Love ... Again

      Love is unreal, but too real as well. Although love is the most discussed and marketed subject in modern life still there is no definitive answer how love should feel or look like. Maybe it is due to the fact that every love story is unique by itself or probably because we learn through experiences and repetition what kind of love we need in our own life and who can make us feel that way.

Scientifically, love is "a chemical chain of reaction triggered in our bodies ultimately instigating the feeling of love to strike our minds. Actually, falling in love is getting into a beautiful trap set up by nature, a natural occurrence we cannot fight.  According to a science-based study by Arthur Arun, on average, the mind of a person takes between 90 seconds to 4 minutes to determine whether it is struck by love or not." As it was explained in an article in Psychopharmacology (2012).

     Despite the fact that love is predetermined by our biology and nature, most of romantic feelings and love stories are exaggerated illusions we allow to take over our lives because simply they feel good comparing to a potential rejection. Add to that, they distract our ego from unwanted endings.

Let's think about it for a second, have you ever kept thinking about someone too long and obsessed over them to find out you are deeply in love with them and justified everything they did or doing in a way that goes with the story you already wrote inside your head? Most of us did that and do that most of time. You know why, because simply we are self-centered egoistic creatures. Our ego doesnt like to feel hurt or get bruised by the truth, we all want to live on our own bed of illusions because it is comfy and safe.

     I am not debating that all love is illusion but I am certainly not saying it is a scientific truth. Love and attraction existence is a biological fact, how we get attracted, who and how is all real although sometime we don't know how to explain it or know why but it has huge biological and psychological elements to it. 

What I want to say, after we get attracted to someone and fall for them; that part is most of the time is illusion mostly because we keep feeding our ego with things we only feel by ourselves and build up a story and support it with evidence to make ourselves avoid the pain or the rejection. I am not being a cynical here, I do believe in love and I think there are so many successful love stories. But the fact they are uncommon or rare goes back to the fact that most of us fall in love for the wrong reasons, and if they fell in love for the right reasons they allow most of the time their ego to take control and lead.

     We fall in love to connect and other biological and psychological needs but let's stay with "connect" for a bit.

We fall in love to connect and this connection allows us to discover more and grow. These discoveries whether successful or not get us closer to what we really need if we were able to control our ego and eliminate the illusions from this process.

Let's be honest with ourselves that no matter what we do sometimes someone won't like us. No matter how much we give someone, sometimes they won't need us. No matter how much we care about someone, sometimes they won't feel the same. Other times, no matter how beautiful things seems to be, life will take its toll and things won't simply work. Sometimes, people have an expiration date in our life and no matter how much we appreciate all they given us they will have to depart our life because the experience they had to give us just came to an end. In many other times people do change and grew apart, not because they didn't care enough or didn't try hard. But because we are built to grow and change and that growth and change might collide with the other person but that doesn't necessarily mean failure.

Most of these experiences and feelings are hard to deal with and very heavy to digest, especially for our self-centered ego. We think about things personally and any failure or rejection must be about us, isn't it better to live in illusions to protect us from these hard feelings? And that simply what our ego does over and over again.

    Love is a wonderful experience and a magical lesson. Through falling in love we learn so much about ourselves and other people, we build beautiful connections. That help us to find better love, to get to know what we really need in romantic relationships, and most importantly (if we listen attentively) we learn how to be a better person for others and ourselves.

It doesnt matter how much you love someone today, someday you will forget about that and laugh at yourself for thinking you never can get over them. Some will stay in your heart forever and you will learn to love yourself more through that and get used to it.

But what can remain from all of this is the real thing. You should remind yourself that you are lucky to being able to love and get love back anyway, and no matter how much it hurts today it will disappear sometime. The best way to heal a wound to give it time to heal with the right conditions, if you will try to cover it too much it will only get worse. The same with the heart, experience - learn - heal. That should take you closer to your final happy destination. Life is simple yet unpredictable and uncontrollable, just like an ocean wave. The best is to take the best of it without challenging it and go with it effortlessly.

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened"

Dr. Seuss

A conversation with myself

Psychotherapy eventually ends at some point, and you are left with your own self back at point zero with nothing but the new skills that you learned in your therapy. In the beginning, it looks so easy and smooth when everything is going well, but it gets harder when you face problems or life throws a serious shade on you. But the real moments when you are tested are the moments when some of the events that put you in depression or helped to progress your depression recurrence! Only then you realize if you really got better or you hid it under the rug until a strong wind come and scattering it all around.

At that moment, you discover the glory of coping skills and how possessing constructive coping strategies can reduce your stress and anxiety to impressive levels. To the contrary, having poor or negative coping skills may let you slip back to the ocean of stress, worry, and anxiety which might throw you back to your depressive mode that you struggled for years to get rid of! Life happens, good and bad. Days and situations tend to move up and down,  and there is no constant state of being. If today you are down, there will be a time when you go back up but as well realizing that you can't be always on top can help put you at ease when you fall back again. Yes, it is just natural and normal to have a healthy stress level or fear that pushes us to work hard to stabilize and secure our life. What is not normal, is to let that stress or fear get exaggerated in our heads and control our critical thinking and paralyze our ability to move forward.

Imagine now the worst situation that can stress you out, imagine as if it happened already. Evaluate the situation with your current state of mind. Again imagine the same situation, but think now that it is actually happening and you are totally panicking about it. Try to evaluate it with your emotions high and full of fear. Finally, compare the two situations and see which one you prefer more. Eventually, it is the same situation but the only difference is your reaction to it. Most of the time we are so concerned with the problems themselves that we exhaust our energy trying to find a solution for them. While if we isolate the problem and look at the whole picture we might even be able to neglect the problem because we found a completely new approach. To clarify, I will mention one of my favorite stories:

"During the height of the space race in the 1960s, legend has it, NASA scientists realized that pens could not function in space. They needed to figure out another way for the astronauts to write things down. So they spent years and millions of dollars to develop a pen that could put ink to paper without gravity. But their crafty Soviet counterparts, so the story goes, simply handed their cosmonauts pencils."

Although this story is complete fiction, the moral of the story still valid. Which emphasis on simplicity that bares us the stress, time and even money in many cases, because we didn't close ourselves inside the scenario but we looked at it from outside which gave us a fresh perspective and most importantly some hope!

It is simple to fall back to old habits than to struggle in the adaptation of new ones. But it worth to mention that once you succeed to overcome your first setback and fear of what happens, it only gets easier since this new coping skills will be soon the habit instead of your old stressing out habit. Eventually, stress has no power to solve anything neither fear have the power to change situations. Only our healthy mindset can help us to get out of our negative circle. Our own belief in our capabilities can unleash unstoppable power that will only get better with time. So think of that, hard times are only a bless in disguise if we are strong enough to handle them. They truly help us to get better and polish our coping skills to face the changing life. No one has all a happy life. Just that happy people know how to protect their treasure. Once they fall they are able to jump right back on their feet.

That's the difference between two ways of thinking; one blames the world for everything and rejects to accept reality. One is not concerned with the blaming at all, it just looks at life as situations and moments that can be favored or unflavored and find a way to work with them.

That was exactly the conversation I had with myself once I started my naive talk about how life can be hard and how situations keep repeating themselves. Sometimes it is easy to believe we are the victims of reality and think that life is hard on only us. While thinking that we are an active part of these situations require actions and efforts. It requires constructive self-criticism and level-minded decision making. All of this not easy, even I will dare to say is a bit scary. But certainly makes life better, and more important; it helps us to be better to ourselves and others.

Eventually, human nature is not a straight forward kind of being. It is complex layers of being that clashes within itself; it is a maze full of turns and dead ends that only a few learn to navigate through it.

The best way to put it is to borrow the words of José Ortega:

"Take stock of those around you and you will hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyze those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions, the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his “ideas” are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defense of his existence, as scarecrows to frighten away reality."