Our Approach

Psycho-education        

The Love-Life Workshop is a psycho-educational workshop. By psycho-education we mean a ‘personalized learning’ workshop. This form of psycho-education is well suited for the internet. Since the internet offers the opportunity to be truly anonymous, very intimate and personal information can now be communicated interpersonally without having to identify oneself. The implications for learning are profound. The internet is commonly identified as a limitless resource for the gathering of information about any topic. This vast storehouse of available information is already expanding the consciousness of most people who utilize cyberspace. Add the possibility of a serious exchange of personal information in a secure and anonymous website and you have the basic elements for an effective psycho-educational service online.

    The objective of our service is to promote consciousness and learning. Consciousness simply defined is becoming aware of something in the context of an interpersonal exchange with another. Learning is the incorporation of information not previously known or previously known but whose significance was ignored or diminished. Consciousness and learning are the two factors that help us define the term ‘psycho-education.’ Through consciousness as an interpersonal exchange of personalized information an individual can identify problems areas, in this case, problems with love. This is the ‘psycho’ in psycho-education.

    The learning or educational element focuses more on solving the problems given definition in anonymous workshop exchanges. Becoming aware of whatever difficulties complicate a person’s love-life is the first step. However in a psycho-educational service the products of consciousness are only useful when they can be incorporated into a new learning process. Discovering what we know and the fact that it no longer works for us is then accompanied by the experience of unlearning and relearning. The ‘educational’ element in psycho-education involves the challenge of new information usually at odds with what is known, accepted, and practiced regardless of outcome.

Love-Life Psychology

A review of an individual’s love-life psychology will reveal the following four universal psychological components: love-life need, love-life expectations, love-life self-esteem, and love-life psychological defenses. In an unconscious love-life compromised by repeated disappointments in love there is an inevitable progression from unresolved parent and child bonding motivations, unrealistic expectations of love, impaired self-esteem, and protective defenses. In a healthy and conscious love-life, previously frustrated parent and child bonding motivations are continuously being resolved in an ongoing conscious grieving and letting-go process, interpersonal expectations of love are realistic, love-life self-esteem permits a healthy feeling of lovability and a view of oneself as a giving lover, and there is a conscious recognition and interest in adult to adult bonding and reciprocal intimacy in adult love relationships.

love-life need

Love-life need is basically ‘what’ a person thinks or feels he/she needs from a love relationship. Love-life need exists along a continuum from parent and child bonding motivations to adult to adult bonding motivations. Parent and child bonding motivations in adulthood consist of residual childhood and adolescent ‘needs’ for love from parental persons. Unresolved as sources of psychological immaturity in adulthood they are projected into potentially intimate or intimate interpersonal relationships. Adulthood relationships largely influenced by parent and child bonding motivations are founded on the psychology of getting what is needed from others with various forms of interpersonal control and dependency utilized to try to make that happen. Within a parent and child bonding orientation in adulthood there is hope that a love relationship will in some way redress the inadequacies of love in childhood and adolescence. The search for parent and child bonding need gratification in adulthood relationships is a source of much disappointment and hurt. It is also a major underlying cause in the breakdown of adulthood love relationships.

    Adult to adult bonding motivations include an age-appropriate need for friendship and reciprocal intimacy in adulthood. Adult to adult bonding motivations are founded on the interpersonal values of freedom, equality, honesty, and independence. They are the realistic and available sources of shared need gratification in adulthood. A preoccupation with getting parent and child bonding needs gratified in an adult love relationship interferes with the recognition and expression of a matured need for shared intimacy in love. An adult to adult bonding orientation also includes the need to give love unilaterally to another. In a healthy adult love-life the adult to adult bonding motivation to share reciprocal intimacy alternates with the motivation to give love unilaterally. The ability to give love unilaterally is the most developed form of independent loving possible in a love relationship. This more subtle and matured need to give love unilaterally is easily eclipsed by the preoccupation and emotion that accompany displaced parent and child bonding motivations in adulthood relationships.   

    For an adult love relationship to be healthy it must be moving toward an adult to adult bonding orientation. Any adulthood love-life can be evaluated relative to where on the love-life needs continuum a person’s love-life currently is. The point of psycho-education at the level of love-life need is to determine and make conscious the degree to which adulthood love-life experiences are infused with unrealistic parent and child bonding motivations. Efforts to gratify unresolved parent and child bonding needs in adulthood are ultimately disappointing and frustrating. Adulthood love relationships simply cannot handle the nature and intensity of the co-dependent expectations that accompany parent and child bonding needs.

    The resolution of parent and child bonding needs in adulthood is achieved through the experience of consciously grieving loss and letting go of outdated, immature, or unrealistic attachments. This process is usually undergone gradually and over time. Any effort to induce a consciousness of parent and child bonding motivations in adulthood along with an introduction to the healing potential of grieving loss is helpful. At the same time an introduction to the experience of healthy adult to adult bonding and its potential for realistic interpersonal gratifications in adulthood should always accompany this resolution process. It is the combination of continuing to grieve love-life losses with learning about and implementing healthier love-life practices that ultimately advances an adult individual’s love-life.

   As workshop leaders we should at least be aware of, and when appropriate, identify and work with the evidence of parent and child bonding motivations in our workshop participants. We should seek to encourage moments of conscious reflection on the nature of love-life needs, provide an informed rationale for appropriate separation-individuation and maturing grief experiences, and introduce participants to and reinforce the importance of learning to develop healthy adult to adult bonding practices in their love-lives.

love-life expectations

Love-life expectations are the ‘who, how, when, and where’ of gratifying love-life needs in a person’s love-life. They are the translation of what is felt to be personally needed into what is interpersonally wanted and sought after. When our love-lives are unconscious and influenced by multiple disappointments, expectations are the unrealistic interpersonal ‘appointments’ that become love-life disappointments when they are frustrated. They are the anticipated interpersonal arrangements we can form with others to predict the gratification of our unresolved parent and child bonding motivations in an adulthood love relationship. These expectations are largely unconscious. They were at one point conscious but are now being recreated repeatedly without consciousness. They are also dependent in the sense that they are derived from parent and child bonding needs. They are repetitive and the underlying source of much of what goes wrong when a frustrated and controlling lover tries to find, commit to, or sustain an adult love relationship.

    Generally speaking, unconscious love-life expectations have three common overlapping motivations: repetition, correction, and completion. Repetition oriented expectations are those that seek to replicate an individual’s earlier experiences of love no matter what their level of health and satisfaction. Correction oriented expectations attempt to create an adult love relationship that will make up for the inadequacy or absence of love earlier in life. Completion oriented expectations seek to complete an individual’s emotional life when the sense of self is experienced as incomplete due to earlier distorted or absent love experiences. In our culture there are those who believe that correction and/or completion are good enough reasons to be in love. It is our belief that these forms of dependent loving eventually create emotional obstacles for any adult love relationship.

    More matured expectations of love involve the pursuit of adult to adult bonding satisfactions in the form of reciprocal intimacy and periodic experiences of unilateral loving. When love-life expectations become conscious the bonds to past disappointments in love can be loosened. Spontaneous new experiences can be substituted for attempts to control love and the predictable experiences of frustration. A shift from simply expecting what we unconsciously want regardless of how unrealistic it is to consciously acknowledging and loving what we realistically can have promotes a healthier and more satisfying love-life.

love-life self-esteem

Self-esteem is a very significant component of our love-life psychology. How we feel about ourselves and how well we take care of ourselves are always major determinants of the quality of our love-lives. Love-life self-esteem is manifested in two general categories: how lovable or receptive we can feel and be, and how loving or giving we can be to others and ourselves. When love-life self-esteem is affected by disappointed and frustrated parent and child needs it is critical and compensatory. Regardless of how active or adamant a person is about making his/her love-life conform to parent and child bonding expectations the underlying feeling is that there is something wrong with oneself for not getting parent and child bonding needs met right the first time. This taking of personal responsibility is a common childhood defensive maneuver and is a prominent source of negative love-life self-esteem in adulthood. Compensatory aspects of love-life self-esteem involve the defensive misrepresentations of self a person may create in order to sustain a temporary but false feeling of self-worth in adulthood interpersonal relationships.

    In adulthood love-life experiences these deficits in self-esteem are commonly manifested in feelings of not deserving love, of being depleted when love is given without reciprocity, and inadequate levels of self-care. Difficulty taking care of ourselves as adults is always derived from parent and child bonding disappointments that have never been adequately grieved and resolved in adulthood. Healthy love-life self-esteem congruent with adult to adult bonding motivations permits an individual to receive reciprocal or unilateral loving with little or no conflict, give love on occasion without a concern for reciprocity, and maintain appropriate levels of self-care. When love-life self-esteem exists in the context of healthier adult to adult bonding motivations there is little or no conflict about receiving love from another adult due to an adequate feeling of lovability. This feeling of lovability has either been reinforced in early childhood and adolescence or has been formed later as a consequence of healthy separation-individuation experiences in adulthood. Either way there is a feeling of deserving and being satisfied with love from another adult.

    In the interpersonal context of adult to adult bonding motivations there is also the experienced ability to love another person unilaterally without requesting or demanding reciprocity. This is where a person gives a selfless gift of love to another that is not dependent upon getting it back. Beyond receiving and giving love as two interpersonal manifestations of love-life self-esteem there is the extent of self-care or self-love. When healthy, taking care of oneself becomes independent as an expression of love and commitment toward one’s ‘self’ as a unique psychological and physical life.

love-life defenses

Psychological love-life defenses are originally formed to protect a person from being repeatedly injured by love-life disappointments. They exist in order to control the anticipated impact of hurtful love-life experience. The difference between well-adjusted and adaptive defenses and those that are not is discernable in the pervasiveness and rigidity of their operation. Originally psychological defenses possessed a degree of consciousness that then became unconscious and habitual over time. When parent to child bonding motivation dominates an adult love-life the threat of repetitive love-life disappointment is great. Adult love relationships can never in reality gratify unresolved parent to child bonding needs. The repeated disappointment will continue to reinforce the felt necessity for psychological defenses.

    Many aspects of psychological and interpersonal existence can be utilized for the purpose of psychological defense. We will concentrate on the psychological defensiveness in love-life behavior, beliefs, and emotion. Defensive love-life behavior involves actions which are meant to protect a person from being hurt by repetitive love-life disappointments. The overall method of achieving this is to control any interpersonal situation where the experience of love could lead to feelings of vulnerability and hurt. Defensive love-life behavior can be distancing or aggressive. In either instance the ultimate purpose is to control exposure to hurtful love-life experiences. Withdrawn or aggressive behavior in love-life situations also indicates the presence of underlying parent to child bonding motivations. When a person’s love-life psychology is guided by adult to adult bonding interests, love-life behavior tends to support and demonstrate an open, less defensive, and more emotionally available presence with other people. 

    Defensive love-life beliefs are unconsciously derived from the parent to child bonding assumption that childhood and adolescent needs can be fulfilled in adulthood disregarding any evidence to the contrary. The idealized acceptance and/or critical rejection of a potential lover are often derived from this underlying assumption. Similar to defensive love-life behavior, defensive beliefs about love are in place to protect the individual from anticipated feelings of loss. On a manifest level, defensive love-life beliefs appear as stereotypic judgments and generalizations. They tend to rationalize the defensive love-life behaviors and emotions. When love-life beliefs reflect the existence of adult-adult bonding needs they are derived from an accurate understanding of love available in adulthood. They are realistic depictions of love mixed with lessons learned from past love-life experiences.  

    Defensive love-life emotions exist in two general categories: those that are generated as a consequence of disappointed parent to child bonding motivations and those that are generated from more realistic adult to adult bonding experiences. When parent and child bonding motivations are prominent three emotional states are commonly experienced:

                              resignation – anger/rage - frustration

Chronic frustration in love-life situations usually indicates that parent and child bonding motivations are being repeatedly disappointed. The accumulated effect is visible in the form of repeated frustration with love relationships as the only source of denied gratification. When anger or its most defensive and malignant manifestation as rage is visible in love-life situations, frustration has been transformed to anger because the hope of gratification, still existent in acute frustration has begun to wane. A person in this angry state of mind is experiencing a diminished hope of ever meeting parent and child bonding needs in adulthood without acknowledging the necessity of grieving loss. When resignation has taken over, the hope of resolving parent and child bonding motivations in adult relationships has diminished further. For most chronically disappointed individuals there is an underlying wish that love relationships could be gratifying in this parent and child bonding form, accompanied by the conflicting awareness that this gratification is no longer attainable. What is usually missing is an open acknowledgment of the need for a conscious grieving experience of disappointment, loss, and separation.

    The love-life emotions that commonly accompany a more realistic adult to adult bonding experience are:

                                 hurt - sadness - anxiety - joy

In tolerable proportions, this emotional constellation is conducive to a healthier and more satisfying love-life. These emotions encourage an individual’s receptivity to the experience of love. For example, hurt occurs when a connection has been promised or established and lost. In hurt there are fewer psychological defenses. The tender more vulnerable heart is generally hurt the most by loss. Hurt is a more honest and direct emotional experience. The feeling of sadness is even more receptive to love. Just as hurt is oriented to retaining a connection now lost, sadness is the emotion that occurs when an individual is trying to come to terms with the loss experience itself. Sadness can be a very open and healing love-life emotion.

    Anxiety is the emotion of anticipation in love. The unpredictability of love is to be expected by all who seek the experience. For that reason it is enough to make us all a bit anxious or crazy as the philosophers and poets tell us. Since love thrives on spontaneity and the unknown, healthy lovers understand that love can never really be controlled or predicted. A developed and enduring tolerance is required for these less popular characteristics of love. Of course we have focused on the more troubling aspects of our love-life emotions. Our love-lives can also be a source of joy for all who take the time and make the effort to

‘work’ on their love-lives.