Of course, the worst part wasn't that it happened, but that you KNEW you shouldn't have done it in the first place... but you did it anyway.

And finally:

Have you ever dated a great guy for a long time... I'm talking about six months, twelve months, or even longer... and it was getting to the point where you needed to have "the talk" with him. But when you tried to bring up the topic of having a relationship and making a bigger commitment, his eyes just glazed over... and then he became distant from you... and the relationship ended soon after?

You were trying to get CLOSER to him, and somehow he kept moving farther AWAY from you.

I'm guessing that when one of these things happened, your girlfriends said things like:

"He's just a jerk, forget about him".

Or they said: "He doesn't see the mistake he's making or what he'll be missing". But he never seemed to see these mistakes... or even miss you.

And the worst part of all: You kept thinking about it.

In fact, it really GOT TO YOU. And I'll bet the REASON why it got to you is because you worried that it might have been something to do with YOU (and not just because he was a total jerk).

In fact, TO THIS DAY you still have the feeling that YOU may have done something wrong, and that you may have CAUSED some of the problems in the first place... and if you would have known the RIGHT thing to do, things would have turned out differently...

Unfortunately, the bad news is that you're probably right.

Chances are you DID have something to do with it, and things probably WOULD have turned out differently if you would have known how to deal with the situation.

You COULD have done something about it... if only you had known WHAT to do...

how to get "Mr Right"

I'd like to ask you a few questions. Be open and honest with yourself as you answer them...

Have you ever met a guy who seemed to be "Mr. Right", but after getting to know him better you could tell that he just didn't feel that same level of "connection" you felt?

You were attracted to him, but he just wasn't into you the same way you were into him?

In your mind, you could sense what a great guy he was, and that, somewhere deep inside, you both shared this strong "chemistry" that made you feel close and comfortable. But for some reason he didn't want to truly connect with you.

Another one...

Have you ever slept with a guy very quickly after meeting him, but as it started to happen you got that sinking feeling in your stomach? You knew it was a mistake, but you did it anyway. And then the thing you KNEW would happen actually happened: He unexplainably disappeared from your life. Honestly, have you ever had this happen?

Anger

Anger may be a (physiological and psychological) response to a perceived threat to self or important others, present, past, or future. The threat may appear to be real, discussed, or imagined.

Anger is often a response to the perception of threat due to a physical conflict, injustice, negligence, humiliation, or betrayal, among other contentions. The expression of anger can be through active or passive behaviors. In the case of "active" emotion, the angry person "lashes out" verbally or physically at an intended target. When anger is a "passive" emotion, it is characterized by silent sulking, passive-aggressive behavior (hostility), and tension.

Humans often experience anger empathetically: for example, after reading an article about a person experiencing racism, one may experience anger, even though she/he is not the actual victim.

Anger is usually magnified and extended in time when a cognitive decision is made about the intent of the individual (or organization or object) interpreted as inflicting the pain. In other words, if one decides the pain infliction was intentional or deliberate, the emotion is usually more intense.

Biology of love

Throughout history, philosophy and religion have done the most speculation on the phenomenon of love. In the last century, the science of psychology has written a great deal on the subject. In recent years, the sciences of evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology, anthropology, neuroscience, and biology have added to the understanding of the nature and function of love.

Biology of love

Biological models of sex tend to view love as a mammalian drive,^{[citation needed]} much like hunger or thirst. Helen Fisher, a leading expert in the topic of love, divides the experience of love into three partly-overlapping stages: lust, attraction, and attachment. Lust exposes people to others, romantic attraction encourages people to focus their energy on mating, and attachment involves tolerating the spouse long enough to rear a child into infancy.

Lust is the initial passionate sexual desire that promotes mating, and involves the increased release of chemicals such as testosterone and estrogen. These effects rarely last more than a few weeks or months. Attraction is the more individualized and romantic desire for a specific candidate for mating, which develops out of lust as commitment to an individual mate forms. Recent studies in neuroscience have indicated that as people fall in love, the brain consistently releases a certain set of chemicals, including dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin, which act similar to amphetamines, stimulating the brain's pleasure center and leading to side-effects such as an increased heart rate, loss of appetite and sleep, and an intense feeling of excitement. Research has indicated that this stage generally lasts from one and a half to three years.^[7]

Since the lust and attraction stages are both considered temporary, a third stage is needed to account for long-term relationships. Attachment is the bonding which promotes relationships that last for many years, and even decades. Attachment is generally based on commitments such as marriage and children, or on mutual friendship based on things like shared interests. It has been linked to higher levels of the chemicals oxytocin and vasopressin than short-term relationships have.^[7]

In 2005, Italian scientists at Pavia University found that a protein molecule known as the nerve growth factor (NGF) has high levels when people first fall in love, but these levels return to as they were after one year. Specifically, four neurotrophin levels, i.e. NGF, BDNF, NT-3, and NT-4, of 58 subjects who had recently fallen in love were compared with levels in a control group who were either single or already engaged in a long-term relationship. The results showed that NGF levels were significantly higher in the subjects in love than as compared to either of the control groups.^[8]

Ambivalence

Ambivalence is a state of having emotions in contradiction, when those emotions are related to the same object, idea or person (for example, feeling both love and hatred for someone or something). The term is also commonly used to refer to situations where 'mixed feelings' of a more general sort are experienced or where a person feels uncertainty or indecisiveness concerning something.

In psychoanalytic terminology, however, a more refined definition applies: the term (introduced into the discipline by Bleuler in 1911), refers to an underlying emotional attitude in which the co-existing contradictory impulses (usually love and hate) derive from a common source and are thus held to be interdependent. Moreover, when the term is used in this psychoanalytic sense it would not usually be expected that the person embodying this 'ambivalence' would actually feel both of the two contradictory emotions as such: except in obsessional neurosis, which sees both sides being more or less 'balanced' in consciousness, one or other of the conflicting sides is usually repressed. (Thus, for example, an analysand's 'love' for his father might be quite consciously experienced and openly expressed – while his 'hate' for the same object might be heavily repressed and only indirectly expressed, and thus only revealed in analysis).

Another relevant distinction is that whereas the psychoanalytic notion of 'ambivalence' sees it as engendered by all neurotic conflict, a person's everyday 'mixed feelings' may easily be based on a quite realistic assessment of the imperfect nature of the thing being considered

Love Quote of the Day:
"Life is not merely a series of meaningless accidents or coincidences, but rather it's a tapestry of events that culminate in an exquisite, sublime plan." --Source Unknown

Acceptance (EMOTION) 250507

Psychology
Emotions

Acceptance
Affection
Ambivalence
Anger
Boredom
Compassion
Doubt
Despair
Disgust
Empathy
Envy
Embarrassment
Excitement
Fear
Frustration
Guilt
Gratitude
Grief
Happiness
Hate
Hope
Horror
Hostility
Homesickness
Jealousy
Loneliness
Love
Pity
Pleasure
Rage
Regret
Remorse
Sadness
Shame
Suffering
Surprise
Sympathy
Wrath
v • d • e

In psychology the terms affection and affective are of great importance. As all intellectual phenomena have by experimentalists been reduced to sensation, so all emotion has been and is regarded as reducible to simple mental affection, the element of which all emotional manifestations are ultimately composed. The nature of this element is a problem which has been provisionally, but not conclusively, solved by many psychologists; the method is necessarily experimental, and all experiments on feeling are peculiarly difficult. The solutions proposed are two. In the first, all affection phenomena are primarily divisible into those which are pleasurable and those which are the reverse. The main objections to this are that it does not explain the infinite variety of phenomena, and that it disregards the distinction which most philosophers admit between higher and lower pleasures. The second solution is that every sensation has its specific affective quality, though by reason of the poverty of language many of these have no name. W. Wundt, Outlines of Psychology (trans. C. H. Judd, Leipzig, 1897), maintains that we may group under three main affective directions, each with its negative, all the infinite varieties in question; these are (a) pleasure, or rather pleasantness, and displeasure, (b) tension and relaxation, (c) excitement and depression. These two views are antithetic and no solution has been discovered.

American psychologist Henry Murray (1893–1988) developed a theory of personality that was organized in terms of motives, presses, and needs. According to Murray, these psychogenic needs function mostly on the unconscious level, but play a major role in our personality. Murrary classified five affection needs:

1. Affiliation: Spending time with other people.
2. Nurturance: Taking care of another person.
3. Play: Having fun with others.
4. Rejection: Rejecting other people.
5. Succorance: Being helped or protected by others

Two obvious methods of experiment on affection have been tried:

1. The first, introduced by A. Mosso, the Italian psychologist, consists in recording the physical phenomena which are observed to accompany modifications of the affective consciousness. Thus it is found that the action of the heart is accelerated by pleasant, and retarded by unpleasant, stimuli; again, changes of weight and volume are found to accompany modifications of affection—and so on. Apart altogether from the facts that this investigation is still in its infancy and that the conditions of experiment are insufficiently understood, its ultimate success is rendered highly problematical by the essential fact that real scientific results can be achieved only by data recorded in connection with a perfectly normal subject; a conscious or interested subject introduces variable factors which are probably incalculable.
2. The second is Fechner's method; it consists of recording the changes in feeling-tone produced in a subject by bringing him in contact with a series of conditions, objects or stimuli graduated according to a scientific plan and presented singly in pairs or in groups. The result is a comparative table of likes and dislikes.

Mention should also be made of a third method which has hardly yet been tried, namely, that of endeavouring to isolate one of the three directions by the method of suggestion or even hypnotic trance observations.