Prepping Your Love-Life For Change

There are a few practical steps you can take to start prepping your love-life for change. I’m talking about a psychological preparation for change that doesn’t involve years of therapy or a long analysis of your personal history.

I’m talking about a simple inquiry directed at what you believe about your yourself and your love-life. This is the kind of thing you can do by yourself unless you start feeling overwhelmed and need someone like a good therapist to help you do it.

The first step is to study your love-life problem and draw out of your mind what you believe and know about it. For example, if you’re having a problem finding a person to love, think about what you believe that causes and/or supports this problem.

Suppose you believe that no one will ever find you attractive for some reason. The details of such a belief will pop up in your mind if you think about your love-life problem long enough. This kind of self-study will get your mind participating with your emotions.

You’ll have a better chance at making a change if your mind and your heart are working together. It’s often helpful to write down your thoughts and feelings and get yourself accustomed to making an open inquiry into your own beliefs. Don’t expect that you’ll have important insights on command.

Just get your mind working on the problem. Ask yourself questions, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have answers at first. Self-directed questions will help you flesh out the beliefs you’ll need to think about.

The next step involves challenging what you believe about your love-life problem that feels limited or wrong to you for some reason. Most people have an intuition about this kind of thing. If you stare at something long enough you’ll start to see the cracks in it, same principle here.

Challenge means you see the cracks or limitations in your beliefs about your problem and you start questioning why you believe. Going back to my example, you’ll start to challenge your belief that no one will find you attractive.

If you think about this long enough you’ll start to see why this is a gross oversimplification that comes from feeling hurt and lonely at the moment. You’ll start questioning beliefs you have about your problem that don’t feel constructive or true. This exercise will introduce a little ‘therapeutic conflict’ into your mind between the part of you that is attached to what you’ve been believing and the part of you doing the challenging. This temporary conflict will loosen things up enough to make a little room for something new and different to come in.

The next step is risking some kind of correction or new belief.  Imagine believing something that would be an improvement on the beliefs you currently hold regarding your love-life problem. Contemplate this new belief.

Again back to our example, suppose you chose to believe that it’s more important that you yourself recognize your attractiveness, regardless of what anyone else thinks. That it doesn’t feel right to give someone else the power to judge your attractiveness. That you are a unique individual and as such possess a native attractiveness simply because you are one of a kind. Imagine keeping this new belief in mind over a period of time. The more you think about it and consider its validity the better able you’ll be to hang onto it as a belief.

The final step is practice, practice, practice, and more practice of these new beliefs about yourself and/or your love- life. Even if it feels superficial or fake to you at first. Find every opportunity to apply these new and improved beliefs to yourself and your love-life.

If you imagine something better long enough it starts to grow on you because you’re bound to eventually see and feel its advantages. Remember the principle is, what you believe about yourself and your love-life has a lot to do with with what you’ll end up experiencing in your love-life.

Comments? Welcome. Dr. Tom  Jordan