All You Need Is Love, Is Not TrueWritten by Dr. Dorree Lynn
The Beatles got it right when they sang: “All you need is love.” But, people tend to get it wrong when they don’t differentiate between being in love and what it takes to have a love relationship. After “kissing a lot of frogs,” hoping your prince or princess will appear, or after a demoralizing dry spell, falling in love seems like a magic potion that will get you through rest of your life.Being romantically in love feels wonderful. Your beloved seems like most wonderful human being on earth. You are obsessed by him or her day and night, world is a shade brighter, and every love song seems to be sung especially for you. Those who have been in love know that it can be a glorious experience that brings out best in you and makes you feel as if you can accomplish almost anything. But, many of you have also had experience where feeling of being in love has lead you into a relationship that is diminishing, painful, and has brought out worst in you. Suddenly, or over time, your heavenly feeling is becomes a life of living hell. How can this happen? People are often confused by feeling of being in love and being in an ever changing love relationship. One can be in love but it does take “two to tango.” A loving relationship requires that both people mutually care about each other. It also requires five big “C’s”: caring, consequences, commitment, conflict resolution, and biggie---all relationships have difficulty continuing without communication. Caring means both people are genuinely interested in welfare of and desire best for other. To do this you have to realize that person you love is different from yourself and what pleases them and keeps them happy may not be same things that keep you on top of world.
| | Education For Our Troubled TimesWritten by Dr. Dorree Lynn
The events of September 11th and aftermath of anthrax scares and security warnings shattered our illusions and morphed our once familiar world into a new and unfamiliar one. As a result, all of us are learning to live with a newly developing normalcy. Metaphorically speaking, we are only at first stage of this education—taking our preliminary prerequisite classes: Living with Terrorism 101. Living with Anxiety 102. Getting out of Bed and Handling Depression 103. Sleeplessness and Nightmares 104. Intimacy and Caring under Stress 105. Staying sane in an insane world is an extremely difficult task. Not all our professors and teachers know what they are doing. Not all are easy to understand. And many are neither very likable nor very good educators. The homework is hard and takes time. Making sense out of often-contradictory news bombardment can seem an overwhelming task. Those of us who pay attention to daily news events are on overload. Every time we think we have hang of what is going on, something new and unexpected develops and with increased confusion, we return to ground zero and have to start our education process all over again. The government isn’t helping us with our feelings very much. On one hand, they tell us to go on with life as usual—to be cowboys and cowgirls, pull ourselves up by our boot straps and ride on—overcoming any obstacles in our path until, at end of day, at our proverbial campfires, we lay our weary heads to rest. On other hand, using terse abstract terms, officials are issuing dire warnings while providing minimal information that can quell our concerns. In general, these information givers are not yet very good at psychological aspects of their job and most can barely teach introductory courses they have taken on. Psychologist know that in order to ease fear, when you give a warning you also give instructions about how to handle warning. Psychologists also know that a very good way to increase anxiety and erratic behavior, even with rats, is to use intermittent reinforcement schedules. The ambiguity helps to drive poor animals crazy.
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