Why do different relationships so often bring us to surprisingly familiar emotional places? Why can we understand our relationship patterns clearly, and still find ourselves repeating them? How can we love someone deeply yet struggle to create intimacy with them? And what does it mean to be loved—and to love another person—for who they actually are?A
From our earliest experiences of loving and being loved, each of us develops powerful expectations about how love works. These expectations shape whom we are drawn to, what feels like love, what makes us feel secure or anxious, what we allow another person to see, and what we are able to see in them.
In this five-week course, we will explore these hidden love templates, how they become active in our relationships, and how they can change through new emotional experience. We will then make an important distinction between love and intimacy, exploring how a person can be deeply loved and still remain profoundly unknown. Finally, we will consider one of the deepest possibilities in human relationship: becoming able to know and love another person as they actually are, while allowing ourselves to be known and loved in the same way.
The course will draw upon Jungian psychology and the work of C. G. Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, while speaking directly to the experience of anyone who has ever loved, longed for love, or wondered why love takes the forms it does.
Session 1 — Why Love Has a Familiar Feeling: Discovering Our Love Template
Session 2 — Ten Love Templates: Discovering How We Learned to Love and Be Loved
Session 3 — Why Understanding Ourselves May Still Leave Us Unchanged
Session 4 — Love Is Not Intimacy: A Difference That Changes How We Understand Relationships
Session 5 — To Be Loved for Who You Actually Are—and to Love Another in the Same Way
5 consecutive Mondays, 7:00 – 8:30 pm Eastern Time, USA, online via Zoom.
