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Author Topic: Mirror-Work What love is ?

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Mirror-Work What love is ?
OP: August 12, 2014, 05:42:36 AM
1.  Well being
Healthy Real Love makes us want for the well being of loved ones.
Toxic False love wants primarily for our own well being, wants and desires to be all important, and can sacrifice the supposed loved one for self.

2.  Self Love
Healthy Real Love makes us balance our healthy self love with our love of others.
Toxic False love wants others to sacrifice and diminish their self love for our benefit.

3.  Strength
Healthy Real Love causes us to want our loved ones to be strong & powerful in their own lives.
Toxic False love makes us act to diminish our loved ones’ strength so we can dominate and control them and, thereby, feel more false safety.

4.  Growth
Healthy Real Love promotes the growth, development, education, and advancement of those we love.
Toxic False love works to block & hamper growth out of fear of being surpassed, outdone, and abandoned.

5.  Aloneness
Healthy Real Love allows & promotes alone time, understanding it’s healthful benefits.
Toxic False love fears being alone and allowing a supposed loved one to be alone or off to himself or herself.

6.  Sex
Healthy Real Love mixes both self love & other love into shared eroticism making it democratic, varied, open to exploration of new & different intimacy, & always guided by caring.
Toxic False love is absent of sufficient love expression &, thus, often is sexually demanding, obsessive, or dominated by sameness &/or fearfulness.

7.  Power
Healthy Real Love pushes us to share power equally, work to synthesize & compromise, operate with free speech, independent action, alternating leadership, negotiation, & interpersonal democracy.
Toxic False love pushes us toward either dictatorial dominance, or an abdication of selfhood through fearful surrender.

8.  Difference
Healthy Real Love promotes & delights in the loved one’s differences, ways of being unique, dissimilar viewpoints, divergent approaches, varying ways by valuing the enrichments they bring to relationships.
Toxic False love works to suppress & eliminate differences and bring about the false safety of sameness.

9.  Dependency
Healthy Real Love helps work for the loved one’s self dependency, one’s own self dependency while also promoting agreed upon, chosen, mutually supportive interdependency.
Toxic False love wants the supposed loved one to be dependent on the false lover, or wants the relationship to be mutually co-dependent.

10.  Jealousy
Healthy Real Love is not jealous, not even a little bit, because love does not spawn jealousy, possessiveness, or irrational suspiciousness.
Toxic False love is jealous because it is grounded in inadequate self love & the fearful insecurity that we can not hold the love of another by our own personal worthiness.

11.  Friends & Family
Healthy Real Love causes us to attempt to love, like, or at least be appropriately & be consistently accepting of those the loved one loves & likes (including pets, ex-spouses,  dysfunctional relatives, etc.) but not to the point of supporting destructiveness.
Toxic False love causes us to work toward excluding, limiting contact with, & markedly avoiding the loved one’s interaction with their ‘others’.

12.  Trust
Healthy Real Love makes us take the ‘gamble’ of trust in our love and the loved one’s love &, therefore, causes us to willfully become ‘vulnerable’ to them, their words, and actions.  This is done to affirm the loved one and make the relationship function in workable ways.
Toxic False love makes us mistrust, spy, be suspicious, hinder the freedom, doubt, & distrust the supposed loved one which eventually destroys the love relationship.

13.  Self Disclosure
Healthy Real Love helps us accept & become self disclosing of (past, present, & future) thoughts, feelings, actions, victories & defeats, strengths & flaws, & all else.
Toxic False love works to hide our less pleasant aspects, be secretive, present false images, & fears exposure.

14.  Priorities
Healthy Real Love puts love first of all values.
Toxic False love puts many things above the importance of love.

15.  Healing
Healthy Real Love causes us to work for the health of our loved ones.
Toxic False love often works toward illness, or avoids the promotion of healthful living.

16.  Affirmation
Healthy Real Love is affirming in word and action.  Compliments of being & doing, praise, brags, showing affirmative support, cheering for the loved one, and more demonstrations are common.  It also makes us look for, appreciate & affirm the qualities of our loved ones.
Toxic False love praises & compliments for personal advantage or gain.  It often also dis-affirms with criticism, put downs, devaluing & debasement.

17.  Tolerance
Healthy Real Love causes us to tolerate the less pleasant aspects of those who are loved unless those aspects are clearly destructive.
Toxic False love tolerates little demanding its own way, or tolerates destructively to weaken the supposed loved one’s strength.

18.  Reception
Healthy Real Love makes us highly receptive to our loved one’s likes, needs, wants, ways, and especially expressions of love.
Toxic False love makes us neglectful, avoidant, critical, & undervaluing of our loved one’s efforts to love us.

19.  Gifting
Healthy Real Love helps us frequently and openly enjoy gifting our loved ones with what they want both with object and experience gifts.
Toxic False love helps us give gifts we want, gifts designed to manipulate, impress, result in return gifting from the loved one, or to give few or no gifts at all, and to gift with poor and negative attitudes.

 20.  Joy
Healthy Real Love helps us take joy in those we love, take joy in their joy, work to enjoy what they enjoy, share what we enjoy, & create mutual joy.
Toxic False love works to disregard or discount the joy of the supposed loved ones, and try to manipulate them to only enjoy what we enjoy.
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Re: Healthy Real Love -or- Toxic False Love
#1: August 12, 2014, 07:05:01 AM

Very interesting that you should post this now Albatross . I am reading a book called Authentic Love which is along the same lines . It has made me realize even more that a lot of H's ways of withdrawing and holding back were done out of fear because he had never learned to trust love .

Thanks

Callan
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Re: Healthy Real Love -or- Toxic False Love
#2: August 12, 2014, 08:32:41 AM
Yes Albatross IMHO people who love and care for you support you emotionally

Not just you supporting them - sharing vulnerabilities

SHARING

 It's not information gathering session so you can figure out what someone else's weaknesses are.

THEN try to destroy them due to them. YOU NURTURE AND SUPPORT and try to help REMOVE FEAR not INSTILL IT.

Not criticizing every single thing they do so someone has some kind of perfect mirror opposite gender to identify with.

DROP CONTROL and set each other free to be the people we can be.

 Even with this kind of freedom the core person does NOT change if they were always self centered and selfish.

Once one consistently thinks only of them selves in life It is very difficult if not impossible for them to change because they see absolutely nothing wrong with how they think.

A Scenario comes to mind. I was making egg salad sandwiches for church one morning. The ex (then the H) comes in the kitchen and comments

"Well you've got enough sandwiches there to feed the village" >:(

And I replied

" And when it's someone else's turn to make sandwiches they feed me" :)

JEALOUSY is a deal breaker in a relationship.
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There are two ways of spreading light:
Be the candle; or the mirror that reflects it

Don't ask why someone is still hurting you; ask why you keep letting them.What you allow continues.

At some point you have to get sick of going through the same sh!t.

Women are NOT rehabilitation centers for badly raised men. It is not your job to fix ,parent, raise or change him.
You want a partner not a project.

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Re: Healthy Real Love -or- Toxic False Love
#3: August 12, 2014, 08:34:15 AM
What could he have said ??
"Hey look at all these great sandwiches you made..maybe I'll go to church today!"
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There are two ways of spreading light:
Be the candle; or the mirror that reflects it

Don't ask why someone is still hurting you; ask why you keep letting them.What you allow continues.

At some point you have to get sick of going through the same sh!t.

Women are NOT rehabilitation centers for badly raised men. It is not your job to fix ,parent, raise or change him.
You want a partner not a project.

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  • Lord, give me patience, but please hurry!
Re: Healthy Real Love -or- Toxic False Love
#4: August 12, 2014, 08:41:21 AM
I was analyzed both of us before she hit the crisis and both of us when she hit the crisis and I found very interesting results from that. At beginning of our relationship there was no any maladaptive points from this list neither she does so far I remember. How time pass she start to getting them a lot of them and I get some of them, but nothing severe. That means unhealthiness of one partner leads to unhealthiness of other one. It is contagious.
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Re: Healthy Real Love -or- Toxic False Love
#5: August 12, 2014, 09:04:06 AM
Good read Albatross.

For me i have come to this simple conclusion............

True love is actually compassion, it’s that part of ourself that reaches out to help a stray dog or an injured bird without any expectation to be loved in return.  It’s that part of us that quietly cries for another in their time of suffering. 

Love is not a feeling but rather an act, a choice to extend patience and kindness. It does not seek its own and does not keep record.  I think maybe that’s why humans have such a deep connection to babies and animals because they remind us of the kind of love we are capable of expressing.  It reminds us of the best part of our-self.

take care
moment
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Re: Healthy Real Love -or- Toxic False Love
#6: August 12, 2014, 09:27:49 AM
I'll probably get 2 x 4rd for this but IMHO women may have a better understanding of what unconditional love is having given birth.

I NOT saying no one else including women with no children or same gender couples have no idea. Or possibly even men..

IMHO  I do feel men a have a really hard time understanding the concept. Conditions follow in regards to them showing love or appreciation. I feel they put a lot more emphasis on sex than is necessary.

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There are two ways of spreading light:
Be the candle; or the mirror that reflects it

Don't ask why someone is still hurting you; ask why you keep letting them.What you allow continues.

At some point you have to get sick of going through the same sh!t.

Women are NOT rehabilitation centers for badly raised men. It is not your job to fix ,parent, raise or change him.
You want a partner not a project.

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  • Posts: 1425
  • Gender: Male
  • Lord, give me patience, but please hurry!
Re: Healthy Real Love -or- Toxic False Love
#7: August 12, 2014, 09:46:09 AM
I'll probably get 2 x 4rd for this but IMHO women may have a better understanding of what unconditional love is having given birth.

I NOT saying no one else including women with no children or same gender couples have no idea. Or possibly even men..

IMHO  I do feel men a have a really hard time understanding the concept. Conditions follow in regards to them showing love or appreciation. I feel they put a lot more emphasis on sex than is necessary.

Sexes doe not matter at all. Yes, we have different parenting in majority cases man and woman. We parent daughter and son equally. Yes, man and woman have different brain, but not significantly different. So, I believe You are wrong. Some people can love some can't. It is not black and white, means a lot in between those exclusions. And love is very complex.
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Re: Healthy Real Love -or- Toxic False Love
#8: August 12, 2014, 09:56:47 AM
Thank you for posting that.  I couldn't believe how many of those toxic false love's my h has exhibited throughout our marriage.  Of, course I share a few of them, but he takes a good part of that list.  And he didn't exhibit those with just me, but our children, too. 

Even though my h is probably never coming back, I hope he learns to love himself and someday be able to have healthy love with someone. 

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Re: Healthy Real Love -or- Toxic False Love
#9: August 12, 2014, 11:18:58 AM
That means unhealthiness of one partner leads to unhealthiness of other one. It is contagious.

I can see how this could be. I would struggle at times to not taken my H's unhealthiness :o

I couldn't believe how many of those toxic false love's my h has exhibited throughout our marriage.  Of, course I share a few of them, but he takes a good part of that list.

My H definitely has the Toxic False Love down ??? It has been there all along and that it is the main reason that I do not see a future with my H - he has been this way long before BD just not as in your face with it. MLC has brought it the surface.

Albatross- Glad to see you posting again ;)
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We all do damage. Character is determined by how we repair it.


BD - December 2012
OW1 confirmed - December 2012 on-and-off for 34 months and counting (still refers to her as just a 'friend')
Wants to live like roommates - November 2013
I moved out - April 2015
H is still checking the anchor

 

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