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Love is a Secondary Emotion

Check, check, check, check. Welcome, everybody. Hold on just a sec.

[Soundbite of "What's Love Got to Do with It?" by Tina Turner]

So I just gave you some Tina and we're going to talk about love and the seven domains. And we're going to talk about the seven domains of love. Love, it is just awful that in the English language, we don't have enough words that specifically guide us for the kinds of love. So when we're talking about the seven domains of love, are we talking about erotic love? Are we talking about maternal love? Are we talking about the love for a sibling or a very good friend? Are we talking about the love of mankind? What are we talking about?

In fact, love is a secondary emotion. Maybe we'll call it secondhand, just like Tina does. Okay? It's a secondhand emotion. The animated movie "Inside Out" was a powerful video that I think every parent and every kid should watch where an eight-year-old girl is living her life having moved from her favorite place to a new place, which is San Francisco, where she doesn't have any friends, but what you get chance is to watch her primary emotions play on a keyboard.

So they are playing together to create the emotional life of this child who's having a pretty hard time.

This movie was made by neurobiologists. Neurobiologists and neuropsychologists helped make this movie. And so you get a chance to see how the inner life of a child is expressed in her outer life. So those four that were in this movie, joy, fear, anger, and disgust are primary emotions. They immediately ask for a response and you don't have much control over it. In this case of the movie, there were four, but some smart people have really considered that maybe there are more than that of the primary emotions. Primary emotions from people who study this, but might say that there are eight primary emotions. In the movie "Inside Out" there were four, just because so many characters inside this little girl's brain playing at the piano of her emotional life was going to be too many if it was more than four.

But they are:

• Anger
• Fear
• Sadness
• Disgust
• Surprise
• Anticipation
• Trust
• Joy

Love isn't one of them. So where does love come into it? Well, this is where love is a secondary emotion. Love is an emotion that combines often two of the primary emotions. So love is an emotion, but you often have to figure out what its manifestation is. So love might make you feel trust. I hope it does. The love of a child might make you feel joy. Love might help you feel the anticipation of being with or seeing your loved one. Love in its anger form might lead to sadness, fear, or anger. So love is a secondary emotion. Meaning primary emotions have been characterized by emotions that give you an immediate physiologic response that tends to be evolutionarily advantageous.

So if something is scary, you feel afraid and you run. If something is disgusting, then you go, "Eww," and it happens immediately. Love is not a primary emotion. Although many of us feel that love is the primary emotion in our lives, it's not. Joy, fear, anger, disgust, all those have reasons to happen immediately. You don't even think about it. You feel it. And then you have to process it.

Love, or Lack-thereof, Can Make You Physically Sick

The opposite of love is hate. And that gets right into fear and anger. And certainly hate can make you sick. We have many, many reasons to believe that forgiveness . . . If you hate someone, it makes your blood pressure go up. It makes your cortisol level go up. It makes all kinds of things that make you sick and make you at increased risk of getting infections and cancer more activated in your body. So the alternative of love you can say is hate, but hate or fear. Hate might be part of fear—which is a primary emotion—is really bad for you.

Also, love is something that when it's expressed in a way that you can receive makes your blood pressure go down, it makes your heartbeat go down. It makes your immune system work better and it makes you feel better all over. It makes you feel warm and tingly—love does—when it's expressed in a way that you can appreciate.

So what's love, but a secondhand emotion? It is a pretty important secondary emotion to us physically. Love in its manifestations can make you feel much better. Erotic love makes you kind of high. And it can be disrupting when it's part of your, or all of your life. The absence of love or hate can make you sick. And something happening to a loved one can make you so distressed it can make you sick.

The Meaning of 'Love'

Here's a little story—

Someone very, very dear to me was very sick and some serious things needed to be done. I was so upset about it as we were processing exactly what we were going to do that I broke out in shingles. So this is a grownup woman who's used to doing difficult things, and I've done a lot of difficult things in my life, but this particular thing, because it was happening to someone I love was so distressing that my immune system was suppressed. The shingles virus, which is the same virus that causes chickenpox was in my body from the time I had chicken pox, when I was six. It realized that my immune system was suppressed and it popped out in the form of a very large outbreak of shingles on my largest dermatomes. The dermatome is the neurologic spread that comes from your spine around your skin. My largest dermatome is on my rear end. Let me tell you, it was no fun. That's what love can do to you.

I think it's important to have the words for your feelings so that you can actually begin to talk to people about them. This is particularly important with children, as they begin to work on their feelings and helping children come to some realization, give a word to how they're feeling so that you can talk to them about it. Now we use the word love as an emotional word all the time. I love pizza and I love the color blue, and I love my husband, and I love my kid. Needless to say, those love that we're using the same word as an active verb, but they all really mean something different. And we are primarily pretty crippled in English by not having enough words for the different kinds of emotions.

So I'm going to call out to my language specialist, Chloé, who's my producer.

 

Dr. Jones: Chloé, do you speak any other languages?

°ä³ó±ô´Çé: I do. I speak Vietnamese.

Dr. Jones: So, give me some words, so, speak them to me. Come on, speak it to me, give it to me, give it to me. Speak me some words of love in Vietnamese. Clear your throat. Sit up straight.

°ä³ó±ô´Çé: What's interesting though, is there are two types of words that I guess communicate love back to English. We want to play the translation game. And for as long as I can remember, whenever I watch Vietnamese TV shows, they always distinguish between love from a parent versus love that you feel for a significant other. So it's pretty much every other kind of love and then the love you feel for a significant partner, right? I've always been able to distinguish, and I don't know what's changed, but within the last couple of years, they've intermixed the two and they only use the one word now. It's called yêu. It's actually really sad. It sounds really odd in English, right?

Dr. Jones: Oh no. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Stop, stop, stop. Stop. Let's have a quick moment of silence. Chloé, I want you to say this word that means love in Vietnamese.

°ä³ó±ô´Çé: ³Ûê³Ü.

Dr. Jones: ³Ûê³Ü.

°ä³ó±ô´Çé: I thought, at least for as long as I can remember, it was love that you felt for significant romantic partner, but lately I don't know why. I don't know what's changed in the culture or in the way that people produce TV shows now, but they've intermixed the two. So now you say that to your friend and your dog and your mom and your dad. I don't know why. Because I've grown up with the two distinguishing forms of love, I guess, in the languages, it's a bit weird to me.

Dr. Jones: Do you think that's the westernization of cultures? Because I don't know any other . . . I know romantic languages and I don't know them that well. I'm not as fluent, emotionally fluent. So we can be linguistically fluent in Spanish and not be emotionally fluent. We could be linguistically fluent in Vietnamese, potentially and not emotionally fluent, not able to distinguish that there really are two words for love. And one is the love of a family of a child or that familial love. And then there's the love of the other like a friend, but romantic love or the love of your spouse is different from the love of your friend.

°ä³ó±ô´Çé: Right. You know romantic love is yêu and every other kind of love that you feel, whether it be your parent or a friend or you know, a little pet or your pencil is thÆ°Æ¡ng.

Dr. Jones: °Õ³óÆ°Æ¡²Ô²µ.

°ä³ó±ô´Çé: °Õ³óÆ°Æ¡²Ô²µ. There's a T. It could be a D, I don't know.

Dr. Jones: °Õ³óÆ°Æ¡²Ô²µ.

°ä³ó±ô´Çé: ThÆ°Æ¡ng, yeah.

Dr. Jones: It's almost like a click word.

°ä³ó±ô´Çé: But yeah, so that thÆ°Æ¡ng is the word that you use for all the other kinds of love. But now when I watch TV shows, they've erased that word and they just use yêu now and I'm like, hmm, okay. That's a little bit odd to me.

Dr. Jones: Well, I think that's important. That's an important transition. When I was growing up, my parents told us that we shouldn't use the word love lightly. So when I love pizza or I love that color, I was reminded that like was the better word here. Not love because love was such a powerful word. And it's the only word we had that we should save it. So for those things which had an emotional content, now I can get emotional about pizza, but not really.

°ä³ó±ô´Çé: To the point where you love it?

Dr. Jones: Yeah, yeah. No, I like pizza.

°ä³ó±ô´Çé: There you go.

Dr. Jones: People now use love all the time. I love that you said that. Comes as an automatic response to a text.

°ä³ó±ô´Çé: I love that you said that?

Dr. Jones: I love that you said that. I love that you said that. Do you really feel love? Do you really feel a combination? Do you feel the combination of trust and joy or is it just this little thing? So the word love has been cheapened. My parents specifically would say, "No, you don't really love pizza. You like pizza. You enjoy pizza. Pizza is tasty, but you don't love pizza."

°ä³ó±ô´Çé: That's a good way to look at it.

Committing Financial Infidelity

Well, it's this business of having not enough words. When there aren't enough words, it's an opportunity for a neologism, which is a neologism, any new neologism meaning word, it would be time, I think, for some new words. So I have a problem and that is, I love my car. Most people would say that's an immature response, but a lot of people love their cars. And in fact, I've always loved my cars and I've almost had what you might call unnatural relationships with my cars. I've only had five cars and my first car, when it died, I actually held a wake with flowers and people came over and I told stories about my first car. So you'd say, well, okay, you love your car, but I now want to talk a little bit about finances and financial infidelity. It's a topic that came up today in the news. And actually financial infidelity is where you are pair bonded with somebody, and you make the assumptions that you share your life with them and you discuss important financial decisions with them.

So once upon a time, about 13 and a half years ago, I went looking for a new car and I knew what I wanted. I went to the car dealership, which shall be unnamed, but it was the car I wanted, was a beautiful color. This car company almost never makes cars in colors. It was cushy because I tried one out and I walked to the car dealership and said, "I want this car in this color," and he points one out in the parking lot. And I said, "Okay," and I pull out my checkbook and I am ready to write a check for the entire amount of this luxury car. So I'm starting to write the amount and he's looking at me and he says, "Mrs. Jones, what does Mr. Jones think about your choice?"

And I went, "My Mr. Jones's primary means of transportation is a bicycle and if I ask him about this, we will not be buying this car. So why don't we just wrap this up? Here's your check and you give me the car."

I was really upset because I thought maybe he was dissing my ability as a woman to buy a car on my own. And now I think maybe he was thinking I was committing financial adultery. I was making decisions without my partner. And it turns out that I think we do that all the time. All my cars I have bought without consulting my husband. And in fact, a lot of things I do . . . for women who have their very own checkbook and their bank account, they may do a lot of things that they don't discuss with their partner in life, their love partner. This has been called financial infidelity.

So financial truthfulness, financial monogamy means that you and your lifelong mate make decisions together. Except when it comes to my cars that I love, I practice monogamy, but I don't talk to my partner—my husband—about that. And it's been 13 and a half years, I think I'm about to do it again. So you'd think I would feel awful. You think that this infidelity would make me feel uneasy, but I love my cars. So how did my cars make me feel? Well, my cars make me feel safe. My cars make me feel like I'm free and my car has history in it.

Love of Place Can Make You Feel 'At Home'

For many people, they have the very same feelings about place and this might be love of a place. Some people might call it love of the environment or of a home. We don't really think that much about how love and the environment might work together. But in fact, we have often a very powerful attachment to place. And there is a neologism, a new word that's called solastalgia, S-O-L-A-S-T-A-L-G-I-A, solastalgia. And it means being homesick for a place or the way the place was in the past.

So, we have a romantic relationship and emotional relationship with place. It could be our forest. It could be our garden. It could be the home that we grew up in. It might be a place that we vacation, but when that place changes and it isn't what it used to be anymore, we are homesick. We could be there, but we're homesick for the place it used to be.

That emotional word is a made up word that was made up maybe 20 years ago called solastalgia. And that's the homesickness or the feeling of loss of a place that we loved, even when we're there, because that place has changed. I think that people are feeling that certainly right now in the time of, oh, big floods and big forest fires. They're going to be places, homes, parks, lakes, places that were very beloved to people where they used to go to walk and find peace where they won't ever be the same because they've been changed by fire.

I have a place that I've been going to for almost 50 years. When I first went there, it was my place of peace. When I was training and working a hundred hours a week, it was a place that I could go where it was always peaceful. Now there are so many people who visit this place that it's completely noisy and overcrowded. You bump into everybody. There's loud music. It's no longer peaceful. I really feel homesick when I'm there for that place, that isn't the way I remember it.

So the love of place can be a very powerful place. The kind of sanctuary that one feels when they're in a place or a home, as I say, or a garden or a park. It's often a place in nature where people feel just particularly calm. But when that changes permanently often, then one feels homesick for a place where you are, but it can't be that place anymore. I think as we're thinking of neologisms, and many new words for emotions of love, it's helpful to have new words that help us think about how we used to feel about a place and how it's not that way anymore.

Love Languages

In terms of thinking about words of love and how English doesn't have enough words for love, you know, we're told that French is the language of love and I'm not sure I really understand that. Well, I do understand that for a couple of reasons. Number one, back in medieval days, marriage was considered really a financial contract between two families. Love didn't have anything to do with it. So love was not part of the deal. It was two families consolidating their power, their money, or their land and making a match between a man and a woman. And in fact, marriages weren't commonly done between people of lower socioeconomic status. They would get together and they would be potentially monogamous, but it wasn't the marriage thing.

But in the Middle Ages, troubadours started singing the songs of romantic love and it had to do with the knights and chivalry, who would want to romance the king's wife, not necessarily sexually, but she was a woman of honor and he loved her and they sang these songs of love and spread the idea of romantic love throughout the French kingdom and actually throughout Europe because of these French troubadours. And at the time in Europe, many people spoke French and with the French troubadour singing these songs, it became kind of nice to think about romantic love. So that's one reason why people started thinking a long time ago that there's a language of love.

Of course, French is a very soft language. It's not a hard language like Russian or German. It's a kind of a soft, I would actually say it's kind of mushy, it's a mushy language. So it leads itself into conversations about love. In fact, Google did a search of what are the most common words that are sought for translation of European languages. And actually some of the most very common words asked to translate from one language to another is what is the French word for love and it's l'amour, so l'amour. Many people want that. They want to know about it. Italian is next. It turns out that nobody wants to hear the English language of love. That's because we're kind of stuck on not very love languages.

So, French is the language of love, but I think that is an incredibly Eurocentric perspective. If you ask people in Africa, Asia, and the polar areas, they have no clue whether French is the language of love. So it's a very Eurocentric perspective.

Having the words for love so that you can express them becomes particularly important. Some people just don't use the word "love" very often. And that was kind of the way I was raised, but in my husband's family, it was like, I don't think anybody uses that word. So they must have it as their private inside word. You know, they don't have it as an outside word. So if you don't necessarily use the word love in your family, there must be other ways of expressing love.

have been . . . it's a very famous book by Dr. Gary Chapman.

1. Words of affirmation
2. Acts of service
3. Quality time
4. Giving gifts
5. Physical touch

In some cultures, some of these will be more prominent in showing love if you're not using words than others. And in some persons they might do one or the other.

 

Dr. Jones: So, in your family, if the word yêu . . . did I say that right?

°ä³ó±ô´Çé: ³Ûê³Ü. It literally is just like the word when you say, "Eww," like that's gross. I know, it's weird to say it in that way, but that's how it is.

Dr. Jones: Vietnamese takes a very big brain because not only is it a sound language, it's a tonal language. So it's got two things going at once. So what if you're willing to share the love languages if you don't use the word in your family? How do you know that your parents love you?

°ä³ó±ô´Çé: I think of the five probably acts of service. Acts of service is probably going to take priority. It's always kind of like the thought that counts and then the action that supports that thought rather than the word itself.

Dr. Jones: How would someone let you know that they loved you?

°ä³ó±ô´Çé: Are we talking about family only?

Dr. Jones: Oh, well, you can share as much as you feel that you want to share on tape. Go for it, Chloé.

°ä³ó±ô´Çé: So my mother is a chef. She cooks a lot. And if I were to kind of pinpoint her one act of service that she uses to express her feelings and her emotions is through food. So she cooks as she cooks for the family. And she always cooks. She'll cook even if she's mad at you, even if she hates you, she'll cook because you're her family.

Because there'll be times where my parents would get into some sort of heated argument and then they won't talk to each other for a day, but she still cooks. There is still always food on the table for him. She won't eat with him. She won't sit at the table and eat with him, but she always makes sure that there's food for him when he needs the food. And same with me and my brother, we always have food. So that's my mother.

Dr. Jones: That's your mother.

°ä³ó±ô´Çé: And that's kind of how I've grown up too. Just because of the way that I was raised in the family that I grew up in, the words "I love you" don't really mean too much to me. I appreciate it. But I think like you mentioned earlier, we use that word, especially in English so often, and we associate it with so many things in our lives that it's almost kind of, like you said, it cheapens the meaning of it. So I would rather you do something meaningful for me rather than say those words and not really back it up with any action.

 

It's important if you have a relationship that's critical to you, whether it's your spouse or whether it's a brother or the sister, it's an important exercise to let them know what your love language is. And so an exercise that someone could try is, "I feel loved when you do this."

1. Write down on a card—pick three cards, your significant other gets three cards, and you have three cards—"I feel love when you do this." And then you say three things that let the other person that you feel loved when those things happen.
2. Swap cards because the other person may not know that what you're doing may not make any difference to them.

So if you give them gifts, well, that's good, but that doesn't mean anything to me. So, it's very helpful if you're going to be living with someone or someone's emotional language is important to you that you know how they feel loved. So I feel loved when you do this.

I think my husband and I did this, and I think it was when I cut his hair because he gets touch. So remember that physical touch is part of it. So he gets a physical touch and he also gets an act of service. And then he also gets words of affirmation like, "Oh, you are so cute with that haircut now." I feel loved when you do this, those things, because we really don't know what's inside someone's head.

The assumption that you do leads to a lot of sadness and doesn't ripen the sense of love that might happen in a relationship over time, or particularly if it's a new relationship. You know, you think that, gosh, if this guy really loved you, he would send you cards on Valentine's Day, or he would remember your birthday, or he would send you gifts.

None of those things my husband has ever done, but those were things that I thought were important to me. Then I had to reframe what was important to me by what were the ways he actually did. So that's the other side of the exercise is I show you that I love you by when I do this. Oh, I didn't know that meant that you loved me when you did that. Oh, okay. I guess I get it. So that kind of conversation, if people need to feel loved and they're not getting it in a way that they can use it leads for dismay that leads for a sense of loneliness in a relationship, and that can be really hard.

The Inability to Feel or Recognize Love

And for kids, you know, your mom shows you that she loves you by cooking for you. And of course, as you raise your kids, you say, you know, I wouldn't yell at you if I didn't love you. So that's a similar kinds of things because kids want affirmation. They want to feel love. And that gets to be a point, particularly in adolescent, where they don't want physical touch anymore, where that's embarrassing for them. So to be able to help your adolescent understand that you do love them and this is the way that you show that.

There's a great song that Willie Nelson sings, "You were always on my mind . . . "

[Soundbite of "You Were Always on My Mind" by Willie Nelson]

But the other person didn't know that this person always had them on their mind. So a mother always has their children on their mind, always. And the kid doesn't know that. The kid doesn't understand that being a mother, mother love means being totally overwhelmed by the dailiness of your concern for your children. Even when they're grown up, they are always on your mind. Kids don't get that. Maybe you can tell them, maybe they'll never get it until they have their own children.

What happens for people who cannot feel or recognize love? This is actually a relatively common problem and it's part of the spectrum called autism. Severely autistic children have a very difficult time, if not impossible for them to read love and the cues of love from their parents. They don't know how to express love to their parents.

On the spectrum of autism disorder is this inability to read other's emotions and express emotions appropriately on their own. They do feel the primary emotion. So the primary emotions are still intact. And that includes joy and fear and sadness and disgust. So they still have those primary emotions, but it's the subtle secondary emotions, which are often difficult for them to read. They don't know when someone's expressing love. They are uncomfortable with closeness. They don't know how to express love for another. And raising an autistic child becomes very hard for a parent who really needs the love language from their child to continue the extremely demanding work of child-rearing.

You need your child to smile at you. You need your child to reach out and touch you. You need your child to be emotionally connected with you. Autistic children have a very hard time reading love and expressing love. And as adults, it becomes very important in their social lives to have to help them learn some cues because it doesn't come automatically. So love is a secondary emotion, but it's extremely important in our interactions with others. It helps us bond and trust with each other. And in the condition of autism, that becomes really difficult.

Loving Yourself

When you love someone like a child who can't express that love in return, one seeks perhaps a higher kind of love or another reason, perhaps, to try to find love for this person who can't love you back. And that's where the powerful nature of spiritual love can be so helpful in people who are experiencing difficult circumstances, loss of love, loss of a person, loss of a place.

That concept of being able to call in your own heart to a higher kind of love becomes very important. Your spiritual life is one which you can carry with you. You can't always carry with you the person of your love, the place of your love, the child of your love, but that powerful sense of belonging to something bigger, the love of a God, love of your God, or the love of a higher power or knowing that you are part of a much larger consciousness or purpose that creates a sense of love and being, of love and belonging is something that's very important for your wellbeing.

Every single culture of every human person on this planet has some history of spirituality. So we must have been designed this way to have a sense of spiritual belonging, a sense of a higher power, something that is good for you because we evolved. Either we were created by our maker to feel love of God, or we evolved in a way to create a sense of love.

The sense of love that one can create from a higher being or from a cosmic togetherness is something that also can lower your blood pressure. It can improve your sense of wellbeing. It can lower your chances of cancer and help your immune system.

All the aspects of spirituality that we've discussed over all the seven domains are important in your wellness. And the most important thing is that you can take it with you wherever you go. With some practice, you can call it up whenever you need it. So it may take some practice. You may have to be still for a while and listen to that quiet voice that says you are loved, you belong, you're part of something bigger because those things are very important for your overall sense of wellbeing.

Love is the Answer

So, there we have it. We've been through the seven domains of love and love and seven domains. I want to thank everybody who spent some time with us and you can join us wherever you get your podcasts or come to our website at . Remember, we have other podcasts that you may really enjoy, including all about men with our wonderful podcast on "Who Cares About Men's Health?" and all about life in the hospital with "Clinical," and you can get those wherever you get your podcasts.

So as we leave, I'm going to give you a little haiku and it's called, "What's in a Word."

 

What is in a word?
Sleepless nights with babe in arms
Love is the answer

 

Take care. Bye-bye.