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I was just doing some research for the 22 Ways 2 Love You film project and came across this inspiring article published last year in Science News. The Helen Fisher group is the only one I know of getting public attention for the brain imaging studies conducted on romantic love. What a great journey & great training ground to explore and essentially study Love on every level from my own personal experiences to my coaching clients’ experience to what people share on the street in random interviews, to what scientists have to share from their findings.

Enjoy! And stay tuned for more postings…

Source: Science News/ Home / News / December 6th, 2008; Vol.174 #12 / News item

Still crazy (in love) after all these years
A brain imaging study reveals that some people are as giddy as teenagers in love, even after two decades of marriage
By Laura Sanders

December 6th, 2008; Vol.174 #12 (p. 17)

WASHINGTON — New research on brain activity confirms that people can be madly in love with each other long after the honeymoon is over.

Researchers led by Bianca Acevedo at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York wanted to know if romantic love — or at least the brain activity it triggers — could last in a long-term relationship. To everyone’s relief, the answer is yes. The group presented its results November 16 at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

The new data suggest that people who have been madly in love for an average of 21 years maintain activation in a brain region associated with early-stage love. “We now have physiological evidence that romantic love can last,” says coauthor Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

Most couples who have been together for many years experience a change from a frenetic, obsessive love to something more subdued and comfortable, says study coauthor Lucy Brown of Albert Einstein College of Medicine. But the researchers noticed a small group of outliers who had been with the same person many years and claimed to be as much in love as they were during the exciting early days of their relationship.

Since that earlier study in 2005 using functional MRI brain imaging, the researchers knew that a certain part of the brain called the ventral tegmental area was activated when people who had been in love for relatively short times — an average of seven months — saw pictures of their sweethearts. Perhaps not coincidentally, the ventral tegmental area is also activated by the rush of cocaine, and is the region that controls production of the natural stimulant dopamine. The researchers concluded that this area was associated with the intense, burning stages of early love. It was unclear whether this region would still be active after 20 years of being in a relationship.

Long-term lovers who had been married for an average of 21 years viewed a picture of their partner while the scientists monitored the subjects’ brain activity using fMRI. People who claimed to be madly in love for 20 years and people who had been in love only for months showed similar activation in the ventral tegmental area of the brain.

At the same time, key differences between the early- and late-stage lovers emerged that suggest potential benefits to staying together for 20 years. People in long-term relationships who were madly in love showed higher levels of activity in a part of the brain associated with calmness and pain suppression, whereas people in love for shorter periods of time had higher activity in a region of the brain associated with obsession and anxiety. “The difference is that in long term love, the obsession the mania, the anxiety has been replaced with calm,” Fisher said in a news conference.

“There is an evolutionary advantage to being paired,” says researcher J. Thomas Curtis, who studies pair-bonding in prairie voles, small animals that are well-known for forming life-long monogamous pairs. Much of the research on voles, including Curtis’ work at Oklahoma State University in Tulsa, Okla., supports these new findings on long-term pairing in humans, he says. In fact, when researchers get rid of the ventral tegmental area of a vole brain, the same region activated in human couples who are in love, the animal no longer forms pair bonds.

To understand the complicated subject of human love, the scientists plan to conduct more brain imaging studies. The next step will be to periodically monitor the brains of newlyweds as the couples slowly enter long-term relationships. The researchers hope to understand how brain activity may correlate with life events, like the birth of a child or relationship troubles, Acevedo says.

After three decades and more than a few relationships, what I finally know to be true is that communication is what keeps love alive. Love cannot live outside of communication. The word itself comes from the root word, commune, which means ‘to be one with’. Interestingly enough, I learned this lesson within the context of friendship. Although, I admit it took a little romance to spark the conversation.

Not just any kind of communication will cut it however. One must be clear, genuine, and without expectation. This is not an easy way to be. If you look at yourself closely, in any conversation, you will find that many conversations occur beneath the backdrop of fear. We rarely say what we truly feel in fear of hurting someone or being hurt. Well, one good place to start is by sharing how scared we are. Letting your fear be present is a surefire way of letting the other person’s guard down. Once that is out of the way, you can get down to what’s important.

Love. It’s the counterpart to fear. Love and fear cannot exist without each other. Love is what is important and often acknowledging our fears is a good way to get back to love.

The kind of love I am referring to is not that crazy electrochemical wave of sensation that runs through us when we are falling in love. There’s no way to keep that feeling alive. If there were, someone would be making billions. Certainly, we can keep chasing the high and there’s nothing wrong with that but how is it any different from chasing any other high? Whatever the high, the primary function of it seems to fill the void of something or perhaps it is just for pure fun.

The love I speak of is available to us at any moment, it’s eternal yet it takes some work to get in touch with it. This love encompasses all loves, including the kind that creates butterflies not only in your physical core but also in your soul. This love is so powerful it brings you to tears when you look at someone and are able to see just how amazing they truly are. In its’ greatest expanse, this love unveils the raw beauty of every human being and piece of life on earth.

I spent the last three years of my life in a serious relationship. We were engaged to be married and we chose to end the engagement, not in marriage, but in friendship. I am happy to say that as I write this, we are friends. We are the best of friends. We are support, respect, inspiration, and a stand for each other’s individual happiness. We have promised each other to do whatever it takes to support each other in living a happy, inspirational, and powerful life.

This has only been possible through communication and some introspection. When our romantic relationship ended, we were devastated. It was like something died and the next logical step was to go our separate ways. This is how so many relationships end up, they just end. What we don’t realize is that the very thing that hurts us the most is withholding our love for that person. We confuse love with certain expectations and if those expectations are not being met, well, how could that be love? Right?

The thing about expectation is it’s all about us and as human beings it is only natural to experience it. The trick is when you feel yourself getting angry or tense, stop to look at it. Where is it coming from and why? You can even go the next step and share the experience with someone. You will be surprised as to how much unfolds in a conversation through the process of communication. This is how fear and anxiety from not getting what you expect can transform into understanding, peace, and ultimately love.

This is how my ex-fiance and I have kept our love alive. What an amazing feeling it is know we will always have this love. It starts here with me and you and all of our personal relationships. If we can master the art of keeping love alive at the personal level, imagine what is possible at the global level?

Life Coach, Pearl Lee Schroy, Ph.D., shares about her personal struggle with her bipolar mother

For some, going home to visit family is a welcome, loving even healing experience to look forward to. For others, like myself, going home begins with the sense of a welcoming experience that quickly turns into a battlefield loaded with triggers. The way I see it, I have two options: either get shot down by all the traumatic memories and emotional hostility or take it on as my training ground as a life coach.

The following is an excerpt from a journal entry I wrote about 8 months ago during my last visit home:

“…This morning, my mother was triggered into an episode and I remembered why it can sometimes be so difficult to come home.The last thing I want to do is fall into the role of playing victim. Indeed, my question is how can I transcend the pain and not dwell in the sadness of the situation? I’m not really sure how many experiences could hurt more than the experience of being harshly judged and rejected by my own mother. I noticed as my chest became really tight and my whole body went numb. I tried to become a filter through which her force could just pass through with no resistance. When she enters that place, I watch her soul disappear, it’s as if a demon has resurrected her corpse. Who is this woman? I ask. She’s my mother. Yet I have no idea who she is. And I see she has no idea who I am. All she knows in the fiery moment is that I am her enemy so she goes into attack mode.

I feel myself disconnecting. Tears run down my face as she continues to scream at me. I call my father because I’m desperate to make it stop. In the past, I would’ve yelled back but who I am now refuses to battle and knows it would be futile. Only peace. That’s what I must bring into the space. My father lovingly reminds me that it’s her disease, not her. I pass the phone to her and she begins yelling and then changes the subject rapidly to how she needs a new music CD to listen to in the mornings, Al Green. She laughs for a second. Her sentences become incoherent. Her thoughts are fragmented and the anger begins to fragment as well.

Finally, she returns to herself and she sees my tears. She apologizes. She tells me that she loves me and I tell her I love her too. Meanwhile, all I really want to do is get on a plane and fly back to my home in Colorado that, probably by no accident, happens to be thousands of miles away.

I watch my thoughts take on the old unconscious, conditioned patterns, of not being enough, fear of all the hurtful things that she said being true, full disempowerment in my frustration of not being able to help her heal. I’m a joke, what kind of a doctor, what kind of coach am I?”

The human kind, I remind myself. I come back to the question, “How can I transcend the pain? How can I transcend the self-destructive patterns? All I want to do is run.”

This time, I’m not running. This time, I’m not surrendering to the machine created in the wake of some disease. If there is to be any hope at all, for me, and for others like me, I must rise to the challenge of reinventing myself so that I can love in the wrath of a violent storm.

I know there are many others, like myself, who are faced with the challenge of having relatives who have been diagnosed with psychiatric conditions. While it’s not easy to create and maintain healthy, loving relationships with those relatives, it is possible. The trick is to believe in the possibility and never give up. While my mother still relapses from time to time, I could write an entire book describing the leaps and bounds she has made over the years and continues to do so.

My family is living proof that there is hope. And my heart grows larger every time I choose to rise to the challenge.

If you have a story or an experience you’d like to share on this topic, I’d love to hear it.

May 30-31, 2009

I am very excited to be participating as a female coach in this upcoming Red Pill Weekend. The Red Pill is Colorado’s version of The Authentic Man Program. This will be my first time working with who I know to be an amazing team of transformational life and relationship coaches. After getting a taste of the work in the training session this past monday, I’m seeing the potential for masculine/feminine dynamics in our society to be taken to a whole new level. For more information, click below:

www.redpillweekend.com

www.authenticmanprogram.com