explanation, logic, reason, arguing the past, or defensiveness.  Patient listening and showing care for the person struggling with replacement fear also is very much in order.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
When feeling insecure, are you good at directly and clearly asking for reassurance that you are loved, wanted, highly valued, etc. or do you beat around the bush, hint and just hope that the reassurance you desire will come your way?

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1. Destroyers of Love – The 7 Big “Ds” Most Likely to Ruin Your Love Relationships