Dr. Jordan's Blog

Vulnerability in Your Love Relationship

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

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

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

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

Get to Know Your Love-Life Psychology

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

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

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

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

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

Preparing For Love Between Relationships

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

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

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

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

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

Problem: Controlling Lover

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