Unhealthy Ways of Coping With Hurt In Love

We come into this world needing love. Contrary to some popular opinion, that need never leaves, it simply goes underground. The need for love is a fundamental characteristic of a human being’s life from start to finish. The problem is, there may be times in a person’s life when one’s love life is hurtful. Coping with the hurt that love life difficulties can create is also a fundamental characteristic of the human psyche. Coping in a healthy way leaves a person open to fixing those love life difficulties at some point in the future. Coping in unhealthy ways means that the ways you are coping interfere with being open to the love that is needed.

Let’s focus on the ways people cope with love life hurt that interfere with giving and getting love. I refer to these unhealthy ways of coping as love life defenses. I am calling them defenses because they defend against the possibility of being hurt in the same way repetitively. It makes sense. Who wants to be hurt repeatedly in love in the same way? The psychological heart remembers and often tries to protect itself in and out of love relationships. Let’s talk about the most common ways people defend themselves against being hurt in love.

At the top of the list is keeping an emotional distance from the person you love in a love relationship. As you might suspect, there are many different ways of doing this. You can limit the amount intimacy that occurs in a love relationship. You could be physically unavailable from time to time. Control the amount of love you give or even control the amount of love you allow yourself to get. The end result is that you are keeping an unacknowledged distance in love just in case you get hurt or have to leave.

Another big love life defense is what I like to call purposeful conflict. Conflict in a love relationship for the purpose of giving yourself a reason to stay defensive and self-protective. Conflict that limits the amount of vulnerability you will experience in your love relationship. Think of it this way, conflict that allows you to defensively replace vulnerability with anger and guardedness. Simply put, some people fight in a love relationship to protect themselves from getting hurt.

Then there’s trying to change the person you are in love with. How common is that? Implied is the belief that one person can change another. I’ve been in the psychological healing arts for more than 35 years and I’m still looking for a confirmed case of one person changing another in a love relationship. The point is, people try doing this as a love life defense to protect themselves from getting hurt. Let’s take a closer look. If I form a love relationship with someone I am not really compatible with or someone whose personality is really not my type, I have a choice. I could leave and find someone who is closer to what I am looking for. Or I could try to make the person into what I want them to be. For the sake of further clarify, there are a few tools at my disposal for trying to accomplish this ill fated task: force, manipulation, rescue, fix the person, and the old repetitive emotional campaign of simply expecting someone to be different and criticizing them when they are not. In my experience the misery you’ll encounter trying to make change happen is much worse than the sadness of having to leave to find someone whose faults you can live with.

Finally, the last and most tragic in this short list of love life defenses is the avoidance of love altogether. As a defensive objective, avoidance is the strongest way of putting a stop to love life hurt. When the number of disappointments in love reaches a certain point for an individual, the person enters what I call resignation. The belief that it is better to give up on love rather than risk more hurt. The implication here is that the resigned individual is predicting with absolute certainty that any future interest in love will produce the same past disappointments in love. I continue to meet many good people who have given up on love who have so much love to give. If only they understood that repeating disappointments in a love life is a treatable problem. When a person resigned to a life without love finds out what they’ve unconsciously learned about love relationships that is generating their repeating disappointments they now have a good chance of unlearning and correcting what they’ve learned for a much better chance at love.

Comments? Tell me about your love life experience.

Dr. Thomas Jordan, clinical psychologist, author of Learn to Love: Guide to Healing Your Disappointing Love Life. Need help fixing your disappointing love life? Confidential Love Life Consultations available by phone, inquire at drtomjordan@lovelifelearningcenter.com or 212-875-0154.