Love comes in many ways and in many contexts.

How often do you hide and push away loving feelings inside you?  Why are you willing to avoid love and to keep it hidden from you and others?  What’s the benefit for you to be estranged from yourself and others?  Is not all this a way to keep your primitive and punishing conscience in the cellar of your heart?

Often in the first few minutes of a new patient in my office, the patient will have some sense of loving feelings toward me along with feelings of fear or just plain anxiety or confusion.  From birth to very old age, we human beings daily go through a parade of all kinds of feelings, including love, fear, anger, happiness, hopelessness, and defenses against emotional closeness.  It’s prevalent that many people unconsciously are spending time and effort to push down and minimize and devalue the good they do have inside themselves.

Let’s stay on the love boat here.  How often do you see someone being loving and caring toward a stranger or someone they know?  When you see the gestures and hear the words, do you allow yourself to have loving feelings towards these people?  Do you ever speak to them about the loving feelings inside you that you have toward them?  If you do this frequently, give yourself an A plus.  If you rarely or never share your loving feelings within you and within them, give yourself an F minus.

I imagine our lives for most human beings would be so much more emotionally  richer and more CONNECTING if we weren’t phobic about loving and genuinely caring about other people, all along the continuum of strangers to the people we love most, including ourselves, of course.
With letters (snail mail, email, etc.) when the word “love” is written, usually its right at the end of the letter, as in “Love, Bill.”  Why not start off the letter with “I love you Bill (or Jill) because you are so……..blah blah blah and so forth.”

Same for phone calls, why wait to the end of the call for a quick “luv ya?”  Try starting the phone call with your loving words.  Maybe the love will come in the middle of the phone call.

“Love phobia” is a huge problem.  What the world needs now, is love, sweet love and so forth from Petula Clark’s song in the 1970s.  Fortyish years later, the song is still contemporary as ever.

I hope you all can be on your love boat and the boats of others where genuine love can be felt and shared in a myriad of contexts.

This is Jonathan J. Brower, Ph.D. saying pay attention to your loving feelings, in your bodies (the only place they can be!) and share the love with all who want love, sweet love.   Lovingly, bye for now.  More words will come your way next week.   Should you want to call me, 818-707-4557.