Breakup Survival, Then - Love & Life Thriving

Mini-Love-Lesson  #226

Synopsis: Fresh approaches and powerful ways to survive a major breakup and go on to a full, thriving love life are introduced, along with some practical how-to’s and go-to’s.

From Hell to Heaven

Breakups and their aftermath can be so incredibly painful, tragic, draining and disastrous but then, if you survive, such a helpful and good thing!  Handled well, breakups can lead to love and life thriving better than ever before.  There are three reasons I know this.  The first reason is I survived more than my fair share of agonized breakups.  The first one literally nearly killed me.  After that, they were less and less bad as I moved up to better and better, and finally to my now 40+ years with Kathleen and being the best loved guy you will ever meet (see “Why Love Problems Hurt so Bad”).

The second reason I know you can go from relationship hell to heaven is that I have assisted several hundreds of people to survive and then thrive after breakups, divorces and other love loss situations, plus I have taught and supervised a fair number of other relational counselors and therapists to know how to do the same.  That is part of the good news.  There, however, is bad news.

It is a sad truth that not everyone survives a breakup even with good, breakup, recovery help.  Breakups precede quite a few suicides, no small number of murders along with a much larger number of often injurious, unsuccessful attempts at each.  Falling into or relapsing into addictions of one type or another, starting to have serious health problems, getting in trouble with the law, losing one’s job, dropping out of school and literally dying of a heart attack also are much more likely to occur in the aftermath of a love relationship breakup.

You do not have to do any of those things.  The third reason tells us why.  It has to do with what research tells us.  Breakup recovery is getting better and better as we learn more about what breakup survival and recovery takes.  That research tells us most people do survive breakups.  This appears to be true for both real love and false love patterns of romantic relating.  It often is tough going at first and it can be quite dangerous for both mental and physical health.  But the research shows that even with severely agonizing breakups, if you get through the first 12 weeks of post-breakup suffering, you are very likely to get mostly okay enough in 20 weeks.  Then with more good therapeutic work, you can get to where you are living and loving happily within a year or two of even the severest breakup.

These time periods can be shortened.  I once was part of a in-house, psychiatric hospital, pilot, research effort investigating patient recovery from serious suicide attempts after romantic breakups.  This involved even patients suffering from severe IFD (see “False, Forms of Love: The Devastating IFD Syndrome”) and Limerance  (see “False Forms of Love: Limerence and Its Alluring Lies”) -- false love syndromes which were thought to be especially difficult to recovery from.  We found that with a healthy love, and self-love treatment focus, our less severe outpatients, as well as our more severe hospitalized (at first) patients, substantially recovered  in about six weeks.  They then all became quite glad they had not suicided.  At a sister facility, somewhat similar patients receiving treatment for only depression required 12 to 30 weeks to approximate the same level of recovery.

First Survive

In the aftermath of a severe breakup, the first thing to do is just stay alive.  In about 12 to 16 weeks you will be very likely be glad you did.  You probably can shorten that time estimate by quite a bit by engaging in certain therapeutic actions.

How to survive?  Well, first know that you may have to lay around and then thrash around for a while in all sorts of terrible feeling emotions.  For a time, it is kind of like suffering a prolonged hangover with a bad, full body sunburn, while being repeatedly water boarded and bitten by a vicious pit bull.  Later there often is rage which can sort of help with depression.  Catharsis (getting it out of your system) can help so long as you do not harm anyone or anything important including yourself.  Using a punching bag, chopping wood, stomping around cussing the cosmos, breaking up cheap stuff, etc. all are ways to get some needed exercise and emotion releasing relief.  My favorite is to go outside and for 20 minutes throw ice cubes at a brick wall or at a chalk outline on the driveway of whoever you want to hate for a while.  Ice shatters nicely and cleans itself up.  Know that too much inactivity is not your friend but a lot of sleep may be for a while.

At some point, you have to start forcing yourself out into the world briefly doing ordinary stuff.  Then lengthen the time doing that.  It will not feel good at first but rather kind of dead like.  Then there will come maybe only a 10 second bit of mildly positive emotion where you may grin or even smile.  Keep going and 10 second events will stretch to 30 seconds and maybe even contain some laughter.  Eventually you will get to feel positive for 10 minutes and then, at long last, 10 hours or more.  Downtimes will likely get shorter and shorter, and further and further apart but when they happen you may be pretty far down for a bit.  Uptimes will get longer, and higher and higher in an erratic pattern.  You can help that along by listening to upbeat music, going to see funny or exciting movies and doing all activities that distract you and that are not dangerous or downers emotionally.  Being around people and pets who care about you, and then forcing yourself to briefly start doing new things and meeting new people, all slowly will make your recovery a reality.  Avoiding doing these things will just make it all take longer (see “Heartbreak Mending and the Deep, Multi-Love Remedy”).  Of course, everyone is different so just use this as a guide to an average recovery but one to aim for.

Eventually, you will get to new romance if you want to.  New romance is dangerous but usually not as much as the old romance.  That also is true for new and past sex partner involvement.  I usually recommend working at a new “romance light – playing the field” approach at first.  To do that, work toward including at least two, maybe three, no more than five mild, romantic involvements.  Be open and honest with them all about the existence of the others.  Then weed out the ones who will not or can not handle sharing you.  Suspect they probably would turn out to be insufficiently self loving, be too possessive and too insecure.  In this way, you let the best ones rise from the pack and you do not let yourself settle for less, while also going more slowly, safely and constructively forward.

Get Busy but Not Frantic

Diving into work, school, projects, voluntary efforts or anything helpful to others, productive and highly distracting is part of the cure for many.  If you compulsively think often and hurtfully about your ex, the past and what went wrong, consider doing it this way.  Suspect that a part of your subconscious is trying to tell you that you have more to learn from that expired relationship than you have so far.  So, plan and schedule an hour or so to concentrate on that every day for a while.  During that time, do concentrated study, especially focusing on ideas of what to do new, better and different in a next relationship.  Also look at your other relationships going back to the ones you had when you are a child.  Look for patterns.  Study to see if your most recent romantic involvements show a pattern of each one being better than the last.  If so, that is a very good sign.  If they all are about the same or getting worse, radical change may be in order and a good love knowledgeable therapist can help.

Plan the ending time for that concentrated study and plan what you are going to definitely do right afterwards.  Keep notes or a journal.  Consider pretending to talk to your broken heart as if it was another person and ask it questions.  Then pretend to be your broken heart giving you the answers which you can make up even if they’re silly.  Very likely, some of them will be surprisingly fresh and spot on.  Gamble on the idea that your subconscious can tell you good answers your conscious does not yet know.  When the hour ends, get up and actively go do more of your regular or new life.  Get and stay busy enough to be distracted from thinking about your old life and relationship.  Gamble on the idea that your subconscious will let you alone after you have learned enough from the old relationship.

On to Life and Love Thriving

At some point along your path of surviving, you also can start toward thriving.  Thriving means doing really well and living and loving enriched, fulfilled and in profoundly satisfying ways that include lots of healthy, real love.  Remember, a lot of others have suffered through the same sort of things you are going through and then they have gone on to thriving so you probably can do this too.  There is a lot of wisdom in the idea that if you can survive you can thrive.  Gamble on that idea.

Grow Your Use of Love Sources

With healthy self-love you can be your own source of healing, strength and even joyous love.  Decide you definitely are important enough to yourself to learn and practice lots of healthy self-love (see “Self-Love and Its Five Healthy Functions” and “From Self-Love to Other Love and Back Again”).  Gamble on the idea that the better you love yourself the better others will also.  Spiritual love also has been known to do wonders for people of all faiths, and even those of no faith who attempt to tap into it as an unknown source or one they do not believe in but are willing to experiment with. Link “Spirituality and Love Great and Grand”

Of course, love from okay others is highly desirable.  I often have gotten good results by suggesting to those who are alone, isolated and lonely, to start with a loving pet.  Then go around new people (see “A Dozen Kinds of Love to Have in Your Life”).

If you do not have okay others in your life, friends, family and the like, gamble on the idea there are okay others searching for you right now.  Your job is to make it easy for them to find you and you to find them.  Yes, you could get hurt or hurt again but with lots of healthy self-love, pet love, maybe some new friend love, plus powerful new love knowledge you likely will not hurt nearly as much, as long, or as deep as before (see “Living Well via Loving Well”).

Keep carefully adventuring forward in love and love relationships as you grow your love skills, and great and good things can happen.  Remember – Do only old actions, you’ll get only old results.  Do not much, and probably get not much.

To Break All Ties or Not?

Love breakups, especially those involving false love syndromes, distort nature in ways that are similar to substance addictions.  This happens neurochemically in your brain.  Every time you re-encounter an addictive substance, or trigger, you are in danger of restarting a brain-made addiction process.  That can lead you back into a bad relationship or just cause you a lot of fresh hurt.  Safest is to not have anything to do with the ex lover for at least two years.  That is not at all possible in lots of life situations like if you work together or share children.  Try practicing a few coping tricks to help you get through times of temptation and re-triggered suffering.  Here’s one.

Think of 3 to 5 of the worst experiences you ever had with your ex.  Give each of those experiences a movie or book type title, and write those titles on a card you carry with you.  Before each encounter with your ex, read the titles.  With each title, ask yourself do you want to re-live another version of that experience again?  Then after that encounter, reread each title, emphatically choosing not to put yourself through that again.

Afterward, do a really good job of loving yourself and, if possible, letting a special, dear other person or persons do the same with you.  Pre-arrange for that.  Then celebrate your escape.

Thriving usually happens as you learn and develop your love skills.  So, how are your skills for loving life, yourself, your spiritual source, others, a super special other and the joy of living a fulfilled life.  For thriving, learn about and develop each of those skill-sets further.

Positivity Feeds Thriving

The results are in.  Realistic positivity works better than anything else.  Realistic positivity means (1.) With a spirited approach, planning and working to maximize the benefits, joys and other positives of any endeavor or situation while (2.)  Taking in to account and planning how to’s for converting or surmounting the likely trials, tribulations, torments and other negatives of any endeavor or situation and (3.) With some adaptability, not surrendering, giving up or giving in easily.  The old scout law had a phrase “and defeat does not down him”.  Taken to heart, that phrase has made the difference between victory and defeat for many an old scout, including this one.  It can for you too.

Positivity is not to be confused with being Pollyanna.  The Pollyanna approach tends to ignore the negatives while positivity aims to embrace and convert or surmount them.

The newer field of positive psychology and, with it, the newer profession of Life Coaching are adding much to the older approaches of focusing mostly on either psychopathology or mere normalcy.  With positivity, you can aim to go above normal in life and love.  So, let me recommend the book Positivity by Dr. Barbara L Fredrickson who heads up the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology (PEP) laboratory at Chapel Hill’s University of North Carolina.

Are You Growing Your Lovability?

This question has two meanings and we mean both of them.  In the first meaning, Lovability works like magnetism, it attracts people to you.  To be well loved, become more lovable.  That was the Roman poet Ovid’s advice 2000 years ago.  Assertively lovable people get more love.  The assertive part comes from their strong, healthy self-love and the lovable part from their strong, healthy and well practiced love skills. Link “Becoming Well Loved and More Loved – Three Main Ways”  This leads to the second meaning.

Lovability also means your ability to love.  The more you do to learn and practice your ability to give, get, and receive healthy, real love the more you are likely to receive, get and give the same.

For all this and more, I recommend you read the book Lovability by Dr. Robert Holden, director of the love education effort known as The Lovability Program.

Going Further

For going further with all this, I suggest you consider, if you have not already, subscribing to automatically getting our totally free, mini-love-lessons every week and then, of course, studying them and applying everything you can to your life.  You also might mention this site to others, talk over some of these ideas with them and, thus, help spread some much-needed, useful knowledge about love to our love-hungry world.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable question:  If you hope that someone will come along and wonderfully love you into a new and better life, could it be that that someone best might be - you?

Bull Wrestling, Bull Dancing and Love Quarrels

Synopsis: How to tell if you are acting more like a bull dancer, a bull wrestler or the bull when you have conflicts with loved ones, and what to do about it – with love.

When you have a dispute, quarrel, argument or fight with a loved one do you go at it more like a bull wrestler, or a bull dancer or the bull?  In ancient Rome they used to select the biggest, strongest guy they could find and put him in the arena with a bull made angry for the occasion.  The bull would charge, if the bull wrestler survived his job was to grab the bull by the horns and wrestle the bull to the ground and then break its neck.  They lost a lot of bull wrestlers that way.  On the island of Crete and later on the Iberian Peninsula they developed entirely different ways of dealing with the angry bull.  Those ways became known as bull dancing.

Today those approaches survive in what we call bull fighting, but it is not fighting at all.  It is an elegant form of dancing in which the charging bull almost always loses.  Notice how this works.  A big, powerful, scary thing tries to attack the Matador.  The Matador does not wrestle the bull, does not run away, but instead he (or she) stands his or her ground, usually doesn’t get hit, and artfully dances the big, dark, horrible, powerful, charging horned thing right by.  In the Portuguese form they do this until the bull is exhausted and gives up and, thus, the bull gets to live as well as the Matador.


So, I ask, do you go about your conflicts with loved ones more like a Roman bull wrestlers or more like an artful bull dancer, or do you behave like the charging bull?   Bull wrestlers meet their charging opponent head on, get impacted, use up their power wrestling with their opponent’s every little move, and usually get wounded if not destroyed in the process.  Remember, only spectators go home uninjured.  Those who act like the bull start roaring and charge ahead full force trying to run over, stomp and gore their opponent any way they can.  Both the bull and the bull wrestler may have a lot of recovery to do if they survive their conflict.  Also if they have any future relationship with each other it is unlikely to be a positive one.

The bull dancer lets the bull charge and expend its energy while artfully stepping aside.  In ancient Crete bull dancers evolved their art into an amusement where they gymnastically somersaulted over the charging bull, bouncing off it and expertly played with it, thereby, finessing it into harmlessness, usually ending with the bull running around in circles until it got tired.  Bull dancers and the bull consequently developed an ongoing relationship with each other in which no one was likely to get hurt and they got to have fun with each other over and over again.

You are likely to be approaching things like the bull if you see ‘red flags’ often, quickly take offense, roar (scream, yell, etc.), get yourself angrily worked up, and go on the furious attack attempting to show your loved one how they are wrong, mistaken, stupid, bad, or worse.  You are likely to be acting like the bull wrestler if you just stand there getting hit, stomped and gored as you might fight back effectively or ineffectively while becoming defensive and ending up emotionally scarred and wounded in the process.  But there are a couple of other options.  You could act like a sacrificial victim and get slaughtered, or you might attempt to run away.

You are probably acting like a finessing, artful bull dancer when you remind yourself that the anger and upsetness of the bull tells you much more about the bull and what it gets itself upset about than about you or your qualities.  You’re a good finessing bull dancer when the bull attempts to gore you with blame, stomp you with accusations, or run over you with its rapid-fire logic and you let all that just go charging past, not take it to heart or let it get you in the gut.

Good listening skills are a lot like a Matador who first uses the Cape, helping the bull get all of its negative energy out.  It’s good to remind yourself with silent, self affirming statements that while the bull is roaring at you with complaint and dissatisfaction it is sort of like the Matador standing his or her ground and doing good, mental footwork to hold on to your position and to your okayness.

You probably know that all analogies break down if you extend them too far.  Being artfully able to deal with conflict coming at you, so you can get to a place where love and reason prevails is the real goal.  Being able to get to where you and those loved ones who seem to be in conflict with you can ‘work together against the problem’ instead of against each other is the best outcome.  You may feel like destroying the bull from time to time but to do so would kill the relationship.

So, the next time a conflict with a loved one starts to happen let me suggest you consider visualizing yourself doing the artful, elegant matador’s dance whereby the horns don’t get you and the bull has a chance to calm down.  You can, with love and cleverness, learn to finesse the charging bulls in your life right past you.  Then you can demonstrate your love and perhaps both of you can get to be OK with each other.  After that, if all goes well, together you can go against whatever the real problem seems to be.  That is sort of like getting to ride the bull out of the arena.

As always, Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Are you tending to deal with difficulties with a loved one better, the same, or worse than the people you grew up around?

Related posts:

1. False Forms of Love: Unresolved Conflict Attraction Syndrome 

Immunity Boosting With and For Love

Mini-Love-Lesson   #271

Synopsis: This mini-love-lesson discusses the connection between healthy, real love and its psychobiological effect on our immunity systems; then gives 10 rather different, memorably named things to do for boosting one’s own immunity functioning which relate to both self-love and other love.

Healthy Love and A Healthy You

Did you know that love is extremely helpful to your immunity system, healing wounds and fending off diseases?  Yes, being in love relationships and experiencing healthy, real love works to improve maintain and strengthen your mechanisms for disease resistance and recovery.  The more you give, receive and do healthy, functional love the healthier you tend to get.  That is the conclusion to be drawn from literally hundreds of love and health related, scientific explorations into what makes immunity mechanisms work and improve.   

Note, that in many of these studies, the word “love” is not used but rather some other euphemistic term.  Sometimes researchers shy away from using the word love and instead use terms like “affectional bonding, emotionally intimate relationships, ongoing mated relating and, a favorite of mine, “stabilized biosocially & affectively interactive”.  I find it odd that quite a few scientifically oriented researchers seem to be uncomfortable with the word love except for comparative experimental psychologists and primatologists  Therefore, finding and collecting research reports on love is a bit complicated.

People in emotionally close, mutually rewarding relationships are constantly found to have better immunity functioning and disease resistance compared with those who do not have such relationships.  Also, as people enter into healthy, real, love bonded relationships their immunity mechanisms work better and they have significantly fewer infections, especially respiratory infections like colds and the flu.

Healthy Self-Love and Improved Immunity

For reasons of healthy self-love you can do quite a lot to help your own immunity system function better.  Also, for reasons of loving others, it is good to keep yourself healthy for their benefit as well as yours.  Both you and those others who love you want to keep you around so, learning to do what you can to help your protective systems operate optimally is loving, wise and reasonable.  To assist you with that, here are 10 actions you can take.  First, note that we will be using some odd, not (yet) real words because in their odd form they may assist you to think and remember these things about immunity boosting.  Finding easier lay terms to communicate about immunity issues may just be beginning.

10 IMMUNITY BOOSTING SELF-LOVE ACTIONS

All the following are suggestions and not medical directives.  Know your own physical condition in order to choose and use them wisely.

1. Love Connect.  As often as possible make loving contact with others psychologically, physically and safely.  This includes pets, especially dogs.  Face-to-face talk is great but also can be pretty significant if done on Skype or Zoom, etc.  Auditory phone talk allows you to experience your loved ones’ voices and the effect of their tones of voice on your reduction of stress hormone production can be significant, no matter what is being said if it said lovingly.

2. Sleep.  When we are sleep-deprived, our bodies get more susceptible to infections.  During sleep, our immunity mechanisms regenerate and repair our bodies as well as work to rejuvenate themselves.  Too little sleep and too destructive a sleep pattern works to de-power our immunity systems.  So, work to get enough, good sleep.

3. Sweat.  When we sweat we rid our bodies of toxic substances that lower our body’s ability to fight off disease, counter toxicity and maintain our biological balances.  Using really hot water (not to the point of injury) to sweat works well.  Hot tubs, spas, hot baths and hot showers, along with vigorous workouts, saunas, hard and fast action sports and anything else that gets perspiration flowing are also fine.  The relaxation effect of hot water increases stress reduction and endorphin production, both of which are very good for our immunity systems.

4. Vitaminize.  Our bodies will not and cannot fight viruses and bacteria effectively if we are vitamin deficient.  A One-A-Day multivitamin/multimineral is simple, quick and probably minimally sufficient.  If you are stressed more vitamin C, B complex and zinc often are recommended.  Check with the appropriate medical specialist for what is best for you individually.

5. Zincanate.  If we get zinc deficient our chances of getting sick, with a respiratory infection especially or other breathing complications, seem to go way up.  When we put zinc in our diet by eating legumes, seeds, nuts, mushrooms, some meats, oysters, crab, lobsters and/or taking a zinc supplement we are acting in a healthy self-love way.  See a healthy diet specialist to get it just right for you.

6. Fiberize.  Generally, the more fiber foods we eat the more beneficial bacteria we have helping our metabolism make our bodies more disease resistant.  Bananas, broccoli, avocado, sweet potatoes and almonds all can be helpful, along with many other vegetables and fruits.

7. Mediterraneanize.  More than 70% of our immunity functioning is heavily influenced by our diet.  Our digestive tract handles most of the pathogens and toxic chemicals that can harm us.  But it can not do that if we do not eat right.  Generally, what is called a Mediterranean Diet works well for lots of people, over time.  That diet includes lots of vegetables, fruits, nuts, some lean meats, many types of seafood, whole-grain breads, olive oil and small portions of many other things, but not too many carbs if your life is rather sedentary.  It usually is best to avoid or limit heavily processed foods, white flour products, refined oils ,refined sugar and sugar-added-foods and especially large amounts of fatty meats.

8. Move.  Our bodies are built to move.  Without enough movement every waking hour, or so, we start to physically weaken and wane.  This, in turn, negatively affects our immunity system functioning.  Sufficient exercise enhances our in vivo responses to viral and destructive antigens and seems to delay immunological aging.  20 + minutes of fairly rigorous exercise, 3+ times a week seems to be the most common recommendation among health professionals. But even brisk walking can help if you are in the couch potato category.  You can find out what might be best for you individually from physical therapists, movement analysts, nurses, physicians and a wide variety of other health specialists.

9. Nasalate. Nasal passage health is also rather important so, give your nose and breathing some helpful attention.  Viruses get lodged in our noses, along with toxic particulate matter and other things you do not want residing there.  The longer they remain there, the more they can attack us, give our immunity systems problems and do us harm.  There are three main ways you might go about helping yourself here.  The first has to do with deep breathing exercises.  To sit straight and do deep and slow breathing for 1 minute, or more, twice or more a day makes a good start.  By the way, do not stand, we do not want you to faint if this is a new exercise to you or you have a troublesome breathing condition.

Learning yoga breathing exercises or other similar systems that get a lot of oxygen into our lungs and, thereby, boost blood circulation which helps our immunity mechanisms function better by quite a bit.  Another way has to do with aromatherapy.  That involves breathing various scents, aerosols, incense and mists recognized as having certain medicinal, generally therapeutic and anti-infection effects.  A third way has to do with using a nasal rinse to flush your nasal cavity of unwanted matter.  Sometimes that is coupled with the use of an antiseptically treated thread gently run through one’s nasal passage.  That makes for a bit of a delicate and moderately unpleasant experience, probably best first accomplished by someone well trained and acquainted with teaching the process.

10. Meditate.  Especially are health-oriented, self-love mindfulness meditation exercises associated with improved immune system functioning.  Research suggests such exercises can assist in the circulating of immune proteins which are good for fighting inflammations.  Meditation also is quite useful in stress reduction and the reduction of destructive, stressor hormone production.  Overall, healthfulness and vitality improvements also are indicated.

All 10 of the above, suggested ways are to be considered general guidelines to be checked-out by your primary health providers for their appropriateness to your individual situation and needs.

Relationship Well-Being and Its Effect on Immunity

Well functioning, love relationships can have a very positive effect on how well our immunity systems protect us.  Likewise, a poor functioning, love relationship frequently is highly stressful and, therefore, neurochemically bad for our biological, self-protection systems.  Also involved is our healthy, self-love functioning.  If it is good, probably so is our immunity system functioning more likely to be good.

One more thing.  We suggest you talk all this over with someone well trained in the healing arts, professions or sciences.  If you do that, please mention this site and all its health-related, mini-love lessons.  Thank you.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Love Success Question: Have you meditated on the fact that you are a truly awesome, huge bundle of miraculous, interwoven systems and, therefore, you are not to be taken for granted or undervalued?  If you haven’t, please do!

Anti-Self-Love Thinking and How to Defeat It

Mini-Love-Lesson #224

                                 

Synopsis: After a short self-exam and a bit of explanation, this mini-love-lesson presents 4 major things to do about the fact that a great many people are programmed to think negatively about themselves, and thus, harm their own lives and the lives they effect.

Take the Anti-Self-Love Thinking Test

Could it be that your head is programmed to think too negatively about yourself?  Could such subconscious programming/conditioning be automatically sabotaging you, causing self-defeat, holding you back, subtly messing up your life, blocking your chances for love, happiness and success plus working against your mental and physical health?  That is what happens to so many.

To find out see what answers pop up in your head to the following 12 simple questions.
Your first impression answers are probably best.

1. Are a good many of your thoughts about yourself critical, negative and/or disapproving?
2. Do you often think about your shortcomings and inadequacies?
3. Does what is wrong with you occupy your thoughts more than what is right about you?
4. Do you compare yourself to others a lot and find yourself coming out on the short end of that comparison?
5. Do you frequently worry about what others think and say about you and suspect it is not very positive?
6. When you accomplish something do you usually find things that are wrong with it causing you to feel less good about what you have done?
7. Do you put yourself down a lot for mistakes, blunders and less-than-perfect performance?
8. Do you suspect your friends, acquaintances and/or coworkers secretly look down on you?
9. Do you believe being critical and hard on yourself helps you improve and is the only way you have a chance at becoming successful or even adequate?
10. Do you suspect that if you like, love or approve of yourself you will be guilty of pridefulness, becoming egotistical, arrogant and no one will like you?
11. Do you sometimes suspect that you are not truly good enough to really deserve much praise, admiration or accolades?
12. Do you suspect or believe yourself to be unworthy of love and/or are unlovable?

Interpreting Your Results

Well, if you answered any of those questions in the affirmative, it is rather likely that you have been, at least somewhat, subconsciously programmed for self-defeat, becoming drained and de-powered, having higher anxiety, depression, limited success at best, as well as for living unfulfilled and far less happy than you could be.  The more questions or parts of questions you answered yes to, the more probable this interpretation could apply to you.

Now, it is important to note that you also have been programmed by nature to be positive about yourself because nature made you into an astounding creature with many positive potentials.  You also may be non-consciously programmed by those who loved you to be at least somewhat self-positive and in opposition to the negative programs.  Those opposite, positive programs probably are at war with the anti-you, negative programs in your head.  Part of your healthy, self-love job is to join forces with every, accurate, positive program and help strengthen them.

Nature programs us to be healthy and that includes our mental and emotional health.  The scientific evidence points to natural, healthy, real self-love being part of that program for being healthy.  The evidence also shows that good, healthy self-love does not lead to egotism, arrogance, selfishness, sloth, etc. (link “Self-Love the Enemy of Egotism”).  In fact, healthy self-love mostly leads to the opposite of all those bad things even though lots of traditional teaching says otherwise.  Frequently, it is the family, and sometimes even more the culture or subculture, we grow up in that teaches that self-love and positivity about the self is bad and will lead you to social rejection and relational ruin.

Join with the Positive

Your job, should you decide to accept it, is to consciously and purposefully join with your natural drive for health and well-being and become strong and more effectively loving to others by growing your healthy self-love. (Link “Unselfish Self-Love”)  Part of that is working against and combating your anti-self-love training and habits for thinking negatively about yourself.

If you are strongly programmed to be negative to yourself and about yourself, you are programmed for harming your physical and mental health.  That is what anti-self love thinking does to you.  It causes your brain to make neurochemicals that help bring on stress and stress-related illnesses, anxiety, depression, fatigue, cognitive inefficiency, immune system dysfunction and a host of other maladies.

Your job is to stop all that and do the opposite for your health’s sake and the sake of those whose lives you effect.  You see, when you are infected with toxic anti-self-love you tend to be bad for others, or at least not as good as you could be.

A Little Understanding Can Help

A little understanding of how programming works can help you reprogram for positive and healthy, self-love thinking.
A part of our brain/mind works pretty much like a computer.  It gets programmed to automatically give us certain thoughts which are triggered, or clicked on, by certain internal and external events and situations.  What is different is those brain/mind, programs also automatically trigger various downer emotions that come with the automatic, negative thoughts.  Many of those programs got into our subconscious from the early experiences we had with our parents, our family, other caregivers and local acquaintances.  Probably most of those people thought they were doing the right thing, or a good thing, for us but they may have been wrong, or only partially right.  Later, our programming experiences came from our exemplary models, playmates and peers, as well by as repetitious messages from various electronic devices.  Some, maybe even a lot, of that may have been healthy, positive and useful, at least for a while.  At the same time, some, maybe even a lot, may have been quite destructive.  The destructive parts, unless you discover and change them, negatively can influence you throughout life.  So, to be more fully healthy, discover these programs and work to delete them.   

Along with that work, is the work of replacement.  You must work to replace the negativity programs with realistic, accurate positives that are good for you and truthfully about you.  You have lots of positives but you may not know it yet.  However, first comes starting to counter the negative, thinking and feeling programs of anti-self-love and those that promote self-negation.

Using the Okayness Approach

One way to think about this is to say just about everything that happens to you can give you an okay message about yourself, or a not okay message about yourself.  If the you are not okay messages are stronger and more numerous than the you are okay messages, and if they get into your head, you are in for trouble, a lot of bad feelings about yourself and probably about life itself.  However, if you can work to de-power and delete the you are not okay, inner messages, you can start heading toward your natural birthright of okayness, sense of well-being and healthy love, including self-love.  Here are four ways you can begin to do that.

Four simple Tools for Defeating Anti-Self-Love Thinking & Self Negation, Inner Programming

1. Talkback
Whenever you hear an inner, negative thought about yourself, talkback!  You might want to emphatically say something like “You’re just an old, negative program in my head and I’m not going to let you make me feel bad about myself anymore, no matter what you say!  I’m a lot more than only just my human shortcomings and tomorrow I’m going to be even a bit better.  You don’t get to bring me down and control my feelings anymore.  I choose to use my power to listen to what you say to determine if it has any use.  But I refuse to feel bad because whatever is not so good about me is only a smaller, sub-part of the total, amazing me.”  The more emotion you put into talking back at the negative inner message the better.  Remember, motion changes emotion so stomping around, shaking a fist, etc. will help your brain make the necessary neurological alterations for improvement.

I have seen this talkback technique work even with people who have serious mental illnesses and hear voices telling themselves very horrible things.  Usually the voices become weaker and go away as talking back is practiced.  With enough strong emoting and repetition, you likely can make it work too.

2. Question the Provenance
Ask, Who says, Why and Where did that come from?  Who programmed me to think that way, what is it for, does it do me any good today and, if so, how much good, or do I just want to toss it because it is out-of-date and more harmful to me than beneficial.

If your inner critic says something like “you’re stupid” or any other putdown term, question its origin and veracity.  Who told you you were stupid, or whatever, and what did they get out of doing that.  Just because there possibly is some truth in the negative message, does not mean you should give it a lot of your power.  For instance, we are all stupid about some things sometimes -- so what!  We also sometimes are brilliant, and much more important than brilliance is the fact we can love.

3. Do conversion thinking
If a self-negating thought appears, ask “Is there any way I can make a positive use of this thought?”  If there is, do so and feel good about having made that conversion.  If not, tell your inner critic to give you more useful things to work with, and to quit with this message.  Example: If you got an inner message like “You’re a lousy lover”, you might convert it into “I think I’ll start learning some more about how to be an even better lover”.  Then thank your inner critic for helping you get to doing some improvement thinking.  Staying stuck with the lousy lover constipation will not help.

4. Do self-affirmational self-love countering
Prepare a list of what is good about you.  Using that list, prepare a series of good, positive messages from you - to you.  When the negative, anti-self-love messages occur bringing on bad feelings about yourself, confront and counter them emotively with the positive messages from your list.  Use body postures, head movements and gestures of strength, pride and being victorious while doing so.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Most of the bad things we say to ourselves about ourselves have a strong, habit component.  Often they got in our heads by being repeated at us over and over.  That may have caused us to say them over and over to ourselves continuing the toxic conditioning or programming effect.  This means it probably is going to take you saying countering positives over, and over, and over to yourself.  The more vigorously you do this the better and sooner it works.  Dare to love and value yourself enough that you do the practice it takes.  There is lots more you can learn about deleting the negatives in your head and replacing them with positives but these four points provide a pretty good start.

Another Item.  Might you do well to talk over these ideas with someone else?  If you do, please mention our mini-love-lesson site and help spread the idea of purposefully learning more about the ways of love that work.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

Quotable Love Question:  If we want others to think well of us, won’t it be good for us to do the same thing?

Smart Kids from Smart Love

Synopsis: This mini love lesson covers love and IQ; the well loved human child; brains and love; love with smarts and success; what is well loved?; and the smart parent challenge.

Love and IQ

Take any two babies of any mammal species (like rats, rabbits, monkeys, apes and humans) and the one most well-loved will likely be the smarter of the two.

For baby rodents the lovingly licked and groomed will learn the psychologist’s maze faster and remember it longer than the one raised by less loving rodent parents.  The cuddled, caressed, petted, kindly fed and comforted when upset larger mammals produce the same kind of results, indicating the better-loved ones are smarter than the lesser-loved ones.

The same is true for every kind of primate where the well-loved appear smarter, handle stress better, are better at social interaction, are more curious, are less susceptible to disease and live longer.  In laboratory tests the well-loved primates figure out puzzles faster, find hidden food sooner, obtain higher social rank and, oh yes, mate more often and make better parents to their own young later.

The Well-Loved Human Child

A human child who receives lots of well demonstrated, loving touch in the form of hugs, cuddles, kisses, pats and strokes and  verbal love especially in the form of affirmation including challenge and encouragement will score higher on IQ tests than children with lesser amounts of loving input.  In research with at least some identical twins, raised separately, the twin who receives well-demonstrated love most likely will have a higher IQ than the one who receives less well-demonstrated love.

Children raised in poverty who receive more love actions in the first years of life are much more likely to go on to graduate from high school and much less likely to become felons than are children raised in poverty who receive less well-demonstrated love actions.  Well-loved children also handle stress better and suffer much less from stress-related illnesses.  This is especially true if in their environment there is loving attention given which helps these children feel securely loved.

Brains and Love

When scientists studying the brains of the well-loved versus the less-loved they have found distinct differences when they studied siblings, identical twins or just matched offspring.  Brain scans and autopsies both show the brains of the better-loved are better built.  Their neurological architecture is more complete, mature and functions more effectively.  Well-loved infants of all mammal species studied tend to keep their neurochemistry better balanced and, thus, tend not to suffer from the disorders of neurochemical imbalances nearly as much as the less well-loved.

Love with Smarts and Success

The well-loved, human child grows up making better grades, attaining higher social status, actualizing talents more, and in just about every category succeeding more than the less well-loved child.  There certainly are exceptions as in the less well-loved child who becomes better loved as an adult.  The well-loved also have higher than average successes.  There also is evidence to suggest that the high IQ children who were not so well-loved are more likely to experience more erratic success patterns.  Especially do the well-loved do well in love relationships more than the less well-loved.  Smarter individuals who focus on learning the skills of love are thought to do much better at love relationships than smarter individuals who do not focus on learning the skills of loving well.

What is Well-Loved?

Being well-loved means receiving ample, skillful demonstrations of the eight groups of behavior, social scientists have discovered, convey love.  It also means that when one is the recipient of these love-conveying behaviors, healthful brain chemistry reactions are triggered which in turn brings about physically and psychologically healthful results.

Briefly stated, these groups of loving behaviors can be titled: Tactile Love, Expressional Love, Verbal Love, Gifting Love, Affirmation Love, Self-Disclosure Love, Toleration Love, and Receptional Love.  (Find more details about these loving behaviors in “Behaviors That Give Love – The Basic Core Four”, “A Behavioral (Operational) Definition of Love”, “Parenting Series: How To Love Your Child Better”.  Also important are the mega-psycho-emotional categories of love actions which can be called Connection Love, Nurturing Love, Protective Love and Metaphysical Love. To learn more about all these I suggest you study the definitions, delineations and descriptions of love and love behavior entries at this site; you might start with “A Functional Definition of Love”.

To learn more about helping your child be smarter and come to have a more successful, adult life you might read the following books: How Children Succeed by Dr. Paul Tough; to learn a lot more about helping young children have healthy brains and, therefore, better lives you might read Why Love Matters by Dr. Sue Gerhardt; to get a fuller understanding of the eight major ways of directly and effectively showing love you might read Recovering Love (in Part Two) by me, yours truly.

The Smart Parent Challenge

Let me suggest you contemplate this. Smart loving parents study smart loving parenting.  They look up research, they read, they take courses and classes, go to workshops and they learn every way they can.  A lot is known and more is being discovered all the time, but too many parents don’t avail themselves of the knowledge. Those who do – do better and so do their children.

As always – Go and Grow with Love

Dr. J. Richard Cookerly

♥ Love Success Question
Are you helping your brain health by being a good receiver of the love that is demonstrated to you, and are you being a good giver of love helping those you love have better brain health?

Related posts:

1. 20 Smart Making Love Questions
2. How Smart Is Your Love? – A Test
3. Virginity Surpassed and Parental Love
4. Parenting Series: Paul’s Points On Love For Parents
5. Better Parenting Through Love Series