What We Don't Know About Our Love-Lives
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By the phrase love-life I am referring to a broad spectrum of interpersonal activities from dating or looking for a lover, the act of making a commitment, the actions required to sustain a commitment over time, the experience of leaving an unhealthy relationship, to the experience of living alone. With this broader definition in mind, the Love-Life Workshops Program was created www.lovelifeworkshops.com as an effort to address the fact that there are too many people living unconscious love-lives founded upon repeated love-life disappointments. Under conditions of internet anonymity people get a chance to review their love-life experiences and make more conscious choices regarding their own particular love-life issues.
If the interpersonal influences on our early lives were largely positive the extent of our difficulties in love would be minimized accordingly. For those of us who are less fortunate the people responsible for teaching us about love did not always live the most satisfying love-lives themselves. Love-life issues are usually difficult to work with openly because of the inevitable defensiveness, embarrassment, and sometimes shame a disappointed person may experience. Most people emerge from their family of origin expecting to know how to love and resisting efforts to reveal shortcomings and areas of misunderstanding requiring additional or new love-life information. This is precisely why many of us will repeat the same love-life mistakes without reviewing and consciously challenging our disappointing love-life experiences and the impressions they have left upon us.
Broadly speaking an unconscious adult love-life is characterized by disappointment, repetition, unresolved childhood and adolescent needs, unrealistic expectations, impairments in self-esteem, and limiting protective defenses. This is a love-life that will probably offer limited satisfactions and little fulfillment. To progress to a more conscious love-life requires a review of one’s love-life psychology while remaining receptive to new learning about the adulthood experience of love and loving. A conscious love-life is the cure for the pains of an unconscious love-life founded upon multiple disappointments in love. Love-Life Psychology is defined as the internal psychological processes and patterns that make up an individual’s love-life from the ‘inside-out.’ A person’s love-life psychology can help or hinder his/her love-life experience.
A conscious love-life is essentially more intimate, realistic, and receptive. It is the psychological context within which to experience oneself as a lover who is intrinsically lovable. A conscious love-life is an emotional experience where feelings move between the more tender and receptive emotions of hurt, sadness, mild anxiety, and joy. In a disappointed unconscious love-life the predominant emotions are frustration, anger, and resignation. There is a preoccupation with getting something from a sought after or available lover. The probability of continued disappointment is high. Repeated disappointment in love is the clearest indication of a problem in the area of a person’s love-life psychology.
Our love-life psychologies usually contain a mixture of parent and child, and adult to adult bonding motivations, as well as a measure of our own unique capacity to give love. Parent and child bonding motivations previously existed in and are generated from earlier parent and child relationships. Adult to adult bonding motivations are derived from an adult capacity to experience intimacy and love in a maturing love relationship. It is an explicit assumption of our workshop program that a healthy love relationship in adulthood is largely oriented toward more conscious adult to adult bonding practices and motivations. The immature needs underlying parent and child bonding motivations in adulthood can be gradually relinquished in a conscious grieving process that addresses past love-life losses, while more effective adult to adult bonding practices are learned in healthy interactive and instructive contexts like our workshops.
Our developing capacity to give love begins with the formation of healthy narcissism in childhood. A healthy person gradually develops his or her inherent capacity to love the self and its creations. The emergence of this capacity is manifested in the various forms of healthy self-love and self-care that are possible in life. Our capacity to love also involves a facility with interpersonal intimacy. Interpersonal intimacy is defined as relational experience where reciprocal forms of give and take are practiced. The presence and influence of psychological representations of past love-life experience is an important component of this relational intimacy. Furthermore the projective experience of bringing one’s own unique psychological capacities to love out into the interpersonal world is the foundation for unilateral loving as the ultimate expression of our capacity to give. True love is the purest form of loving in the sense that it is given to another person unilaterally without narcissistic interest or demands for reciprocity. A healthy love relationship integrates reciprocal or give and take experiences of interpersonal intimacy with unilateral expressions of love.
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love-life disappointments
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Repeated disappointments in the context of an unconscious love-life are the life occurrences which generate the psychological difficulties that complicate present and future love-life experiences. In many instances the effects of love-life disappointments are cumulative. Unrealistic love-life expectations and the unresolved parent and child bonding needs they often represent are focused fundamentally on what a person can get from a love relationship not what he or she has to give to one. Ultimately there is bound to be at least frustration if not anger when what is desired or needed is not forthcoming.
The most common aftereffects of multiple love-life disappointments are irrational dependencies, the formation of unrealistic expectations of love, low self-esteem, and psychological defenses to protect against the possibility of further hurt and frustration. Unconscious love-life disappointments can usually be identified in a person’s experience of lost love-life opportunities and/or failed love relationships. More specifically, love-life experiences where a person is not given what he or she expects to get, realistic or not. Love-life disappointments can begin at any point in life and continue into adulthood psychologically complicating all present and future searches and/or commitments to a healthy love relationship.
There are many different types of disappointment in love. Most involve the absence of love from the person who had been ‘appointed’ to love us. Absence can occur due to a realistic unavailability. For example, if someone is at a different location or there is a lack of motivation to be present for some personal reason. Another type of disappointment occurs when the designated giver is defensively narcissistic. In this instance, interpersonal difficulties result in a defensive self-absorption and inability to connect interpersonally with people who are loved. Another form of disappointment in love can occur when a lover betrays trust. This usually involves some form of dishonesty either by commission (intentional dishonesty) or omission (dishonesty by the exclusion of information). There is also disappointment as a consequence of limitations in a lover’s capacity to love. A limitation of this kind can occur as a result of an inherently limited capacity to love or as a consequence of the absence of chemistry with the intended recipient of the love.
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