It can be said very simply and forcibly that many marriages and maybe even marriage as a societal institution is in trouble. In fact, if things continue along the path of more and more couples deciding that getting married is unnecessary the moral and legal authority that marriage has in society might just disappear. The statistics are alarming and for divorce rates they have been alarming for some time. The fifty percent divorce rate has remained fairly constant for some time and it really doesn’t seem to matter how much money you have, what god you worship, or your social standing. I suspect that if you asked how many couples were happy or content together, that number would be alarmingly low. They either have not yet decided to separate or have decided to stay together for some other reason. We just are not doing a good job as a society and culture with making marriage work.

This is not news. And many people and organizations have tried to turn the tide. There are organizations with names like “Saving Marriage”, or the “Marriage Initiative”, even welfare laws have been structured to try and encourage marriage. And most every religious faith, and certainly the Judeo-Christian heritages celebrate marriage as central to their life of faith and make every effort to keep couples together. And yet most initiatives, including marriage counseling have a dismal record of preventing divorce and improving struggling couple’s chances of staying together.

There is one notable exception, at least in the field of marriage counseling. With over 15 years of research Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) has a 70-75% (and a few have 80-85%) success rate of helping unhappy marriages. It also reports that 90% of couples treated report significant improvement. This is great news and I have seen the results in my own experience of counseling couples with EFT. It is truly amazing how effective it can be. Couples have stated they had very little hope of making their marriage work and have been overwhelmed with gratitude when it did after counseling sessions based on the EFT method.

I have learned how to practice EFT from Dr. Sharon May Morris. She is a follower of Jesus Christ and a master EFT therapist. She has written two books on EFT, the most recent is How to Argue so Your Spouse Will Listen. She has worked with several churches in California, including David Jeremiah’s church Shadow Mountain Community Church helping to implement mentoring and counseling programs based on EFT with great results. I am hoping that a coalition of churches and organizations in the Lexington area will help bring Sharon to Lexington for three days to help our local efforts. Centenary United Methodist and Crossroads Christian Church have committed to help. Please consider joining the effort to make marriage work.

In one of his newsletters Francis Frangipane made this statement: “We believe that the key to healing society is found in restoring marriage to its greatest goal as proclaimed by God in the book of Genesis. What is that goal? The Lord said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness . . . And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them” (Gen 1:26-27).

Man and woman, married, united, in the image of God. If we restore this, we will restore our society one family at a time.”

We can restore our society one family at a time if we make marriage work.

One of the great qualities of Christmas is the time it affords family to be together. If you happen to have a family that enjoys being together, it really is a wonderful time of year. Christmas is also about the Christ. It is a comment on our culture that we even have to mention that He is the focus of the season. I remember that my childhood family seemed to focus on the gift giving celebration part of Christmas, not the Christ giving. But then maybe that was just me. I liked the gift giving part and really struggled with the Christmas Eve service candle wax dripping necktie tight pants itchy feet sweating staying in my seat listening to boring service part.

It was really difficult for me to believe anything other than we were just putting in time before the good stuff; me getting my stuff. Christmas was not about Him, it was about Me! Oh what a joy to get what you wanted! And most of my life has been about getting what I want until what I want became incredibly destructive to myself and others. That is when I woke up or more accurately desperately began hoping that there was something else beside satisfying insatiable appetites and desires.

Did my problem begin because Christmas is too secular, too focused on buying and getting and not focused on Jesus? Well, I do not know about you, but my problem with appetite and desire run amuck is a lot more complicated than reminding everyone that “Jesus is the Reason for the Season”! I know there are people who are very disciplined and able to manage their appetites and personal desires in order to achieve larger goals. It does not follow that they are any more satiated, that their desires and hungers have been completely satisfied. It just might mean that their temperament is more suited to delaying gratification.

There is a long held notion in psychology that we all have different temperaments that come with the package, so to speak. Our particular temperament has to do with a prevailing mood, emotional disposition and emotional intensity. While there are different classifications, most agree that there are four basic types. The original typology of temperament was developed by Galen around 200 B.C. I am most likely a choleric, quick to react and hot tempered. My wife, Carolyn is more sanguine, warm and pleasant. A phlegmatic tends toward being slow moving and apathetic and the melancholic struggles with sadness and depression. I think most of us can figure out our basic temperament and what our particular prevailing emotional state is. If you can’t figure it out, ask someone close to you. They will definitely know!

So what does this have to do with Christmas! Well, God sent His only Son that we might have eternal life and He did that because He loves us. God gave us his Son as our gift. That is what we celebrate on His birthday; His gift to us. Our desires and appetites drive us to focus on what we can get, even if we do it in a disciplined or friendly manner. How many of us focus on what we can give? My wife might be more warm and fuzzy and I am definitely pricklier but does that mean she is more likely to give of herself? Maybe she is just more pleasantly selfish.

I still have trouble sitting in church on Christmas Eve. My hot, quick tempered nature will probably not disappear until Jesus returns and I get my new body. My appetites and desires are still there, maybe not as forceful or persistent, but they are still there. One thing that is different is that I know I need to give, like God gave me His Son. It is the only thing that really helps satisfy. By the way, my wife is pleasant, and very giving.

This Christmas give yourself as a gift to someone else.

Merry Christmas!

What does it mean to be thankful? Why should we be thankful? What do we have to be thankful for?

Thanksgiving is a time to give thanks, to express gratitude for the many blessings in our life. During our Thanksgiving meal my family takes time to talk about what we are thankful for and we usually do not allow the perfunctory expressions of thankfulness for friends and family unless you can back it up with specific examples. Just saying “I am thankful for my family or my friends…” is not good enough. You have to be able to describe what about your family or friends make you feel grateful. What we are looking for is an understanding of what it means to be thankful and grateful. It is usually more difficult to express with specificity our gratitude.

<http://www.gratitudeglass.info/index.htm

These are troubling times. Unless you have your head in the sand or make more than $250,000 per year (the current definition of rich), you are likely anxious about your economic circumstance. Of course, a certain percentage of the population is anxious because they have an anxiety disorder. They can be on the beach in Maui sipping their favorite beverage and feel horrible. Circumstances don’t matter much to those folks. These times probably just add to their anxiety; but what about the rest of us? How are we coping with the edginess we all feel when we are told we are about to fall off the economic cliff of “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.” Wow. My folks lived through that and World War II and they never talked about either very much. We usually don’t like to talk about painful experiences unless we have to or need to.

So what to make of all this; how are you feeling? I, for one, keep wondering if the other shoe is about to drop even though I have no idea what that shoe is or what the drop entails. I just have this feeling of waiting for something really bad to happen. But hasn’t something really bad already happened? Not to me, not yet anyway. But something bad is always happening to someone somewhere and in this economic crisis a lot more people have lost their jobs and practically everyone has lost much of their monetary worth. But there clearly are worse things than losing these things.

I think things feel worse than maybe they are (that other shoe might drop but if it is only an economic loss, meaning we have to lower our lifestyle and endure forced discipline of doing without, that might be a good thing), and this malaise has other reasons or causes. I don’t pretend to know exactly what is going on or what the answers are but I can describe some of the symptoms that might help us name what is going on in our malaise. Allow me to give juxtaposition:

Stephen L Carter in his Author’s Note of Palace Council , a novel set in the sixties comments “I mark the sixties as two decades, not one, the era beginning with the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and ending with President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. Brown, like the Cold War and the Apollo Program, was a product of the nation’s buoyant postwar optimism. Nixon’s fall from power reflected the nation’s newfound pessimism. The Vietnam War formed the bridge between the two. Like so many wars, Vietnam began in idealism and certainty, but ended in cynicism and doubt….The end of the war in 1975 marked the beginning of the end of rule by the World War II generation, and the dawn of modern America—the mean-spirited America of me-first, trust-nobody, sound bites, revile-anyone-who-disagrees, and devil-take-the-hindmost. All of this misbehavior is a mark of our timidity, not our confidence. Americans across the political spectrum cannot bear dissent, because we lack the courage to meet it squarely.”

The contrast is from Henri Nouwen’s Bread for the Journey: “Love unites all, whether created or uncreated. The heart of God, the heart of all creation, and our own hearts become one in love. That’s what all the great mystics have been trying to tell us through the ages. Benedict, Francis, Hildegard of Bingen, Hadewijch of Brabant, Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Dag Hammarskjˆld, Thomas Merton, and many others, all in their own ways and their own languages, have witnessed to the unifying power of the divine love…It is in the heart of God that we can come to the full realization of the unity of all that is, created and uncreated.”

Mean-spirited-me-first-revile-anyone-who-disagrees-with-you pessimism or our-hearts- becoming-one-in-love-because-all-that-is-created-or-uncreated-is-from-love optimism? Seems like an obvious choice but most of us are not mystics, we are modern or post modern everyday Americans trying to make it through. Maybe we should consider becoming mystics. Especially if it means that I can love you even though I vigorously disagree with you. Maybe then you and I will have hope and optimism not because someone promises it to us to win an election but because we become love ourselves.

If Stephen Carter is right, and I believe he has eloquently named our current condition, then this economic mess we are experiencing is only a symptom of Carter’s pessimistic America. The cure then is not throwing more money to Wall Street or Ford; it is becoming the optimistic America that believes in itself because it believes in one another not as an enemy to destroy or prove wrong but as a brother or sister who needs one another. As the mystics express it, it is love that unites us, and the root of our culture of pessimism is our loss of knowing what love is and how to love. Maybe the root of our pessimism is wondering if love even exists.

We do not usually talk about our failure in a public forum. This is especially poignant during a presidential campaign where the only failure talked about is the opponent’s. Failure is understood to mean when something falls short of what is required or expected; it is unsuccessful, the desired goal is not achieved. There is something negative about failure and yet conventional wisdom of successful people is that they often learn more from their failures than their successes. I wish the political process would allow for that but in America it is all about being right and winning. American culture does not tolerate failure very well.

I am in a business where what we do, therapy, often fails; at least in the short term it appears to be a failure. This week I have seen two marriages fall apart, one that is farther down the road of divorce and one that is dangerously tittering on the precipice of divorce. One might be salvaged; one most likely will not be salvaged. So what have I learned from my mistakes, from failure? What can I take away from this that will make therapy more successful next time?

I think I am asking the wrong question and looking at this failure the wrong way. Yes, I expect to help every marriage that walks in my door. I expect success because I am trained and I have seen much success before with couples. I am trained and learning more about EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy) which has a great research track record of significantly improving marriages 75-80% of the time. But what makes the difference? Why do some respond and others do not?

I wrote to one of the spouses who do not want to end their marriage that without vulnerability love does not happen; it cannot thrive. It is choked off in self protective armor that stifles and restricts and bounces back every attempt of love’s embrace. What in the world would make someone reject love? Why would anyone do that!? Because what is offered is not perceived by the receiver as love; the source of love is seen as anything but loving. They are afraid, for whatever reason(s) to be vulnerable.

I am grieved by these couples’ pain. I hate that our efforts ended in a lack of success; that love did not win the day but disappointment and rejection did. I don’t know if there is anything more painful than a failed relationship except that it is tempered by the hope of finding love somewhere down the road. We are usually eternal optimists when it comes to love. In fact, many relationships end precisely because someone decides they can find love with someone else. But in divorce someone has decided that love does not happen for them in this relationship. How sad and painful is that.

I want to be honest about my failure to help and to love. It does no good to pretend we have all the answers or pretend that we will not fail. In fact, if conventional wisdom is true, failure is necessary but this conventional wisdom is only true if we do not quit trying. We are meant to love. It is what we are designed to do. We are lovers, and love is most fully realized in a monogamous relationship. It cannot be found in a series of relationships because serial relationships do not require commitment and thus avoid vulnerability. If I am never safe enough to risk being hurt, that is be open to being misunderstood, not valued, or accepted then I can never know love. This is the paradox of love; it can only happen when we are open to its failure. For us to know love, to experience love in our life we must be willing to suffer the pain of rejection, the disappointment of being misunderstood, and still hold out hope that love, in the long run, will not disappoint.

“Adult love inevitably reconnects us to the earliest experience of infantile dependence on our parents or caretakers. And no parent is perfect, and no one’s earliest experiences of love are consistently and absolutely positive. These and later disappointments sometimes surface when we are faced with love as adults. As a result, some people find themselves unable to let go; they seem to prefer the familiarity of their fears to the potential danger of the unknown.” (David Benner, Surrender to Love) This statement, in one form or another, has been made by any number of respected psychologists, therapists, or pastors. It has become an understood facet of married life that we all bring baggage our marriage. We know that some baggage is heavier and more numerous than others, but we all have baggage when it comes to relationships.

So what? What is the big deal and why does it matter so much? Why can’t we just put our baggage in storage and move on? Damn the baggage anyway! The bottom line answer is because it is a part of who we are, a part of our identity. Our identity is largely shaped by how those significant persons in our life treated us. We see ourselves reflected in our lover’s (not sexual lovers but soul lovers) responses. Whenever we enter into a love relationship we are faced with reflected ghosts of our past love relationships. They are stored in our brain. The baggage cannot be ignored, denied, or deleted; it must be emptied out, examined, and replaced with something different. We need to see a new reflection of our self in the eyes of our lover.

How often do we ask ourselves “What does she think of me?” or “How does he see me?” We are very concerned and conscious of “our image” in the “eyes” of our lover. How we answer these questions is at the heart of our baggage. Our baggage is the fear that we will receive the same negative answers: “I keep getting the same disappointing results no matter how hard I try.”

Research from the neuroscience of interpersonal relationships suggests that our brain becomes hard wired to respond in the “same old way” especially when we perceive something or someone to be a threat. All the stored memory of our past disappointments is activated and our “baggage” comes rushing out. Something in the way our loved one looks, smells, acts, feels, or responds to us is registered as sensory input in our brain and rapidly processed and assessed. (Read my blog on “Emotionally Hijacked”) Anything that smells, looks, acts, or feels like previous threatening occurrences puts us on the defensive: “Danger! Danger! This is not safe. I must be careful here. I am not sure this person really loves me.” Like a freight train wreck our baggage spills out all over the place.

What are we to do? How can we stop the madness of rapid, almost instinctive reactions that push away the very thing we desire? How can we possibly get around our baggage in order to receive the love we so desperately need? How can we stop the self destruction? The short answer: Rewire your brain.

This is the good news. We can create new neural connections that reprogram our sensory processing so that we respond in a different way. And the way we do that is with the one you love. We literally learn to let go of our fear and experience loving interactions that heal us. Especially in a committed relationship like marriage, or in a community like AA, or a stable church community, or in counseling sessions, we can learn how to love one another. And it is in the learning how to love that healing happens. Our baggage of fear of rejection is replaced with the certainty of acceptance: “I really am lovable!”

Depending on your baggage, this is not easy process but it happens all the time. People do learn what love is and how to give love in return. Do not give up on love; it is what we are created to do. We are our most truly our self when we love.

We often like to scare ourselves. We get a kick out of the adrenaline rush of fear that comes from a scary movie or a roller coaster ride. We like the feeling of being afraid as long as it comes in a form that is some sort of controlled context. The movie and the thrill ride have an end. We know that we are not in any real danger. As long as we know we have some sense of control over the situation we do not mind being scared. In fact, it is fun.

But what happens when we experience a situation that makes us feel helpless, when we don’t know what to do to protect ourselves? We experience fear that seems to have no end and we are overwhelmed. Just think about our current economic and social situation. Many people are facing overwhelming economic difficulties as are many important financial institutions. Our financial structure is under great stress and we are facing uncertain outcomes. The words “panic” and “market crash” and “great depression” have been bandied around to describe our current situation. Experts in the field are warning us that we are vulnerable and exposed to a potentially devastating financial crisis.

How are you responding to this? This is an external threat to our well being and it seems no one, certainly not “us average citizens” have any control over the situation. If you listen to the dialogue of the financial experts they repeatedly comment that the financial institutions at the heart of the crisis do not know what to make of their situation. They are confused and disoriented. Their world has been turned upside down; they are confused about where the end point is, and they are frantically grasping for a firm hold. Their uncertainty has paralyzed their ability to act and so they panic.

What usually happens when we feel overwhelmed with fear is one of three things. We run, or we fight, or we freeze. This is the so called “stress response”. In response to the financial crisis, we cash out and stuff our money in a mattress, or we act like Bill O’Reilly and many others who angrily attack and blame someone else, or we sit there like a deer in headlights and do nothing, not registering that a truck is about to hit us.

Is there another choice to the stress response? Are we locked into our instinctual response to threats? Can we look a threat in the face, even financial ruin or death and not be controlled by fear? Only if we believe that there is something more to life than what we can see, taste, or touch; only if we believe that life is fundamentally, basically, and organically infused by love.

The difference between feeling helpless and frightened or vulnerable and safe is most often a difference of perception. How do you perceive your world? Is it a hostile and threatening place where you must be on guard and defensive? Or can you be open and responsive, even in the face of threats, because you trust that the end game of life is love? A world infused by love is like a scary roller coaster ride; we feel the rush of fear but learn to trust that we can endure the ride.

David Benner in Surrender to Love says “the deepest ache of the soul is the spiritual longing for connection and belonging. No one was created for isolation.” He then says we attempt to compensate for our isolation through “people, possessions, and accomplishments.” That is, we attempt to soothe the pain of separation with the balm of earned recognition from what others think of us, from what we have, and from what we do. This never fully satisfies the ache because it does not address the fundamental problem of feeling separated and alone.

How many of us believe this is our problem? Do you feel isolated or do you know in your heart that you are loved, valued, and cherished? That you are or have been the recipient of another’s time, attention, and concern where you are more important to them than they are to themselves? This is the cure for the ache of isolation. It is love.

If the answer to that question is “no” or “I don’t know” then you probably question the power of love in your life. You experience a restlessness and agitation that might not always be visible but runs in the background like a computer virus gumming up the works and slowing down the system. Dr. Benner asserts that “to be human is to have been designed for intimate relationship with the Divine”. I believe he would also agree that to be human is to have been designed for intimate relationship with one another. That is, there are two great love relationships we must fully experience to be as we are designed to be; the love of our creator and the love of one another. The great commandments of the scriptures are to love God with all of your self and to love one another as your self. This is the dynamic of the cross, vertical relationship with God and horizontal relationship with one another. If the death and resurrection of Jesus are true, then this dynamic dance is foundational to who we are. If we are not participating in both movements of this great dance of love we are going to experience that virus of never being fully comfortable in our own skin.

One of the paradoxes of love is that you cannot fully love another without being fully loved yourself. One might think that would encourage a focus on self, but the paradox is that we only become truly unselfish when we have been totally and unconditionally loved. 1 John 4:19 says we love because He first loved us. Because we have been loved, because we know the reality and power of love in our life, we are able to love ourselves and others. It is when we have not experienced the wonderful and joyous presence of love that we become consumed with a self trying to find satisfaction and contentment in a disconnected world. The first order of business then is to be loved. But of course that is not up to us and that is where we become trapped in the striving to earn love. We know we need it, we have not experienced it, our soul aches for it, so we push to find it.

There is another verse in 1 John 4 that is rather startling and illuminating. Verse 10 says “This is love: not that we love God but that He loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” It is not about what we do, it is about the love God has for us. We are all so driven by the failures of love in our life that we have great difficulty wrapping our souls around the fact that God loves us. This is the nature of love, this is the nature of God, to love us; He cannot not love us. We are loved and once we fully wake up to this fact life becomes a lot easier and simpler; the only thing that really matters is love.

Are you standing in the ballroom watching others dance, maybe resenting the joy on their faces? Do you believe that the dance of love does not include you? This is the ache of your soul yearning for connection and belonging. Listen to it as an invitation to the dance. We all have the same need and you will be welcomed. God loves you.

Preparing for a seminar on “How to Connect in the Middle of a Fight”, I have been considering a couple of movies that might have good examples of Attachment issues. I am looking for brief segments that capture the essence of the movement of our attachment dance. Sometimes it is much easier to see the dance of relationship than it is to listen to someone describe it. Two movies came to mind, The Story of Us and Kramer vs. Kramer, both movies about a couple struggling with their marriage and the effect it has on their family. In Kramer vs. Kramer there is a wonderful presentation of a father and son bonding after the wife and mother leave. You can see the movement of an unattached and emotionally clueless husband and father learning to connect with his son who has been abandoned by his mother, and come to terms with his role in losing his wife. (If you are offended by a few expletives or nudity do not watch either movie but I hope you do watch them.)

Sue Johnson, in her book Hold Me Tight makes a compelling point that attachment needs are “absolute”, meaning fundamental to who we are and how we are designed. That is, our hardware won’t operate to its full potential, and is often damaged, without the software system of human bonding. “Attachment is the bottom line, the scaffold on which other elements (of a relationship like sex, caretaking, play, work, etc.) are built. Without secure, safe and bonded relationships, especially during childhood, but also in adulthood, we will not have fully satisfying personal relationships or develop into fully functioning human beings.

Dustin Hoffman, the father in Kramer vs. Kramer makes the journey with his son that Dr. Sue Johnson describes as necessary for creating such relationships: “To achieve a lasting loving bond, we have to be able to tune in to our deepest needs and longings and translate them into clear signals that help our lovers respond to us. We have to be able to accept love and to reciprocate. Above all, we have to recognize and accept the primal code of attachment rather than attempting to dismiss and bypass it. In many love relationships, attachment needs and fears are hidden agendas, directing the action but never being acknowledged. It is time to acknowledge these agendas so that we can actively shape the love we so badly need. ”

Like many of us, Dustin Hoffman’s character has very little idea of his significant longings and needs but when thrust into caring for his son he chooses to care. He accepts “the primal code of attachment” and does not dismiss or run from it. Refusing to abandon his son, he learns what love is and how to love. There is a remarkable scene where his son falls off a jungle gym and busts his face. His father was attuned to the danger, tried to prevent it and then runs with his son in his arms to the emergency room, refusing to leave him during his treatment. Contrast these scenes with earlier ones of his hapless attempts to care for his son. He becomes a likable, compassionate human being who is there for his son. It is a journey and transformation we all must make to become fully human.

Many of us, particularly men, might question Mr. Kramer’s manhood or challenge how important all this really is. His boss certainly does. He is an example of dismissing the basic need of relationship; he is attached to his career. Learning to acknowledge our attachment needs and fears in an open and responsive manner is not emotional sentimentalism. It is rather recognizing that we need the basic scaffold in place in order to build an enduring structure. Without the basic structure of knowing ourselves and facing our fears, being able to communicate and ask for what we need, and being vulnerable enough to receive what we need, we will continue to experience disappointment and failure in our intimate and meaningful relationships. In other words, we will continue to experience disappointment and dissatisfaction with life.

There are many examples that I can give of when I “dismissed and bypassed” my basic need for close, safe, and bonded relationship. I put many other things first, like success, career, sensual enjoyment, demanding my own way, or preferring to be alone. Like Mr. Kramer, my children have taught me to pay attention to building the scaffold of relationship for enduring and rewarding attachments. There is nothing more enduring, more powerful, than an attached relationship. It is something that we all hunger for and what we commonly name love. Do you know your hunger or do you dismiss or deny it?

David Benner in Surrender to Love makes a profoundly simple and true assertion: “Genuine transformation requires vulnerability”. This captures the challenge of my daily work with individuals, especially couples. Those individuals who struggle with being vulnerable are very difficult to help. Being vulnerable means “to be without adequate protection and open to physical or emotional harm” and most of us do not like that particular state of being.

There are obviously situations where we should not be vulnerable because we are around unsafe people. We need to have our guard up and be careful about what we reveal because there are manipulative and abusive individuals. And sometimes it is a spouse or parent. There is probably nothing more negative and destructive to our being than the betrayal of our source of trust and affection using and abusing us.

The context for Dr. Benner’s comment is the healing power of love. As a marriage therapist anything to do with love catches my attention. As a human being it should catch everyone’s attention. For some the thought that love heals is foreign; for others it is ridiculous and for most of us it is a pleasant platitude that we believe but don’t really understand. Love heals? Of course it does! And in the hidden comments of our self talk we wonder how that really works.

The reason vulnerability is so critical to transformation is that without it we cannot receive love. If we are busy protecting ourselves then when love comes we miss it. Dr Benner says that it is not “the fact of being loved unconditionally that is life changing….It is the risky experience of allowing myself to be loved unconditionally.”

I cannot count the number of times I have heard “he/she does not love me unconditionally” and yet most people have had someone love them unconditionally. They might not be parents or lovers but most have experienced mercy and compassion from someone who was not looking for anything in return. Most parents and lovers know that love needs to be unconditional and make their best effort to give it. Why is it so difficult for us to receive love when it is offered? What makes us refuse it when love is standing right next to us?

One critical factor is the lack of self acceptance; we don’t like ourselves. How can anyone else like us or love us? We are conditioned to believe that we will only get what we need if we are good enough. This critical piece is difficult to grasp. We are often unaware of our lack of self acceptance and this makes it very difficult to accept. Even if we realize or lack of self acceptance how to we get over it?

We get over it by risking rejection, the very thing that most likely caused us not to accept ourselves in the first place. We need to be like the cartoon character Popeye: “I am what I am, I’m Popeye the Sailorman.” Most likely you will find that the people in your life are struggling with the same struggle. It is by making ourselves vulnerable, “naked and unashamed” that allow us to receive what we need. Are you willing to risk it?

If you have experienced the healing power of love how has it changed you? Are you able to find the words to describe your experience? If so, please do and tell someone else about it. You are a witness to the power of love and your witness can change lives. You will be a bearer of good news!