Love. Strategies and Values
What is valuable when the need for love is important right now? This is what will bring to life the attention and acceptance of other people – relationships, close ties, sincere interest, compliments, praise, a sense of personal worth and uniqueness.
If I need love (this is a need), I want close relationships, so I need to find an exceptional person for such relationships. To achieve this, I need to attract him (even if we are not talking about relationships in a couple, but about a group of interesting people, which I want to belong to). What do we do to get attention? We are starting to decorate ourselves, we want to look in some interesting, attractive way, to fit into society, to please some specific people. We can decorate ourselves in different ways: through the appearance or through creativity we can express our inner world. Both these things in this case become values for satisfaction of need for love.
Values from the need for love and acceptance:
• Close relations. It is important to find the very one person among a million others who will become the most important for me, to whom I can discover something very sincere, secret. Intimacy here also means. In close relationships, we can touch each other, hug, kiss. Sex is the ultimate closeness of man and woman. A strong desire for intimacy often leads to complete loss, to the loss of a sense of own boundaries.
• Feelings. Feelings are a criterion of intimacy, so they are also very important if the need for love is significant. Of course, it is more preferable to have such feelings as tenderness, desire, joy, but if we do not have such feelings, so at least it is better to have any rather than to have nothing. Indifference means a lack of communication, a lack of love, so people with a leading need for love provoke a partner to show vivid and bright emotions, they can get hysterical in order to knock out at least some kind of emotions.
• Self-expression. Usually people with a leading need for love are very creative. Creativity is an opportunity to express your inner world and present it to others to receive attention, recognition, praise, understanding, emotional reaction, etc. Criticism or indifference to creative products is experienced very painfully, as it is perceived personally “If they didn’t like my poem, they didn’t like me.”
• Personality. As love is a feeling of exclusivity in the lives of other people, individuality becomes a high order value for people with a leading need for love. “In order to be loved, I need to be special, have my own distinction, uniqueness, and be different from millions of other people. Having a bright personality, I will have more chances to get love.” However, in this quest for individuality, a person can fall into another trap. Love implies a feeling of unity, similarity and individuality emphasizes the difference. Therefore, an imbalance in favor of individuality leads to a feeling of loneliness: “I am different, different, there are no more such people”.
• Sincerity. Sincerity is another criterion of intimacy. If we are close people, we should know everything about each other, we can and should share sincerely all our thoughts and feelings, talk about all events in our life. It also has some traps. A strong desire to get love often makes you talk about yourself only pleasant things, it is essentially a lie or not complete sincerity, which creates an internal conflict: “Sincerity is very important to me, but I’m afraid to lose your love, so I embellish myself.”
What strategies do people use to get values and satisfy their need for love?
Strategies for getting love:
• Deserve love. In order to feel love and connection with others, a person constantly pays attention to the object of his sympathy, fits into his problems and tasks with some help, constantly strives to be near. “I want to be so necessary and useful to you that you cannot live without me.” Such behavior greatly stresses the other person with the amount of help, attention and love that is given to him. In this behavior, values of the highest order are closeness and dependence.
• I am a delicate flower. To feel love and connection with others, a person demonstrates his uniqueness, beauty, weakness and vulnerability in order to attract his “parent”, who will fulfill all desires, because the parent must take care of his “tender flower”. Such a person constantly requires attention: “Put on all your matters, devote all your time to me, do something good for me.” This behavior of a capricious needy child aggravates a loved one. Such a strategy is often based on the manipulation of resentment. Here the values of the highest order will be individuality, feelings, beauty, creativity.
• Buy love. To feel love and connection with others, a person works hard on himself to build a smart shape that everyone will like. This strategy of getting love is built on high activity, productivity and the pursuit of status. The standard is the generally accepted current understanding of success, and all activities are aimed at achieving the status of “smart”. The guarantor of attracting love is all sorts of success attributes – brands, positions, achievements. Here the highest order values are fashion, style, image, attention, admiration.
• Avoid pain. This is a clever variant. In order to feel love and connection with others, I doom myself to loneliness. “I need love and acceptance so much that I can imagine in advance how much I will suffer when I lose love. Not to experience this suffering, I abandon relationships and love in advance”. In such cases, a person can be a recluse, a hermit, however, creativity will fill his life, although “for the desk drawer.” Here values of the highest order will be creativity, self-expression, individuality, feelings, beauty.
Respect. Strategies and Values
What values are the most significant, when we speak about respect and self-respect?
Values from the need for respect:
• Power. Self-esteem is directly related to self-respect. “I could. I managed, although it was hard, but others could not do it at all.” If we can say this, it allows us to be proud of ourselves, to respect ourselves and those others whom we can think about in this way.
• Autonomy. Autonomy is a criterion of strength, because if you can cope without outside help, you are strong enough. Autonomy and independence also allow you to feel clearly your boundaries, this is necessary for self-respect.
• Power. Power is also a criterion of strength. “I am so strong that I can influence the situation of other people. Everything happens according to my will.”
• Struggle. Despite the fact that we all try to avoid it, the struggle is a circumstance in which we can show our strength and, therefore, satisfy the need for respect. Struggle is a proof that the strong can fight and defeat circumstances and other people.
• Achievements. Achievements are victories that we record on our own account. “I am strong, my achievements are a real demonstration.”
• Professionalism. Professionalism is a tool for achievement. “I am a professional in my field. Significantly, my opinion is authoritative, they will listen to it and respect me.”
• Responsibility. Responsibility determines the degree of influence. “If the influence on the situation is in my hands, then I’m the main one. I will decide what, how and when to do, while I am ready to be responsible for any consequences.”
Strategies of getting values:
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