Fact Sheet
Love-Life Project, Inc.
dba Love-Life Workshops
574 West End Avenue, #64
New York, New York 10024
Contact
Dr. Thomas Jordan, Founder, drjordan@lovelifeworkshops.com
Focus: Love-Life Problems
Since the advent of online dating many people look to the internet as the medium within which to make a love connection. In recent years articles have appeared in the popular media retelling experiences of frustration and disappointment looking for love online. Unfortunately many online seekers are repeatedly disappointed because they lack an awareness of what is not working in the ‘psychology’ of their personal love-lives. Ordinarily people do not think of working on their personal love-life psychology. They often repeat what they have learned about love earlier in life without awareness and regardless of negative consequences. Some people do become aware that they are re-creating their own love-life disappointments but are unable or unwilling to disclose their love-life problems to a professional in an office setting. There can be many different reasons for this reluctance, some of which include:
shyness and/or embarrassment
excessive anxiety
shame
fear of judgment
emotionally or physically abused by controlling spouse or other
fear of travel
over-weight
illness or disability
fear of the unknown
fear of exposing personal identity
living in remote regions
phobic disorders
resistant to the idea of needing help for love-life disappointments
Service: Anonymous Online Workshops for Love-Life Problems
As an anonymous online service focusing exclusively on love-life problems, our program begins to address this need to work specifically on the personal psychology of love-life problems. The Love-Life Workshops website introduces a convenient and safe way to work on one’s love-life psychology in an online workshop with a licensed psychologist without having to identify oneself. We also offer our members public and private love-life oriented chat-rooms and message boards that encourage the formation of a supportive membership community.
The Love-Life Workshops program is increasing the public’s awareness of the existence of love-life psychology and its complications as a primary cause of repeated love-life disappointment. We have made it convenient for people to get the personal love-life information and guidance they need online to improve the possibility of finding and/or sustaining a healthy and fulfilling love relationship.
Our Primary Objectives
Anonymous Professional Love-Life Service
Recent interest in anonymous websites inviting emotional confessions is evidence of the public’s need to freely articulate problematic love-life experience without being identified. Until now love-life revelations have taken place in a cyberspace populated by one or more anonymous users. Under these conditions the levels of honesty vary from truthful confessions to extreme falsity and fabrication.
Anonymity is one of the essential ingredients needed to successfully review
love-life experiences and learn something new about love online. When an anonymous person interacts with a fully identified professional helper with verified credentials the outcome is more often skewed toward honesty and openness.
The absence of personal identification has little effect on the confession of personal love-life experiences. It is the actual psychological experience people have that counts and serves to truly differentiate them as individuals. People often learn more about themselves under anonymous conditions because the feeling of safety they are having opens them up and increases their receptivity to new learning.
Mental health professionals currently practicing online therapy or counseling
from their own website or as part of an e-clinic require identifying information from their clients or patients to conduct their practices. As in a traditional office practice the person who provides the services is the same person who bills the patient. Given this practice requirement, therapists, whether they are online or in an office, cannot provide anonymous conditions to their patients.
The Love-Life Workshops website is set up so that no workshop leader knows the true identity of any workshop participant. Only two administrators, Dr. Jordan and Adam Glenn have access to the secured identifying information necessary to process credit card transactions and neither administrator provides workshop services to members. Our workshop leaders are never involved in the billing process at our website. Members participate in our workshop program knowing their true identities remain securely anonymous at our website.
Personalized Love-Life Education
The Love-Life Workshops program is psycho-education not psychotherapy.
At our website psycho-education is defined as a personalized learning experience conducted by a licensed psychologist with required training and experience. Our licensed psychologists promote learning experiences by providing the needed personalized love-life information, guidance, and advice to our members. We specialize in tailoring the learning experience to each member’s love-life by keeping our program focused on personal love-life experience.
Option to Learn By Observing Workshops
Our services are provided in anonymous public forums at our website. All workshops are conducted in our chat-rooms. All registered members of the Love-Life Workshops website can participate in a workshop or just ‘observe’ any workshop in our schedule at any time as a benefit of membership.
We included this option to observe workshops in order to extend the psycho-educational reach of our services to those members who for one reason or another cannot or will not participate actively in our program. Since our services are quite specific in focus (i.e. love-life themes) members will have no difficulty identifying with each other’s love-life experiences. For a nominal monthly membership fee a member can have a meaningful learning experience even at a vicarious level of involvement in our program
Affordability
Another objective is to make the Love-Life Workshops program available to as many individuals in need of a love-life review and learning as possible. Our nominal monthly membership fees, low workshop fees, various discounts being offered, and option to freely observe workshops achieve this objective.
Price Listing:
Guest Membership: Chatrooms...Yes (No Posting); Message Boards...Yes (No Posting); Newsletter...Yes; Cost of Workshop..54.95; Cost of Consultation (25 min.)...44.95; Cost of Consultation (50 min.)..89.95; Support Groups..No; Monthly Membership Rate..Free; Quarterly Membership Rate..Free; Bi-Annual Membership Rate..Free; Annual Membership Rate..Free.
Silver Membership: Chatrooms...Yes; Message Boards...Yes; Newsletter...Yes; Cost of Workshop...49.95; Cost of Consultation (25 min.)...39.95; Cost of Consultation (50 min.)...79.95; Support Groups...No; Monthly Membership Rate...9.95; Quarterly Membership Rate...26.95; Bi-Annual Membership Rate...47.95; Annual Membership Rate...89.95.
Gold Membership: Chatrooms...Yes; Message Boards...Yes; Newsletter...Yes; Cost of Workshop...43.95; Cost of Consultation (25 min.)...34.95; Cost of Consultation (50 min.)...70.95; Support Groups...Yes; Monthly Membership Rate...11.95; Quarterly Membership Rate...31.95; Bi-Annual Membership Rate...56.95; Annual Membership Rate...99.95.
Supportive Membership Community
We are committed to building an online membership community of people serious about reviewing and learning something new about their love-lives. We are building a community of users that identify the Love-Life Workshops website as a secure and mutually supportive place to safely work on personal love-life experiences and to help others work on their love-live issues.
Respectful Website Environment
At registration all applicants are required to accept our Terms of Service Agreement that clearly outlines guidelines governing conduct at our website. Violators are warned and/or terminated from our service if compliance does not occur. This Agreement, our efforts to monitor chat-room activity, and the fact that our workshops are controlled by our workshops leaders ensures that an online experience at our website will remain constructive and respectful for our members.
Our Terms of Service Agreement also offers guidelines concerning the most effective way of participating in our program. Our members are encouraged and coached by our staff to communicate in workshops in ways that maximize the usefulness of this psycho-educational experience for all participants.
Verifiable Professional Experts
Over the past three years Dr. Jordan personally interviewed and hired the various workshop leaders independently contracted with the Love-Life Project, Inc. to conduct workshops. Workshop leaders were matched to their workshops based on their expertise and relevant love-life experience. This selection process insures that workshop leaders are intimately acquainted with the love-life theme of their workshops and can guide workshop participants from professional as well as personal experience.
The 61 New York State licensed psychologists independently contracted with the Love-Life Workshops are separately listed on their own profile pages at our website. Along with a current photo, license, educational, and professional information, we requested that relevant love-life information be included. Website members can peruse these pages and select workshop leaders based on the information they find there. This more comprehensive information provides our members with a greater measure of control in selecting workshops and the professionals conducting them.
Dr. Jordan’s Concept of “Love-Life Psychology”
Dr. Jordan has been studying the love-life experiences of his patients and others since the early 90s. This extensive period of research culminated in his concept of “love-life psychology.” Dr. Jordan believes that the only way to truly change love-life experiences is to identify and change the psychology of a person’s love-life. He identifies the various components of a person’s love-life psychology with what he calls the “Love-Life Review” and “Practices of Conscious Loving.” To have an impact on a person’s love-life psychology it is necessary to invite an open and honest psychological review of love-life disappointments and to encourage new learning about love.
The Love-Life Review is a conceptual tool that helps identify the psychological complications in a person’s love-life at the levels of love-life need, love-life expectations, love-life self-esteem, and the kinds of psychological defenses an individual uses to reduce and/or avoid love-life hurt.
The Practices of Conscious Loving is used to introduce a person to the various learning experiences needed to change his or her love-life psychology to improve the chances of finding and keeping a more satisfying and healthy love relationship. This conceptual tool consists of various ideas and actions that can be used to emotionally ‘prepare for love’ and ‘sustain love’ once it arrives. Correcting misunderstandings about the experience of love, developing individuality in love, and the intimate practice of friendship in love address the importance of preparation to maximize receptivity. For Dr. Jordan, sustaining love once it occurs requires the continuous practice of communicating about certain love-life topics that reconnect lovers emotionally, along with the mutual practice of independence in love.
Dr. Jordan’s conceptual ideas and practices are integrated into the professional functioning of the Love-Life Workshop website. Nevertheless, our workshop leaders are independent professionals and experts in their own right. This obvious fact promotes the professional diversity of opinion and practice we endorse and encourage in our program.
History of this Project
In the late 1980’s Dr. Thomas Jordan met Victoria Salta, L.C.S.W. at a community mental health clinic in New York City. They were both single at the time and interested in what kind of services could be made available to single people experiencing chronic love-life disappointment. Conversations on this topic continued throughout their dating relationship and into their marriage. Shortly after marrying in 1994, they began working together on providing a group psychotherapy experience to single men and women that focused predominately on love-life issues. These groups were called, ‘singles support groups.’ The groups were conducted in Dr. Jordan’s private practice over a seven year period and were advertised in local newspapers and the New York Magazine. It was in this context that Dr. Jordan developed his concepts of love-life psychology.
Eventually Dr. Jordan became aware of a larger group of individuals who were curious about the support groups but could not make a commitment to join. Anxiety, embarrassment, shame and a myriad of other resistances frequently stood in the way of receiving the benefits of this office group treatment. It was at this point that Dr. Jordan began exploring the possibility of reaching this larger population of people another way.
The support group program was transformed into the Love-Life Workshops, a program of small office workshops conducted in Manhattan for people with love-life difficulties. In 2004 shortly after this format change, Dr. Jordan met Adam Glenn, a young man with outstanding internet research and marketing skills. Over the subsequent three year period, they explored the possibility of conducting the Love-Life Workshops program online. Together they developed the specifics of a website based workshop that would utilize the latest chat-room technology. They incorporated as the Love-Life Project, Inc., developed the Love-Life Workshops website, and hired 61 New York State licensed psychologists as independent contractors to conduct 139 workshops per week at the site. The Love-Life Workshops website launched to the internet in the February 2008. The website can be found at www.lovelifeworkshops.com.
Competing Markets
Beyond the standard office practice of psychotherapy that is usually not exclusively focused on love-life issues, we compete in the new and advancing market of online psychological services. One important advantage to our service is that it is not online psychotherapy and does not utilize the medical or sick model to address love-life difficulties.
We subscribe to a personalized learning approach and encourage our members to review their particular love-lives at our website and learn something new about their love-life experiences. Our service is also distinguished from other websites that may offer psychological services to individuals with love-life problems by providing true anonymity to our members, an exclusive focus on specific love-life themes in our workshops, and a large staff of verifiable licensed Ph.D. psychologists as workshop leaders. We are also unique in offering a vicarious learning option to our website members where they can observe the chat-room dialogue of any workshop in our schedule at any time. ### ### ###
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