The internet has certainly made the search for love more technically sophisticated. Dating websites are instilling the hope of a love connection whether promoting the availability of potential partners or guaranteeing compatibility. The problem is a growing number of people are experiencing the frustration of repeated disappointment despite the guarantees and assurances being made. Too often the hope of finding a genuine love connection does not survive the reality of actually meeting a potential partner online.
As a psychologist the complaints I hear the most are the time and effort it takes to sift through the sheer number of responders, the worry involved in possibly meeting a ‘crazy’ person on the internet, and complaints about the sexual intentions of men online. For many people frustration forces them to temporarily cancel their online dating memberships only to return when disappointment fades, hope returns, and loneliness compels efforts to find love again online.
The solution is not just to meet more people, compatible or not. A love-life gets better by being psychologically prepared for love when an opportunity arises and by learning more effective ways of finding and/or being in a love relationship. Unfortunately most people don’t like the idea of having to learn anything new about their love-lives. They simply want to remain hopeful about meeting the right person doing things the way they always have.
What if love-life frustrations and disappointments could be reviewed by professionals online? Would this make it easier for people to work with their love-life issues? This option would be especially attractive to people already accustomed to using their computers to meet people, as well as those who are unable or unwilling to make their love-life problems known face to face with a professional helper. There are a large number of people who still find it intolerable to reveal and work on their love-life problems in a professional office even in this contemporary world of personal therapies and self-help groups. Whether its embarrassment, shame, or some other personal contingency that makes it difficult if not impossible to actually go to an office, the consequence is a large group of people in need of immediate help for their love-lives.
An effective online professional service for love-life problems would for starters have to be anonymous to circumvent the kind of defensiveness people usually feel revealing the details of their love-live experiences. Only the internet can provide the conditions necessary to support a truly anonymous professional service of this kind. Such a website would host anonymous learning forums with easily identified licensed professionals addressing a range of love-life problems from dating to marriage to divorce. The cost of such a service would have to be affordable to reach the widest possible audience. The website would also have to be a safe supportive place that encourages openness and allows members to identify with and learn from each other.
With these program requirements in mind, the Love-Life Workshops website is the first to provide anonymous psycho-educational love-life workshops conducted by licensed professionals. We offer the computing public an opportunity to join our online community and participate in love-life oriented chat-rooms, message boards, and low cost workshops, or by simply observing any scheduled workshop as a free benefit of membership. Participation is totally anonymous, convenient, and very affordable.
Workshops are small and conducted in chat-rooms on the Love-Life Workshops website. The focus is exclusively on love-life issues and each workshop explores personal experiences guided by a particular love-life theme. The emphasis is on getting people the personal information they need to better understand their love-life issues and what they can begin doing about them. One of the program’s strengths is its exclusive focus on personal love-life experiences. Workshop leaders never just lecture at participants. Instead they deal directly with personal love-life experiences in learning dialogues that take place in chat-room workshops with only a small number of participants.
Workshop leaders are all New York State licensed Ph.D. psychologists matched to their workshops on the basis of professional expertise and their own personal love-life experiences. Our workshop leaders are easily identified as professional psychologists at our website. The identities, expertise, and certifications of our professionals can be easily confirmed by their photos, credentials, and personal love-life experience available in detail at their own web page. We encourage our workshop leaders to be open about their own relevant love-life experiences as an aid in conducting their workshops. In fact, the combination of anonymous participants and easily identified professional leaders encourages people to trust being more consistently open and honest than usually found on the internet.
The Love-Life Workshops are always conducted in a highly personal manner. Because we are offering total anonymity to our participants they are free to be as honest and revealing as possible. Our psycho-educational approach to love-life problems consists of the delivery of personalized love-life information in the form of guidance and advice to anonymous participants. This personalized review of love-life experience in our workshops makes the free observation of workshops by auditing members very personal as well. For those individuals not yet sure about participating in a workshop themselves, this vicarious learning option provides a chance to check out a workshop and workshop leader before registering. The fact that each workshop focuses on a particular love-life theme guarantees an experience of personal relevance for anyone choosing to simply observe workshops.
Many people think of their love-lives in terms of what they are struggling to accomplish like finding a lover, making a commitment, leaving an unhealthy relationship, or just trying to live a healthy single lifestyle. Others characterize their love-life problems more specifically by a love-life experience such as divorce, marital separation, abuse in a love relationship, the experience of dating in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, etc. Our Love-Life Workshops are guided by these and other familiar love-life themes compatible with the usual ways people think of their love-life problems.
Once enrolled in a workshop our professional psychologists encourage participants to identify their love-life problems, consider more appropriate love-life solutions, learn something new about love, and think more broadly about their own love-lives. We encourage workshop participants to begin thinking about their own personal ‘love-life psychology’ as the underlying psychological pattern of thoughts, feelings, and actions that determine the success or failure of their love-life experiences.
When our love-life psychologies are causing us unhappiness they are usually repetitive and formed from the disappointments with love that occurred in our lives sometimes as far back as childhood. The more hurtful our love-life disappointments were the more rigid our love-life patterns can become. We can get stuck repeating something over and over again in our love-lives because we are not yet conscious of the fact that it is happening and do not yet accept the fact that it has happened to us. Because of this lack of conscious acceptance we never let go of these disappointments and get past their influence in our love-lives. I like to think of the average adult love-life psychology as a mixture of unresolved childhood and adulthood needs for love depending on the nature and degree of love-life disappointment a person has had to deal with. The Love-Life Workshops were created to help people become more conscious of their love-life issues. Despite all the precautions about the internet these days, it is still a great place to promote consciousness.
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