Teaching Audiences How To Work On Their Love Lives
“There is nothing like a room full of people interested in love!” This is my opening line whenever I’m face to face with an audience of people interested in my Love Life Seminar. The prospect of teaching a group of people how we learn to love and how unhealthy learning about love relationships can be corrected is a joy beyond words. My Love Life Seminar starts off with a bit of a shocking realization that “most of us” are not in control of our love lives. What that simply means is a lot of people are unaware of what they’ve learned about love relationships over the course of their lives and how what they’ve learned is in control of what they experience in their love lives, healthy or unhealthy.
The proof that this is in fact true can be easily found in the current divorce statistics. Fifty percent for first marriages, 60% for second marriages, and a whopping 73% for third marriages, and if you add the percentage of repetitive unmarried breakups, and who knows how many that is, I think that makes “most of us.” The only way to understand these relentless percentages is to assume that people are making the same love life mistakes over and over again in their love lives.
So, what’s in control of our love lives? The answer is simply, what we unconsciously learn about love relationships over the course of our lives. A follow-up question would be: How does what we unconsciously learn about love relationships control our love lives? The answer to that question is unconscious learning about love can recreate the experiences that taught us. If what we’ve learned is healthy, all well and good. If what we’ve learned is unhealthy, there will no doubt be trouble in paradise. We will probably recreate the unhealthy relationship experiences we’ve been exposed to in our lives without even knowing it. By the way, all of this learning and the relationship experiences that created the learning are stored in what I like to call the Psychological Love Life. Changing your Psychological Love Life, and we all have one, makes permenant improvements in your love life experiences.
Once an audience understands the importance of what we unconsciously learn about love relationships, the fact that they have a Psychological Love Life, and how it can recreate unhealthy relationship experiences, they are ready to learn how unhealthy learning about love relationships can be “unlearned” and something healthier learned. Motivated by a strong curiosity to stop repetitive hurtful unhealthy behaviors, beliefs, and feelings from controlling their love lives, audience members at this point are focused on the “fix.” Dividing up my Unlearning Method into three simple steps helps keep the solution easy to understand and applicable to most people’s love lives.
Step 1 is always making our Psychological Love Lives conscious. Consciousness permits us to differentiate healthy from unhealthy learning about love relationships. Step 2 involves the challenge. Strengthening our ability, through practice, to disrupt this unconscious learning with consciousness and replace it with corrections that improve the outcome of our love lives. This is Step 3, correcting what we’ve learned that was unhealthy by replacing it with its opposite. For example, if you’ve learned how to be dishonest in your love life from earlier dishonest relationship experiences, challenging ourselves when dishonesty is about to occur, disrupts the old habitual learning, and replaces it with the new, unfamiliar practice of honesty in a love relationship. Knowing what “opposites” matter to you and practicing them over time is tailor made to improve your particular love life experiences.
In the course of my love life research into the ways in which unhealthy learning about love relationships can be changed, I discovered that the “opposite” healthy relationship experience that heal a person’s psychological love life can be practiced first in a person’s imagination. This would involve imagining yourself engaging in the opposite experience that corrects your particular love life difficulties. Repetitive imagining of corrective love life experiences eventually creates healthier learning first in one’s mind which then translates into healthier beliefs, behaviors, and feelings in love over time. For example, if I tend to abandon love relationships when they get too emotionally intimate because I’ve unconsciously learned to abandon love relationships in my family of origin, practicing an imagined commitment to a love relationship is an effective way of studying and familiarizing myself with the opposite unfamiliar relationship experience that would eventually heal my particular love life (from the psychological inside out) and makes applying the change to my love life easier.
The Q & A that comes after a Love Life Seminar is an opportunity to interact with receptive (and defensive) audience members in ways that reinforce and clarify the dramatic effectiveness of this psychological way of working on our love lives.
Comments welcome…
Dr. Thomas Jordan, clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst, psychological disability consultant, speaker, and author of the award-winning book, Learn to Love: Guide to Healing Your Disappointing Love Life. Love Life Seminars and telehealth Love Life Consultations available upon request. Contact: 212-875-0154 or drtomjordan@lovelifelearningcenter.com for inquiries. Visit my speaker page at lovelifelearningcenter.com/speaker
