What The World Needs Now Are Love-Life Lessons
by Dr. Thomas Jordan
Love is a natural capability we all come into the world with. Given the right conditions love is supposed to evolve into the experience of giving to others. When thwarted by the misfortunes of life, love can be transformed into something ugly and destructive. Unfortunately we still do not know how to take care of this most precious of human potentials. Favorable conditions for the development of love have never really been adequately implemented. It is so very easy for human beings to be trained instead with lessons drawn from experiences of pain and interpersonal violence. Perhaps we are made too anxious by the vulnerability and openness love requires. For many people defensiveness seems easier. Others take the path of offensiveness, bringing forth whatever hurt and unhappiness they themselves experienced and recreating it anew in the lives of other people. And of course there are some who have given up completely on love and instead seek power and control as more reliable allies in life. Where has all of this confusion left us? I say, in need of an education about our own personal love-life psychologies.
In the title of this essay I use the phrase ‘love-life psycho-education.’ What does it mean? By psycho-education I mean an education that is ‘personalized’ focused on what a particular person should learn about his or her particular love-life. For this topic, the specificity of individual love-life experiences is warranted. Otherwise it might be a little to general. For the purposes of this essay, however, I will supply the concepts and you the reader will have to do the personal application. There is not much in what I am about to tell you that you will not be able to identify with. Love is a very universal experience we can all identify with whether happily or disappointed. Consider these ideas as a crash course in a kind of love-life guidance, an attempt to move aside what you customarily believe about your love-life while introducing you to something new to think about. The old ways have already been tried and only bring you repeated disappointment and frustration. I think we can all agree on that. Why not think things through in new ways you may not have considered. The worse that can happen is a small waste of your time which you can shrug off pretty easily while quickly returning to your old love-life ways. No strain.
On the other hand, if you keep on reading you just might be influenced by something different, a new idea or two about your love-life. Remember little changes can often have big consequences. For starters let’s understand that every human being has his or her very own ‘love-life psychology.’ The outlines might be similar to someone else’s but in the particulars each and every one of us has a unique love-life experience. I call it a love-life psychology because I am asking you to focus on the inside of your love-life. Most people try to change their love-lives by changing something on the outside of their life style. Different clothes, different manners, different places, and perhaps different people, but the bottom line is they have not changed the common denominator, themselves. The first big idea I would like you to consider is that no change can take place in a your love-life unless and until you change your own personal love-life psychology. So don’t go out any buy any new clothes just yet. Our task is to change your thoughts, feelings, and behavior about love from the inside out.
OK now the next question that should come up in your mind is what does my love-life psychology consist of? Good, the short answer is needs, expectations, self-esteem, and defenses. Once a person becomes curious and interested in the composition of his or her love-life psychology 50% of the battle, so to speak, has been won. Put it this way, if you don’t know about something in yourself the chances are very good that it is on automatic. I other words, it functions without choice, your choice. This is precisely why personal freedom is so related to human consciousness. If you are conscious of yourself you have choice and you are free. If you are not conscious of what you believe, feel, and do you are imprisoned by these things beyond your own ability to modify them as needed during the course of your life. So here’s another very important idea about your love-life, everyone’s love-life psychology needs an update from time to time. Most people never consider the fact that their love-life thoughts, feelings, and behavior will need a tune-up as life changes and time evolves love-life experiences. Unfortunately, there are some people who are still living with a love-life psychology that was basically developed in childhood or adolescence and has remained at that level without change. This can be quite painful and disappointing to say the least.
The first thing to learn about your love-life psychology has to do with your love-life needs. Are they realistic or not? Do you still have some left over dependency from your childhood or adolescence influencing the way you think, feel, or act in love-life situations? Most of us have to outgrow childish thoughts, feelings, and behavior at various points during adulthood. If you accept this fact of human nature it’s easier. If you don’t then you will deny too much to be able to work with your self in this area. The objective is to develop a bit more independence in your love-life. By that I don’t me isolation and distance from others. I mean being able to love someone and be yourself at the same time. Another way to say this is to change into someone who is more interested in giving than getting.
There can come a time in your life where you realize the importance of giving as a general orientation toward others. Of course I don’t mean irrational giving, or giving without reason. That is, giving without thinking about the need of the person you are giving to and what it is he or she really needs, not necessarily what you wanted to give him or her. The incentive to make this move from getting to giving in adulthood is based on the recognition that there are more personal rewards from giving that getting. The chances of meeting our disappointed childhood and adolescent needs for love in adulthood are pretty slim. What is more likely to happen is the quest to get more in your adult love-life will only bring you additional disappointments. On the other hand, selfless giving fills a person with love and naturally generates health and happiness. There is a far greater chance of feeling satisfied trying to figure out how to give than how to get more. The later can only be grieved and outgrown as unrealistic to make room for something possible like adult forms of intimacy and love.
If the orientation in your love-life is to get as much as possible from a lover you are bound to be disappointed sooner or later. With this objective in mind, your expectations toward potential lovers will be largely unrealistic. You will probably try to get an adult lover to make up for past love related disappointments and deprivations. You will probably use a lot of subtle or not so subtle forms of control and manipulation to make that happen. Most adult partners will resist and rebel against your efforts to extract what you think you need from them. The end result will be more hurt and more disappointment for everyone involved. If this is you, the only real option you have is to realize this is an unhealthy pattern in your life and stop trying to make other people love you. Next you begin putting your energy into healing the disappointments that drive you to change other people in the first place. I know this is quite a change in the direction of your love-life. Think about it this way, the alternative is to be chronically unhappy for the rest of your life. Simply put, you don’t deserve that when all you are looking for is love.
I am just trying to loosen the grip these expectations have on your love-life experiences because they are making you unhappy. To unlearn the hope of controlling or forcing people to change or give us what we did not get is very difficult because there are emotions of hurt and unhappiness driving it. There may even be a belief or two in the way like the hope that someone’s love could complete you as a person, fill in the gaps so to speak. In the long run, learning how to heal your emotional hurts inside becomes more realistic and vastly more beneficial for your love-life. If you realize that no one can make up for what was lost in your childhood or adolescence, you will feel sad and unhappy, but eventually you’ll start accepting your own personal reality. Just because the person(s) who were supposed to love you earlier in your life when you couldn’t take care of yourself failed to do so properly does not mean you are deficient or lacking in some way. I know it is easy to feel that way but realistically you still have a lot more going for you in the form of natural resources than you realize. We all have to learn how to get in touch with those internal resources to readjust our expectations of love and heal our love-life disappointments.
Like I said, when the people who were supposed to love you did not do a very good job because of their own personal love-life limitations, it is common to apply a little childhood or adolescent logic and come to the conclusion that there is fundamentally something unlovable about yourself. This is when the self-esteem in your love-life gets corrupted. It is very common for children to come to such a conclusion based on the idea that there seems to be no better person to blame for the problem. It is also very common to continue feeling this way straight into adulthood. Figure it this way, if as an adult you never get around to reviewing your own love-life psychology the beliefs you took with you from childhood will pretty much remain in effect unchanged for good or for bad. Of course this problem ties nicely into the unrealistic expectations we discussed earlier. If you do not feel good about yourself in your love-life one false option is to try to get other people to make you feel better. That never works well or at least consistently and always seems to guarantee some continual measure of hurt and disappointment.
The real cure for love-life self-esteem problems is to root out the underlying beliefs that are supporting these limited conclusions about your self. After that it is all about practicing self-care and eventually self-love. I say practice because these things don’t change easily due to the fact that we have already been practicing the negative version for some time. This is precisely how bad psychological habits form. BY the way, low love-life self-esteem is easily determined by the kind of company you keep in your love-life as well as the ways in which you treat yourself. Treating yourself bad only brings unhealthy people into your love-life. If you can stop being so convinced that that is what you really deserve, the opportunity for something better has a chance to emerge. Better self-care is usually what starts to happen when love-life self-esteem is on the mend. This includes taking better care of your body and mind. You can even throw the spirit into the equation if you like. Regardless, the idea is to start taking care of your self as if you yourself are now the most important project you want to take to completion. The goal is good and consistent self-care. Nothing bad is allowed to happen to you. You are now the self appointed guardian of your self. It won’t be long before you start to feel the benefits of this dedication. You might even take better care of your self than the people who were supposed to take care of you earlier in life, body, mind and soul. If that is the case then you’ll have to get used to learning as you go.
From here you can begin to feel the possibility of love coming back or for the first time into your consciousness of and treatment of your self. Pardon the example, but it could begin to feel like falling in love with a pet you take very good care of and have warmed up to over time. The extent to which your very own pet depends upon you and only you to live is now visible to you. You have sworn to protect it no matter what, lucky pet. From here it is only a short step away from fully realizing the extent of your own personal value. Let’s consider the fact that you are a unique individual, one of a kind, never to be replicated again in all of your splendorous particularity. Don’t forget uniqueness is fundamentally the definition of what is precious in this world. So once you realize how precious you truly are in your uniqueness the importance of taking care of your self in this life is undeniable.
When you start to feel that subtle feeling of love for your self your love-life gets naturally and spontaneously better. A gift for all the anxiety and unhappiness you endured making this change in yourself. Remember the fundamental love-life lesson, if you want to change your love-life change your self, in this case, your love-life psychology. When you love your self and take got care of your self you naturally respect your self and never allow any one else to abuse or mistreat you in any way, period. No excuses, no rationalizations, it is a fact of life that brings more loving and caring people into your personal love-life. After a love-life change of some kind, like when a love relationship breaks up, it is always a good time to learn something new about your love-life. Unfortunately, some people jump right into a new love relationship without ever giving themselves an opportunity to learn something from the last one. The problem is hurt. Most people don’t life the hurt that comes from love-life losses and disappointments so they try to run away from them in any way possible. And there are a million and one ways to run away. The problem is what you run away from always haunts you in one form or another.
This difficulty most people have with love-life hurt seems to necessitate the use of love-life psychological defenses, or so it seems. Psychological defenses are a little like physical defenses, the major difference being they operate in the mind. When I physically defend against something I put up a block against it. When I psychologically defend against something I am also putting up a block against something I perceive as emotionally hurtful or damaging to me realistically or not. You see, it is entirely possible to believe that something could be hurtful to you, which in reality is really good for you and vice versa. So there is always a little judgment involved. Nevertheless, the point is we all use psychological defenses to minimize the impact of our experiences in life, especially our love-life experiences. What happens if you choose not to defend yourself or you can’t for some reason? You could feel vulnerable to an attack of some kind. You might even feel fear or at least anxiety, as if something is going to happen to you that you are unprepared to handle. The love-life lesson here is to develop a courageous tolerance for this feeling of vulnerability until you can figure out whether or not your fears are rational. If they are not you are free to be intimate in a situation where you would be ordinarily defensive and avoidant. Otherwise you can always go back to your usual defensiveness and remembering Shakespeare feel good about the fact that you took a noble risk in your love-life no matter what the outcome.
The simple truth is that anything you do, feel, or think can function as a psychological defense. In your love-life once you become aware of this fact a greater consciousness evolves for the what, when, where, and how of your psychological defenses you have to protect against the hurt feelings that can happen in love. Tolerating an awareness of this is 50% of the solution. Making different choices and practicing alternatives are the remaining percentage of change. The alternative to psychological defensiveness in your love-life is being able to see someone for who he or she is and tolerating the feelings that awareness creates. Let’s face it, the probability of some hurt in one form or another is pretty good in a love relationship. By the simple fact that you are dealing with two people disagreement is guaranteed. To avoid disagreement in a love relationship requires some form of deception, dishonesty or control. It is more useful to expect disagreement and difference, and see it as an opportunity for real intimacy. By real intimacy I mean two people who are real enough with each other at least from time to time and tolerate temporary unhappiness in order to be honest and direct.
To appreciate a relationship where differences are visible, accepted, and appreciated you have to believe in your own ability to heal hurts when they do occur. If you don’t believe in your natural ability to heal love-life hurts love can become a very scary option indeed. Psychological defenses become more important than risk and love is harder to find and receive as a consequence. If you believe in your natural ability to heal the expectable instability of love it becomes tolerable and even more enjoyable in time. Yes love can hurt, otherwise it wouldn’t be love, that crazy emotion we all dream about and fret over. Being cognizant of your love-life psychology means taking the time to review your love-life needs, expectations, self-esteem, and defensiveness for the purpose of getting better at giving and receiving the love that is possible in your love-life.
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Thomas Jordan, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, and university professor. He is the author of “Individuation in Contemporary Psychoanalysis,” a unique study of psychological development in adulthood. As a continuation of his work, Dr. Jordan has developed the concept of “love-life psychology” as the identifiable psychological pattern that generates repetitive love-life experience. He created a convenient and very affordable method of helping people create a healthier love-life psychology by founding the Love-Life Workshops at
http://www.lovelifeworkshops.com, an online professional service that offers personalized love-life information to anonymous participants. For additional information, go to
http://lovelifeworkshopsblog.com.
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