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Core Value love is awareness that our compassion, kindness, and love make us better. Core Hurt love is hoping that someone else’s love, compassion, and kindness will make us better.
Core Value love is secure, respectful, compassionate, cooperative, and responsible, characterized by behaviors that make us feel worthy of love, as opposed to entitled to it. Core hurt love is insecure, disrespectful, resentful, controlling, and blaming. Other people can make us feel loved but not worthy of love.
We feel worthy of love when being protective is more important than being protected, when doing right is more important than sounding right, when offering compassion is more important than receiving it, and when loving is more important than being loved.
How Core Value Love Turns to Core Hurt Love
If you don’t like the behavior of loved ones and want to make things worse, blame, criticize, shame, or frighten. If you want to make things better, care about how your partner feels. Most of what we fight about in close relationships is failure of compassion – creating the impression that we don’t care that our partners feel bad. When compassion fails, partners engage in power struggles. In love relationships, power struggles are about ego. Disputes in love relationships must be resolved according to values.
Self-awareness often declines in love relationships, due to routine numbness and the fact that we tend to judge our own behavior by our intentions and minimize or ignore its negative effects on loved ones. Ignoring, disregarding, or minimizing the effects of our behavior on loved ones aggravates and prolongs their hurt. When our behavior is questioned, we must never state our intentions before validating and sympathizing with the effects the behavior had on loved ones.
Persuasion vs. Confrontation
Persuasion in love relationships occurs only with positive regard. We’ll never convince our partners that we’re right by making them defensive or by devaluing them. These are more autobiographical than revealing descriptions of others; they reflect how we feel now, rather than honest attempts to communicate, much less request behavior change.
The Function of Guilt in Love
Guilt is a distance regulator in love relationships. Get closer—invest more interest, compassion, protection, love—and guilt fades. Get too far apart, and guilt flares up. Blamed on loved ones, guilt turns into resentment or anger.
Human compassion and guilt evolved synergistically to strengthen emotional bonds, which were once necessary for survival. Compassion builds intimate bridges, guilt tells us they need repair.
Solutions to relationship problems often lie in examining what we feel guilty about, as well as what we’re afraid of and what we’re ashamed of, especially when resentful, angry, or depressed.
Love and Routine
The awesome adaptability of the human spirit is how the bad gets bearable and the good gets boring, in a kind of emotional regression to the mean. If we don’t deliberately show our partners that they’re important to us, routine behavior will make them believe they’re not.
