Parenting Tips: The Secret to Being Loved

One of the most important things we can teach our children, perhaps the most important thing, is how to be loved and loving. We can’t protect them from the many difficulties, even tragedies, of life. But we can teach them how to surround themselves with support and love. People who are loved have people around them to celebrate the good times, to share life’s triumphs, and to manage the rough spots. People who have solid relationships are seldom lonely and seldom lost, no matter how challenging or painful their life’s course. People who are loved have a security deep inside that makes it possible to take risks and to accept defeats. People who are loved during life die satisfied.

As basic and important as love is, it certainly isn’t simple. I know it doesn’t sound very romantic, but love is a skill as well as an emotion. It’s something we do as well as something we feel. Love has to be reciprocal and active if it is to last. People who don’t know how to do love — to both give it and receive it — often lose it.

The only exceptions to this rule are “mother-love” and “God-love.” Mom and God each cut us far more slack than anyone else ever will (and often far more than we deserve). As soon as we reach beyond Mom and God, however, love becomes very complicated.

Why? Because with everyone else there is an eternal tension between the “I” and the “We.” I want what I want when I want it. But I also want to be close to others — who want what they want when they want it. How an individual negotiates that tension between “I-ness” and “we-ness” determines how loved or alone he or she will be. How she or he manages that tension with a particular loved one determines the depth and breadth of their relationship.

The key to bridging the “I” and the “We” is sharing. Whether we are 2 years old, 15, or an adult, sharing is tough. Sharing requires a certain degree of selflessness. Sharing requires caring enough about the relationship to put it ahead of personal desires and needs. Learning and practicing sharing is a lifetime effort that, when done well, leads to a lifetime of love.

Effective Parents Teach Their Children about Love

So, given all this theory, what’s a good parent to do to teach a child about how to love? Here are some ways that effective parents help their children learn and practice the skill and art of loving.

• Model sharing and consideration for others, including your partner, your children, and your friends. Kids breathe what we do and say. Your willingness to be unselfish when it would be easier not to be really does matter. One mother I know says that she tries to take an attitude of “why not” rather than “why” whenever someone asks her to do something. She has found that this fundamental shift in her thinking makes an enormous difference in how she gets along with others.
  
  
• Name loving acts. Help your children recognize when they are showing love in ways big and, especially, in ways small. One of my teachers used to talk a lot about the importance of catching children being right. Noticing and commenting when your children do something thoughtful, selfless, or helpful helps them to understand something as abstract as loving and makes them want to do it again.
  
  
• Make a conscious effort to do something subtle and personally meaningful for those you care about as often as you can. Most people don’t want parades and flowers (well, maybe occasionally they do). Most people feel very, very loved when someone makes a call during a rough week, remembers how they like their coffee or does an errand they find hard to fit into the day. It really is the little things that count. A friend of mine knew I was having a particularly difficult day at work. Her children had given her some flowers for her birthday that she had placed on her desk. When I came back from lunch, there on my desk were a few flowers in a paper cup. A dozen roses in a crystal vase couldn’t have pleased me more. She noticed when I was struggling and let me know simply and eloquently that I wasn’t alone.
  
  
• Make sure that your kids learn how to recognize when people have extended themselves for them and help them learn ways to express appreciation. Love is an interaction between people. Children as young as 18 months can understand that they need to say thank you when they have been on the receiving end of love. The rote response that comes after a parental prompting will become their own response in time. From the time her children were able to hold a crayon, a neighbor of mine has helped her children draw and “write” thank-you notes whenever they received a gift. By the time they were teens, her kids automatically sat down with paper and pen to acknowledge the thoughtfulness of others. The key to this good behavior is that their mother didn’t see it as an odious chore but rather as a very, very important part of maintaining relationships. When the kids were little, she made a game out of it. As they grew, she helped them understand the richness that comes from graciously receiving love and sending it back as a verbal hug.
  
  
• Don’t forget to show affection. Everyone needs touch and hugs and little gestures of connection and contact — especially when they don’t feel that they deserve it. One of my friends claims that it takes a minimum of three hugs a day for kids to grow into healthy adults. I don’t know if there is scientific evidence for this idea, but I do know that her kids seem really secure and happy.
  

Love and Be Loved

The secret to being loved, if you haven’t already guessed, is to be more loving. And Valentine’s Day offers the perfect opportunity to demonstrate to those we love exactly how we feel about them.

Valentine’s Day — what a wonderful holiday! For over a thousand years, there has been a day dedicated entirely to love. Regardless of whether we are in the midst of romance, Valentine’s Day gives us all a chance to reflect on the love we have in our lives and to show our appreciation and gratitude for it. Whether we send cards, share chocolates and flowers, help our children address cartoon valentines for classmates and friends, or simply make an extra effort to say “I love you” to those we care about, we are practicing the doing of love. Practice doesn’t make love “perfect,” but it does make it real, and having real love in our lives is something worth celebrating.

How to be loved for who you are

How to be loved for who you are

What is the one thing that every person in this world no matter how old you are or where you from really want? The question is quite easy to answer as it can relate to everyone, YOU want to be loved for who you are.  Not for whom he might think you are or how you look or dress, it's your true self that you want to be loved for unconditionally. My guess is that you haven't found that somebody yet since you read this, but trust me hope is not gone. Maybe the man you thought loved you for who you were, didn't really do that because it was more important for you to try and be someone else. You want to to be loved for who you are, not someone else.

When I think back of past relationships, I come to think of one thing I have always done in the beginning of our time together? I have like many others set up what I like to call the facade of perfection, I found myself always trying to be perfect even in ways no one would ever demand from me, and then later when we got more comfortable with each other I started to fade back to my true self.

I'm not telling anyone that you shouldn't reach for to be the best you can be, but you must always know that being perfect and only keeping it for a while, might result in that person getting some unreal expectations. Your goal of showing who you really are will then not turn out like you've hoped.

If you want a man that loves you unconditionally for who you are, you must learn how to present the true you, he will love what you let him love, and by doing that he will love you for who you are
There's a book called MenMadeEasy.  which will teach you very much when it gets to get a good man and how to keep him. It's written by a very wise women named Kara who have dedicated a lot of her time to really try to learn the science between the sexes and how to really communicate and present yourself the right way to men.

 

Be Loved For Who You Really Are 

Everybody wants to be loved for who they really are - beneath the masks they wear, the impressions they try to make and the mind games they play. But how do we go about doing that? Two of America’s most respected, pioneering and sought after authorities on relationship dynamics, Jim Sniechowski and Judith Sherven, challenge our understanding of love to give us a new vision on how to be loving in a relationship, in their new book Be Loved For Who You Really Are.

Most of the images we have of love and romance come from movies, television and romance novels. They’re all about pursuit and capture, dominance and submission. Once the guy gets the girl, the movie ends. That leaves us with a considerably incomplete picture of love as it is in the real world. Love is much more than just an experience of beginnings.

Sherven and Sniechowski point out that our culture has a rather poor and adolescent understanding of what love is and what it takes to create real love. At the start of the relationship, we are swept away by emotions and fantasies and expect the other person to fulfill them. When those expectations aren’t met and we begin to see the imperfections and differences in our partner, we walk away. We search for the “perfect” partner, not knowing that he/she can never be enough because he/she will always be different from what we expect.

The beautiful thing about a romantic relationship is that love isn’t found – it is co-created. Yet there are countless people who search for love as if it belongs to someone else. We don’t find love. We find one another and allow love to grow between us.

“That don’t impress me much!”
Many of us go on a date with the intention of impressing the other person. A man might lease a car that he can’t afford in order to impress a woman while a woman might completely give herself a makeover. Instead of the goal of the date being, “I want us to get to know each other for real and see if we like each other,” it is more often, “I want to impress you.”

Sherven and Sniechowski point out that if we go out on a first date and put on a show, we are working against emotional intimacy because all that the other person is getting is a false front. Ultimately, that illusion will come apart because it can’t be kept up forever. What follows, is resentment and disappointment that is unnecessary if things are done simply and straightforwardly.

If two people are truly interested in one another and want to go out with each other, the authors recommend that they do things like going out for coffee or to other places that are not romantic. That way they can begin to get an idea of who the other person is instead of witnessing the show that both of them are putting on. If they do this a few times before anything more extravagant occurs, they can find out whether or not it’s worth going forward without expending emotional energy and finances on a process that eventually leads to nothing.
Ultimately we cannot control whether or not someone will be impressed by us because it is their choice. So it’s better to be real instead of setting out to impress someone. Our actions often reflect our self-esteem. Sherven gives us something to think about when she says, “If your focus is on impressing the other person, then you are voting for the belief that you are not good enough as you are. The rejection process has already started, and it has started from within.”

Expectations can be limiting
As the relationship progresses past the “honeymoon” stage, some of the masks we initially wore begin to come off. We soon discover that we carry several unrealistic expectations that can prevent us from getting to know the other person for who they really are. It is better to let our partner be him/herself and see what happens.

One of the major expectations that women often bring into the relationship is that the man is going to bring the substance that she’s searching for – the money, social connections, adventure and romance. But when the relationship finds more solid footing, she realizes he’s just another human being like she is. He can only provide who he is.

Unfortunately, many women who are not satisfied in their own personal lives look to the man to fix it, and he can’t. Even if the man actually sets out to fulfill those fantasies, it is an impossible task. Her expectations and his attempt to fulfill them doom the relationship right from the beginning. He cannot be authentic if he is acting according to stereotypes or another person’s ideas of who he should be. She will never be happy in the relationship until she accepts him for who is, not who she thinks he should be.

Differences are an opportunity to grow
The importance of partnership comes sharply into focus when there is a conflict. It is inevitable that two people living in the pressure cooker of a long-term relationship are going to crash into each other at some point. They are going to be disappointed in one another, irritated by one another, disillusioned or angered by one another. Many people believe that those conflicts are signs that the relationship is off track. But what drives a relationship off track is not conflict but the inability to handle conflict.

A classic example of this would be of a couple where one person is a spender and the other person is a saver. Although the difference is usually seen as a bad thing, the fact is that they’re both out of balance. They have taken their approach to money and finances to an extreme in one direction. What lies before them is the opportunity to learn from each other how to handle money in a much more balanced and respectful manner while working together as a team and relying on each other’s strengths. They can create a true partnership out of the differences.

A couple’s love is tested through conflict and when they emerge from that still wanting to be together, they have proved that differences can be a good thing. Although many of us have the notion that differences are a dreadful thing, they actually open the way to true intimacy. They give us the opportunity to value how different we are from the one we love and use those differences to grow and change.
“One of the most beneficial things you can do in a relationship is to recognize that your partner is not you! When you really understand that, you won’t try to change them into what you think he/she should be and you will get to know them intimately for who they were created to be. Remember, there are two people involved. It’s a relationship – not a dictatorship!” say Sherven and Sniechowski.

Curiosity is a powerful tool in a relationship because it means staying open and wanting to know more about the other person. Because of our self-involvement, we often end up missing out on all that an intimate relationship has to offer. When we look at it one way – our way – we miss it when it appears.
We need to love others for who they are if we desire to be loved in the same way. As two people look deeper and deeper into the relationship, they will find that the emotional intimacy between them expands so that there is more room for both of them. And remember that if you’re not being loved for who you really are, you’re not being loved at all.

 

Something I get asked often by those who are bereaved, like you, like me is “Where are my loved ones now?” “Are they safe?” “Are they happy?” “Will I see them again?”

I believe they are and you will, but what I believe doesn’t matter, it’s what you believe. It’s your belief alone that ultimately is going to answer those questions for you. 

You might be scrambling about in the dark right now wondering what you do think about life after death. You will no doubt fall into one of these categories:

Yes with absolute certainty.

No, there is nothing after death.

I’m confused; I don’t really know what I believe.

Words linked to the afterlife you may hear and know are heaven, hell, a peaceful place, a sanctuary, the hereafter, kingdom, nirvana, paradise, eternity and Elysian Fields. There are others soul progression, lessons in life, reincarnation. Many of those words are linked to a spiritual foundation or a faith.

It is often the loss of a loved one and the very questions that we ask above which become the triggers for exploration and lead us on a quest to find out more. I did just that and continue to explore my belief systems and my spirituality in general.  I would encourage you to do the same and go looking for the answers you seek.

I’ve read hundreds of books: Christian and spiritual texts, books written by mediums, psychiatrists undertaking past live regressions, near death experiences, angelic encounters, after death communications and much more. It’s stretched me beyond what I knew or believed and strengthened my spiritual foundation, my belief that yes; my son is safe, is happy and is beyond the suffering that we are experiencing here on earth.

I may not know with certainty, none of us really do, but I choose to believe that. It gives me a great deal of comfort. It gives me hope. It gives me peace in my heart but more it sustains me through my darkest days. There are always dark days. Although my life is full and happy now the loss of my precious son’s physical presence always sits within me, alongside my life and always will. There are tears and there are sad days. My belief doesn’t make those go away, it helps me to deal with it.

One of the books I did read very early on was Heaven Is So Real by Choo Thomas which describes her Christian faith and visit to heaven. You know now I can’t even recall where I borrowed it from but there is one thing from that book that will never leave me. She described the flowers in heaven, the colors as being bigger and brighter than here on earth. Just prior to my reading that book I received a “message” from my son. Guess what he spoke of….flowers. He said I would like it where he was, there were so many flowers, and they were bright, so very bright and colorful. That is why I remember that book and that passage. It was an affirmation yet again that yes, he was safe.

So there is much to ponder. If you are already of a strong belief and faith, that alone may already guide and support you greatly through your pain. If you are not, go exploring, go seeking, and go find what you are looking for.