Removing Your Hidden Blocks to Receiving Love Fully

Synopsis: Your hidden blocks, need to unblock; love block defined; an example; many kinds of reception blocking; where the blocks come from; and what to do about it are all covered here.

Your Hidden Blocks

You have love blocks!  They get in the way of receiving love when love comes your way.

They once did you some good but now they are just preventing you from feeling the energizing, warm, safe joy of feeling well loved.  Your love blocks also probably are sabotaging your chances for experiencing love more fully.  Why do we think this is true?  Because having blocks to receiving love is almost inevitable and universal in most of the world’s cultures and most of the world’s families.  No one starting life as an infant and experiencing childhood is thought to escape developing some hidden, subconscious blocks to receiving love.

Actually you might not have survived without them protecting you in your early life.  Now they are in the way.  The good news is you can get them out of the way and go on to a much greater, empowering and more abundant love.  Furthermore, remember that receiving love well is extremely important for giving love well.  It also is very important for doing your share of ‘cycling love’ in a love relationship which is what keeps a love relationship going.  (See the mini-love-lessons on Receiving Love at this site)

Why You Need to Unblock

We now have an abundance of scientific research pointing to a great fact.  If you don’t have healthy, real love in your life, your biological and psychological health systems start to malfunction.  Quite commonly after that, your life may malfunction in one major way or another.  It therefore, is to everyone’s benefit that you discover and remove your major blocks to receiving love fully.

What Is a Love Block?

A love block is anything that repeatedly gets in the way of getting love, when it there to get.  Here we are most concerned with your own, internal blocks to receiving love well and fully, which thereby interferes with you doing healthy, Receptional Love.  Your love blocks likely are too deeply ingrained, non-conscious habit patterns  preventing you from being able to perceive or experience yourself as loved and valued, when love conveying behaviors are being sent to you.  There is research which suggests as much as 75% of the love conveying actions that comes to an average person is missed and, therefore, not received.  A large part of what does get received is not received fully or well.  Could it be that if we all got good at love reception, and got our blocks out of the way, the world would be 75% more love nourished?

An All Too Common Example

After making love, Cato with a big smile, sincerely said to Lacey “I really enjoy the looks you have when you’re in ecstasy, and the sounds you make are a big turn-on too”.  He meant it as a loving affirmation and hoped it would help her feel intimately good, as well as it was sharing of his own, intimate, good feelings.  However, his statement ran into Lacey’s love blocks.  She took it as he was trying to embarrass her by making fun of her, and that he was actually being critical of her in a sort of sarcastic way.  That is how she was taught to interpret straight-forward, complimentary statements in the neighborhood and family she grew up in.

She also learned to react with self-defensive, pulling away while steeling herself with cold indifference.  She further acted to get out of that situation as fast as possible because it had become so negative to her.  Cato took her defensiveness as rejection, which activated his own love blocks.  He was sure he once again had failed with a woman, probably because he was an inadequate lover although he didn’t know how he had failed.  He also once again was thinking he probably was unlovable and would never find the love he really longed for, so he concluded, why try.  He certainly would not call Lacey or try to see her again.  Lacey also decided she would not try again with Cato either because once again she thought she had run into a real, unloving jerk.

It could have turned out much better had either Cato or Lacey, or both of them, been brought up in such a way as to instead regularly think something like this.  Compliments were just compliments, and they themselves were lovable and valued.  So sincere compliments would naturally come their way, and were to be enjoyed.  It also would have helped for them not to quickly think with blame, and consider themselves okay, lovable people who can continue working together on a probable glitch in communication, or mis-perception.  But no, their conditioning and programming made sure their first conclusion was that something negative was coming toward them, and blame and guilt had to be part of it.  Therefore, they should fight or flee from the person sending the perceived negative.

So long as Cato subconsciously and secretly believes women will find him sexually inadequate and basically unlovable, he will view something that goes a bit awry in a relationship as proof that he is failing.  He will then defend himself with counterattack or withdrawal, cutting off his chances to receive love or start a love relationship.  So long as Lacey has a habit of perceiving compliments, praises, thank you’s, and affirmations as not being real or containing some hidden negative meaning, she will effectively block genuine affection, respect and the love she so desperately wants.

The Many Faces of Love Reception Blocking

Blocking love coming your way usually occurs without you consciously knowing it, and in a great variety of different ways.  Here are clues to some of them.  If you think things like the following, you may be blocking your own reception of love.

“If I have to ask him for what I want, that spoils it because if he loves me he is supposed to know and then give me what I want”.

“I’m really not important or special in any way, so no one could really want me.”

“If anybody is nice to you, nine chances out of 10 they are after something, and you’re going to get hurt in the long run if you get taken-in by them”.

“I’m too (fat, skinny, ugly, poor, dumb, etc. etc.) for anyone to ever love me”.

“I’m such a bad person I don’t deserve love”.

“I don’t know how to know or share what I’m feeling and I don’t want to”.

“Love just makes me vulnerable and gets in the way of my success”.

“I missed my one great chance at love and I know I’ll never get another.”

“Whoever I get close to, ends up hurting me”.

“It’s a lot more important to me to be powerful.  Love just makes you weak”.

“It’s too late for me”.

“Love is just a pretty word for sex”.

“When they say they love you, it’s just a manipulation”.

“If you don’t love me just the way I want you to, you don’t really love me”.

“Love means you put yourself last and everybody else first”.

“Aren’t we supposed to be humble, and self effacing, and doesn’t enjoying getting love get in the way of that”.

There are lots more, but maybe this helps you understand the basic ideas about how love blocks get you to think and act against your own best interests.

Where Do Your Love Blocks Come From?

The culture you grew up in, and also whatever subculture you are a part of, can have a lot to do with where your love blocks come from.  For instance, if you were taught that anything having to do with love may have something sexual in it, and everything sexual is bad, you may subconsciously dodge anything loving so as not to be bad.  Many girls, on having their first period, stopped being hugged and kissed by her father, and all other males in the family or neighborhood.  So, ever after, she dodges love with males because she is subconsciously sure it will end in very painful rejection. 

Many boys gets teased, laughed at, shamed and embarrassed by their peers for doing something loving.  In many subculture groups, boys get criticized when they do something loving and chastised for not being strong, cruel and tough; then they never gets over it.  In other cultural groups many girls and boys learn that loving actions are used as a phony mask to manipulate others, and so they never trust or learn to do anything real concerning love.

Families and parenting are where, accidentally, lots of mistakes are made and malfunctioning ways are unknowingly passed on, generation to generation.  In some families they still believe in the, now much disproved, concept that parents who are too loving to their children turn them into weaklings.  Back before real research taught us better, the US and other governments sent out pamphlets to new mothers saying just that, and advising mothers not to cuddle, hug or lovingly touch their children, especially when they cry.  Tough soldiers for the future seemed to be the goal.  Lots of families around the world treat children with cruelty, indifference and neglect when they need love, and so subconsciously program them to be afraid of love and its many manifestations.

Addictions are especially a big problem.  For the child growing up with an alcoholic parent, half the time they do something nice to the sober parent and get a loving response.  The same thing done to the drunk parent brings agony.  This actively, but unknowingly, trains a child to connect love with frustration, confusion, anger, resentment, guilt, pain, contradiction and failure.  Then in their later relationships, all this gets in the way when they attempt relating in love.

What Can Be Done To Unblock and Go On To Good Receptional Love?

I like to suggest that the first thing to do is start learning and practicing the behaviors of healthy, receptional love.  It is amazing how well the “fake it, till you make it” approach works for many things, and this may be a key to one them for you.  You do not have to wait until you have discovered and countered your love blocks.  The very act of trying to accomplish good, receptional love will, in fact, do some of that for you.  As is taught in some forms of Buddhism, right action will lead you to right feeling and right-thinking and thereafter more right action.  However, that might not get the whole job done.  To learn the behaviors and thinking of receiving love well, I recommend you start with the mini-love-lessons at this site that have to do with receiving love or Receptional Love and then get busy.

Then it’s usually good to add more learning about your blocks.  To do that I like to recommend an older, but great, book by Dr. William Ryan and Mary Ellen Donovan called Love Blocks.  It is super for raising into consciousness what your blocks to receiving love may be.  Another ‘red flag’ may be when you experience dysfunction in a relationship.  You might ask yourself, “Might this be caused by one of my love reception blocks”?

Working on improving your healthy, self-love often proves crucial and intricately interwoven with developing good receptional love ability.  Again start with the healthy self-love mini-love-lessons at this site and go from there.

Getting more knowledge about receiving love and the processes that may be involved for you, also can be facilitated by reading Receiving Love by doctors Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt.  My book, Recovering Love, also has very practical sections helpful to this issue.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
The next time somebody says a loving statement to you, or gives you a loving touch or look, how do you want to see yourself respond internally and externally?

Related posts:

1. How Receiving Love Well Gives Love Better 

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 

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?

Related posts:

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

Murder and False Love

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson begins with “an event all too common”; it then presents ‘is it really love or false love’; ‘is passionate love a murder motivator’; ‘love against harm’; how you can help; and ends with the question “Can passionate, false lovers be helped?”

An Event All Too Common

You Can Help!
I’m angry and I’m sad.  Once again, I have been referred the children of a parent who has been murdered by the children’s other parent; in this case a teenage step-daughter and her two younger, half siblings whose father murdered their mother.

He has been arrested, and the police say he has confessed, and the case is airtight.  The parents were separated and the father said he did it because she would not reconcile with him, and if he couldn’t have her no one else could, because he loved her so much.

The agony of the children is heartbreaking to see.  The hate and desire for vengeance on the part of the adolescent may ruin that child’s chance at all future love relationships.  If the courts for some reason let the murderer off, the victim’s brother vows to capture and torture him to death, even if it ruins his own life.  The victim’s mother has been psychiatrically hospitalized and the murderer’s father has had a heart attack.  These kinds of secondary outcomes also are all too common in this type of all too common murder.

This kind of referral has happened too many times in my practice, and in the practices of many of my colleagues.  Time and again we hear statements like, “I did it because I love” him or her.  In this case the husband robbed from his own children, his and her parents, siblings and friends, someone they dearly and truly loved – but this abhorrent act was not motivated by love by the perpetrator.  I maintain that healthy, real love never motivates the violent harming of someone truly loved.  Only false love and a great lack of real love does that.

Such murders are all too common in many parts of both the developed and lesser developed parts of the world.  Justification that the murder had something to do with love is also all too common.  Sometimes it is children who are murdered, sometimes the father/husband or some other friend or family member.  Almost always in these kind of situations the murderer voices that it was love that drove them to kill.  “I loved her so much I could not stand to lose her”, “I could not bear to see him with someone else because I loved him so much”, “ I loved him too much to let him live after what he did to me”.  These also are the all too common kind of statements made by love relationship murderers justifying what they did.

Is It Really Love or Is It False Love?

I maintain that healthy, real love causes people to always protect the ones they love, to consistently be constructive not destructive, and to want for and work for the health and well-being of the loved.  It primarily is false love that motivates the murderer to kill those they supposedly love. (A ‘possible’ exception is mercy killing)  Murdering someone you think you love is an act of profound, loveless, perverse self-serving.  It is in truth an anti-love action.  It actually gives proof that no real love existed, and only a huge, needy, sick, demanding desire to be loved was in the place of love.

It also gives evidence that the murderer was sorely lacking in healthy self-love, and probably subconsciously had regressed to an infantile, demanding, controlling, possessive, immense sense of insecurity and inadequacy coupled with hurt and rage.  Such people in that state usually are considered incapable of having or giving healthy, real love.

I further suggest that it actually is those who are intensely love-starved who commit murder when they hurt badly because their major love relationship does not go as they would wish.  They long to find some person willing to give them some love, or positive attention, and feed their secretly infantile, insecure, needy, love-starved selves.  They don’t really love.  They only have their hungry neediness disguised as love.  When they do get what they think will be their saving source of love, things in the relationship improve for a while and then deteriorate.

In their lack of self-love, deep insecurity and lack of belief that anyone could truly love them, they become possessive, controlling, authoritarian, demanding, often more needy, frustrated, angry and they destroy the very relationship they so depend on.  Sometimes they do this in very sneaky, manipulative ways and sometimes blatantly.  If alcohol or other addictive substances are involved, their neediness escalates and exacerbates the danger potential.  A number of several syndromes of false love frequently involve these dynamics (See “Fatal Attraction Syndrome”).

Is Passionate Love a Murder Motivator?

What about the many people who say passionate love, gone awry, is a major motivator for murder?  Homicide detectives, criminologists and detective story writers seem to commonly hold this view.  By doing so, they promote this idea and give a large number of people a false excuse and, in a sense, permission for doing violence to those they supposedly love.

It is true, many murders are committed in the name of love but think about it, could that be real love?  I’m of the opinion that it definitely is not.  I suggest those who murder their lovers, spouses and others are the outcome of three things. The first is the presence of one form or another of a false love syndrome. (see False Forms of Love Series).  The second is a severe absence of healthy, real love in the murderer’s development.  The third is the cultural teaching that presents passionate love as jealous, possessive, obsessive, desperately needy, controlling, and an insane phenomenon.

That cultural teaching promotes the idea that one is justified in harming and even killing those they love if the person they love severely emotionally hurts and betrays them, or wants to leave them for any reason.  This cultural teaching basically helps people think that ‘if I love you, you are mine’ and, therefore, I own you.  It is not much of a cognitive jump from there to thinking ‘if I own you’ I can do what I want with you, even destroy you’.

I once consulted on a sentencing hearing of a mother who attempted murdering one of her children.  She argued the child belonged to her and, therefore, she had every right to kill the child after it became too disobedient and rebellious.  The fact is that that viewpoint was once upon a time a standard belief, and in some places was well supported by law.  It was similar to the law that said if a husband found his wife having sex with another, it was grounds for justifiable homicide and case dismissal.  Remnants of those very anti-love positions still exist in the minds of many, and still are in effect in some parts of the world.

I maintain that none of that has anything to do with healthy, real love.  No, it’s the kind of thinking that once grew out of various forms of false love and the under-valuing and lack of understanding of how healthy, real love works.

Love Against Harm

I counseled a daughter who shot and killed her father.  The father had on four separate occasions beaten the daughter’s mother to the point she had to be hospitalized with broken bones and other serious injuries.  Though they had moved to escape him, the father had found them and was once again breaking through the front door vowing to beat the mother and the daughter unless they came back to him because ‘they belonged’ to him.  That was when the daughter emptied a revolver into his chest.

This and mercy killing are the only types of protective, real love that I know of which can lead to violent killing.  It is the kind of love that can go to extremes to protect a loved one from harm.  Healthy, real love can cause people to go to great lengths to protect a truly loved one from harm.  And hopefully an effective intervention can be applied before it comes to these extremes.  One also has to be careful here because over-protection can be a detriment to the well-being of the loved.  Basically, healthy, real love is the enemy of harm.

How You Can Help

Do you agree that healthy, real love is a constructive and not a destructive force in the world, and that it is not real love, passionate love or other mis-guided substitutes that ever motivate the violent harming or murdering of the truly loved?  Do you also agree that a society which accepts the idea that love can sometimes cause people to do violence, even to the extent of killing those they love, is in effect unknowingly excusing, supporting and promoting love relationship violence and murder?  Do you further agree that society will be healthier and safer if we rid ourselves of the teaching that promotes the idea that love sometimes causes people to justifiably harm and destroy those they purport to love?

If you agree or tend to agree with these propositions here is what you can do.  You can search for and find opportunities to bring up these concepts.  Wherever you can, you can work to promote the constructive view of love with anyone and everyone you have contact with.  By doing this you will be promoting healthy, real love in our world, as you also act to work against love ignorance, sick false love and all the harm it does.  So, I urge you, do your bit and help change the ethos that presents love as a motivator for harm and death.

You also can help if you know a family member or friend who continues to accept escalating physical violence, by lovingly sharing some of these concepts and relating to them the very real danger they may be in, and starkly telling them many people are killed in those situations.  You might help them explore options to keep themselves and their loved ones safe.  And if you find some of the examples ‘a little too familiar’ please don’t think “It can’t happen to me” – that is what many of those murdered by a supposed loved one said to themselves.  Get help!  Get safe!

Can Passionate False Lovers Be Helped?

Those who suffer (and they do suffer greatly) from the fixations of false love, can indeed be helped.  They can go on to healthy, real love although it usually takes a fair amount of therapeutic work.  Those trapped in false love syndromes can learn healthy self-love and then healthy, other love.  They usually have to unlearn a great deal in the process, reprogram their anti-love and non-love approaches to love relationships, and practice what they learn for quite a while before they become fully love successful.  Often in their fear of seeing their own immense love starvation, and feeling it’s pain more acutely, they dodge the very help that would save them and those they addictively endanger.  But if they do seek help from a love knowledgeable therapist things can go wonderfully well.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Have you believed that real love could turn to hate, and what do you think of that idea now?

Related posts:

1. False Forms of Love: Thrill and Threat Bonding
2. False Love Awareness
3. False Forms of Love: Unresolved Conflict Attraction Syndrome
4. Healthy Real Love -or- Toxic False Love
5. False Form of Love – Nympholepsia