Love-Life Workshops Blog

Get More Out of Your Online Dating Experience

Many online dating services promise a volume of possible love prospects. What they want you to believe is that the more single people you are exposed to the greater your chances of finding someone to love. The problem they overlook is that many disappointed lovers are unconsciously guaranteeing their own love-life disappointments by making the same limited love-life choices over and over again. Volume by itself cannot guarantee a love-life connection especially when you are still unaware of your love-life patterns. You can increase your chances of a love connection by becoming aware of the ways you jeopardize your love-life with self-defeating thoughts, feelings, and actions while looking for, committing to, or leaving an expired love relationship.

    

Other dating services offer estimates of compatibility to people looking for love. Usually in the form of survey results that identify compatible people with a measure of interests and other personal indicators. The assumption is that their measures of compatibility will increase the likelihood of a love connection more significantly than chance. Whether assessments of compatibility improve the possibility of falling in love is a matter of statistical analysis. If anything, the experience itself of completing a detailed compatibility survey nurtures the hope of finding a compatible lover. My concern, however, is that the multiplication of prospects and forecasts of compatibility only fan the hope of a love connection without becoming conscious of the personal complications and frustrations involved.

    

Many people using online dating services are in need of information that will psychologically prepare them for the love they seek and highlight more effective ways of being in love. It is now possible to get personalized love-life information anonymously from professionals online http://www.lovelifeworkshops.com. Providing people with the personalized love-life information they need is the key to a successful love-life. So when prospects are plenty and compatible, and the chemistry of love occurs, people who are prepared will respond in ways that encourage the growth and endurance of a love relationship. One of the more common tragedies in human experience occurs when the chemistry of love emerges to someone unknowingly unprepared to receive it. We all know that true love comes infrequently to most people anyway. You have to be mentally ready for love when it arrives and you need to know how to keep love healthy over time. Being mentally ready for love means having an accurate perception of the experience of love, a healthy sense of oneself as an independent person in love, along with the ability to form and preserve a friendship with your lover. Sustaining love requires an enduring interest in developing a capacity to communicate along with an ongoing development of one’s psychological independence in love.

    

Without a conscious recognition of what works and what does not work in your love-life it is more likely you will repeat what doesn’t work over and over again creating the same old chronic disappointment. Once you have reviewed and identified your particular love-life psychology you can begin changing the dissatisfying consequences it creates in your love-life. The first step is to know that you have a personal love-life psychology. A personal pattern of relating to love that determines the quality and satisfaction in your love-life. From there it becomes possible to do something different. To learn something new about love in the ways you think, feel, and act when you look for it, find it, or commit to it. Like everything else in life, once something new is learned it becomes a part of the way we live through practice.

Review Your Love-Life Psychology for a Better Love-Life

What is wrong with your love-life? If you say something like I’m too old, too young, don’t have enough money, not educated enough, job is not good enough, wife cheated on me, I’m single parent, or recently divorced you are overlooking the real reason for your love-life disappointment. Let me put it to you this way, the real reason for your love-life problems is not in the circumstances of your life or the people in it. The real reason is you probably never upgraded ‘love-life psychology.’ By love-life psychology I mean the psychological pattern that determines the thoughts and feelings you have and actions you take when you are trying to find love, commit to love, or leave an expired love relationship. If you didn’t know you even had a love-life psychology, you’ve been probably looking everywhere but inside yourself for the answer to your love-life problems.

    

Once you are convinced that you have a love-life psychology and it determines the fate of your love-life, you will be well on your way to creating an improved love-life experience for yourself. Most people experience a lot of defensiveness when they think about changing the psychology of their love-lives. Why can’t what we learned about love in childhood and adolescence guarantee a loving and satisfied adulthood? It usually doesn’t because much of the time we learn love-life lessons from someone else’s failed or limited love-life. These lessons from the past are never tailored to our own unique circumstances. It could be your parents or other family members who showed you by example. In other instances, you might form a love-life pattern from your earlier love-life disappointments, or a combination of the two. From hurtful love-life experiences we learn to expect and avoid more hurt in ways that keep us stuck in repetition and defensiveness. To keep your love-life fresh you have to periodically review your love-life psychology. This involves a review your love-life needs, your expectations of a lover, your feelings about yourself in love, and the psychological defenses you are using in your love-life to protect yourself from hurt.

Love-Life Needs

What are your love-life needs? In a general sense they are the feelings of need that you experience for or in a love relationship. They can be developed or undeveloped, dependent or independent, mature or immature, depending on your current state of mind. If your love-life needs are immature, your adult love-life will be heavily influenced by parent-child forms of need. There is a tendency for past experiences with love dating back to when you were a child or adolescent to still be shaping the experiences you have in your love-life. This could prove troublesome because parent-child love-life needs do not fit very well into adult love relationships. In adulthood, intimate reciprocal love relationships where there is an equitable give and take, work the best.

    

Love-life needs stop developing from the time you start trying to get adult lovers to make up for the love you did not get at some earlier point in your life, when the emphasis was on getting love rather than giving it. This kind of immature love-life need will start developing again once you become conscious that it has stopped growing in the first place. Admitting to oneself that something like this exists is sobering to say the least. But if you don’t, there is a good chance that your undeveloped love-life need will contaminate every love relationship you have resulting in repeated love-life disappointments. We all need to accept that we can’t make up for the love we didn’t get in childhood and adolescence by getting it in our adult love relationships. Once this is accepted, the feelings of grief and sadness that come can eventually set you free to have a more realistic love relationship in the present. This love-life sadness should be tolerated and shared whenever possible. It is an emotional sign that the required healing is trying to take place.

   

It also helps to know and believe that you are really not as dependent on someone else’s love to survive as you might ordinarily think and feel. Most people are taught to look away from themselves and toward others for the emotional resources required to survive hardships in life. As a result of that training we lose track of our true emotional potentials and become focused on always getting what we need from others. Some of us rediscover that the human heart is built in such a way as to be able to survive the disappointments of love earlier in life. When this happens a person’s orientation begins to shift from getting love to make up for past losses to giving love to others. No matter how emptied you feel because of complications you experienced in your earlier love-life, you still possess the capacity to give love. Whether or not you rediscover this resource in the course of your life will depend upon how much consciousness you can tolerate. The most rewarding experience in life by far is to rediscover your capacity to give love selflessly to another.

Love-Life Expectations

What you expect from your partner in love has a powerful effect on what you get in love. To make matters more complicated, the love-life expectations I am referring to may be working beyond your direct awareness. It is very common for people to repeat the same disappointing activities in their love-life over and over again. This usually happens because there is something unfinished in a person’s love-life that gets unconsciously recreated. Psychologically speaking, if an experience of love created hurt feelings that are unresolved we tend to recreate that experience across love relationships. This just might be the mind’s way of trying to go back to something that happened in the past in an effort to resolve it. The problem is that the resolution of past hurt we are seeking does not take place by trying to change what has happened in the past, but by grieving our disappointments and moving on from them.

   

Love-life expectations can also take the form of an effort to ‘complete’ something in ourselves by getting the love we think we need from someone else.

The origin of this expectation is usually an emotional emptiness again from earlier love-life disappointments often beginning in childhood or adolescence. Trying to get other people, in this case lovers, to complete something inside of you by getting them to give you the love you think you need is a set up for more disappointment. No one really gets a chance to make up for lost love in this way. A current lover should never be made responsible for replacing a love lost earlier in your life. Beyond the unfairness of giving someone new this responsibility, the chances of it happening are nil. For the simple fact that time has passed and you are no longer a child. Adult love relationships require the reciprocity of needs to remain healthy and grow. An adult lover cannot parent his or her lover without resentment and unhealthy feelings of self-sacrifice. Being in an adult love relationship requires a commitment to intimacy in the form of mutual loving and the satisfaction of need. Anything less, only recreates the conditions for the repetition of earlier love-life disappointments in the relationship.

    

Another form of unhealthy love-life expectation is to hope that a lover can be

a source of ‘correction’ in one’s love-life. Similar to seeking completeness, expecting correction means you feel cheated by earlier love-life losses and you secretly or not so secretly want your lover to make up the difference owed to you. As in striving for completeness, correction also breeds resentment and unhealthy forms of self-sacrifice if it is coveted during the course of a love relationship. When striving for past love-life corrections take the place of reciprocal forms of adult intimacy in a relationship it is only a matter of time before conflict and disappointment emerge. Past love-life disappointments get corrected by being grieved and accepted as the unfortunate limitations they really are. Whether or not we have to continue be limited by them in adulthood is the important question.

Love-Life Self-Esteem

Are you lovable? This may seem like a strange question. Strange because people do not ordinarily ask themselves this kind of question unless something is critically wrong. The answer to this question will tell you a lot about your love-life self-esteem. How you really feel about yourself has a lot to do with the quality of your love-life. For example, if you don’t feel lovable it will be hard to accept someone else’s love. You have already passed a negative judgment on yourself so there has got to be something wrong with anyone who attempts to love you. A closely related problem is a negative perception of the love you have to give, if any. Negative love-life self-esteem tends to contaminate both how lovable you feel and the perceived quality of the love you have to give.

    

One of the more common love-life problems that emerge when self-esteem is low is an unhealthy tolerance of abusive people in your life. When your self-esteem is low it is easy to lose self-respect and the respect of others. A person will stop standing up for herself which permits certain people to take advantage. In fact, low self-esteem enables mistreatment to continue long past the point where a more self-respecting person would draw the line. Once you get it in your mind that your love relationship is abusive either emotionally, physically, sexually or financially, change is just a few steps away. At this point a little support from people who can understand your need to either get out of the relationship or set limits is vital. Remember, once your attitude toward the abuse shifts to a more realistic perception of your partner’s emotional impotence, change is inevitable. The abuse does not continue when a mistreated person recognizes the ways she has been setting up the role of victim by seeing herself as only fearful and powerless.

Love-Life Psychological Defenses    

Psychological defenses can be both offensive and defensive. You’ve heard the saying the best defense is a good offense, right? Some people go on the attack right away at the first hint of fear. Others build great walls of defense against what they perceive to be the inherent dangers in love. For some, psychological defenses are best applied as self-protection when looking for love. For others, it is best to stay out of commitment so that an escape is possible once the going gets rough. Too many fish in the sea, right? Wrong, the problem is that psychological defenses limit the extent of intimacy that is possible in a person’s love-life. Take your pick, love or defense you can’t have it both ways. If you picked love, you have some anxiety to look forward to because that is what happens to us when we shed defenses. Everybody gets temporarily weak in the knees or a little shaky, all signs that love-life vulnerability is now in charge of your responses, and contrary to popular opinion, so far so good.

    

If you prefer to stay defensive in your love-life here is what you have to look forward to and why. Anything and everything we think, feel, and do can be used for defensive purposes. When we are being defensive we are protecting ourselves from something else, be it dangerous or not. Of course when something is not dangerous and we are still compelled to protect ourselves from it there is a problem. This kind of problem is common whenever love is the issue. This is because we all know what it is like to be hurt and disappointed in our love-lives on some level starting in childhood. So early on in life we develop a facility for protecting ourselves from further hurt and disappointment. Unfortunately, in love there is a cost for defensiveness. Many of the feelings involved in love require states of mind and heart that cannot be directly felt when you are defensive. Defensiveness trades off sensitivity for safety and security. In a love relationship this can be very detrimental.

    

Defensive behavior can be simply defensive or offensively defensive as mentioned earlier. This means you can either protect yourself by reacting to the aggressiveness of others defensively or offensively. When someone converts fear or hurt into anger or rage they are practicing the dubious art of defensive offensiveness. In love, people engage in defensive love-life behaviors like always avoiding certain love-life experiences, or controlling the experiences they do have in their love relationships, or making sure they always pick the same type of partner. Whatever it is, the underlying purpose is to control an experience that would threaten what is known or familiar whether or not it is healthy or satisfying. When love-life behavior is not defensive it promotes openness and risk-taking.

    

People retain all kinds of defensive beliefs in their love-lives. Everyone has a philosophy of love acknowledged or not. Some of us have a defensive love-life philosophy that constricts and controls love-life experiences. In many instances defensive beliefs are stereotypic generalizations made to avoid the assumption of predictable problems in love. It is common to believe that certain people are eligible partners because they possess certain characteristics that other people do not. The problem with this kind of defensive thinking is the judgment involved. Love is never bound by such beliefs. Other human motivations such as an interest in power certainly are. The important thing is to become aware of whatever beliefs and behavior are curtailing or worse interfering with love in your life. We all struggle with our personal commitments to ways of life that diminish our ability to love and be loved. Consciousness and tolerance for something new helps us outgrow what is blocking our development in this area of our lives.

    

Last but certainly not least is the role of feelings and emotions in our love-lives. Feelings can be used for defensive purposes like everything else. For convenience I have placed the feelings that are most commonly active in an experience of love on a continuum. Roughly speaking there are positive love-life emotions and negative ones, emotions that encourage and support an experience of love and emotions that do not. On the negative end of our continuum we have ‘resignation.’ As a love-life emotion resignation is extremely defensive. Its purpose is to deaden love-life need and love-life hurt. In this regard it does an excellent job. When love-life resignation sets in, a person feels very little need and takes no further risks with love. Resignation is common after a deep hurt or after many repeated love-life disappointments or failures. A common indication that resignation exists is, no longer believing there are any available partners left.

    

Anger and its twisted cousin rage are further along on our continuum of love-life emotions. Anger is also a very defensive emotion but not as defensive as resignation. The one advantage to anger is that the angry person is still feeling some kind of hope and fear about love. That is why he or she is angry. Otherwise the deadening defensiveness of resignation would take over. Regardless, anger is still defensive enough to interfere with the vulnerability required to be in love. In an angry state of mind love is diminished in favor of power. Toward the middle of our continuum is love-life frustration. In a frustrated state there is much more hope than fear and avoidance. Frustration is mildly defensive as a negative love-life emotion and focused more on manipulating love. People who are committed to controlling love in any way are subject to love-life frustration. As a negative love-life emotion, frustration is only a short step away from the more positive love-life emotion I will call ‘hurt.’

    

You might wonder how hurt became a positive love-life emotion given it intuitively appears negative. To be hurt in love is to be involved and vulnerable.

There is a degree of openness in hurt. It’s not defensive and it’s more amenable to love. In fact, it is impossible to be in love without experiencing hurt feelings at some point or another. The fact of separate people in a love relationship guarantees it. Our task as lovers is not to try avoiding unpredictable hurt. Our task is to retain a faith in our capacity to heal love-life hurt when it happens without being self-destructive. An even more positive love-life emotion is ‘sadness.’ Sadness is a natural attractant. People who have the capacity to feel sympathy for others are moved (e-motion) by sadness. It is an emotion that opens the heart and encourages feelings of love. The relationship between sadness and love is very interesting. In one sense, sadness reminds us that nothing is permanent least of all love. Mixed with sadness, love has the ability to heal the broken heart.

     

Lastly, there is anxiety and joy. I mention these two positive love-life emotions together because I think they have an interesting and often ignored relationship.          

Again you might wonder why anxiety makes it to the positive end of our continuum. I am not talking about clinical anxiety as an illness. I am talking about anxiety as a common state of mind that emerges when something new is happening or about to happen. Anxiety is not a bad thing. It’s a reminder that we prefer to keep ourselves safe and in predictable if not controllable circumstances of life. When the known transforms into the unknown there is going to be anxiety. A little or a lot, there is always some degree of anxiety in love. Joy is the ultimate emotion of love where a person is able to transcend the feeling of being alone in this world however temporary for a feeling of connection with something greater. In this instance, that something greater is the love between two people. The letting go of oneself in love is always unnerving. When the temporary state of joy is over there is always reality waiting. There is always the wish that joy would stay without the necessity of contrast with other emotions. These shifts create anxiety. The newness of love is very alive and joyful. For this many people will tolerate any kind of discomfort.

    

A conscious review of these various components of your love-life psychology will help you identify what needs to develop further. Remember, changing one part of your love-life psychology will inevitably change others. A review of your love-life psychology, supported by practice, initiates a leaning process that will transform your love-life from repeated disappointment to satisfaction and fulfillment. The only way to truly change your love-life is to make change on the psychological inside of your experience of love.    

    

Anonymity Helps People Talk About Love

Most people talk openly about their love-lives when there is guaranteed anonymity. Is it because we still don't want to take public responsibility for what is going on in our love-lives? Are we embarrassed about needing love like it is a sign of weakness or something? The fact is that it takes a lot of fortitude to handle an experience of love. If you can't handle a bit of emotional turbulence than love will remain interesting but scary. If anonymity gives a person a chance to get up close enough to his/her experience to find out what is uncomfortable about love, it has been useful. The internet offers the purest form of anonymity available to the public. Apart from hackers determined to read your love-life thoughts as if each word represented a coveted piece of highly classified information, your love-life secrets are safely disguised by your username. At the Love-Life Workshops, anonymity is sacred. We know that without it there would be far less openness and honesty on our site. We accept this and realize that people are defined less by their name, address & phone number than the love-life experienes that influenced them and shaped their personalities.

Value of a Helper's Personal Experience

When you seek out a professional helper, let's stick with a psychologist for now, you want to make sure he or she can help you. Makes sense right? But how do you do that? You can look at her credentials, diplomas on the wall? You can check on what kind of schools or clinical experience she has had. Good enough? Hardly. Training is necessary but not a sufficient measure of competence. The rest is experience. There are plenty of competent helpers who are experienced without necessarily being professionals. Self-taught and lived through of the experiences they are trying to help others with. But I'm talking about finding a professional who has both training and personal experience with the problem. The number of these individuals is probably greater than publicly acknowledged. Probably for the sake of protecting professional reputations, a lot of professionals keep their personal experience out of their professional presentation. Unfortunately some are not aware of the personal reasons they are competent or committed to certain love-life topics for example. Not that the public would not understand. In my experience the public is often reassured especially if what they (the professionals) had to go through is past history and enriched them personally and professionally by going through it. Now the public can reap the benefits of their experience for themselves.

I have 50+ professional psychologists working as workshop leaders at the Love-Life Workshops website www.lovelifeworkshops.com. It took me a couple years of interviewing to find them. At our profile pages on the site I asked them to not only list their credentials and professional experiences but also their relevant love-life experiences as well. Most of them gave me plenty of detail as to why they consider themselves professionally and personally competent to conduct their particular workshops. I thought this was extraordinary. I did not get any of the resistance I half expected. I have 60 of the finest professional psychologists available. And beyond that, they all have the personal experience required to talk with authority about their particular love-life workshops.

Love-Life Workshops Online Community

When we launch (later this year) our emphasis will be on building a online community of people who use our website to learn more about what is going on in their love-lives and how to improve it. We have loaded as many helpful services as we could into the site so that people can anonymously communicate with each other and with professional experts about a topic that more often than not is kept private. Online anonymity is well suited for love-life learning. What matters more than your identity is your experiences. If you think about it, our experiences are really what defines us as unique individuals. Sharing our unique love-life experiences anonymously is a great way to learn.  http://www.lovelifeworkshops.com

Press Release

From: 

Love-Life Project, Inc.

dba Love-Life Workshops

574 West End Avenue, #64

New York, New York 10024

www.lovelifeworkshops.com

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Contact: 

Dr. Thomas Jordan, drjordan@lovelifeworkshops.com

Press Room: www.lovelifeworkshopsblog.com

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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Professional Online Workshops Improve Love-Life

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New York, N.Y., November 1, 2009  Consumers of online dating services are often frustrated by repeated disappointment and no place to review and learn from their dating experiences. Many married and committed individuals need a professional source of love-life information and guidance but are unwilling to identify themselves in an office setting. In response to this urgent love-life need, Dr. Thomas Jordan, a Manhattan clinical psychologist and university professor, developed anonymous professionally conducted internet workshops called the Love-Life Workshops www.lovelifeworkshops.com. The website employs a large staff of 60 New York State licensed psychologists ready to explore personal love-life issues in more than 100 workshops per week. Their sole objective is to provide very affordable, personalized information, guidance, and support to anonymous members experiencing difficulties in their love-lives from dating to marriage to divorce.

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The Love-Life Workshops website offers weekly chat-room workshops focused on 60 love-life themes like coping with separation and divorce, developing dating skills, identifying abusive relationships, and improving a marriage. Each workshop leader was hired for the expertise and personal love-life experience necessary to conduct particular workshops. Their website also offers love-life focused public and private chat-rooms, and message boards. As an added benefit of membership, a member can choose to freely observe workshops for a vicarious learning experience.

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According to Dr. Jordan, “Many people are unaware of the need to work on the psychological part of their love-lives to improve their chances of finding and sustaining a healthy love relationship. One problem is they do not ordinarily think of their love-lives as needing ‘work’ from time to time. They are so accustomed to what they have already learned about love that they blindly repeat it regardless of outcome. Another problem is that until now a truly anonymous online workshop that reviews love-life experiences with a professional was simply not available to the public. For people who cannot or will not get help for their love-lives at a therapist’s office the internet is the next best place to work on love-life issues.”    ###   ###   ###

    

                                                        

Keeping Your Love-Life Healthy

Not too long ago I realized that I had to clean out garbage files on my computer on a regular basis in order to keep it functioning at its best. Machines generate byproducts that have to be cleaned. Your love-life is not a machine but it surely requires upkeep for maximum efficiency. Unfortunately a lot of people still think of their love-lives as maintenance free. Nothing new to learn and no problems to fix, the version you leave your family of origin (the factory) with is expected to work well forever without upgrades or maintenance. If this were the case, I wouldn’t be in business. One of the big reasons love-life psychologists exist is because people don’t bother to tune-up their love-lives.

    

The two items that are vital to the long term maturity and maintenance of a meaningful love relationship are the conjoint practice of communication and independence. At first glance they may appear at odds and perhaps they are in some ways. Communication is about connection. Ideally, it is about reaching your partner to participate in a dialogue of meaning and feelings. This is not to say you always have to talk in depth to your partner. It might get a bit tiring to do this all the time. The communication I am talking about is frequent but not constant. It grows in the context of a love relationship because two people realize, like with a computer, they will inevitably collect thoughts, feelings, and actions that will complicate and contaminate their love relationship. There is a time to clean, so to speak, by expressing the emotions and thoughts that have been generated in a relationship and it can only be done together.

   

Independence

on the other hand is a practice that many people find counterintuitive when it is associated with love. Most people think of love as a mutual dependency one to another.

Independence

is usually reserved for whatever separated movements away from the relationship are required. I am going to ask you to think outside the box. Think of independence as a love-life skill. Think of dependency as an immaturity that will eventually interfere with love if left unchecked. In this context, independence is the maturation of a capacity to sustain oneself as an individual in a love relationship, where more than the ambivalence and instability of dependency is offered to a partner.

    

Independence

means I don’t need you to fill in my gaps. It means that we are free to have a relationship where what I give you, and the commitment I make to you, are chosen. As an independent person I have the ability to decide where my love is directed. As such you will surely feel my presence in our relationship. This is the key. More independence equals more presence. My need for you never overcomes the love I have to give you.

    

Let’s think some more about communication. In love people can talk about anything and they usually do. The communication I am talking about has more to do with ‘how’ two people in love talk to each other than the ‘what’ or content of their conversation. More problems are created and remain unresolved because of the dysfunctional way two lovers can communication with each other. For starters, if you are going to be in love you should expect to be defensive. Defensiveness is the mind’s way of protecting itself from additional hurt and disappointment. If you can’t control something outright defensiveness is the next best thing. Nobody gets to control love and this is why there is so much defensiveness in our love-lives.

   

The defenses we use in love can range from the thoughts we have, to the feelings we have, to the actions we take that have self-protective objectives. Just about anything can and will be used defensively. The problem with love-life defenses is that they block the communications needed to constructively solve the problems and mend the hurts that can create distance in a relationship. So here’s the deal. In order to effectively talk about problems a couple has to communicate about their mutual defenses as well. You can’t do the former without the latter. What I mean is, until a couple acknowledges the ways their mutual defenses mess up their communication it will always be negatively affected by defenses.

    

Talking about defenses can be a bit of hard work. Most people do not enjoy having their psychological defenses exposed, never mind discussed. This sort of thing takes us right back to the vulnerability that has to be tolerated to be in love in the first place. Humility and honesty help of course. Equality also comes in handy, and the freedom to speak sincerely regardless of your partner’s response is also helpful. A mutual discussion of each other’s defensive efforts to control communications and their impact will clear the air but expect a bumpy ride getting there. You would have to say to yourselves that talk like this is good for the relationship no matter what. Interactions like these go under the heading, ‘Honesty in Love’ with reminders that if you don’t have honesty you don’t have much. Practice believing that love is not always smooth and effortless. Convince yourself that a relationship can on occasion be upsetting to do the work that love requires.

    

Sorry to say that talking about your mutual defensiveness is not the only unsettling conversation you are going to have if you want to sustain a deeper intimacy with your lover. The other big area of experience that needs a dialogue is the effects of each other’s family of origin on the relationship. Of course you can say that I’m a nut and you have better things to talk about. A lot of people will probably agree with you. The only problem is if you don’t talk about your respective families more of your experience growing up gets played out in your love-life. For good or for bad this is what always happens like it or not. The only way to avoid this intrusion of the past is to make family of origin influences conscious in dialogue with the other person it happens with, your lover. If there was love in your childhood you obviously have less to worry about. If there was mostly disappointment why risk the replay. Your love relationship is not just someone to spend time with so you won’t be so alone. It’s much more than that. It’s an opportunity to grow, change, and learn. If it’s not, expect some trouble.

    

Conversations about each other’s side of the family and how they influence thoughts, feelings, and behavior in the relationship can provide information that helps you avoid making the same fatal mistakes over and over again. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t repeat some part of childhood in his/her love-life. We use what we know, plain and simple. When we leave home we unconsciously take our family experiences with us in the form of needs, expectations, love-life self-esteem, and/or the kinds of psychological defenses we use to stave off any more love-life hurts. Our partner witnesses the transformations as the relationship endures. It is common to start out one way and end up another once noxious family of origin influences take hold.

   

Let’s consider a common example. I have met people who were free and passionate when they were single and living together. Once they commit to each other or marry, they become overly sensitive and emotionally closed with negative consequences for the relationship. The same thing can happen over time even if the couple does not marry or commit. As if time and familiarity (a word with its root in the word family) ensures that the family of origin’s influence will come to the surface, ready or not. The family of origin pattern of how to be in love whether constructive or destructive is there waiting to be activated. The only hope we have of doing anything about this fact of life is to move the whole thing into consciousness and regular dialogue.

    

An original meaning of the word consciousness, by the way, is the mutual exchange of information or knowledge. Shared perceptions divided by the fact that both of you are in love makes for a potentially strong learning experience. Sharing information is the way people learn and solve problems in a love relationship anyway. Sharing perceptions about the influences of each other’s family of origin is a particularly potent form of love-life learning. What is the objective? The objective is to point out the differences between who you and your partner are, as unique individuals in love right now, from all the other influences of people in your lives past and present.

   

Once those influences are identified they can be accepted, modified or deleted. Your love partner becomes an ally in helping you identify what you might be carrying around from the past. He/she is in the best position to help you make this differentiation because he/she is the closest to you. But first you have to put away your fear that this kind of openness will hurt your love relationship rather than help it. So what if your partner left you because you wanted to be honest and open (vulnerable) about such meaningful things with him or her? If he/she left over this, look at it this way, he/she did you a favor.

    

Along with sustaining love with the right kind of communication, you can also sustain love with the matured practice of independence in your relationship. Matured means not the kind of pseudo-independence or running away we hear so much about these days. Real independence does not take us away from intimacy. Quite the contrary, it brings on a deeper intimacy. The reason why a person runs away from closeness or hides from love is not because he is independent but because he is dependent. When you are independent you are no longer afraid of what others can say to you or take from you. You don’t need someone else to support your insecure sense of yourself. Your partner can be who he is while you live openly as the person you are. An independent person is genuinely intimate and knows he or she has love to give. When you are truly independent you have differentiated your love-life from everyone else’s, you have chosen to give your love to somebody special, and you have accepted the person you love for who he/she is without trying to change him/her.

    

Communication as a sustaining love-life activity is interpersonal. It takes place between the lovers involved as an interpersonal dialogue. On the other hand, independence as a love-life practice that sustains love is a personal experience with wide ranging interpersonal consequences to be sure. The practice of love-life independence always involves the differentiation of one love-life from everybody else’s. I discussed this theme earlier in relation to the communication of family of origin patterns. To differentiate your love-life means to identify it as uniquely your own creation different from everyone else’s. How other people influence our love-lives can be subtle and hard to discover. The influence exists as patterns of living both psychological and physical with their origin in childhood and adolescence. We take these patterns from home as if they were meant to guide us now that we are separate from the family. The implication of course is that the offspring (that’s you and me) have not done their thinking and deciding for themselves. This is what I mean when I said that your love-life is not your own. It becomes your own when you have acknowledged your ownership because it meets your own particular needs and wants not what someone else thinks you should need and want.

    

It’s very easy to borrow someone else’s love-life, especially if you love or loved the person from whom you borrowed it. In many ways it’s a matter of family loyalty. I also find that disappointment in love earlier in life creates a greater likelihood of repetition. In other words, we tend to repeat the love-lives of people who disappoint us in love the most. If you don’t heal it, then it has a high probability of being recreated again. Like when somebody comes from a divorced home and never really deals with the feelings of loss divorce created. The chances of getting divorced are high only because of the fact it is familiar and has a lot of unresolved emotion in it. We are often drawn to what is unfinished and has hurt us. So getting your very own psychological love-life going is very important. And remember the solution to this difficulty does not have to be so complicated. Once a consciousness for this stuff occurs, it’s easier to pick and choose the right actions to take in your love-life.

    

The great thing about love-life independence is the more independent you are the more you are able to engage in what is called ‘selfless loving’ without feeling cheated or used. When people are disappointed in their love-lives starting from at the beginning, it is easy to be focused on getting what you feel you deserve from others. The love you did not get is coveted and waited for, becoming a measure of how satisfying a relationship really is. When this is the case the focus is on getting love rather than giving love. The problem with this love-life orientation is that you can’t really satisfy childhood or adolescent needs for love in an adult love relationship. No adult lover wants to parent another adult and give up his or her own need for love without deep resentment. You could literally spend a lifetime looking for childhood love that is now out of date and no longer available.

    

Once this love-life fact is accepted and properly grieved, meaning the sadness of loss is acknowledged, felt and expressed, love-life independence becomes possible. It becomes possible simply because giving the love you have becomes more important and meaningful than getting the love you lost. Without a dependence on getting love a person is freer to give love selflessly. This is the most advanced state of loving there is, and it is only possible when a person has become independent. In addition to declaring your own love-life freed from the influences of others, independence in love can be expressed in the act of choosing to love. This is when you consciously make a decision to love someone simply based on the feeling of love that exists inside of you. This is what a real commitment to love looks like. It’s exclusive and for one person only. I choose to love you and no other. Congratulations, you have made a commitment to a deeper love. You can only do this when you are no longer dependent on resolving past disappointments in love and free to give the love you feel.

    

As an independent person in love, your greatest gift of love to the person of your choice is an acceptance of who he or she is as a person. It is so very common in love to want your lover to be better than what he or she is now. We often have a mental image of what form that should take. It is really just a selfish desire secretly meant to extinguish past love-life disappointments. This desire for better can be so subtle as to be only discernable in a feeling of disappointment that reoccurs from time to time.

   

When acceptance is given in love you stop trying to satisfy yourself by changing your partner. You stop trying to mold him or her into someone who will match your ideal. You get to love your partner separately and selflessly. If I think I will be happier or more satisfied with someone else but I am too afraid to risk loneliness, I can try to change my partner into what I think I should have. In truth this is only a defense. When I stop looking for someone else in love with you, I have found both myself and you in this relationship. I am now independent and can give a selfless gift of love to you or move on to find someone more compatible with my desires.

    

I hope this article has shown you how to take good care of love when it arrives. If you want a better love-life, over time work with your love-life psychology through these methods of sustaining love. The quality of love in your life depends upon your love-life psychology. Review it, bring it up to date, and by all means own it. Remember, you can only give yourself to someone else if you have an independent self to give. You can only know your partner as a unique individual in your life if you separate enough from your past to experience your own and someone else’s true presence. You can only be independent in your love-life if you let go of your dependency on fixing the disappointments of your past love-lives by getting someone else to make up for what you did not get.

   

When you are ruled by the past and someone else’s preferences for your love-life, you are not free to love. When your ability to choose love is forfeited because you are dependent on someone else’s judgment and choices, you are not free to love. If you must change your lover to match your own expectations you cannot meet anyone new since technically you are so focused on repeating your old experiences that you are not free to love. In a healthy love relationship you also get a chance to keep finding a new truer version of yourself with your partner, as he/she gets a chance to keep finding a new truer version with you. This is one of the priceless rewards you get for doing the work of sustaining love in your life.

Giving Love

Once you become aware that you have a ‘love-life psychology,’ the internal psychological pattern that governs your love-life thinking, feeling and behavior, it becomes possible to identify its characteristics and ‘work’ with it. The key to understanding your personal love-life pattern is to break it down into its primary psychological components. Our love-life psychologies are made up of our emotional needs for love, interpersonal expectations of love, love-life self-esteem, and the psychological defenses we use to handle experiences of love.

Our love-life needs are either child-like or adult-like or a combination of the two. Our love-life expectations are the ways we go about getting those needs met in our love-lives. Your love-life self-esteem is essentially how you feel about yourself as a lover, and love-life defenses are the ways you defend yourself against being hurt again in love. These four factors determine the form and health of our love-life experiences.

Today let’s focus on love-life needs. When your love-life has been largely shaped by unresolved disappointments early in life it tends to form a particular pattern. I call this pattern the ‘get love’ pattern as opposed to a ‘give love’ pattern. The get love pattern is focused on you guessed it, getting love. At first glance getting love as the primary orientation in your love-life may seem to make sense, but ultimately it recreates disappointment. An exclusive focus on getting love in love relationships suggests that underlying past disappointments with love are now operating and controlling your adult love-life.

     

For those of us with a get love mentality the invisible underlying disappointment with love is never too far from the surface. Chances are the people who were supposed to have loved you did a lousy job or were not there physically or emotionally or both most if not all of the time. Now in adulthood the need for love gets distorted into a need to make up for the love that was lost. The problem here is that this original need for love, twisted out of shape by past love-life disappointments, can never be satisfied in an adulthood love relationship. Attempts to do so always recreate the original disappointments over and over again in cycles of painfully dispelled hope. An adult partner no matter how much in love he or she is with you will never make up for your past love-life losses and disappointments. Any efforts to make that happen only waste time and mess up the opportunity to have a healthy adult love-life in the present.

     

The good news is that people caught in this disappointing ‘get love’ psychology can make changes for the better if they know what to look for. Being conscious of your love-life psychology is always the first step. From there you can identify the areas in your particular love-life psychology needing change. I identified four general parts of our love-life psychology as the first places to look when deciding what needs to change in a love-life. Remember the focus here is on changing the ways you think, feel, and act in your love-life. Obviously this is a little different than the usual ways of thinking about love-life improvements. Unfortunately, most people make superficial changes on the outside hoping that will change what is happening on the inside.

     

If you are always in some kind of love-life desperation or self-sacrificing for the love of another person your love-life needs are a problem. If your expectations of a lover are he or she will recreate your parents’ marriage, or complete or correct some disappointment in yourself or previous love-life experiences that is also a problem. How healthy your self-esteem is in terms of feeling lovable and having quality love to give is always a powerful influence on your love-life experience. Of course we also have to figure in the psychological defenses you are using in love-life situations. By defenses I mean things that people do like rationalizing or avoiding or controlling something so they don’t have to feel uncomfortable. The defenses are there simply because you don’t want to be hurt in the same way over and over again. So you try to protect yourself. Makes sense, except for the fact that your protections can eventually become habitual and a burden, interfering with the creation of a healthier adult love-life.

     

This may seem like a lot to digest, but the important thing is to begin thinking about what is going on inside your personal psychology that may be complicating your love-life. For most of us psychological change can be scary. Most people avoid and resist it preferring to stay with what is familiar even though there is plenty of evidence that what is familiar is not working for them. The hardest part is to get over your resistance to change. Once you know where the problem lies and what form it can take, it becomes a lot easier to fix than you might think. This is so simply because consciousness can make risk taking easier.

     

Most people would like to believe that the love-life lessons they learned in their families of origin are good enough for them if they were good enough for the previous generation. Wrong! In many cases they were not good enough for the previous generation either and deep down inside we know that they will not be good enough for us. Once you admit to yourself that your love-life needs some work and the answer is not in what you are wearing or where you go to meet eligible people or what you have bought your partner recently, a change is possible. The realistic hope is you can manage to become receptive enough to learn something new about your love-life and yourself. The rest will come naturally with a little practice and patience.

     

Moving from a ‘get love’ pattern to a ‘give love’ pattern also means that your love-life is about to mature. The only way to do that is to let go of what sustains your hope of correcting past disappointments in your current adult love-life. The choice is yours. You can spend the rest of your life trying to make up for the past or you can begin using your capacity to give to create a new love-life. If you choose to let go of past disappointments you will have to tolerate some grieving. Simply put, when we do not get the love we need as children and adolescents it constitutes a loss. Losses have to be grieved. It is the natural order of things. In other words we were made to grieve losses and move on. In fact the grief experience is the mind’s way of preparing itself to heal and move on to something new, to disconnect to reconnect again later. If you don’t grieve you really can’t move on.

     

Given this very human fact of life, there are a lot of people out there with broken hearts that have never been adequately healed. They are either afraid of grief and the deep sadness that can occur or they have been taught not to grieve because it is weak or some other such nonsense. The consequence is that a person stuck in such a feeling of love-life disappointment remains subject to that disappointing experience now automatically recreated in some form in their current love-life. In terms of wasted human potential such a personal outcome is very tragic to say the least.

     

Grief itself never killed anyone. Our reactions to grief, blocking it or twisting it out of proportion in some way or overreacting to it, they are the real culprits. Allowed natural expression, grief as a feeling flows out naturally with a beginning, middle, and end, as my old mentor used to say, decreasing in intensity over time. The most important advantage to grieving past love-life disappointments is the freedom it creates to move on with your love-life. And more importantly, a new love-life unencumbered by your disappointed past. One of the greatest pleasures in this life is the experience of getting our love-lives unstuck.

Online Anonymity Helps Resolve Love-Life Problems

Virtually everyone these days is interested in learning something new and useful about their love-lives. Popular love-life advice columns and informative articles on love relationships are on the daily reading list of millions of Americans. Add the internet as a source of information and the range of educative influences multiplies even further. In fact the internet is packed with advantages and potential opportunities for people who are interested in better understanding their love-life experiences. Of course, I am not simply talking about sex or where to find a date. The internet is far more useful than that.

     More specifically, the internet offers a chance to be anonymous online. It offers the possibility of anonymity while conducting a real time conversation with another live person. That is truly phenomenal. Anonymity of this caliber has never existed before now. The usual attempts at interpersonal anonymity always involved some kind of physical contact, like a face to face meeting or at least a voice contact as in a telephone communication where personal identities are unknown. Or there might be anonymous contact between people but no interaction in real time, like when two people communicate anonymously by letter.

     For the first time ever, the internet offers its users complete anonymity online. As a psychologist I can only marvel at the potential for human growth and development in this technology. One of the most important professional applications is the role of true online anonymity as a facilitator of open interpersonal communication. By ‘true’ anonymity I mean a totally anonymous verbal communication between two adults without any kind of identifying physical contact. One of the best examples of real time internet communication is the ‘chat-room,’ where two or more people can interact anonymously online.  

     Ordinarily, anonymous people interact with other anonymous people in chat-rooms. Temporary identities are established as usernames or screen names for the purpose of differentiating one chat-room participant from another and in some instances to add a little creativity to an anonymous presentation. The probability of personal identification is nil especially if participants follow custom and say nothing about themselves that would reveal their true identities. Of course some people choose to step out of this invisibility and reveal their identities because they like what they read online.

     When two anonymous people interact online their interaction is subject to what I like to call the ‘pendulum effect’ in online communication. You either get extreme honesty and openness or extreme falseness and misrepresentation. Sometimes you get both of these reactions in the context of a single online communication. This is not altogether a bad thing unless you are expecting an honest and straightforward conversation with someone online. It could be useful either way. Some people express their deepest and darkest secrets online or just vent to see what kind of reactions they can elicit. On the other hand, misrepresenting yourself online might also have its advantages, like a chance to indulge in playful fantasy. Of course online misrepresentation can run aground when you want to know that the people you are communicating with are actually who they say they are at least in the roughest outlines.

     Here is precisely where the professional application comes in. If you take two people in our chat-room situation and make one of them a verifiable professional helper the communicative possibilities change. What you now get is a communication between an anonymous person and a certified professional helper that skews the communication in the direction of greater honesty and openness. Add a few more anonymous people to the chat-room and a love-life theme like coping with divorce, learning dating skills, or identifying abuse in a love relationship and you have what I call a ‘love-life workshop.’ An online psycho-educational chat-room workshop where highly trained professional helpers focus exclusively on the personal love-life issues of anonymous workshop participants. Currently the only anonymous chat-room workshops focused on love-life issues can be found online at www.lovelifeworkshops.com.

     So far we have a clearly identified love-life expert communicating useful ‘personalized’ love-life information to a small group of anonymous people in a chat-room workshop focused on a specific love-life issue. Given the fact that a lot of people need to talk to somebody about their disappointments with love this computer application promises to have mass appeal. Online anonymity is well suited for any work you might have to do on your love-life. Especially if what you need is accurate personalized information to help you identify your love-life problem and figure out what to do about it. A service of this kind is complicated, however, by the fact that most people hide the reality of their love-life concerns even from themselves. Under the usual circumstances, admitting love-life problems to another person is difficult enough. A big part of that difficulty is tolerating the open admission of having love-life problems.

     Popular opinion is that sex and money are still the most important contemporary taboos. That may not be true anymore. Now that we have all become somewhat used to the media’s focus on the frequency of sexual misdeeds, and the importance of an adequate credit rating, the old cultural sensitivities in these areas are surely waning. What we are left with is a taboo in the area of a person’s love-life vulnerabilities. It is one thing to talk about who you slept with, another to speak openly and honestly about your love-life needs, hurts, and disappointments. What makes this a taboo is the vulnerability involved in an open admission of love-life feelings and needs. Nowadays most people do not like admitting this kind of thing and being publicly perceived as weak and vulnerable or ‘needy’ as the derogatory label goes.

     Given this less than fully visible sensitivity, a truly anonymous forum to discuss love-life concerns attracts the interest of most people. The very human problem we are left with is that our personal identities often differ from our real underlying experience. By identities I mean the patterns of social and familial influences that people adopt and use to define themselves in public. I am such and such, and so and so. ‘I am’ statements of identity certainly carry a lot of clout. So much so that most people do not like experience at odds with their identities to become visible to others. It is usually too uncomfortable to say the least. We wear our identities like we wear our clothing. It is essentially how we would like to be perceived and remembered by other people.

     A prominent part of our personal identities are devoted to our love-lives. I like to think of it as a personal ‘love-life psychology.’ Everyone has a personal love-life psychology defined as the repetitive pattern of thought, feeling, and action a person experiences in his or her particular dealings with love. It is psychological in that the pattern functions on the inside of our thoughts and feelings, and it is repetitive in the sense that a person may not be and may never become aware of his or her love-life psychology. Let’s just say your love-life psychology is automatic or unconscious and over time sets up the experiences you have in your love-life with or without your awareness or permission.

    Automatic psychological patterns are OK if they guide us in positive directions toward constructive objectives. If they are mostly derived from unresolved past disappointments in love we are in trouble. This usually means that your love-life psychology needs work, love-life work to be precise. Your love-life psychology needs to be made conscious and eventually changed simply because you are ‘locked’ into getting the same old hurtful or at least disappointing results from your love-life efforts. Making your love-life psychology conscious usually happens in situations where people are communicating openly and honestly about their love-life disappointments. This is not to say something like this cannot be done alone. It is just easier and more effective to do this work in a social context where you can bounce your feelings and experiences off other people going through the same experience.

     So how do I change my love-life psychology? Good question. Like anything else in life there can be complications. Unfortunately we all learn to defend against change and resist the influences of others, even when it’s good for us not to. Most people defend their love-life psychologies just the way they are, resisting the influences of others to induce change through awareness and learning. The good news is, under conditions of real anonymity most people feel much less defensive and resistant to constructive feedback and have a better chance of becoming aware of their own love-life difficulties.

     Online anonymity with a certified professional provides hope to people who would ordinarily be too defensive or resistant to learn something new about their love-lives. This also includes those individuals who are too uncomfortable or for some reason unable to actually sit in an office and talk about themselves with a professional helper. As an online anonymous alternative, you can sit in the comfort, safety, and familiarity of your own surroundings and talk about personal love-life matters without the worry of disclosing your identity. In an interesting but odd way a certain intimacy grows among anonymous people who are sharing similar love-life experiences in this way. As though a personal identity has less to do with connecting to other people than the emotional experiences we can acknowledge and share with each other.

     Imagine a chat-room filled with people who have experienced a certain love-life disappointment becoming strangely personal even though identities have remained invisible. What becomes more visible once the pride and ego involved in defending ourselves is put aside is the common bond with each other our search for love has created. Online anonymity with a professional helper and other likeminded anonymous people offers a chance to get out from under the limitations of customary ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in love to consider different and perhaps more constructive ways of finding a lover, committing to a lover, or leaving a lover if the relationship is over.

     If you can tolerate the consciousness involved in hearing straight talk about your love-life problems, the advantage to doing this kind of love-life work is greater receptivity to love in your life. Generally speaking, greater openness in the area of love has a lot of benefits. Keeping your love-life psychology up to date and free from chronic negative patterns is well worth any initial discomforts you might experience opening this area of your emotional life up for review. The tragic part of all of this is that some people make it to old age having blindly repeated the same worn out love-life patterns over and over again with the same old disappointing consequences. Whether repeatedly choosing and marrying the same kind of unhealthy or unavailable person, or repeating mistakes in a love relationship, or the same old mistakes while dating, a little love-life consciousness can change the course of your love-live, save you time, and help you stop repeatedly disappointing yourself. Given your present love-life disappointment, now is the best time to review your love-life psychology as a wise investment for your future.

     No question, love-life disappointments take quite a toll on so many people’s lives. Working on your love-life is easier to do once you accept the idea that your love-life psychology, not unlike your body, hairstyle or occupation, needs an occasional tune-up or upgrade, to use a more current term. Most of us do not have the privilege of relying solely upon what we have learned about love from our parents or other adults when we were young. Quite frankly, if the truth be told, a lot of our parents did not get it right either. Claiming your own love-life as an adult person means a life-long dedication to generating the love-life consciousness necessary to change what does not work and strengthening what does. Now that the internet is such a prominent part of our lives, many people will take advantage of the anonymity that is possible and work on their love-lives online.

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How to Keep Your Self-Esteem Healthy in a Love Relationship

Your self-esteem, defined as how you feel about yourself, has a lot to do with the quality of your love-life. For example, if you do not feel good about yourself it is very likely that your love-life will reflect that feeling. You could be avoiding love altogether or finding partners who mistreat you in a way that matches how you feel about yourself. Keeping your self-esteem healthy in or out of a love relationship helps you prepare for and maintain a healthy love-life. Practice the following:

1. Stop all forms of abuse (physical, sexual, emotional & financial) immediately. Allowing people to abuse you because you ‘love’ them can only be destructive. No exceptions and no excuses. Get free.

2. You should be in a love relationship by choice, not because your partner is forcing you to be. Controlling people have difficulty feeling secure. They force and control others so they will not feel vulnerable and scared. Get free.

3. You are equal with your partner, different roles but equal power and responsibility. If not, you are only going to feel trapped and like a child at some point in the relationship. Make it equal.

4. Practice two person love relationships, where there are two people, two voices. Speak up even if it makes everybody uncomfortable.

5. If there is real love in your relationship, honesty will begin solving your love-life problems. Remember what they say, the truth will set you free. Free to love or free to leave, either one.

6. Practice sharing with your partner. Sharing is good for your love relationship. And every once in a while give something without expecting anything in return.

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Love-Life Workshops

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