Dr. Jordan's Blog

Get to Know Your Love-Life Psychology

Unfortunately, a lot of people fall in and out of love without the slightest idea what controls their love-lives. The mind tends t form patterns and these patterns once they have been practiced a bit become regular and expectable features of a person's experiences in the world. If you aren't interested in understanding your psychological patterns then you live a life with significantly less choice. Your psychological patterns in the area of your love-life may have been molded by your family of origin or whatever experiences in life you have had so far, the point is you are not really in the driver's seat so to speak. For me, this is much too much of a sacrifice. Who really wants to give up on their love-life like that? We are so dedicated to everything else, right? Look at how much energy we put into the things we value in our lives. Imagine investing a little time in reflecting on what is going on in your love-life and how productive that could be?

If you are feeling courageous here is a tip to help you get started. Think of it as a Love-Life Review. The purpose being to get to know what drives your love-life so that you can take over and direct it in more satisfying directions. This is the short list of items that make up a person's love-life psychology: Love-Life Needs, Expectations of Love, Love-Life Self-Esteem, and the Psychological Defenses Used in Love. When you think Needs in love you should think about whether or not your childhood disappointments in love are affecting your adult love-life. Are you looking for a 'parenting' kind of love from your lover? If you are, the easiest way to modify this is to think 'equality.' On emotional levels most things in a love relationship should be reciprocal. That means what is good for you is good for me and vice versa. Keeping things equal in a love relationship helps keep our heads above the limiting influences of childhood love disappointments. And if you get good at that, you can move onto to loving your partner even when you feel empty. This one is a little harder.

Reviewing your expectations of love will bring you to a belief that your partner is going to complete or correct something in you. Although sanctioned by our culture and the media this kind of thinking interferes with the growth needed in a love relationship. The main objective in a love relationship is for two people to grow into the individuals they truly are over the course of the relationship. You help me be me not by being me for me but by supporting the me I am? (Say that ten times fast!)

Self-esteem is a very import part of a love-life. How lovable you feel coupled with how much you value the love you have to give make up the love-life self-esteem for most people. Its kind of simple, if you feel good about you (and take good care of you) this will be reflected in the quality of your love-life. For one thing you would never tolerate abuse or mistreatment because you have higher standards.

Last but not least, the Defences you use in love are very important to get to know. They get kind of habitual and hard to notice after awhile. So you have to concentrate on yourself in love-life situations. Why are I doing this or that? Is it because I am afraid of being hurt? No risk no love. Once I see what I am up to, I can get involved directly and either maintain it or change it. I choose.

Vulnerability in Your Love Relationship

Most people think of vulnerability as a negative. Look around, in this day and age it's about protect and defend. People usually don't talk about the importance of being vulnerable. Here's the problem....being vulnerable..or let's choose an easier word on the eyes...open, is necessary in love and it takes a certain tolerance. If you walk around protected all the time you are not vulnerable and at the same time you are not open to love. Only when the heart is open is love received and given. Otherwise you have defenses. Don't believe me? Have you ever tried to love a defensive person? Usually you can't get in close enough to do so.....distance, chilly, distance, more chilly, etc. I think you get the point. So how do you go from defensive (not vulnerable) to open?

Not to make things overly complicated, but you will have to take several factors into account. One is whether or not you are ready to take a risk? And risks involve the possibility of getting hurt. Of course, this is not only from a psychology book but my own experience of being overly protected. Going from protected to open is not easy because you can always rationalize why its easier to stay defensive. The bottom line is risk means being prepared to deal with hurt if it happens.

Beyond the risk there must be a belief or faith in your own personal ability to handle and heal hurt. Most people avoid stuff because deep done inside they don't believe they can handle the experience. Love-life experiences are definitely included. If you stop thinking of vulnerability or openness as a weakness or something and more like a particular state of mind that has its time and place and function, it makes it easier. In the state of emotional openness love can emerge in your feelings and you are vastly more receptive to accepting someone else's love.

I got married when I was 40. I had spent many years in control of my life and love-life. That means keeping myself unaffected by the real impact of a love relationship. I probably did that by semi-consciously staying away from anyone I thought I could love. Looking back, I regret having done that. But nevertheless it was my way of staying away from being hurt. You see, the implication here is that hurt would be something I could not handle. So the conclusion was always scrap the experience all together. I wish I could tell you that some miraculous experience happened to change my mind about this but it was far less dramatic than that. More like a willingness to take a risk because the old male version age clock was ticking away. Becoming conscious of my fear was the first step, and that occurred with a little help from good old fashioned anxiety and loneliness. I can remember the decisions and thoughts I had when I decided to live with my wife. The vulnerability flag went up, up, up but I figured it was time to jump in no matter what the consequence. For some reason going down with the burning ship was more desirable than being safe. My point here is to isolate, if I can, that moment of decision to accept a certain degree of uncomfortable vulnerability for a good cause. It's worth studying for love's sake.

Preparing For Love Between Relationships

Did you ever think you could 'prepare' for love? Most people think of love as something that happens to them and there isn't much that can be done to facilitate this beyond exposing oneself to people and being patient. Consider the possibility that changing your 'state of mind' could positively hasten the experience of love. How?

Beyond the simple fact that postive expectations bring postive results, let's assume that there is a state of mind that psychologically encourages and supports the experience of love. I'm not just talking about thinking loving thoughts here. I'm talking about exercising and developing certain psychological functions and experiences that increase the possibility of falling in love under the right conditions. There's a real practical side to this because if you can identify the experiences that are compatile with falling in love you can 'practice' them. I'll list the kind of experiences I'm talking about and we'll discuss them further as we go along:

tolerating the feeling of personal vulnerability; developing the ability to be spontaneous; the ability to let go when necessary; the experience of healing a hurt feeling; decreasing control over another and/or oneself when needed; and acting on the rational desire to give.

Don't Treat Your Lover Like a Child or a Parent

Parent-child relations can be a thinly disguised power move when they show up in your love relationship. They can also be a disappointing way of trying to make up for what was lost earlier in life now in the adult context of a love relationship. Either way, they often bring negative consequences to a love-life. Here's how....power moves are fundamentally a problem for love because simply put...love thrives on equality between partners. For example, when you feel equal to your partner you can speak freely. Speaking freely makes a person feel safe and open and receptive in a love relationship. Love always grows and repairs well under these conditions. When lovers start incorporating parent-child ways of communicating and relating to each other, one person plays the parent and the other plays the child. Obvious forms of interpersonal equality are out as parent-child modes of communicating come in. Beyond the obvious reality that there are two equal adults involved, parent-child modes of communicating are not very friendly to adult loving. They often involve one person telling another what to do with criticisms and control. The partner who plays the child gets to be passive-aggressive of course (that means resent it and rebel undercover) and the partner who plays the parent suffers his/her own brand of resentment because they never get to relax and just be loved for who they are. Beyond the lousy communication and relationship parent-child interactions create in adult love relationships, there is often the underlying hope that parent-child disappointments from previous times in life can be undone in an adult love relationship. Sorry to say this never works. In the long run its a lot easier to grieve the loss of parent-child love in childhood and work on getting and giving reasonable and healthy forms of love in adulthood.

Problem: Controlling Lover

The recipient of control in a love relationship is the usual focus of this problem. Losing your freedom because your lover is too suspicious is a common problem. The most common symptom is your lover going through your cell phone log. Who did you call and when? In many cases the suspiciousness is justified. Nevertheless, the experience sucks. Why? Simply put, because control does not work in a love relationship. If you are the person trying to control, lets face it you're miserable. Deeper in, the control you are trying to have is coming from insecurity and low self-esteem. You figure there is no way your lover will love you without being forced to. Its not a good position to be in. Its really a problem of trust and/or a tolerance for leaving. Being in a relationship with someone you have to stalk to keep is not worth the effort. Putting your energy into finding someone who can be loyal is a better option. In fact, I can't tell you how many people I have met who look for and find uncooperative hard to commit partners because subconsciously they need to recreate this struggle: making someone love them the right way. I say, become conscious of this as soon as possible and break out by cutting out the control and seeing what happens to the relationship. If it goes down hill you've saved yourself some time and effort, you can grieve the loss, and move on to greener pastures. If it improves you are onto something new.

Educating Our Love-Lives??

Why are we so defensive about learning something new in our love-lives? You think it has something to do with the fact that we learned what we know about love when we were young? Some kind of loyalty to the family of origin? As a psychologist I see a lot of love-life repetition. The same mistakes being made over and over again. Some people, however, do manage to break out of the repetitive cycle of disappointment and do something new. Its like getting out from under the influence of someone else's love-life. I know a man once who took emotional care of his depressed mother when he was a child. In adulthood he found one depressed woman after another to love with the same disappointing endings. He realized one day that he was recreating the same kind of relationship over and over. Trying to rescue each woman and shape her into someone who could give him the love he did not get earlier in his life. As a consequence of this conscious understanding he grieved the loss of what he did not get earlier in his parent-child relationship and was freed to find a more emotionally available woman. The point is...it is possible to step out of these repetitive cycles of disappointment once they are consciously identified. You just have to tolerate the uncomfortable feelings that come with discovery.

Controlling Lovers

Control in a love relationship is always a bad sign. It simply means there is an underlying insecurity in the person who tries to control the partner who could hurt him/her. One implication is that the controller knows what hurt is and is trying desperately to control the potential source of future hurt. It is understandable why this happens, but it never works very well. Most if not all people resent having their freedoms messed with. Freedom is essential to human living. We are all at our healthiest when free. What I have discovered is that people eventually get sick when that freedom is taken away.

Unfortunately control endures in a love relationship because the victim of control does not have the self-esteem necessary to challenge it. In fact, the only real hope the relationship has is that these things will be challenged so that something new can develop. Control over time leads to either submission and sickness or resentmnt and escape. When a person feels good about himself/herself, the freedom to be onself is mandatory. With a little humility, some frustrated controllers get a chance in time to experiment with personal vulnerability. At first glance, vulnerability can appear less attractive than power, until you realize the bonus is love.

Liberate Your Love-Life

Once you realize the influence of your past on your present thoughts, feelings, and behavior it can get really scary. Its so easy to sleepwalk and repeat the same things over and over again simply because they are familiar. Of course, the down side is the repetition takes place whether or not what you are doing is good for you or not. Maybe this is Mother Nature's space saving thing, repeition is a bit more compact than doing something new all the time. Whatever...I prefer new over automatic. So how do you mess with this?

Lets assume that 'new' is a lot more interesting and adventuresome simply because you don't have predictability and control. Anything can happen including something better than what you have been repetitively doing. Lets take me for example. I grew up in a home where communication was reserved for the 'functional' things in life like eating, sleeping, health,  following family rules, and of course, work. Communicating about personal feelings was conspicuously absent. Tensions would build and be discharged in the culturally sanctioned or a little less sanctioned ways, with an occasional unpredictable eruption to make life interesting.

One of my repetitions is to set up the same thing in my immediate family. Once aware of its limitations, my communication experiments led me to the joys of that occasional 'family meeting' where we all get to speak our minds (and feelings) democratically. My son knows a lot more than he dares to tell unless invited, and my wife feels a lot more than she is aware of until she communicates. And I know both of those experiences pretty well myself. Once you get a taste for it though, personal communication about your emotional experience to people who matter becomes a necessity. Then you start wondering how the hell you ever lived without it no matter how uncomfortable it temporarily makes you.

Love-Life or Love Life?

The word 'love-life' is interesting for several reasons. In its traditional meaning it simply refers to your life of love. Said another way, the nature and measure of love in your life. But I think it also refers to your love of life, without which I doubt there would be much love-life. When you love life what does it feel like? My own moments of loving life are precious to me and never last long enough. Now that I have become aware of their importance and my own need to study and dissect them, they seem to vanish upon close inspection. Lets say they have a life of their own. Once again, not everything can be under our control. I see that I love life the most when I have forgiven everyone around me. That I have gotten myself into a state of mind where I believe it is better to live myself and let live to others. Surprising how both of those ideas are so very compatible. If I value my own moments of life I glimpse the value of the moments of life of people around me. Maybe we all have to keep this under wraps for some reason. I know, because if we became too aware of it, the intensity and incompatibility with how we are living would drive us crazy. I'll try to stay hopeful.

I figure we are all lovers deep down inside. What that means is, we are all looking to give or get love depending on the circumstances of our present lives. As an adult I can safely say that my best moments are when I feel I have something to give. The worst are when I am not getting what I think I deserve. My wife knows this conflict too. Being married has given me an opportunity to explore and experiment with this stuff. When I love life I contribute to the life I find around me. Funny thing, if you haven't noticed, love comes only under those conditions. If I am making demands, love tends to rebel and stay away. The best part is to realize that we can all give and feel love even when we are disappointed.

Creating Your Own Love-Life 101

So much of the world distracts us that most people forget or worse never remember how powerful their consciousness actually is. It might have passed before your eyes a million times in a million different guises...what you expect is what you get. Let's consider this a law. So if you don't pay critical attention to what you believe there is a good chance that something else other than you personal choice will be driving your life.

Apply this to your love-life. Are there beliefs in the way of getting what you truly want and need? Life can be full of spontaneity and surprise. If you are afraid, you will trance yourself into believing this is not so. Once you get your love-life into predictable patterns that feel controllable and safe, you know that life is draining out of your LOVE-life. Do something different.