We thrive when we express positive emotions for others and
we flourish when we are on the receiving end of warm regard. The capacity to love and be loved is one of
the 24 VIA character strengths that could bring us gratification and authentic
happiness (Seligman, 2002). Love
as a positive emotion and our ability to form relationships are central to the
concept of flourishing when viewed from the perspective of PERMA. And that
means feeling love as a positive emotion in relation to our self as well as
others.
So how can we make
sure we get all the benefits that lots of loving provides?
I’m going to look at three ways that we can love and be
loved, loving ourselves from the position of self-compassion , being in a
loving relationship with significant others and love as a micro moment we can experience
daily with anyone, a universal experience that is a win-win situation.
When I refer to self-love I am not talking about
self-esteem. When we are encouraged to view self-love as seeing ourselves as
better than others, as comparing who we are and what we have, we are setting
ourselves up to fail, to feel anything but self-love. But when we see it as
self-compassion we are accepting all of who we are, warts and all.
Dr.Kristin Neff researches self-compassion, she advises that
instead of heartlessly judging and criticizing ourselves we treat ourselves as
we would a good friend, with kindness and acceptance. Neff divides
self-compassion into three elements, self-kindness, common humanity and
mindfulness.
With self-kindness we
are warm and thoughtful toward ourselves when we hurt, are unsuccessful, or
feel insufficient, rather wallowing in self-criticism; we recognize that being flawed
and inadequate, is unavoidable, so we are more likely to be gentle with ourselves
when challenged with life instead of feeling annoyed when we don’t get it
right. We can’t always be or get precisely
what we want and denying this certainty, fighting against the reality,
increases stress, frustration and self-criticism, accepting the inevitable with
consideration and thoughtfulness makes us feel better. We have greater
emotional stability, we can be in control.
All humans suffer, displeasure at not getting our own way is
often compounded by an illogical but widespread sense of separation; no one
else has to put up with this! However by the very definition of being “human”
we are all vulnerable and imperfect. Therefore, self-compassion needs us to be
aware that distress is part of the shared experience of being alive; common
humanity highlights that this is something we all go through rather than
something that happens just because I am “me”. When we view life from this position we can
identify that our thoughts, feelings and actions are effected by “external” influences
such as our history, culture, genes and the environment, as well as the actions and beliefs
of others. Thich Nhat Hahn talks of a reciprocal cause and effect process in
which we are all imbedded; when we recognise this ‘interbeing’ we can be less
judgmental about our own imperfections. When we acknowledge our necessary
interdependence we don’t take ‘life’ so personally.
Mindfulness encourages us to take a sensible attitude to all
of our emotions in order that we neither repress nor inflate our feelings. We
cannot disregard our discomfort and feel empathy for the hurt simultaneously, mindfulness
necessitates that we don’t “over-identify” with thoughts and feelings, when we
create a space we are not driven to rash action, we are we are in
non-judgmental state of observation.
Details
of all self-compasion exercises can be found at:
http://self-compassion.org/category/exercises/#exercises
When we are able to accept ourselves with kindness,
compassion and empathy we are more likely to be accepting of others and that is
a healthy position from which to form long-lasting relationships based on love.
And that that could come in handy as according to Harvard Psychiatrist Dr.George Vaillant we shouldn’t underestimate the power of love, because it's the
key to happiness, he proposes two pillars of happiness: "One is love. The
other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away... Happiness
is love. Full stop." He came to this conclusion based on evidence
from the Grant Study, one of the longest-running longitudinal studies of human
development. The project, which began in 1938, has followed 268 Harvard
undergraduate men for 79 years, measuring an astonishing range of
psychological, anthropological, and physical traits—from personality type to IQ
to drinking habits to family relationships to “hanging length of his
scrotum”—in an effort to determine what factors contribute most strongly to
human flourishing.
Vaillant has said that the study’s most important
finding is that the only thing that matters in life is relationships. A man
could have a successful career, money and good physical health, but without
supportive, loving relationships, he wouldn’t be happy (“Happiness is only the
cart; love is the horse”).
“The conclusion of the study, not in a medical but in a
psychological sense, is that connection is the whole shooting match,” says
Vaillant “The more areas in your life you can make connection, the better.”
So the study found
strong relationships to be far and away the strongest predictor of life
satisfaction and as life goes on, connections become even more important. The Grant Study provides strong support for the growing body of research that has
linked social ties with longevity, lower stress levels and improved overall
well-being.
Knowing strong supportive meaningful relationships matter
are one thing keeping them going is quite another. Despite high rates of
divorce, infidelity and marital dissatisfaction, a 2012
study published in the journal Social Psychological and
Personality Science 40 percent of couples who had been married for a decade
reported they were “very intensely in love”, As did couples who were married 30 years or
more with 40 percent of women and 35 percent of men saying they were “very
intensely in love”.
In the Guardian this weekend there was a report on a couple
who have been married 78 years. Morrie and Betty Markoff, 103 and 100, say that
there’s no particular secret to their very long marriage, other than tolerance,
respect and luck. But why has Morrie never told Betty that he loves her? Why
not the word “love”? Morrie states that
“to me, love is possessive; it’s controlling and demanding. The word that I
would rather use instead is ‘caring’. You care about people. ‘Care’, to me, has
a much deeper meaning. Love is an esoteric word, but one that people also use
to mean all sorts of off-hand things. ‘I love playing tennis,’ and such. I hug
Betty constantly, I kiss her constantly, I care very much about her.”
I wonder how their relationship would have matched up to research
from the Gottman institute which shows that to make a relationship last, we need to
be better friends, find a way to to manage conflict, and be creative to support each other’s dreams for
the future. theDr. John Gottman has nine
rules which he says support healthy relationships and are based upon
empirical data from studies of more than 3,000 couples. This research shows
what actually works to help couples achieve a long-term healthy relationship.
This is what we need to do:
·
Build
Love Maps:
How well do you know your partner’s inner emotional world, there
history, fears, anxieties, thrills, and expectations? Well get out some
coloured pens and a big sheet of paper and map them out. Together. For fun. And share.
·
Share
Fondness and Admiration:
Contempt is the
death-knell of relationships, to strengthen fondness and admiration, express
appreciation and respect.
·
Turn
Towards:
The small moments of everyday life are actually the building
blocks of relationship. Be aware of the moments when someone wants your
attention and respond to (turn towards)
them..
·
The
Positive Perspective:
Look for solutions.
·
Manage
Conflict:
Manage conflict
rather than “resolve” conflict, because relationship conflict is natural and
has functional, positive aspects; there is a critical difference in handling continuous
problems and solvable problems.
·
Make Life
Dreams Come True:
Create an atmosphere that encourages each person to talk
honestly about his or her hopes, values, convictions and aspirations.
·
Create
Shared Meaning:
Understand important visions, narratives, myths, and
metaphors about your relationship.
·
Trust:
This is the state that occurs when a person knows that his
or her partner acts and thinks to maximize that person’s best interests and
benefits, not just the partner’s own interests and benefits. In other words,
this means, “my partner has my back and is there for me.”
·
Commitment:
This means believing (and acting on the belief) that your
relationship with this person is completely your lifelong journey, for better
or for worse (meaning that if it gets worse you will both work to improve it).
It implies cherishing your partner’s positive qualities and nurturing gratitude
by comparing the partner favourably with real or imagined others, rather than
trashing the partner by magnifying negative qualities, and nurturing resentment
by comparing unfavourably with real or imagined others.
We seem to have greater expectations from our long-term
relationships than our parents generations had;
we want our relationships to help foster self-actualization and personal
fulfilment whereas as in the past
marriage was undertaken to provide for safety and security, and maybe sex on a
Saturday if played your cards right. (OK so I know this is a cliché but that’s
what my parents’ marriage was like). I wonder if this strain on an exclusive
relationship to provide the environment for flourishing is actually that good
for us? I prefer to give and get my love
from a wide range of sources, which is where Barbara Frederickson’s take on love
works for me.
Fredrickson thinks that we need to take the view that first
and foremost, love is an emotion, a fleeting state that influences both our
mind and body. Love, like all positive emotions, feels good. However it is more than feeling good, a micro-moment of love, as with other positive
emotions, actually modifies our mind. It expands our awareness of environments,
our sense of self and the borders between us melt away, bathed with love we see
fewer differences between each other. In fact when we experience love as an
emotion we connect with a sense of oneness that can induce transcendence…love
is indeed a drug.
Fredrickson emphases the body’s perspective of love; when we
have positive resonance, micro-moments of shared love, our physiology responds
in very particular ways. She considers that love, as positivity resonance, is identical
whether the instants occur between parent and child, friends, lovers, or total
strangers. Fredrickson maintains that these micro-moments originate through the
eyes leading to us to be in sync with others. This idea of synchrony is
fundamental to understanding positivity resonance, Fredrickson uses three key
standpoints to explain her theory; oxytocin stimulation, vagal tone, and mirror
neurons, or what has been called “brain coupling.”
She cites research by Uri Hasson at Princeton and his
colleagues, who examined people engaged in conversation while their brain activity
was monitored by an fMRI. The research shows that when brains are in sync, the
neural links allows us to truly comprehend another.
This, (along with other studies) backs up positive resonance generating
reciprocal empathy, leading to a commonly shared physical occurrence in the
brain. So we sense our two brains as having one experience.
Fredrickson shows that people with higher vagal tone have
more moments of positivity resonance. Briefly the vagus nerve connects our brain to
our heart, it is involved in how we smile, make eye contact with others and
monitors the middle ear muscles so we can focus on other voices.
Vagal tone is the link of the heart rate to the
breathing rate so it stands to reason that the higher the vagal tone the
better. People with more and better positive connections, are more loving and have
high vagal tone. It used to be that vagal tone once was thought to be as stable
as one’s height and couldn’t be changed, however Fredrickson’s research was
able to prove that mind training can improve vagal tone. And it was done by
practicing loving-kindness meditation (LKM), the ancient Buddhist repetition of
nurturing positive feelings toward the self and others.
In her Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology (PEP) lab she
randomly assigned participants to take part in LKM for less than an hour a
week. Their vagal tone compared to a control group climbed radically after a
few months of daily practice. Those who had the largest increases in vagal tone
had the most frequent positivity resonance experiences with others.
This is a radical research: Fredrickson establishes that
love isn’t something we just fall into: We can intentionally create love.
She then adds oxytocin, “the great facilitator of life” due to its role in mother-infant bonding, social
connection, and sex, into the research mix. Oxytocin is released during intensified
engagement with others and is part of our “calm-and-connect” response. It makes
us more trusting and open to others. When we are under the influence of
oxytocin we pay more attention to
people’s eyes, smiles and other cues
that are associated with positive social connections, of course what this means is that positivity
resonance lasts only as long as people are engaged. (This is similar to limbic
resonance as described in A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, & Richard Lannon.)
Love, through this lens, is not just an emotion for soul-mates
and family members, it is not to be saved for special occasions. Love like this can be shared several times a
day with different people to cover the full gamut from the love of my life to
strangers on the street. Fredrickson’s definition of a moment of love is thus “Love
is a momentary upwelling of three tightly interwoven events: First, a sharing
of one or more positive emotions between you and another; second, a synchrony
between your and the other person’s biochemistry and behaviours; and third, a
reflected motive to invest in each other’s well-being that brings mutual care”
(Fredrickson 2013, p. 17). This habit of building and maintaining strong
relationships, of cultivating micro-moments of positive resonance, can start
intentionally but builds to become who you are, so that loving and being loved
can indeed become a key strength in your value repertoire.
25 Barbara LOVE 2.0
facts
1. "...love,
and its absence, fundamentally alters the biochemicals in which your body is
steeped."
2. Love is a
momentary state that can pass between strangers who share a mutually positive
experience together.
3. Love is a
skill that can be learned which impacts the expression of your genes.
4. "The sheer
complexity of love's biology is reason enough for awe."
5. When you
learn to prioritize love, you actually get more value from it and become
resilient faster.
6. Love
literally changes your mind and enables you to see others wholeheartedly,
helping you transcend your usual ego perspective.
7. Love is the
arising of three events: shared positive emotions, sychrony between you and
another's biochemistry and behaviours, motive to invest in each other's
well-being.
8. Other
positivity emotions are not mirrored back in this way.
9. Love
reverberates between people and belongs to all parties involved.
10. Safety is a
precondition for love.
11. People who
suffer from anxiety, depression, loneliness and low self-esteem; have a limited
ability to experience love 2.0.
12. Eye contact
is a potent trigger for positivity resonance.
13. You can
experience some of the positive effects of love 2.0 while alone, when thinking
about a loved one for instance, but the effects are diminished.
14. Love impacts
your body on the cellular, even molecular level.
15. Love
physically impacts your brain's development, causing you to experience more
positivity and less anxiety.
16. Love 2.0
triggers cascades or oxytocin, sometimes called, "the love hormone".
17. Oxytocin is
the lead chemical in the "calm and connect" function; it literally
reduces stress.
18. Oxytocin
appears to make people more intuitive about others.
19. Love
increases "vagal tone", which your doctor can measure to predict the
likelihood of your having a heart attack.
20. People with
higher vagal tone regulate glucose levels and inflammation, as common
denominator in many diseases, including diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
21. Vagal tone
can be improved with training with positivity resonance.
22. "In the
very moment that you experience positivity resonance, your brain syncs up with
the other person's brain."
23. The effects
of love can be carried to you by a person's voice.
24. "Brain
coupling" occurs between people who are experiencing positivity resonance
and in some cases, you begin to anticipate the other person's thoughts,
feelings and words, rather than just react to them.
25. The causal
arrow runs in both directions at once and drives self-sustaining trajectories
of growth.
So viewed from Fredrickson’s position love is far more universal
and abundant than the limited hearts and roses Valentines version. In this
manner love is connection that can be experienced as mild or intense but
either way our body responds with a set of positive reactions which increase
our wellbeing and may also increase our life expectancy. Whether it’s the moving
flutter of our heart when we gaze into a baby’s eyes or share a fond hug with a
loved friend, or the affection and sense of shared purpose we surprisingly
sense with strangers who’ve come together to listen to a lecture on positive psychology,
this kind of micro-moment of positive resonance can be experienced anytime two
or more people meet. And to me that feels just what we need right now. Following
love as a shared moment that unfolds and
resonates between and among people — within interpersonal
transactions — stops it being about me, my emotions, and
instead belongs to all parties involved, and to the symbolic connections that
binds us together, even if only briefly. So more than any other positive
emotion love belongs not to one person, but to multiples of people; within
connections we find meaning and purpose, hope and reason to believe that
ultimately everything will be OK. Romantic as that notion may seem I feel that
humans’ capacity for universal love will outlast any momentary damage that
individualism may inflict.
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