Dr. Jordan's Blog

Coming Soon!!

Dr. Jordan's Love-Life Tutorials are a series of audio downloads that will be available on this blog in the spring of 2012. Each tutorial offers helpful information on a range of love-life problems and their resolution. I am a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, and university professor with a specialty in the study and treatment of illness caused by love-life difficulties.

My unique focus is on what people believe about themselves and their intimate relationships that can cause or aggravate emotional illness. My approach is very effective in identifying specific love-life issues to work on while strengthening a person's conviction that he/she can initiate healthy changes.

My Love-Life Tutorials were extracted from extensive clinical experience effectively treating emotional illness through the resolution of love-life difficulties.

Bookmark this announcement for further updates on availability.

Changing Your Love-Life

To change your love-life you have to first become aware of what needs changing. Simple enough? Not so simple, why? Because we are usually unconscious of this kind of stuff. We can become conscious of something being wrong like if painful feelings or symptoms show up. Unfortunately most of us pay more attention to getting rid of the symptom than trying to understand why it exists in the first place. We think of these painful signs as something to medicate, get away from, or simply wait for it to leave (time cures all right?). Once you ask yourself the question, is this symptom trying to tell me something about me or the way I am living you start to move in a far more productive direction.

Once you've admitted to yourself that something is wrong, you can begin to look for the answer. Whether you find it in dialogue with another loved/trusted person or as a result of soul-searching,the point is you are looking. Good. Next step is getting an answer that feels right. You might not like what you come up with but that never discounts the possibility you might be right. Hard truths are just that...hard. If you could possibly accept that the honest truth about what you are thinking, feeling, or doing in your love-life is bringing you misery, then you can think about change.

Now understand that change means you are going to go in a totally new direct. This is going to be a little scary at first and liberating after a while. Intuitively you will probably already know what it is you need to change. Unfortunately we are all good at hiding the truth from ourselves. I wish we didn't do  that it would certainly make my job easier. Nevertheless, what you come up with as far as a change in your love-life goes, will probably feel like you knew it all along. The important point is once you start to change you won't feel so good again. At least not right away. Remember, we all have an investment in staying the way we are whether or not it is helping us or not. This is exactly why change is so difficult to begin with.

Now practice is what makes the whole thing real. Practice means you, now with full consciousness, try to do something different over and over again, until it starts to feel second nature. In other words until the change comes to you automatically. Like driving an automobile for the first time. Remember how many things you had to think about at the same time. Same thing. Once you have done it for a while it comes to you without much effort. Psychological change is the same way. Practicing something we need to change is not very enjoyable at first since we are so used to doing it the old way. That's precisely why I am using the word practice.

To review the steps are consciousness and practice with a heavy dose of honesty to keep it real. Dr. J.

Conscious Love-Life

Dr. Thomas Jordan

Love-Life Workshops Develop a Conscious Love-Life  

I am here today to tell you about the benefits of making your love-live conscious. I’m also here to tell you about a workshop I created that effectively does just that. My name is Dr. Thomas Jordan, I am a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, and creator of the Love-Life Workshop. I’d like to start by answering the question, “How did the Love-Life Workshop come to be an interest of mine?” To answer this question I will have to tell you a short love story. I met my wife Victoria in 1987 when I was thirty–four. I married her in 1994 when I was forty-one. Before 1987 I was consumed with a passion for my career, which I only later learned was excessive. I had blocked out most of my need for love and companionship by overworking and undervaluing my love-life. There was simply no room for love in my life at that time.

Looking back, I can remember episodes of loneliness and disappointment which I never allowed to linger very long, never mind understand.  I believed that love was not as important as professional success and I did not have a conception of how the two could co-exist in the same period of time. It was work or love, one had to overpower the other. So I regrettably put off love for some distant other time.    As in any good love story, there is always a subplot. When I met my future wife, my resistance to love became more visible to me. I was finished with the rigors of graduate school and I was making enough money to begin relaxing and enjoying my life again. Remember I met Victoria in 1987 yet I married her in 1994. Looking back, I remember those seven years as time I spent unprepared for what was being offered to me. If you ask me did I know she’d be the one, I’d tell you that I knew the first time I looked into Victoria’s eyes that she would be my wife. Although along with this intuitive knowledge came the resistance I had lived with years before. I was still not ready for love, but why? I had achieved many of the accomplishments I had earlier set out for myself. My education and career had reached most of the goals I had imagined for myself. Why couldn’t I just acknowledge I had met my partner and it was time to act on the love that was trying to emerge? At that time, I began to recognize my emotional insistence on being alone. Although I dated often and started and ended relationships throughout this period, I gravitated toward people I did not really love to cope with the fact that I did not have Victoria in my life.     

Victoria and I maintained a painful curiosity in one another during the seven years that I knew her. Between relationships, we had both tried to date each other with disastrous consequences. We now look back on this period with humor and enjoy telling our new friends about the comedy in these experiences. Yet we both know that at the time it was more than upsetting. We simply could not get along. Our dates became a series of experiences where one or the other of us jeopardized the date in one way or another. One of us either drank too much, or over-reacted too much, or simply rationalized his or her anxiety at the prospect of being together too much. The outcome was that we remained in some kind of distant contact with occasional attempts to revisit the possibility of being together. In the meantime she had disappointing relationships as I did. We both felt that what we really wanted neither of us could allow ourselves to have.      I learned in this seven year period that unresolved family of origin experiences were at the heart of my difficulty permitting true love to enter my life. An adulthood dependency upon my mother remained a subtle yet unconscious and powerful barrier to consummating my love-life with Victoria. Eventually I recognized that I needed the support and understanding of a psychotherapist to begin the emotional process of letting-go so that I could start my own love-life. My mother and I had grown too close and too dependent upon one another. When my emotional work in this area progressed, the relationship between my parents improved and I was freer to invite Victoria into a committed love relationship. I am truly thankful that she was still available at the time, and that I had found a psychotherapist who knew how to work with my love-life. There could have been stronger regrets at the end of this story had she moved on to another relationship, and I had not understood the emotional barriers in my love relationships.    

Consequently, the importance of being receptive to love in adulthood has become a primary professional preoccupation of mine. I draw upon these experiences in my own love-life to try to understand the emotional barriers that can exist when dating and in a love relationship. The fact that we can be unprepared for love when it emerges is personally tragic to all who have this experience. Though I sometimes wonder what I might have done earlier to avoid spending so much time at odds with my heart. Answering this type of question for others is the true motivation for the Love-Life Workshop I will talk to you about today.      Looking back, the one thing I could have really used at this earlier time was more consciousness of my love-life.  I was struggling against the psychological complications in my love-life with little or no reflection on what was really happening. I simply lived out the disappointing patterns that I had subconsciously established. Never questioning what was familiar, never wondering whether I had to do something different. This absence of consciousness led to repeated disappointment and delay, which I unfortunately learned little from. I would now like to offer people interested in their love-lives, an opportunity to reflect and become conscious of their love-life experiences, so that disappointments become opportunities to learn, not just repeated experiences of frustration and unhappiness.   So what is a Conscious Love-Life?   First let us define consciousness as an exchange of awareness between people. We at Love-Life Workshops are particularly attracted to this definition because it will help you understand why we prefer working with love-life issues in a small group workshop.

We believe that a small group of people exchanging awareness is the best setting within which to explore love-life concerns. In fact, since love-life issues were originally generated in a small group they should be reviewed and brought back to consciousness in one as well. Our workshop leaders are trained to organize each workshop experience to promote an exchange of awareness between participants as sensitively communicated feedback. So the first thing about a conscious love-life we need to know is that  consciousness of one’s love-life is best initiated in the context of a small group’s exchange of awareness between its members.      The areas of the love-life experience that are kept in awareness in a conscious love-life are the way we feel about ourselves, our intimate friendship experiences, and our dating and love relationship experiences. All three areas are involved in our love-lives, and they are all related to each other. How we feel about ourselves, for example, is very important in terms of the quality and nature of the love relationship we establish. And the ability to form trusted friendships that endure is definitely a factor in what kind of commitment to a lover will be made. In a conscious love-life, an individual sustains a proactive awareness in all three areas of her love-life experience.     

A conscious love-life also involves an understanding of the importance of learning in how we experience dating and love relationships. The working assumption here is that the conduct of our love-lives is learned. Once learned, however, that learning becomes less conscious and less available for review and occasional modification. Most adults stop thinking about their love-lives. Repetitive actions take the place of self-inquiry, reflection, and awareness. Once we reconsider the fact that the ways we behave in our love-lives and what we expect from our love-lives are learned, we can begin the process of learning something new about our past and present experiences with love.      

New learning from old disappointments leads to an enhanced capacity for more realistic choice in our love-lives. When your love-life is conscious, you make better choices for yourself, for your intimate friendships, and for your love relationship. A well functioning freedom of choice in our love-lives is the hallmark of a conscious love-life. When we are aware of alternatives, when we see the patterns in our lives more clearly, healthy more satisfying choice is inevitable.      The last characteristic of a conscious love-life I will mention today is the requirement that awareness be an ongoing practice in order to be sustained. The Love-Life Workshop was created to offer an interpersonal context within which to begin this process of love-life awareness. To sustain this awareness once initiated requires a personal commitment to continue a life long review of one’s love-life experiences.  

But why do I need a Conscious Love-Life?   We need consciousness in our love-lives because certain psychological complications can form that interfere with the search for and/or continuation of a love relationship. These complications originate from an accumulation of disappointments in love and their effects on our emotional lives. Love-life disappointments can begin as early as the family of origin experiences we have with love. If these earlier disappointments are not resolved, they become the sub-conscious reference for how we conduct our dating and love relationship experiences. When this is the case, disappointments are likely to be recreated and repeated into adulthood. These sub-conscious patterns complicate our presentation of ourselves to potential partners, and what our self-regard and self-care communicates to others. Love-life disappointments can also complicate our expectations of love and the defensive reactions formed to protect ourselves from further disappointment and hurt.     

When our presentation of ourselves to potential partners is complicated by disappointment, it is common to misrepresent ourselves when there is an opportunity for a love connection. We will not trust that our true self is the best presentation to give a potential partner. The fact is, if your true self is not attractive to a person then that is not the person for you. Of course, this can get complicated when a person does not have much experience being real to begin with. In this instance, becoming aware of the importance of this issue will promote experimentation with different and potentially more effective ways of dating and being in a love relationship.      As I mentioned, disappointments in our love-lives can also affect our self-regard or feeling about ourselves. The extent to which we like who we are and feel “lovable” can be damaged by repeated disappointments. On the way to developing a more secure sense of ourselves as adults, our self-regard is naturally vulnerable to how other people treat us, especially someone we are in love with. This can be a very painful time in the evolution of our identities as adults, extending well into our adulthood years. Eventually, our sense of our own individuality can mature to the point where disappointment in love maybe hurtful but does not damage our self-regard. At that point in our lives, a love relationship will obviously be easier to handle.      Another important aspect of this experience is the quality of our self-care. By self-care I am simply referring to how well we actually take care of ourselves. Disappointments in love can affect this part of our psychological lives as well. A person can accumulate enough aftereffects of disappointment and frustration to begin mismanaging aspects of her emotional and/or physical health. Both self-regard and self-care will have a powerful effect on the quality of dating and love relationship experiences. Again, when a person does not feel good about himself, it is common for that feeling to be communicated to potential partners. The consequence can be avoidance by healthy potential partners and an attraction to unhealthy partnerships.      Disappointments in love can also establish a pattern of unrealistic expectations in a love relationship. Apart from the repetitive nature of expectations generated from disappointment and frustration, unrealistic expectations focus mostly upon how a person can get reparation for previous losses. Because hurtful experiences were never healed and are now below consciousness, they affect the perception and experience of potential partners and the actions taken to get what is desired. The outcome is frequently more disappointment and frustration.      The last aftereffect of love-life disappointment I will tell you about today are the defensive reactions we form as a result of the experience of hurt in our dating and love relationships. Once hurt we naturally protect ourselves from further hurt by forming defensive attitudes and behaviors. Although these defenses are understandable, they often become barriers to the openness and trust required to risk trying love again.   So how can I achieve a Conscious Love-Life?                       

Because the conduct of our love-lives is learned, under the right circumstances we can unlearn what we have learned, and relearn more effective and independent ways of dating and being in love. This unlearning process is the key to the effectiveness of our Love-Life Workshops.  First of all, the right circumstance for this unlearning to take place is an interpersonal setting where people can talk openly about their love-life experiences and receive the right kind of sensitive feedback from others. This is precisely why our workshop groups are limited in size, large enough for variety but small enough to facilitate trust, personalized support, and a real feeling of sincere togetherness.   But what exactly is a Love-Life Workshop?   I developed the Love-Life Workshop as a small group consciousness creating workshop that initiates an unlearning process for individuals who need to become more conscious of their psychological and emotional barriers to love. Our workshops consist of a small group of men and women, usually six, who meet weekly for a mutually agreed upon time, usually around six weeks, with a specially trained psychologist who functions as a workshop leader. Each workshop meets for 90 minutes at the private office of the particular workshop leader. All workshop participants are individually selected and invited to participate in a workshop based on the confidential information they have given us regarding their love-life experiences. Under the professional guidance of the workshop leader, the mutual objective is to help each other achieve the agreed upon goal of making each participant’s love-life conscious.     

In our workshops we practice the Love-Life Review, an effective method of creating an awareness of all the possible psychological problem areas in an individual’s love-life. I developed the Love-Life Review as a specialized workshop format for our Love-Life Workshops in order to more efficiently focus these psychological problem areas for individuals who are dealing with dating and/or love relationship disappointments. In other words, to clarify what each participant in our workshops has learned about love. The Love-Life Review makes it easier to effectively define what has been learned and is now interfering with finding and sustaining a satisfying and healthy love relationship. The unlearning phase is initiated when this past learning is sensitively questioned in the supportive setting of a workshop group. Participants are introduced to new ideas about dating and love relationships that challenge the hold that past experience and learning have on the individual’s love-life. Workshop participants are urged to focus on whether or not what they have been taught is helping them achieve their love-life goals. When awareness is supported and encouraged in this manner, people begin to strengthen their resolve and ability to make healthier and more satisfying choices for themselves.     

So what becomes conscious in a Love-Life Review? The Love-Life Review is our highly specialized workshop method of increasing each participant’s awareness in each of the following five (5) love-life problem areas:  Workshop participants are sensitively encouraged to talk about the past and present disappointments that are affecting their love-lives. This supportive experience of individual exploration and sharing in the workshop group gives each participant a chance to more deeply understand the emotional impact his/her disappointments have created. For many individuals this is the first time they will articulate and share these experiences with anyone. We support and encourage all efforts to become more aware of these effects and learn from them to improve dating and love relationship experiences. This mutual sharing naturally creates a greater feeling of togetherness and trust among participants in a workshop.    

The ways in which individual participants present themselves to potential partners, as well as to other participants in a workshop, will also become conscious. Becoming aware of how we come across to others permits a determination of whether or not our presentations are helping us or hurting us find and keep a fulfilling love relationship. Of course, one of the workshop leader’s responsibilities is to make sure that feedback of this kind is always conveyed in a sensitive and beneficial manner. Over the years I have become aware of the extent to which our self-regard and level of self-care are intimately related to the quality of our love-lives. As I indicated earlier, how I treat myself and how I allow others to treat me are very much related. The self-regard part to this experience usually involves a feeling of personal “lovability.” How lovable do I really think I am and how does that get communicated to others? The self-care component involves the quality of my care of myself. How well do I take care of myself in the course of my daily life? And how does this level of self-care communicate to a potential lover? A group discussion about these matters is always illuminating and encourages participants to begin asking themselves the kind of questions that precede constructive changes.     

The nature of our love-life expectations is another very fruitful topic for the Love-Life Workshop. Past disappointments with love have a sneaky way of shaping our expectations while dating or in a love relationship. And these past experiences with love can go all the way back to very early periods in our lives. It still amazes me how persistent unhealed experiences can be in affecting and determining the way we currently behave in our love-lives. When there is unfinished love-life business there is a tendency to be preoccupied with what we did not get and how we might now get it. A preoccupation of this kind usually involves less than conscious attempts to correct past losses or injuries through current relationships. Unfortunately, the expectations that emerge from unfinished business are often unrealistic and troublesome when dating or in a relationship. We make an effort in the Love-Life Workshop to help participants understand the difference between what was not obtained in an earlier love-life experience and what now is available to give to a relationship. For most of us, this transition from getting something to giving something signals the advent of a matured conscious love-life. We at Love-Life Workshops believe that a person with unrealistic expectations of love needs to become conscious of this problem and begin the healing transformation from what is unrealistically expected from a partner, to what can be realistically given to a partner. Our workshop leaders are trained to sensitively initiate this healing experience in the context of a supportive small group workshop.     

The last problem area involves our universal tendency to defend ourselves against emotional hurt. We are all very self-protective. In many instances it is completely understandable, especially if the love-life hurts occurred earlier in our lives. The problem exists when our defensive reactions are retained long after their relevance and utility is over. As if we cannot quite believe times have changed and that we have also changed. A revision is required in how comfortable we feel taking risks, and how we protect ourselves before, during, and after hurt in our love-lives. Our familiar defensive reactions become known to us and retained even if they are no longer useful. This can create the love-life condition I have heard referred to as ‘looking for love closed.” Closed means that reactive psychological defenses like avoidance and anger are making it nearly impossible for a person to meet and relate receptively to other potential partners.     

In the Love-Life Workshops we encourage participants to talk openly about their dating and love relationship experiences so that the defensive reactions being used are understandable to everyone in the workshop group. We then help each individual explore the functioning of their own defensive reactions and the psychological purposes these reactions are serving. My old analyst used to say that you can’t be in love without tolerating an occasional hurt. After fifteen years of research and study in the area of adulthood love relationships, I would also add that you can’t be in love without trusting your capacity to heal those hurts. Beyond our familiar defensive reactions which we all use to tolerate and manage the pains of love, there is the softer more vulnerable source of our natures. It is from here that love emerges into direct experience, sometimes welcomed and unfortunately sometimes not. Working consciously on our defenses in an open and supportive group of 'like-hearted' people is a step toward dissolving these barriers to a more receptive heart. If you listen carefully to a person’s love-life stories, you will hear about the defensive reactions they have subconsciously formed to protect themselves. Once aware of these psychological defenses it becomes easier to begin changing them.     

The relearning phase of our Love-Life Workshop experience involves the practice of new and more effective lessons of love in an individual’s love-life. These love-life practices promote an emotional preparation for the experience of love, as well as help sustaining love once experienced. The ultimate objective is a more independent and fulfilling love-life.   So what is practiced to prepare for and sustain a love relationship?  For the relearning phase, the last step in this unlearning process, I created the Practice of Mature Loving, a series of “lessons” that help an individual prepare for love as a psychological experience, and sustain love once it has emerged. Our “practices” have survived the test of time and application to the lives of many of my patients, friends, family, and of course my own life and therapy. Workshop participants are introduced to the Practice of Mature Loving at the end of the Love-Life Workshop. Participants are encouraged to discuss each lesson recalling as many relevant personal experiences as session times allow.

This entire exercise is divided into five separate categories:  The first practice involves the actual experience of love and developing an understanding and tolerance for that experience. The idea is that through understanding love as a special experience with its own unique set of psychological qualities, a person emotionally prepares for the experience of falling and being in love. The next practice involves a preparation for love by further developing one’s individuality. Practices under this heading are devoted to the development of individuality in and out of a love relationship. The idea being that a better defined sense of individual self will help us endure and enjoy the experience of being in love.     

Then there is the experience of intimacy. At the Love-Life Workshops we work with intimacy as the skill involved in setting up a mutual and reciprocal love relationship that is honest, free, and equal. The practice in this area addresses the need to develop intimacy as the friendship that forms a healthy foundation for one’s love relationship experiences.      How and what we communicate to our lover is another practice of mature loving. Communication has always been a vital force in the development of a love relationship. Workshop participants enjoy discussing the novelty of our ideas concerning the communication of our family of origin experiences and observations of each others defenses as the most important areas of dialogue in a maturing love relationship. The idea here is to marshal as many constructive forces against the onslaught of past experiences which are ever so ready to distort or interrupt a current love relationship.    

The final practice we simply refer to as the goal of love-life independence. We introduce the idea of an independent love-life to alert participants to the psychological importance of establishing one’s own love-life. By independent we mean a love-life formed independently from one’s family of origin. This is not to say that support and encouragement from one’s family are not of value at times like these, quite the contrary. What is problematic is when a person is living out the love-life of another or others as the case may be. An essential psychological liberty, as I see it, is the right to one’s own love-life. This means, you learn how to consult with your own heart in matters of mature loving. Even if you don’t have a lot of experience looking inward to answer the questions you might have about love, we at Love-Life Workshop understand love-life independence to be the ultimate objective.

Do You Have An Interesting Love-Life Story?

If you have an interesting love-life story or know somebody who has an interesting story we can all marvel at or learn from let me know. Of course it can be anonymous. I'm going to get into the habit of posting interesting love-life stuff as I become aware of them.

Real Help for Your Love-Life

Dr. Thomas Jordan 

Everyone is thinking about their love-lives in one way or another, probably whether or not it is satisfying enough. Most of our contemporary concerns run along the lines of where to meet the right man or woman, the ways that one person might attract another, being able to detect whether or not your partner is available or eligible, and of course, the strategies that a person might use to get someone else to commit. All worthy of consideration as we search for the love we all need. What is overlooked, however, can determine the very nature and success of our love-life experiences. What is overlooked is the influence of our personal psychology on the success or failure of our love-lives.

I am going to call the area in question our “love-life psychology.” Now what is our love-life psychology? As a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst specializing in adulthood psychological maturity, my research and practice over the years has taught me a lot about what happens to people when they are looking for love, and of course what can happen to them once they have found it. From these experiences as well as my own love-life disappointments and relationships I have come to a definition of love-life psychology as composed of three things: 1. psychological complications that are generated from love-life disappointments; 2. psychological receptivity to love as an experience; 3. psychological ability to take care of love once it arrives. These three areas of our psychological experience make up what I am calling our love-life psychology.

This is not to say that the contemporary concerns I outlined in an earlier paragraph are not important in the successful formation of a love-life. Yes they obviously are. But what is infinitely more important is your state of mind prior to, during, and after love smites you. Let us take the first component of our love-life psychology for example. Disappointments in love, especially if they have occurred repeatedly, will generate emotions and psychological effects that may complicate any further dealings with love. Since love involves the most tender and vulnerable of human experiences, the feeling of having to protect ourselves is common. The only problem is that we eventually lose consciousness for our protections and when they become familiar through loads of practice they become automatic. Now you have psychological complications that can and will interfere with all aspects of your love-life. No matter how well you look and how great the places you go to meet, your love-life psychology will follow you and influence your receptivity to love from the inside-out.

Speaking of a receptivity to love, let us consider receptivity as a state of mind that can be either open or closed. In fact there is not much gray area in between, even though people like to think of receptivity in degrees. It is sort of like being pregnant or honest. You either are or you are not. Gray area is generally rationalizations used to have one’s psychological defenses and be out there too, if you know what I mean. In some instances we just don’t get to eat the cake so easily. An openness to love means taking risks and deciding to be vulnerable for the noble cause of having love in our lives. A well planned exploration of the psychological complications in our love-life will give us the information needed to begin challenging what we have learned at the hands of hurtful disappointments in our love-lives. It is simply a tragedy to be psychologically unprepared for love when it comes looking for us.

Lastly, on our shortlist of ingredients is the psychological ability to take care of love once it emerges into our lives. This part of our love-life psychology can be at odds with how people commonly think about a love relationship. In love-life psychological terms, conditioning one’s psychology in relation to love is always the most fruitful way to go. For example, we stress the importance of communication between people in love not just to talk about how much in love they feel. Quite the contrary, we urge people to talk about topics that reveal and expose more and more of what is commonly hid in other relationships. Furthermore, most people have the misconception that love is strengthened by pulling one’s partner closer and promoting as much similarity as possible. Nothing could be further from the truth. Similarity is really the preoccupation of lovers who are struggling with forms of psychological insecurity and doubts about their lovability. It is really difference and individuality that promotes and develops our love-lives. It is only the practice of independence in our love-lives that naturally fans the fires of love.

Helping people develop a “positive” love-life psychology is the dedication of our love-life project. Through years of personal experience I know the aftereffects of love-life disappointment quite well. I also know the extent to which these aftereffects can keep love at bay. This mixture of personal and professional experiences has led me to develop a method of intensifying a consciousness for one’s love-life experiences. The Love-Life Workshop is a small group method of challenging with awareness all the things we have learned about love through love-life disappointments, going as far back as the beginning stages of one’s life in some cases. If the conduct of our love-lives in adulthood is learned at earlier periods in our lives and repeated over and over again without consciousness, our hope is to break out of this trance and unlearn what is not working in our favor and relearn something new and far more useful.

Our Love-Life Workshops provide the interpersonal context for such an experience, as far as I know, the only one like it anywhere. We have developed procedures that are streamlined and maximize the chances of achieving a consciousness of one’s love-life. We believe it is the right time to become aware of a love-life psychology. People are tired of the impact of consumerism on love in our society. A small group of people sincerely interested in helping each other achieve a conscious love-life is appealing. We can only really work on our love-lives through making changes in ourselves with the help and support of others.

What the World Needs Now is Consciousness Sweet Consciousness

Any casual observer of human affairs will notice that adult love relationships are troubled these days.  The divorce rate is climbing, and men and women are commonly believed to be on “different planets” struggling to survive together in love.  Many single individuals are making it to middle-age discontented and pessimistic about the chances of finding an enduring love relationship.  As far as solutions go, traditional answers in the form of counseling and psychotherapy, when trusted, are only reaching a minority of those individuals with love problems.  Now that we have become more sophisticated in our understanding of how interpersonal relationships influence development throughout life, it is time to go back to the drawing board and determine how consciousness can be useful to a love relationship.

At the risk of including myself among the cacophony of voices haling one panacea or another, I will simply propose that “consciousness” be given a second chance.  More specifically, a form of consciousness not commonly considered when definitions of this word are offered.  By consciousness, I mean an exchange of ideas and observations in the context of an interpersonal relationship.  “I will help you understand you, while you are helping me understand me.”  A contemporary extension of the idea that we can rarely read our own minds as well as someone who loves us can.  The bottom line is that, someone else is required to find out who I am.  We believe that this form of interpersonal consciousness can be applied to a love relationship in a way that heals and renews.

With these thoughts in mind, I set out to develop a forum within which single and coupled men and women can learn how to apply “interpersonal consciousness” to their love-lives.  Our seminars and workshops grew out of a book I wrote entitled, “Principles of Conscious Loving.”  This book proposes fifteen “principles” of interpersonal consciousness that can constructively change and develop an adult love relationship.  For starters, “falling in love” is differentiated from “loving.”  The former is a bio-emotional phenomenon that is never under a person’s control.  Falling in love simply happens to us, no one can make it happen.  The experience of loving, on the other hand, is something we learn, usually starting with the love relationships in our families of origin.  It is the way we have learned to treat love once we have “fallen.”  Do we take care of love or do we do things unconsciously to ruin our chances of having it grow?  We believe that when a person becomes conscious of her ways of loving, she will have a better chance of challenging and unlearning the old familiar ways of being in love.  Now something new can be learned.  For example, if a person discovers that he is loving someone in the limited way he experienced one parent loving another, this awareness could initiate better and more satisfying ways of loving.

“Unconscious loving,” so to speak, is a way of relating to another while in love that has never been brought under conscious scrutiny.  A person in this position is usually influenced by the “disappointments” of past love relationships, imposed as barriers in current love relationships, in the form of “expectations” and “defenses.”  What we end up unconsciously expecting is that our histories will repeat themselves, requiring the same old unproductive defensive solutions.  This is precisely how unconscious loving interferes with an ability to love and be loved in adulthood.  Our “principles of conscious loving” offer an awareness of disappointments, expectations, and defenses as an initial effort to psychologically prepare oneself for love.  Undeniably, falling in love will always be unpredictable.  But being receptive to the event, if and when it happens, is something we can all do something about.

The book, “Principles of Conscious Loving” also suggests a revision of how adult love relationships are ordinarily conducted.  Given the understanding that a love relationship is the optimal interpersonal context for human growth and development, it is vital that we understand how to use this most valuable of human resources.  An adult love relationship is an ideal interpersonal situation within which to undergo certain growth experiences.  In the book there are discussions of how disappointments, expectations, and defenses can be talked about with a lover.  How practicing the art of forgiving, and most importantly forgetting, can prepare the way for growth in a relationship.  There are discussions about the psychological state of emotional vulnerability and tenderness, and the place these more receptive human experiences have in adult love relationships.  The relationship between a sense of one’s own “unique individuality” and healthy loving is also explored.  So often in an adult love relationship, we can leave so much of ourselves out of the way we relate when in love.  Last but certainly not least, the experience of giving to another without an anticipated reciprocity is elevated to the most advanced of human experiences possible with another person.  Letting go of childhood and adolescent demands for reparation is often the very first step in emotionally preparing ourselves for a truly giving experience in our love lives.

Other principles in the book propose a set of humanistic values that “nurture” love once it happens.  These values are “freedom,” “honesty,” “equality,” and a “devotion to awareness.”  Freedom in love is understood as an effort to be in love without controlling the experience in any way.  A good example of this is the possessiveness that often occurs as an attempt to resolve personal fears and insecurities by controlling one’s partner.  The practice of honesty in love means communicating to one’s lover without omitting or distorting feelings or thoughts.  This “loving practice” inevitably establishes a form of interpersonal trust not available otherwise.  Equality in a love relationship means that two people will share the responsibility for what happens in their relationship.  Lastly, a devotion to awareness in love involves regular dialogues about defenses and expectations that emerge in the course of the love relationship.  Valuing conversations that help a couple become more aware of the limiting effects of defenses and expectations, can literally save a love relationship.

A practical way of delivering this message of interpersonal consciousness is to offer seminars and workshops where people can openly discuss these “principles of conscious loving,” while referencing their own personal disappointments in love.  Since loving is learned, in the right interpersonal setting the ways we have learned to love can be unlearned and something more constructive relearned.  We are proposing that the new learning needed can be initiated by the “principles of conscious loving.”

Love & Terror

The Impact of Terrorism on the Human Experience of Love  

Dr. T. Jordan

    What happens to love when our lives are chronically threatened? Does our experience of love change when we are coping with the possibility of terror? Love is the most sensitive of human experiences. It is tragic that love can still be so easily eclipsed by the actions we take to protect ourselves from feeling vulnerable. The undeniable fact is that fear and love require two very different mentalities. When terror grips our lives, most people find it difficult to resist its influence. We are already morbidly attracted to trouble like bystanders at a gruesome fist fight, or in an automobile passing a fatal accident on a highway. It is a sad fact that the various manifestations of hate can still be more exciting and draw more popular attention than the various manifestations of love.

    Terror is about an anticipated offense and an insecure defense. Both are familiar experiences in our competitive culture. When terror occurs, people struggle to protect themselves from harm as they experience the world as unsafe. There is a little more distance between all of us when terror abounds since precarious sides have been drawn and we are all forced to judge each other in order to determine the enemy. Terror breeds an extra emphasis upon the familiar. Fewer risks are taken in the hopes that sticking to what is known or familiar will offer a margin of safety during troubled times.  Terrorism breeds sadness. We all grieve for the innocent that have lost their lives for nothing.

    Terrorism creates defensive feelings of anger and occasionally rage. Under better circumstances, these feelings are siphoned off with cheers of satisfaction when an enemy has been found and temporarily defeated. Under worst circumstances, we have dumped what we feel onto innocent people who are easy targets because they resemble the enemy in our minds.  Terror breeds fear and anxiety. Fear when danger is predictable, and anxiety when it not. Inevitably, terrorism creates guilt. Guilt because we have all participated in the decision to defensively take human lives. Terrorism breeds a time of conflict and disagreement. For the simple fact that most of us are able to care for others, we can feel sympathy for the victims of our victory. Terrorism requires that we practice diminishing our innate ability to feel for another. How else could we destroy threatening lives unless we are convinced that it is absolutely necessary to preserve our own. Too much feeling for our enemy only deepens an unwanted experience of conflict.

    This last psychological characteristic of terror is particularly important in a comparison with love. Only by numbing what we could feel for another when an intended victim is involved, can we take life from our enemy. We have passed judgment that they do not deserve to live. The magnitude of this decision is rarely felt at the time when terror haunts and understandably so. It is more likely to make its uncomfortable appearance at a later time when the determination to be victorious and the certainty of cause are less strong in individual consciousness. The depersonalization of another is the only comfort that is possible. But in this dehumanizing experience, certain human sensitivities must be temporarily suspended. You could say that dehumanization in addition to actual deaths is the inevitable price of terror. For safety’s sake we endure the losses required. So death comes not only to the innocent and the unfortunate protectors who bravely lose their lives for us in the line of duty, but to all of us who as spectators lose a little of that sensitivity we have been created to feel for one another.

    Love as a practice requires that a person at least tolerate and if possible learn to enjoy the sensitivities and vulnerabilities of loving another. Loving is tender and raw. It is individuated in the sense that it occurs between unique individuals never really substitutable. Love mixes with sadness because we will realize that the one loved will not remain on this earth forever. Love is a risk that when overwhelmed by feeling we will survive and thrive from the experience. Love is deep sympathy for another. The deeper I know you the better chance I have of forgiving your humanity and loving you in your distinction. Love seeks to preserve and continue life. Love struggles to bring differences together so that we can all strengthen our common humanity.

    What happens to loving when we are protecting ourselves from chronic terror? It hides in familiar places. It stops growing. It develops a paranoid persona. It waits for a time when the destruction is over, and rebuilding commences. It even twists itself into distorted forms when war is required to free the innocent. Love was never made to be temporarily twisted in this form. Like spring time after the natural destruction of winter, love can be a rebirth. Love’s patience helps us understand that former enemies can once again be allies. Because of love, hate is never permanent.

    I believe that love is fundamental to our natures. I do not believe that fear has to be. I believe that how we love is learned and as such can be unlearned and relearned in a life time. I believe that consciousness is the true savior of human beings. In the consciousness of what is true to our nature, we will all find that we are lovers at the core. Unfortunately for many of us, early relationship lessons are repeated without consciousness for the remainder of our lives. If we are brought up to believe in the primacy of offense and defense, we will have difficulty trusting the vulnerability love requires. If we are brought up to believe that hate and anger is the only way to settle disputes, our interpersonal lives will be filled with conflict and strife. Regrettably, we have not yet comprehended the need of every human being to experience love at least once in his or her life time. This would ensure that the forces of hate and impersonal experience never overtake a human heart. Furthermore, we have not yet understood the importance of meeting with each other for the sole purpose of discussing our love-lives. We have forgotten the importance of being together where love is involved. Loving is never just an experience between two people. Love involves all of us and requires all of us to attain its intended influence in our lives. I like to think of the potential in this as a resource that exists in the heart of people tapped or untapped. It is in these thoughts and reflections that I regularly recover the hope for our future.

    To put these thoughts and beliefs into practice adds an element of reality to a person’s life. Will advocating for love be popular in a time of terror and war? I think so. Human beings have an enduring tendency to balance themselves repeatedly throughout history. So how can I advocate for love in these trying times? The simple method is to bring people together to talk about their love-lives. To my amazement, but not surprise, most everybody has a love story to talk about and a need to talk about it. Something wonderful happens when a group of adults sit together and talk about their experiences of love. As a psychoanalyst one of my primary interests is the nature of our love-life expectations and our psychological reactions when love arrives. It is precisely our expectations and reactions that require the most consciousness these days. How tragic it is to witness an individual repeating the same disappointments in love over and over again. Without awareness we are destined to always take familiar actions and make the same limited choices over and over again.

    When a small group of men and women are open to a frank and forth coming discussion of love, a natural interpersonal healing begins to take place. We can help each other attain the consciousness required to break free of the repetitions in our love-lives. We can increase one another’s interest in love, real love, not just fantasy love or what happens to love after commercialism has had its way with us. I am so happy we do not have to be fully and completely cured of all of our eccentricities or abnormalities in order to love and be loved. Who ever designed us in all our human frailties had the heart to permit love no matter how damaged. I am of the belief that loving is akin to healing and that a love relationship possesses natural healing qualities. To me this is so much so, that even a discussion of love between strangers is potentially healing. Simply put, the topic carries that much impact. Because new love and old love behave as magnets, so much of what has hurt us comes forth when love is the topic of discussion. Being conscious of this mixture helps a person tease apart what belongs to the present and what belongs to the past. This is precisely how a heart heals. Our greatest challenge is to keep up with time, and not allow ourselves to be stuck back where old experiences feel unresolved. Healthy love and loving requires a maximum of presence. Many of us continue to choose to work this out with a lover and get beyond the fear of being deeply involved.

    It is of great benefit to know that we can survive and recover from the bumps that will inevitably occur in love. For people who are trying to commit and feeling anxiety or fear, there is the possibility of understanding the danger more fully. For those who are stuck in a relationship that has expired, there is the possibility of realizing the need to leave as the only good for all involved. Then there are those who need simply to feel good about being alone. In aloneness there is the possibility to rediscover our unique individuality. For some, this discovery can only take place while single. Once achieved, this experience of consciousness bodes well in any future love relationship when a person has to stand up for what is believed and felt. Whatever the complication, sitting and talking together with others interested in love-life issues is the most efficient and effective method of exploring these concerns.

     My contribution to this effort is to offer a workshop that provides a safe and respectful place to re-examine our expectations of and reactions to love. The Love-Life Workshop, like a small family gathering, is an opportunity to experience the common bond that an interest in love creates. It is also a place to achieve the consciousness that will allow new choices to lead to new directions and new experiences of love.

Giving Love the Business

     What better time to talk about love? Just listen to the news. Love always takes a back seat in current affairs. To be more specific, I am interested in what role the media plays in teaching us about the ABCs of love and loving. Before we jump in, I would like to define a few terms. To me, the experience of love is a “fall,” or simply falling in love. It is a spontaneously chemical experience and certainly beyond human control and manipulation. Thank God! At least a few human experiences are still successfully resisting the advances of technology and the illusions of control they afford us. Loving, with an “ing,” on the other hand, is a learned experience and as such can be unlearned and something better relearned. Another Thank God! is in order. If this was not the case, what we all learned earlier in life would be imprinted irrevocably for the rest of our lives. I suggest we start looking at the need to learn loving as an essential adult developmental objective.

     It is a plain fact that the media as representatives of our beloved culture are major players in the educational industry. Through example, suggestion, conversion, whatever, the media teaches us how to think about ourselves, and how to relate to each other. Thinking about oneself is a pretty full and complete topic on its own. I will have to regrettably save that for another essay. Our primary focus here is on how and what the media teaches us about loving. Of course just to be complete, the other two major instructors in living are the schools we attend, and of course, the family of origin. Each time we open a magazine, turn on a station, or surf the net, we are exposing ourselves to a multitude of messages about how people should relate to each other.

     Now that we have established the context for my essay, I propose that our culture is currently doing a questionable job teaching us how to be loving. Love and loving have become a business. We learn quite a bit about what attracts us to each other. We also learn a lot about how people are different, and get a lot of prefabricated messages about what those differences should mean to us. In a phrase, we learn a lot about “immature loving.” By immature I mean ways of relating that originate from and are applicable to child and adolescent relations. Consider these examples. At the present time, sensationalism and superficiality, coupled with materialism, are in charge of what we are learning about loving. The lost message is that matured loving requires some skills in human intimacy and an enduring interest in consciousness. At present, there is an absence of maturity in what the media is teaching us about love and loving. We are taught how to think mostly of ourselves in a relationship, as if competing to fulfill one’s own “needs” is the primary purpose for making a love commitment in the first place. True giving is foreign to many people in love. Instead, the focus we are taught to have is to build up ourselves at the expense of others. So what? The emotional differences between the sexes are high-lighted, and more than that, we have capitalized on those differences. We teach people that men and women are from different worlds and therefore losing sight of what ground we share in common. The other day, a single woman in her 30s said to me, Dr. Jordan your ideas are unusual simply because you are counseling people to tolerate openness and vulnerability. She went on to say that most authorities on love and loving are counseling people to get and maintain control at all costs. I can only wonder how does love grow in a climate of too much interpersonal strategy and control, it doesn’t.

     Then there is the issue of honesty. I think the media is less ambivalent about that human value than most others. Honesty sells less than all the other things people can do with the truth. When a person lies about who he or she is to a prospective lover the foundation for their relationship is dishonesty, and they have stopped developing intimacy. Physicality and sexuality are the other great complications in love. Quite frankly, love is not sex and can never be reduced to sex without dire consequences for human beings. Love is about individuals and their commitment to be loving with each other. Some things never change, and that is one of them. However, before people are capable or ready to make a commitment of this kind there is still sex. A form of built-in entertainment at its best, and tragic irresponsibility at its worst. The natural desires, however, set us up to be influenced in one direction or another away from learning human intimacy. Our sensations are immediate and highly stimulating. This is why automobiles still sell better when a gorgeous woman happens to be present in the advertisement.

     It is quite a thing to free oneself from the suggestion, supported by our media, that loving should be determined by appearance. So many people have and will marry someone they like looking at but can’t be intimate with.

When we “learn” such a lesson, supported by our mediated Hollywood role models, critical thought and reflection ceases. Unfortunately they are replaced by cycles of disappointment and frustration. There are many single, separated, and divorced men and women to attest to this. Thankfully most of us are very spirited beings. It’s not long before certain individuals challenge the limitations they are learning and demand something better. That something better in this circumstance is a serious opportunity to “learn to be loving.” In most cases, it takes letting go of what we have already learned and in most cases tried. This is never easy because when we hang onto to something long enough we can refuse to let it go simply because it has become familiar. Beyond taking this initial step to conscious loving, the rest of the way is learning something more useful and effective about love.

     You might ask, what do I really need to know about love and loving? We all have to know that a love relationship grows and satisfies if it is founded on intimacy. A simpler way of saying this is that loving should be based on close friendship. Intimacy is what you get when two people deepen their friendship with each other. Loving is intimacy plus. The plus is that good old “chemistry” that can never be man-made. If you have a spark and a dedication to friendship with another individual, you have all the necessary ingredients for a satisfying love life. Nevertheless, intimate friendship has its own “technology” so to speak. There are certain “practices” involved in its cultivation and maintenance. Certain conditions are required for its growth. For example, when a relationship is equal, honest, and free, intimacy naturally grows. Mutual respect and compassion are also useful, while learning how to forgive and forget.  Understanding the relationship between our unique individuality and our capacities for loving another is useful as well. And loving one’s own way instead of automatically establishing the same kind of love life our parents had is a great thing to learn. There is also the matter of defensiveness. The ways we have all learned to protect ourselves against hurt only interfere with the experience of love. Lastly, I would like to mention expectations. I sometimes think we suffer more from expectations than anything else. Expectations are what we expect to find in our love-lives. What happens if we cannot find what we are looking for? Learning how to revise our expectations is necessary for a relaxed and satisfying adulthood. We should expect that most of our expectations going into our love-lives, at least at the beginning, are left-over from past experiences that were not exactly the way we wanted them to be. To continue expecting the same old things into adulthood does nothing but ensure misery. Keeping our expectations up to date helps settle our past experience, and free us up for new and more satisfying experiences in the present and future. Now who should take the responsibility of teaching this stuff?

     Apart from the family of origin and our educational system, neither of which have taken this responsibility really that seriously, there is the media. Personally, I am hoping the media will take a greater interest in this project. Perhaps becoming more conscious of the way love is portrayed to the public and more responsible for teaching people how to be intimate and loving. It would be an excellent way to redress the years of misrepresenting love as an experience for profit and exploitation. The absence of this responsibility among the major sources of learning have left a gap closed only temporarily by the mental health profession. In this case, you have to get sick first to learn something new about your emotional life. This is obviously unacceptable as a long-term solution. In response to this need, I have developed the Love-Life Workshop whose sole purpose is to introduce people to the idea that their love-lives are learned and can be consciously improved. At our workshop you can relax and contemplate your love-life in a supportive and professional atmosphere with other interested single people. Where ordinary people like you and me can practice the art of “conscious loving.” I wanted to create a safe and intimate place to review what you have learned about love that may or may not be helping you achieve your love-life goals.  

Single in Middle Age

    What are single people in their 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s really experiencing? As a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, I became aware, both in my own life as well as in the lives of my single patients, that finding and sustaining a love-life can be quite difficult, if not painful at times. At the present time, there are plenty of opinions about how a single person approaching or actually in his or her middle years should behave in the “singles world.” In recent years a number of articles and books have been published that suggest rules of conduct or offer labels and ready-made solutions to single people in the hopes that this will provide them with the information they need to find love for themselves. Again, plenty of opinions and suggestions, but no one seemed to be asking single individuals how they feel about themselves and the relevance of these feelings for their love-lives. When we started asking this more personal question, we found that our single middle-aged men and women needed to resolve feelings they had about themselves as middle-aged single people. Invariably, these feelings complicated their love-lives. Let me explain further.

     The unfortunate thing about all these suggestions and opinions about what is right or wrong for a single person, is that many of the people who follow them are stacking up one disappointment after another looking in the wrong place for the right answer. Many single individuals I talk to during the course of a week tell me about the money and time they spend trying to find the “right” man or woman. A lot of energy gets expended going to places where they might meet other available singles. Weekends, vacations, singles dances, dating services, online dating, etc., all geared toward answering the relationship need by introducing the single person to as many people as possible. Sort of like playing the odds by placing as many bets as possible. The idea is that the more people you meet, the greater the chances of finding someone to love. Compatibility exists somewhere in the numbers. Unfortunately, a long line of disappointed people exist for whom these methods have not worked and for whom no real help has been available.

      I know there are scores of single people who have not yet clearly identified the experience of who they are as unique individuals and suffer relationship failures as a result of this delay. Consider the idea that when you are settled inside about who you are as an individual, your relationships with others will naturally improve. No gimmicks or fancy rules are needed. You see, “working-on relationships” can become a defensive avoidance of the real issue, how you feel about yourself and how that affects your dating and love relationship experiences. A better relationship through personal growth is not some abstract clique, but the direct experience of what happens to people when they establish a better relationship with themselves. As an example, everyone knows someone who feels unhappy with himself. Usually such a person does not have a satisfying and fulfilling love-life.

     An argument can be made that if you get into a relationship first, this will take care of the self-esteem issue. Relationship first, then I will feel better about myself. This kind of “strategy” may result in the type of frantic dating behavior I sometimes observe among middle-aged singles, dating as if one’s life depended upon it. With the inevitable litany of psychological consequences if it does not work out to one’s satisfaction. Furthermore, this kind of unhealthy dependence upon being loved is often accompanied by attempts to control the one giving love so as to keep one’s self-esteem afloat. So let’s go back to the original issue. How a person feels about herself has everything to do with the quality of her love-life.

     Now we’ll tie this into our discussion about being single and middle-aged. My proposal is that many, perhaps most middle-aged single men and women, are ultimately dealing with the need to identify who they are as unique individuals and who they change into when in a love relationship. By this I mean, many middle-aged singles are still trying to settle how they experience themselves on the inside while not allowing those unsettled feelings to interfere or complicate their love relationships. Quite frankly, the most defensive way of doing this is to keep oneself alone and seemingly free of confusion. For some middle-aged singles, these unsettled feelings get concealed behind a very busy work or social calendar. The deeper problem, however, is being unprepared to handle the psychological issues that will most likely arise if the plunge into love is taken. So the individual remains “closed” to love, no matter how involved he seems with dating and social activities.

     I will elaborate further on this theme of being “closed” to love since this idea has come up so often in my work with middle-aged single people. I have used this word in the context of trying to understand how a person may be really “looking for love closed.” This means he or she is out there in the single’s world mixing and mingling but really not open to involvement. No problem if our single person has chosen to sew the old proverbial oats for a while. But there is a problem if the quest is to find someone to love. So what kind of difficulty does this pose for the single middle-aged person looking for love?

     When we look for love closed, we are protecting ourselves from being hurt again. Sounds simple enough, right? The rationale for this psychological armoring makes sense but its implications are disastrous. A wise old psychoanalyst once said to me, as I was lamenting over the risks involved in getting married, “How can you expect to be in love without getting hurt?” Of course my first response to this question was defensive and I tried explaining why I thought it was important to protect myself from hurt whenever possible. What I did not realize at the time was that the medicine I was applying was vastly more dangerous than the illness. By this I mean that self-protectiveness was now a bigger problem than the experience of being hurt by someone being loved. In a closed and protected state of mind, a person is not really “open” to being in love.

     The first step out of this snag is to re-new one’s faith in our natural capacity to heal ourselves if and when we get our hearts broken. Getting hurt does not have to mean the end, and there are ways to bring oneself through a recovery. A big part of the problem is the way in which we all inflate through imagination our fears and anxieties based on past experiences. The result is we anticipate more than reality has to offer and by so doing keep ourselves defensive. This difficulty plays out in more specific ways when people worry about “losing something” rather than “gaining someone” when they enter a love relationship. It is common to experience a troubled relationship as trying to take something precious away from us. Freedom, time, possessions, money, etc., all and more are subject to the feeling of being taken, reinforcing the thought that one needs to be protective and closed. All of this leads us to one of the biggest illusions going, that we can actually lose ourselves at the hands of another person. The reality is, revealed to anyone willing to look more closely, we are the only ones who can sacrifice ourselves and what we have for love.

     I like to refer to this illusion as a relationship expectation, one of a set of expectations that guide a person’s behavior in a relationship. Let me be more specific. The way in which I lose myself is to stick to my familiar expectations rather than see what is really happening.  If I expect something to happen the same old way, I do not allow for the novelty of a situation to affect me. If I expect that people I meet will treat me the same way as people I have known, I am under the influence of a self-fulfilling expectation. In my work with middle-aged singles I have witnessed all kinds of relationship expectations. They are as varied as there are individuals.

     Expectations of this kind restrict the individual from breaking-out of repetitive situations that reinforce protective ways of life. For middle-aged single persons this curse of familiar but unsatisfying relationship expectations can be a major barrier to starting a satisfying love-life. By the time many of us reach our middle years most of us have formed a few resistant relationship expectations that we may not even know we have. These expectations are often generated from disappointments in past relationships. When they guide our love-lives we do not have to do anything new or risk that we could be caught in a novel situation with someone we do not know and could relate to from scratch. By scratch I mean of course without those preconceived expectations that tell us immediately what to anticipate with or without the cooperation of reality.

     As we all know but rarely admit to ourselves, we all hang onto these expectations as if our lives depended upon them. Quite the contrary, our lives depend upon letting them go! Then the possibility of novelty and spontaneity can present itself. Otherwise, we have taken the passion and unpredictability out of our relationship experiences. Relating this to our search for love, what better state of mind is there than being open when we are looking for love? From what I have seen, no other state of mind permits the chemistry of love to unfold. Listening closely to single people has taught me that the chemistry of love is more common than most of us think. In the course of a life-time the average person bumps into a number of people who can ignite a spark. The problem is not finding the spark but how the spark finds you! When the heart is closed, sparks never make a fire and the individual remains in an endless search for love. A closed heart, protective, avoidant of hurt, and without faith in the capacity to heal, does not allow love but a long list of disappointments that confirm negative expectations.

     At this point in my work with middle-aged singles, or any other singles for that matter, I am sensitized to the presence of this “closed state of heart.” Looking to understand the individualized reasons for a person’s emotional closure is now a primary professional interest of mine. A first step toward change is to increase an individual’s awareness that he is in fact looking for love closed. This followed by a detailed inquiry into the individual’s relationship expectations helps to illuminate the particulars of that individual’s emotional closure. From there, the goal is to open up to one’s inner experience and begin tolerating and working with the felt vulnerability of it. Opening up to a trusted and reliable person or persons who can help define the reasons why emotional closure is retained is the way to work on opening oneself up to love again.  

     This growth process is further reinforced with an acceptance of being single and the various emotions that acceptance can trigger in a person. At times it is simply necessary to “clear the heart” to get one’s bearings after being in one disappointing relationship after another. This is commonly referred to as soul-searching, a time to find out what it is one truly wants in one’s love-life. From the standpoint of psychological growth, this is a very important time indeed. A time of reflection and reconsideration of whatever course of action one has been taking up to now. People often temporarily leave the singles scene to accomplish this reorientation.

     The problem comes when this need for emotional “singularity” is interpreted as a personal failure, a sign that he or she could not handle things in the fast and furious dating world. As a consequence, what commonly happens is that the single person, feeling this self-admonishment, will not permit living and learning through this transitional period in any comfortable manner. Instead, some single individuals accede to pressures to be in a relationship by either getting into a love-less union, compulsively dating, or simply loading on the self-criticism for not having love in their lives.

     Remember, how we feel about ourselves has everything to do with the nature of our love relationships. So if working on oneself does not take place when our insides are telling us it is time, the chances of going through the same old disappointment in our love relationships is a very strong possibility. So what interferes with this calling to experience the needed psychological growth as a single person? Again, the interferences are as varied as there are individuals. To try to generalize, I would say that being alone is one of the biggest culprits. Being alone, of course, is just the external description of one’s actual state of life at the moment relative to other people. It does not begin to tell us anything about what being alone means to a particular individual. Many people interpret being alone as some kind of emotional disaster. So disastrous in fact that the prospect of making this period of time a learning experience is lost.

     This is when we are most susceptible to what I like to call security relationships. By this I mean a relationship which has the primary purpose of soothing and defending against being alone. On occasion I encounter a single person in such a relationship who tells me he or she grew as a consequence of being in it. For example, if a person goes out with a married man or woman or someone on the rebound from another relationship. In neither case, is the married or rebounding individual ready to be open and receptive to love. The relationship, however, may permit the single person a chance to work something out of her system. As an instrument of growth, or simply a waste of time, either way the relationship is limited and always involves an attempt to cope with the feeling of being alone.

     Getting comfortable with oneself as a single individual has a lot to do with finding and sustaining a love relationship. This might still sound contradictory to you, so I will try one more time to clarify the truth in this statement with another example. Let us try to imagine the most constructive way of handling the feeling of being alone. The first thing to understand is why this experience can be so frightful to many of us. I think we are generally hesitant to encounter our true selves since that can be at odds with how we would like to represent ourselves to ourselves and others. Yet this reconciliation of who we truly are as individuals permits us to look for love “open.” We have nothing to really lose if rejection and disappointment come. So what does this have to do with finding and sustaining a satisfying love relationship? It simply has everything to do with it. This is precisely why being single is not just an arbitrary state of living that occurs between love relationships. Unfortunately when viewed in this defensive way its importance as a transitional phase in life and its potential for growth is lost to us.

     Currently in our society, we are largely preoccupied with our relationships to others, so much so that we often overlook that most sensitive of relationships, the one we have with ourselves. If we do not like or even love who we know ourselves to be deep down inside, this can create a lot of problems, one of which is a difficulty giving and receiving love. So much for the philosophy, what about practical solutions?

     More than ten years ago my wife Victoria and I developed support group services to address these psychological needs in the New York City singles community. At that time we put together groups of middle-aged single men and women for the purpose of exploring their love-lives together. Many of our group members went on to more satisfying love-lives and we learned a thing or two about dating, single life, and love relationships. That support group service has now evolved into a workshop we affectionately refer to as the Love-Life Workshop. Our workshop is a condensed and more intensive form of our earlier singles support service and retains much of the focus that the support groups had. We like to think that we have gotten better at what we do and can do it more efficiently in a shorter period of time. Our workshop objective is to introduce as many people as possible to their often unacknowledged need to talk about their dating and love relationships, and in the process make their love-lives conscious. The workshop itself is always a supportive and intimate experience for all who are sincere about their need to learn something new about their love-lives.

     Its 2010 and we are still at it.

Critique of the Media's Misrepresentation of Love

There are three main channels of instruction on life:  family and friends, formal educational institutions, and the media.  Let’s explore the impact of what the media communicates to us about love in our society.  Falling in love is a spontaneous chemical interaction and certainly beyond human control or manipulation. Loving, with an “ing,” on the other hand, is a learned experience and as such can be unlearned and something better relearned.

As an adult, learning to be loving should be an essential adult developmental objective. What role does our media play in teaching us the ABCs of love?  Fundamentally, the media represents our culture. Through example and suggestion, the media teaches us how to think about ourselves, and how to relate to each other. Each time we open a magazine, turn on a station, or surf the net, we are exposing ourselves to a multitude of messages about what we should expect from others and how we should relate to ourselves.  Now that we have established the broader context for this essay, I propose that our culture is currently doing a questionable job of teaching us how to be loving.

Love and loving have become a business. We learn quite a bit about what attracts us to each other. We also learn a lot about how people are different, and get a bunch of prefabricated messages about what those differences should mean to us.  We are exposed to and, as a result, learn a lot of “immature loving” through the media. By immature I mean ways of relating that originate from and are applicable to childhood and adolescent experience. Sensationalism, superficiality, and materialism are commonly substituted for love. The lost message is that matured loving requires some skills in human intimacy and an enduring interest in consciousness.

At present, there is an absence of maturity in what the media is teaching us about love and loving. We are taught how to think mostly of ourselves in a relationship, as if competing to fulfill one’s own needs is the primary purpose for making a love commitment in the first place. The other day, a single woman in her 30s said to me, “Dr. Jordan, your ideas are unusual simply because you are counseling people to tolerate vulnerability.” She went on to say that most authorities on love and loving are urging people to get and maintain control and the strategic advantage at all costs. I can only wonder, how does love grow in a climate of interpersonal control? Well, quite simply it doesn’t. True giving is foreign to many people in love. Instead, we are taught to build ourselves up at the expense of others. So what? So the emotional differences between the sexes are emphasized, and further than that, we capitalize on those differences. We teach people that men and women are from different worlds and therefore lose sight of what precious ground we share in common.

 

Then there is the issue of honesty. I think the media is less ambivalent about this human value than most others. Honesty sells less than all the other things people can do with the truth. When a person lies about who he or she is to a prospective lover the foundation for their relationship is dishonesty and they have stopped developing intimacy. Physicality and sexuality are the other great complications in love. Quite frankly, love is not sex and can never be reduced to sex without dire consequences for human beings. Love is about individuals and their commitment to be loving with each other. Nonetheless, as physical beings, sensations such as sexual attraction are immediate and highly stimulating. Some things will never change, and that is one of them. Hence the challenge, before a person is capable of, or is ready to, make a loving commitment there is sex, a form of built-in entertainment at best, and a tragic irresponsibility at worst. 

I believe that the natural desires are too often exploited to influence us in one direction or another away from learning human intimacy. It is quite a thing to free oneself from the suggestion, supported by our media, that physical attraction, such as sex appeal, plays the primary role in loving. So many people have and will marry someone they like looking at but can’t be intimate with.  When we “learn” such a distorted lesson, supported by our mediated Hollywood role models, critical thought and reflection ceases. Cycles of disappointment and frustration take over. Many single, separated, and divorced men and women can attest to this. Thankfully, we are very spirited beings. In our own unique ways, most individuals challenge the limitations.  After a breakup a person can discover something new about him or herself and something he or she does not want to see in a future mate. We should all be trying to learn something useful from our painful experiences, especially our painful experiences.

As adults we have a serious opportunity to learn something new about ourselves and the art of loving. The best way to do this is to let go of what we have already learned and tried, an act much easier said than done.  Beyond taking this initial step to conscious loving, the rest is learning something more useful and effective about love with people who can and will support this kind of change. In other words, practice has the potential to make us wiser and ultimately happier. For those who ask, what do I need to know about love and loving? First and foremost, know that a love grows and satisfies if it is founded on intimacy. Loving should be based on close friendship. Intimacy is what you get when two people deepen their friendship with each other. Loving is intimacy plus. The plus is that good old “chemistry” that can never be man-made.

If you have a spark and a dedication to friendship, you have all the necessary ingredients for an enduring and satisfying love-life. Nevertheless, developing an intimate friendship is a skill. There are certain “principles” involved in its cultivation and maintenance. Certain conditions are required for its growth. For example, when a relationship is equal, honest, and free, intimacy grows naturally. Mutual respect and compassion are also useful, especially while learning how to forgive and forget.  Understanding the relationship between our unique individuality and our capacity for loving another is important as well. Loving your own way instead of automatically establishing the same kind of love-life your parents had is a great thing to learn.

There is also the matter of defensiveness. The ways we have all learned to react against hurt only interfere with the experience of love. Lastly, there are those expectations. We suffer more from expectations than anything else. Expectations are what we expect to find in our love-lives. What happens if we cannot find what we are looking for? Learning how to revise our expectations is necessary for a relaxed and satisfying adulthood. We should anticipate that a lot of what we expect going into our love-lives, at least at the beginning, is baggage from our past experiences. To continue expecting the same old things into adulthood does nothing but ensure misery.

Keeping our expectations current helps settle our past experience and free us up for new and more satisfying experiences of love in the present and future. The countless misleading messages we are receiving, promoted by recent media campaigns, are growing increasingly complicated. People are desperately trying to understand what love is. The absence of a responsibility among the major channels of instruction in our society has left a gap closed only temporarily and on occasion by the mental health profession. You have to get sick first to learn something new, obviously unacceptable as a long-term solution. While becoming more conscious of the way love is portrayed to consumers and feeling more responsive to the role the media plays as teacher.

My wife Victoria and I founded the Love Life Workshops to begin a correction of the misrepresentation that love has undergone for profit and exploitation. In response to this critical need, I developed a series of workshops whose sole purpose is to introduce people to the idea that loving is learned and can be unlearned and relearned at a better and more satisfying level of life, love-life. At my workshops, people can contemplate their love-lives in a supportive and professional atmosphere with other interested and understanding peers. At a Love-Life Workshop we can learn the skills required for a more “conscious love-life.” We offer a safe place to learn the principles of love and loving that will help open people up to a healthy romantic involvement with another.

Dr. Thomas Jordan