Love and Curiosity

An article popped out at me from the NY Times. Catherine Pearson writes about a new book, How to Feel Loved. Drs. Lyubomirsky and Reis, study happiness and close relationships. They propose that one of the most important paths to happiness is to feel loved. Sounds good, but how do you do that?

Minnie Pearl, a comedienne famous from her performances at the Grand Ole Opry answered that question when she told about advice she got before her first appearance: “Love ’em and they’ll love you back.” The researchers’ book says basically the same thing and that’s where curiosity comes in.

My new book starts with curiosity because it’s the engine that drives us to learn what we don’t know. When it points towards what we don’t know about the other person it motivates us to learn more. That’s what makes them feel loved. Not only does a genuine interest make them feel loved, but learning about the other person also makes us feel empathy, which naturally leads to positive feelings. That brings us full circle. Curiosity leads to empathy, which leads to our own positive feelings, and they make the other person happy! Well, there’s one more step. “Love ‘em and they’ll love you back.” A happy client will also develop a trusting and positive alliance with their therapist.

Curiosity also has another important property. It is constantly looking for what we don’t know, which means it is exquisitely sensitive to what has been left out, what we still don’t know. The authors of How to Feel Loved point out that part of showing a genuine interest is going beyond the first answer and asking follow-up questions. Curiosity is what tells us where to inquire further.

Perhaps you have guessed where I’m going next. Yes, accurate empathy means using your curiosity to see what is missing and constantly asking follow-up questions to keep deepening our empathic understanding. I define it as “an ever-deepening, emotionally engaged understanding of the other person’s experience.”

The researchers have some wisdom for clients and others who want to elicit love from others. What they offer is a classic example of how old schemas are frozen in time and that it takes new, surprising information to collide with old beliefs and lead to change.

Typically people don’t think of loving others so they will be loved back. Instead, the authors point out that the usual instinctive solutions are first, to try to fix oneself, to be more perfect, attractive, etc. But that doesn’t work because the other person is more interested in what you think of them! They don’t care as much about your less-than-perfect characteristics unless they sense that you, yourself, judge them as failures.

The second maladaptive approach is to try to fix the other. “If you loved me, then you would…” That doesn’t work because only small children have a right to be loved. Adults need to earn it by doing their part and participating in the relationship in ways like taking an interest in the other.

The two maladaptive approaches are usually learned early and held tightly because of their high survival value, especially when being loved was not something the child could count on. Learning to give away love by taking an interest in the other is counterintuitive from a young point of view. Children naturally think, “I want to receive love because I am good and because you owe it to me.” The shocking truth is that the simple and natural act of following curiosity is a major factor in bringing adult love, and, according to the researchers, a big part of happiness.

In my last post on Lucid Therapy, I listed three steps for changing old patterns. The first is to activate the old pattern. Here, just talking about needing love will probably activate the old yearning. Next, there has to be a new pattern available. In this case, we can draw from our own playbook in teaching clients a social version of how to seek accurate empathy. Calling on one’s natural curiosity and focusing on the other are often not so hard to learn. These skills may simply be adapted from other contexts in the client’s life. The surprising revelation is that giving our interest (not our advice) is how to give love. The third step is delivery of new, disconfirming information to the subcortical brain structures where the critical schemas reside. The element of surprise along with new experience will likely lead to a collision and the prediction error that opens the door for the new information to rewrite the old schema.

In this particular case, there are two helpful advantages to make our work and our client’s easier. First, curiosity is a built in drive, so motivation is not so much of a problem. Second, as long as the partner is appropriately chosen, the results are immediately pleasurable. That’s rewarding and leads to wanting to do more of the same. How often does it happen that all the elements of what is therapeutic happen to align with how we humans are naturally built?

Jeffery Smith MD

My new book, How Psychotherapy Works: Navigating the Therapeutic Space with Confidence is now available at a pre-publication discount from Routledge, the publisher. An Audio Book is due July 17, next year, 2027.