eBook Excerpt “Relearning Honesty in Love”

The following excerpt is from my new eBook entitled: HEALTHY LOVE RELATIONSHIP: LEARN HOW.

Excerpt from Chapter 14  “Relearning To be Honest In Love”

Imagine, Cupid’s arrow is poised and ready to deliver the emergent feeling of love. But the little guy can’t quite find his target. This is precisely what happens when honesty is absent from a love relationship.

Honesty locates the heart. It locates the person you love. It’s impossible to love a dishonest person. Who would you love, anyway—the person being represented to you, or the real person hidden underneath the lie? This is the point. Dishonest lovers don’t want you to love the person who is hidden. They feel the need to hide, and want you to love the false person they are representing to you. And for you, it’s like being in love with an emotional phantom. Believe it or not, this is pretty common. To have a chance of loving a dishonest person, you first have to find a way to meet the real person underneath. If you’re dealing with a practiced deceiver, this is no easy task.

You were born into this world an honest and open being. For a healthy love relationship, we all can relearn some of this native honesty. As an infant, you were innocent and naïve, and you told the truth of your experience in the feelings you expressed to others, the gestures on your face, and whatever sounds or words you could muster. We’re all made to be honest and truthful. Honesty takes no effort. It takes a lot of energy and effort, however, to lie and maintain lies. The world corrupts us, teaching us to misrepresent our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Funny thing is, it is fundamentally healing to return to a state of honesty and truth. In my line of work, people get healthier when they risk the kind of honesty and truth-telling they were built to experience.

The beautiful thing about honesty is that it is a friendship value; something nurturing and stabilizing for a committed love relationship. Along with equality, freedom, and trust, honesty mixed with romance builds intimacy and makes for an enduring and healthy relationship. How about those lucky souls who get a chance to marry their best friends? This is the simplest prescription for a healthy love relationship I can think of. If you are lucky enough to fall in love with someone with whom you can cultivate friendship, you’ve got the makings for a deep and lasting love relationship.

Now what reasons could someone possibly have for practicing dishonesty in his or her love relationships? The common ones that come to mind are fear of rejection, manipulation or control, semiconscious hostility toward love, or fear of intimacy and closeness. The dishonest person practices the art of lying to avoid acknowledging one or more of these underlying reasons. There are two ways of lying. The first is by omission. A lie by omission simply means you are lying by leaving vital information out of what you are telling someone. What you leave out is essentially what worries you. Omitting information is an effort to manipulate the perception and understanding of the person you are talking to.

The second form of lying is by commission. A lie by commission occurs when you consciously distort the information you provide. In a love relationship, it’s a bold-faced lie to misrepresent facts without the slightest hint otherwise. People usually think a commissioned lie is the most egregious, though the subtlety of an omission can make it equally destructive. In either case, when information is distorted, it is usually shaped to support whatever agenda the liar intends. In love the most common agenda for the commission liar is the portrayal of love when it is absent. Similarly, the most common agenda for the lover who omits is to avoid admitting that love is gone………Dr. Tom Jordan

My eBook is available here >>>> Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Apple’s iBookstore.