I am sure you have heard this title or formula either from the media, either from your girlfriends, complaining that they are the ones who sacrifice in a relationship.
But is it truly possible to love too much?
Firstly, we would have to agree on a definition of love so we can see who are the heroes who goes behind that. And that is pretty much an impossible mission, since thousands of years of evolution didn't improve much in the way we live and understand love, much less on having a manual of love and relationships.
But since we are human, we will compromise and agree that love is a deep emotion that fulfills your soul, gives you meaning and makes interaction with people worthy of deeper levels.
The problems arises when, for many women, love is indeed the triumph of imagination over ration.
And I will not be misogynistic (not me) and I will expand this pathological side of love to men as well. Many women and men will get actually attached on the feeling of love, on the intense chemical revolution that is sparked within the brain by the projections awakened by this feeling and will engage in unhealthy forms of "love".
More often than not love is misinterpreted as attachment, illusion spiced with it's intimate friends - possessiveness and jealousy all along the ride.
Women who love too much are women who will keep investing in a relationship although all the signs tells them hat they should move on. Women who love too much are those who give too many second chances, women that will hold an irrational hope that things will change or get better, even after years of progressive decline of the relationship.
Women who love too much are women who will keep giving and giving, without getting not nearly half in return, are women who misunderstand forgiveness with naivete.
Probably it is more specific to women, since the social stereotype, religion moral and family education holds women as the bearers of the forgiveness, understanding and the keeper of the family nest.
And since this society it is still a misogynistic one, with higher payed jobs hold by men, with discrimination against women in the hiring process, with much less women in high key position and with a sex industry exploiting mainly the women, then this biased society will oblige women to take decisions having in mind many other reasons than that of "free love".
Women who love too much tend to get more attached emotionally and financially, they will center their live around The Man, fulfilling their live by fulfilling the man's life.
Women who love too much are women who give up on searching a personal meaning for their life, whose main job is to build a pedestal for the relationship and their man, who will find meaning in nesting an emotional attachment - efforts which will be rewarded most of the time with indifference and neglect.
And that is happening because one of the secrets of a healthy relationship is independence. And when your partner will be burdened by your expectations because you give so much, most of the time they will try to escape and take distance- exact the opposite effect you expected.
If on the other hand you show independence, on all levels - emotional, sexual, financial, intellectual, then your will become a wanted person - every one is secretly in search for this kind of partner. It's just the complicated web of our minds doesn't allow us to be aware or voice freely our desires.
When one has found the happiness and fulfillment by it's own life choices, then the relationship won't be an expression of a need or of the desire of escaping loneliness - but an expression of the desire to share the beauty of life, to enjoy together the understandings and individual fulfillment.
But most of the time people will engage in relationships from all the wrong reasons. I guess it is a kind of weird pleasure in experiencing that possessiveness feeling of belonging to someone, a kind of unreal security which we would like to be real, that nothing bad is ever going to happened and that our existence will be validated by being seen and acknowledged by the loved one forever.
This lie is sold to us since the very step of a marriage: the vows, the promises that we make to each other eyes in eyes with a spark of an unrealistic happiness - because life around us is proving us wrong at every step. And yet we keep continuing to lie to ourselves and make irrational emotional investments - it is a kind of shared madness.
Another reality of life is that we have to come to terms, at a point, with the feeling of insecurity which is an implacable principle of life, but yet we try to deny it or escape it by any means.
Learning to tolerate a certain amount of uncertainty and even enjoy the mystery of life, being confident in your own powers to attract always fulfilling experiences, will give you the power and freedom to not be possessive and needy in a relationship.
Will give you that aura of self confidence and nobleness that is ever so seductive because everyone is unconsciously seeking for this: finding balance within themselves and achieving a level of happiness less dependent on people or exterior factors. And if they see that in you, they will follow you like a magnet - they want to be close to someone who they would like to be like.
Women who love too much can learn to love themselves firstly more than loving others and find fascination and fulfillment in various dimensions of life - life is so generous in it's offer of ways of doing something great. Maybe you won't get the noble Prize but at your own award ceremony you can get an Oscar for a life lived after an original screenplay - yours!
And then you might switch places and be the one who is loved too much - with real, conscious love!
Those are the moments when an objective and qualified opinion can bring insight and objectify situations that otherwise are complicated and may take a long time to get resolution. My promise is that my experience, not only with clients but both as a player of this game, entitles me to offer you the needed help in troubled times.
Seek for an experienced therapist when troubled times knock at your door: you may be so caught in the tension and lost in trying to understand, that a rational and objective opinion might be just the help you need. Relationships can be beautiful, it's just that we all need to become artisans with a Phd in the art and science of relationships!
Learn more about Sophie Rinaldi or get a session of online counseling through life chat or email advice at www.therapy-counseling.net
Author's Bio
Sohie Rinaldi is a life coach and licensed counselor.
Sophie Rinaldi holds a master degree in psychology, certified trainings in cognitive therapy, psychodrama, transpersonal therapy, NLP trainings, positive therapy, ericksonian hypnosis, non-violent communication, art therapy, yoga therapy.
A few years ago Leeza Gibbons devoted the entire hour of her daytime talk show to an investigation of the causes and cures for prejudice. I had been on the show before talking about how beliefs cause most of our thoughts, feelings, and behavior, so she asked me to come back to discuss the relationship between beliefs and racial prejudice.
Before the show we went into the audience looking for a volunteer who would acknowledge having prejudice and who also would like to get rid of it if possible. We found Chad, a young man in his mid-20s, who said that he was “prejudice against any ethnic group, the way they act and the things that they do.” After getting rid the primary belief that caused that feeling before the show started, he announced during the show to a nationwide audience that the feeling he had when he started, he didn’t have any more.
Just as we in 21st Century America look back at cultural practices of years gone by with a combination of repulsion and amazement, future generations probably will look back at the prejudice that runs rampant in the world today with similar reactions.
Just as it is almost impossible for us to understand the Roman thinking that feeding people to lions is a spectator sport, in a few years people will try to understand why millions of otherwise sane individuals would consider some people “less than” others because of the color of their skin, their ethnicity, or their sexual preference.
Rather than wait for future generations to try to figure out what made the widespread prejudice possible in the early days of the 21st century, let me offer one possible explanation while we are living in the middle of it.
Because our beliefs are the primary determinant of what we do and feel, and even what we perceive, all prejudice can be traced to beliefs.
People who are convinced that African-Americans, or Muslims, or gays are not as good as them (usually white heterosexual Americans) are expressing their beliefs about those people. (Actually, many people in those groups have similar feelings about white heterosexual Americans.)
A belief is a statement about reality that we experience as the truth. It is a fact about reality for the person who holds the belief. So when we hold a belief about something, we are convinced that we know the truth about that something.
But, in fact, no belief describes the truth about reality. Without exception, all beliefs are nothing more than arbitrary interpretations of actual events in reality. Physical objects and events certainly occur in the world, but the meaning we give the events exists only in our minds, not in the world.
How prejudicial beliefs are formed … and can be eliminated
Let me tell you about the conversation I had with Chad before the Leeza show went on the air.
When we started the conversation he had told me that he felt that members of ethnic minorities, especially African-Americans, couldn’t be trusted. So I asked him: “What do you believe about these people that would have you not trust them?”
He answered: “Blacks are dangerous.” (He used the word “Blacks”; I used the word “African-American.” Moreover, there probably were additional beliefs, but this was one the most relevant.)
I replied: “It’s clear that anyone with your belief would feel the way you do. But you didn’t have that belief when you were a year or so old. What happened that led you to that conclusion?”
“When I was 10 my dad took us to the gun cabinet and said we had his permission to kill a Black if he stepped on our property. Areas where Blacks lived were very dangerous—a lot of crime and killing. The news was full of it. Most of our friends had the same negative attitudes about Blacks. I heard this constantly at home and at school. I also remember driving my car once and saw a Black man get into an accident that was clearly his fault.”
I said to Chad: “Your belief about African-Americans—that they are dangerous—is one explanation for what you saw and heard as a child. What else could the same events mean?”
Here’s what he answered:
1. What my father and others said might have been true of some Blacks, but not all of them.
2. Some Blacks are … (almost anything) just like some whites are … (almost anything).
3. The behavior I heard attributed to Blacks is true of some people from every race, not just Blacks.
4. Because what people say is a function of their beliefs, and do not necessarily reflect the truth, the fact that some parents, families, or friends have negative thoughts about Blacks doesn’t mean that those thoughts are true, only that they believe it. Had they had different childhoods with people telling them different things, they wouldn’t have the beliefs they do and they would be saying just the opposite.
It was immediately clear to Chad that his beliefs about African-Americans were only one arbitrary interpretation of what he had heard about African-Americans as a child, and not the truth.
I then asked him: “Didn’t it seem as if you could see African-Americans are dangerous when your father and friends talked about the crime and the killings in African-American neighborhoods?”
“I did see it,” he replied. “Anyone would have seen it.”
“Okay, if you could see it, tell me what does ‘African-Americans are dangerous’ look like,” I asked.
“Well, it looks people getting robbed or killed in Black neighborhoods.”
“Yes,” I said, “you could see that, or hear people tell you about that. But that fact could have a lot of different meanings. You just gave me four of them. I want to know what ‘African-Americans are dangerous’ looks like.”
After a moment’s reflection he replied, “Now I understand what you mean. I can’t see “Blacks are dangerous’. I now realize I only saw certain people saying things to me. My beliefs about Blacks are interpretations that exist only in my mind. I made them up. They have nothing to do with reality.”
It was after this short interaction with me that Chad announced on national TV that his prejudice was gone.
The prejudice that exists today against Muslims, African-Americans, gays, or any other group is based on beliefs that are nothing more than arbitrary meanings we gave to a series of events (9/11, what we read in the newspaper, what we were told by parents, what lots of other people already believe, etc.). The beliefs are not facts. They are not the truth.
There is a well-known psychological term that describes people with prejudices, people who have mistakenly confused a thought that exists only in their mind with the truth about reality: they are delusional.
About the author:
Morty Lefkoe is president and founder of The Lefkoe Institute. He is the creator of a series of psychological processes (The Lefkoe Method) that result in profound personal and organizational change, quickly and permanently. He created a revolutionary way to deliver his method online that you can sample free by clicking Natural Confidence .
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This post is specially dedicated to Cat-in-Sydney, Brad and all my blog readers who are cat lovers and Hello Kitty fans. Have a nice day...
Please note that to understand this joke, you must realize that there is a "Camel" brand cigarette....
Jane and Arlene are outside their nursing home, having a drink and a smoke, when it starts to rain.
Jane pulls out a condom, cuts off the end, puts it over her cigarette, and continues smoking.
Arlene: What in the hell is that?
Jane: A condom. This way my cigarette doesn't get wet.
Arlene: Where did you get it?
Jane: You can get them at any pharmacy.
The next day, Arlene hobbles herself into the local pharmacy and announces to the pharmacist that she wants a box of condoms.
The pharmacist, embarrassed, looks at her kind of strangely (she is after all, over 80 years of age), but very delicately asks what brand of condom she prefers.
'Doesn't matter Sonny, as long as it fits on a Camel.'
The pharmacist fainted.
Have a nice day! :-)
When the human body first experiences stress adrenaline takes over and causes a chain-reaction within the nervous system. The heart begins to beat faster, the sizes of the body’s blood vessels are changed, and the body actually prepares itself for a frightening or emotional event. Even though the humans that are in existence today aren’t in constant physical danger from wild predators as our pre-historic ancestors were, we still experience this familiar fight-or-flight reaction due to a great deal of different types of stressors.
There are two main types of stress experienced by humans, either chronic or that which is emergency-induced. The chronic type of stress can be particularly harmful to the brain because of hormones and chemicals referred to as glucocorticoids or GC’s. When the body experiences a rush of adrenaline which is accompanied by stress, a portion of our brain called the adrenal cortex begins to release these GC’s which are useful for dealing with the emergency-type of stressors.
Chemicals such as cortisol, hydrocortisone, and corticosterone act together to increase the production of glucose, constrict blood vessels and essentially help our brains deal with or regulate stress. The GC’s tell our brain either to calm down or to boost its levels of awareness and reaction in order to deal with the issue at hand. These glucocorticoids also affect memory functioning, especially in the hippocampus region of the brain.
While the GC’s may help us remember frightening or stressful events so that we are better able to deal with them in the future, they can also be harmful to the delicate neurons of the brain. Prolonged periods of stress or depression may actually lead to the damage or even the death of certain neurons, especially those within the memory center of the brain.
It’s important to remember that different people react differently to stressors; one person may be able to move on from a trying event while another may suffer from serious psychological effects from a similar event or situation. Learning if your stress is chronic or acute is critical for counteracting the negative affects it has on the brain. Those people who are prone to anger, anxiety, depression, and who suffer from low self-esteem are far more likely to experience damage to the brain than their calmer, more relaxed peers.
Most every one of us experiences bouts of depression or periods of “the blues” at some point in our lives, but a person who is constantly angry or depressed may require medical or professional assistance. While it may be possible to recover from depression through various means such as drug therapy or counseling, the long-term affects on the brain are still largely unknown. Doctors have recently reported that as many as fifty percent of patients who experienced periods of major depression also possessed high levels of cortisol, which as we know can have negative effects on the brain and it’s cells.
A recent study conducted by The Washington University School of Medicine located in St. Louis, Missouri has shown conclusive evidence of damage to the brain’s neurons in people suffering from depression. Even those people who had been depressed years prior to the testing still showed signs of brain damage, as much as 12-15% cell atrophy in their hippocampus, resulting in the loss of an infinite number of memory cells.
Aerobic exercise is an excellent way to reduce stress and its negative effects on the brain. By engaging in some sort of physical activity the body is able to relax, relieve levels of tension and stress, and burn off nervous energy all at the same time. Endorphins, which are the “feel good” chemicals produced within the brain, are dramatically increased when we exercise which in turn makes both the body and the mind feel better. Not surprisingly, self-esteem can also even be lifted with regular exercise as well as an increased overall body image.
In his book “Saving Your Brain” Dr. Jeff Victoroff theorizes that the cultural evolution and fast-pace of today’s society has essentially overwhelmed the capabilities of the brain. However, by simply relaxing, slowing ourselves down and learning how to better deal with the common stressors of every day life we can literally save ourselves from brain damage.
written by Leon Edward
Author's Bio
Leon Edward helps people to reduce harmful stress and improve IQ, focus, memory, concentration, creativity, speed reading, public speaking, time management .Download his IQ Mind Brain Memory Self-Help library at his website http://www.IQMindBrainLibrary.com
Leon Edward helps people improve in Goal Setting, Success, Leadership, Motivation, Self-Improvement, Happiness, Memory Improvement, Stress Management and more through his articles, blogs, reports and self-help success roladex-on-line. Visit his Success-Leadership Library, Articles and blog at http://www.AwesomeSuccess.org
