Is It Love or Love Addiction? Part II

11. Healthy Love encourages us to be ourselves, to be honest from the beginning with who we are, including our faults.
Addictive Love encourages secrets. We want to look good and put on an attractive mask.
12. Healthy Love flows out.
Addictive Love caves in.
13. Healthy Love creates a deeper sense of ourselves the longer we are together.
Addictive Love creates a loss of self the longer we are together.
14. Healthy Love gets easier as time goes on.
Addictive Love requires more effort as time goes on.
15. Healthy Love is like rowing across a gentle lake.
Addictive Love is like being swept away down a raging river.
16. Healthy Love grows stronger as fear decreases.
Addictive Love expands as fear increases.
17. Healthy Love is satisfied with what we have.
Addictive Love is always looking for “more, bigger, better.”
18. Healthy Love encourages interests to expand in the world.
Addictive Love encourages outside interests to contract.
19. Healthy Love is based on the belief that we want to be together.
Addictive Love is based on the belief that we have to be together.
20. Healthy Love teaches that we can only make ourselves happy.
Addictive Love expects the other person to make us happy and demands that we make our partner happy.
21. Healthy Love creates life.
Addictive Love creates melodramas.
http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/cc-is-it-love-or-love-addiction/

We are addicted to our thoughts.
We cannot change anything
if we cannot change our thinking.
Santosh Kalwar

Crazymakers

Crazymakers are devilishly charming. Do you know anyone who has been stopped for speeding a dozen times but never got a ticket? There’s a good chance this charmer is a crazymaker. At the surface they are almost always incredibly interesting and appealing. Crazymakers believe they are somehow different from others, often above others. They expect special treatment and make demands in absolute terms putting themselves ahead of others. Telling another person what that person “will” and “will not do” is a common trait of a crazymaker. Crazymakers have little respect for boundaries and have some notion that rules don’t apply to them. In their self perceived specialness they are mostly blind to other’s needs. I could be deeply involved in a work project I brought home and have a complete derailing begin with a question like “I know you said you had to focus on your work thing, but I can I ask you one little question?” Seems innocent enough, but rarely turned out that way. Crazymakers are the type of people with a thousand ideas, often including some good ones. They are also the ones who never get much past starting on them, if they even get that far. Something will always happen they give can place blame on that prevented them from moving forward. They finish almost nothing they begin. And they begin only a few things they intend. Crazymakers hate order and thrive on chaos. Given a short amount of time one can make any given moment a hurricane of disorder. Sometimes this is done to bring attention to them self. At other times it is to take attention off others. Crazymakers are expert blamers. Nothing is ever their fault. Even the things they do will get re assigned elsewhere as they explain why their actions have little to do with them and all to do with someone else. In their mind you made them to it!

Taking crazy things seriously
is a serious waste of time.
Haruki Murakami

Love Challenges

Many of us struggle with underlying feelings of being unlovable. We have trouble feeling our own value and believing anyone could really care for us. We all have a “critical inner voice,” which acts like a cruel coach inside our heads that tells us we are worthless or undeserving of happiness. This coach is shaped from painful childhood experiences and critical attitudes we were exposed to early in life as well as feelings our parents had about themselves. While these attitudes can be hurtful, over time, they have become engrained in us. As adults, we may fail to see them as an enemy, instead accepting their destructive point of view as our own. These critical thoughts or “inner voices” are often harmful and unpleasant, but they’re also comfortable in their familiarity. When another person sees us differently from our voices, loving and appreciating us, we may actually start to feel uncomfortable and defensive, as it challenges these long-held points of identification. With real joy comes real pain. Any time we fully experience true joy or feel the preciousness of life on an emotional level, we can expect to feel a great amount of sadness. Many of us shy away from the things that would make us happiest, because they also make us feel pain. The opposite is also true. We cannot selectively numb ourselves to sadness without numbing ourselves to joy. When it comes to falling in love, we may be hesitant to go “all in,” for fear of the sadness it would stir up in us. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/compassion-matters/201401/7-reasons-most-people-are-afraid-love Read more from Dr. Lisa Firestone at http://www.psychalive.org/author/dr-lisa-firestone/

Your greatest task
isn’t to find love,
but to discover
and destroy
all the barriers
within yourself
that you have
built against it.
Unknown

Take Your Feelings As They are

Feelings are an important part of you. In order to live fully and effectively, you need many sources of information (e.g., your senses, your thoughts, your perceptions) to guide you, motivate you, and help you make sense of things. Your emotions provide one such source. Often, there is a strong relationship between the events in your life and your feelings–for example, to feel sadness in response to loss, or to feel happiness in response to something desirable. Feelings may also be related to past events or even to expectations of the future. For example, sorrow about a recent loss may evoke sadness from past losses. These feelings can be an important source of information as well. Rather than ignore or exaggerate your feelings, it is helpful to be able to take your feelings as they are, accept them, think about them, and learn from them. When you are feeling something consider asking yourself the following kinds of questions:
What is this feeling?
What is this feeling telling me about this situation?
Why has this feeling come up right now?
http://www.counselingcenter.illinois.edu/self-help-brochures/self-awarenessself-care/experiencing-and-expressing-emotions/

Raise your words, not voice.
It is rain that grows
flowers not thunder.
Rumi

The Drama

Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they choose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them. If the first woman they passionately loved, the mother, was not true to her bond of love, then how can they trust that their partner will be true to love. Often in their adult relationships these men act out again and again to test their partner’s love. While the rejected adolescent boy imagines that he can no longer receive his mother’s love because he is not worthy, as a grown man he may act out in ways that are unworthy and yet demand of the woman in his life that she offer him unconditional love. This testing does not heal the wound of the past, it merely reenacts it, for ultimately the woman will become weary of being tested and end the relationship, thus reenacting the abandonment. This drama confirms for many men that they cannot put their trust in love. They decide that it is better to put their faith in being powerful, in being dominant. Bell Hooks

Among men, sex sometimes
results in intimacy;
among women, intimacy
sometimes results in sex.
Barbara Cartland

Men and Women

Male attachment needs are somewhat different from women’s. Men generally do not need verbal communication about feelings or “talks” about the relationship. Nor do they need direct, verbal validation of their feelings or needs. Men have a natural, biological proclivity toward interaction with the environment, more so than the verbally based interactions that women desire. They do need to know they are appreciated, respected and loved. And men are often quite satisfied by having these needs met with direct, physically nurturing behaviors by women. Many adult men feel a basic sense of security and even love simply by the very presence of the significant women in their lives. Men also experience sexual connection as a form of nurturance, acceptance, love, and even emotional security. Sex for men is a primary attachment need – compared to women, who need verbal communication and validation. Men also tend to have fewer friends than women, and when they do, they tend to focus on activities rather than verbal interactions (watching sports, hunting and fishing are examples). Recent findings from modern neuroscience and interpersonal neurobiology show there are unique aspects of the male brain (also endocrine and other systems) – quite different from female brains. This includes analytical brain structures (not emotional) designed to solve problems. Men have an inborn, biologically based competitive instinct. They also have an area of the brain designed for sexual pursuit that is more than 2 times larger than females (Brizendine, 2010). The brain circuits for fear, aggression and defense are far more prominent in men than in women. In comparison, women have more prominent mirror neuron systems for emotional empathy. There are no male-specific diagnoses in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The most common diagnoses for men are addictions, personality disorders such as narcissism, avoidant, and anti-social personality disorders, intermittent explosive disorder, conduct disorder, and ADHD. Depression, however, is very common in men. Men also experience complicating medical issues such as stress-related heart and digestive disorders, and they may also present with a variety of sexual disorders. Other medical concerns may result from drug and alcohol addiction. From article by Richard J. Loebl, LCSW, PA http://www.goodtherapy.org/therapy-for-men.html

I would suggest that just as women
who make it in the world of business
need male business mentors,
perhaps men who make it
in the world of emotions
will need female
emotional mentors.
Warren Farrell

More Intimacy

Stop missing out on enjoying time with your partner, by worrying about something that hasn’t happened, with people that aren’t part of your relationship. …stop focusing on that which you DON’T want to happen, and spend more time creating what you DO want. The universe doesn’t understand that what you are thinking about all the time is something undesirable. It takes any thought you create as a request and conspires to manifest those requests. So, if you constantly focus on the negative thoughts around your relationship, chances are you will keep inadvertently creating negative situations between you and your partner. Changing your thoughts, and letting go of the fear, makes room for more thoughts about what you really want to create in your relationship. It’s a much better way to use your energy and if you focus on how to give more love, how to strengthen your bond and create more intimacy, you’ll find you easily manifest the good loving you really desire. All of this is not to say that you should be ignorant of any intuition or signs of infidelity. If you have a feeling things have gone astray, or there are obvious signs that your partner’s focus may have shifted, then you should trust your own intuition and be willing to address your concerns. Having an honest, adult, and somewhat vulnerable conversation with your partner about what you’re worried about can be the difference between realizing you had the wrong end of stick and getting on with loving each other, or letting your mind run away with the worst case scenario and having that fear ruin your relationship. Open, mature conversation about boundaries and expectations is the only way to really approach the fear of being cheated on and a much more promising way to build a lifetime of love. From an article by Rachael Lay http://www.rachaellay.com/why-worrying-about-cheating-is-pointless/

For a marriage relationship to flourish,
there must be intimacy.
It takes an enormous amount of courage
to say to your spouse, “This is me.
I’m not proud of it — in fact,
I’m a little embarrassed by it —
but this is who I am.”
Bill Hybels

Why Men Do What They Do…

It seems that we are re-discovering the undeniable fact that men and women are actually quite different. And we are beginning to develop a coherent and compassionate understanding of healthy, normal male emotion, behavior, and relationship dynamics. Man’s earliest ancestors lived in a harsh and hostile environment that placed a high premium on physical strength. The strong survived, and the weak lived exceedingly brief lives… Because he was the fighter and because he was the provider, it was inevitable that the male came to be responsible for woman’s welfare. This is the historical reality. Gender differentiation evolved out of actual physical, perhaps physiological, necessity. This biological foundation, along with recent findings from modern brain science, helps to explain why men do what they do, feel what they feel, and how they struggle with confusing, even conflicting contemporary role demands and expectations. Men have primarily been defined by their work roles (along with conquests and success in business, sports, wars, and other ventures), not by their role relationships within families or other social groupings. Historically, men were dominant over women, driven primarily by physiological factors, and the major forces of historical change were conducted by powerful male rulers and military leaders, a male-dominated church, and other powerful men. In the modern era, male stereotypes developed as a result of cultural ideals created in literature, movies, and television (cowboy, romantic hero, soldier, 1950’s family man, and even the angry, bigoted archetypes like Archie Bunker). Currently we are influenced by post-feminist stereotypes such as the bumbling, ineffective and inarticulate man, or just the insensitive “cave man” who “cannot communicate”. The role of men in the workforce, relationships and society has changed dramatically in recent history, as a result of revolutionary economic and social changes. Until very recently, there was no need or expectation for men to communicate in an intimate manner. There was no historical necessity for men to talk about their feelings, to be emotionally sensitive to others, or to “validate” women or children. From article by Richard J. Loebl, LCSW, PA http://www.goodtherapy.org/therapy-for-men.html

Feelings are not
supposed to be logical.
Dangerous is the man
who has rationalized
his emotions.
David Borenstein

Gender Differences in Emotional Health

The stereotypes of reserved men and emotional women are widespread and do affect the way young boys and girls are raised. Some researchers argue that we may be ingraining gender differences that do not naturally exist by accepting and passing on these stereotypes to our children. Other researchers believe these differences have developed due to the evolutionary roles placed on men and women to survive and thrive. While researchers debate these gender differences, they agree that the differences ultimately can have a negative effect on members of both sexes. Some research has found that the differences may be rooted in cultural stereotypes. For example, women are perceived as being more emotional and behave that way because it’s believed that’s what women do, while men express emotion only when the situation warrants it. Parents may have a hand in promoting these gender differences, expressing disapproval with boys who cry or express other “weak” emotions while shrugging off similar behavior in girls. Other studies posit an evolutionary cause for these gender differences in emotion. Men serving as hunter-gatherers needed to take more risks and be more dominating, while women who stayed home and cared for young needed to be more nurturing and cautious. These roles have resisted change as human society has progressed, and indeed, progress may cause these roles to become even more pronounced. Gender differences in emotional processing and response have direct consequences on the physical and emotional health of men and women. Overly emotional women tend to be at greater risk for depression, anxiety, and other mood disorders, while men who repress their feelings tend to be at greater risk for physical ailments such as high blood pressure, and also tend to indulge in more risky behavior and vices such as smoking or drinking. Others believe that parents can help dull or negate these stereotypes by refusing to reinforce them. Whether you’re trying to bring up children without gender stereotypes or looking after your own emotional health, be aware of these gender differences and how they affect both men’s and women’s experiences of the world. From an article by Dennis Thompson Jr. http://www.everydayhealth.com/emotional-health/gender-differences-in-emotional-health.aspx

Women need to feel loved
and men need to feel needed.
Rita Mae Brown

The Truth

The Five Levels of Truth-Telling:
First, you tell the truth to yourself about yourself.
Then you tell the truth to yourself about another.
At the third level, you tell the truth about yourself to another.
Then you tell your truth about another to that other.
And finally, you tell the truth to everyone about everything.
Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God II

If you do not tell the Truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people. Virginia Woolfe

The Light is more than some abstract, unknowable energy force. Light is Truth. If Light is truth, then darkness must be lies. Each and every lie we tell to ourselves and others casts the shadow of separation upon us. Every time even the most minor deception is revealed and the truth is made known we are re-united with the Light. So, Let there be Light. Those are the words by which you can create your own magnificent world. Renee Bledsoe

There is no such thing as
an inconsequential lie.
Gary King