Founder’s Page I am often asked how the Love-Life Workshop came to be an interest of mine. I can give the most meaningful answer to this question by first telling a short love story. I met my wife Victoria in 1987 when I was thirty–four. I married her in 1994 when I was forty-one. Before 1987 I was consumed with a passion for my career, which I only later learned was excessive. I had blocked out most of my need for love and companionship by overworking and undervaluing my love-life. There was simply no room for love in my life at that time. Looking back, I can remember periods of loneliness and disappointment which I never allowed to linger very long, never mind understand.  I believed that love was just not as important as professional success and I did not have a conception of how the two could co-exist in the same period of time. It was work or love, one had to overpower the other. So I regrettably put off love for some distant other time.

As in any good love story, there is always a subplot. When I met my future wife, my resistance to love became more visible to me. I was finished with the rigors of graduate school and I was making enough money to begin relaxing and enjoying my life again. Remember I met Victoria in 1987 yet I married her in 1994. Looking back, I remember six of those seven years as time I spent unprepared for what was being offered to me. If you ask me did I know she’d be the one, I’ll tell you that I knew the first time I looked into Victoria’s eyes that she would be my wife. Although along with this intuitive knowledge came the resistance I had lived with years before. I was still not ready for love, but why?

I had achieved many of the accomplishments I had earlier set out for myself. My
education and career had reached most of the goals I had hoped for. Why couldn’t I just acknowledge that I had met my life partner and it was time to act on the love that was trying to emerge? At that time, I began to recognize my emotional insistence on being alone. Although I dated often and started and ended relationships throughout this period, I gravitated toward people I did not really love to cope with the fact that I did not have Victoria in my life. Victoria and I maintained a painful curiosity with one another during these six years. Between relationships, we had both tried to date each other with disastrous consequences. We now look back on this period with humor and enjoy telling our new and old friends the comedy in these experiences. Yet we both know that at the time it was more than upsetting. We simply could not get along. Our dates became a series of experiences where one or the other of us jeopardized the date in one way or another. One of us either drank too much, or over-reacted too much, or simply rationalized his or her anxiety at the prospect of being together too much. The outcome was that we remained in some kind of distant contact with occasional hurtful attempts to revisit the possibility of being together.

In the meantime she had had disappointing relationships as I did. We both felt that what we really wanted neither of us could allow ourselves to have. I learned in that six year period that unresolved family of origin experiences were at the heart of my difficulty permitting true love to enter my life. An adulthood dependency upon my mother remained a powerful yet unconscious barrier to consummating my love-life with Victoria. Eventually I recognized that I needed to begin the emotional process of letting-go so that I could truly start and retain my own love-life. My mother and I had grown too close and too dependent upon one another. When my psychological work in this area progressed, the relationship between my parents improved and I was freer to invite Victoria into a committed love relationship. I am truly thankful that she was still available at the time. There could have been stronger regrets at the end of this story had she moved on to another relationship, and I had not understood the emotional barriers in my love-life.

Consequently, the importance of being receptive to love in adulthood has become a professional focus of mine. I draw upon these experiences in my own love-life to try to understand the emotional barriers that can exist when dating and in a love relationship. The fact that we can feel unprepared for and not receptive to love when it emerges is personally tragic to all who have this experience. Looking back, I now know what I could have done to avoid spending so much time at odds with my heart. Answering this type of question for others is the true motivation for the Love-Life Workshop. The one thing I really needed at this earlier time in my life was more consciousness of my love-life. I was struggling against the psychological complications in my love relationships with little or no reflection on what was really happening. I simply lived out the disappointing patterns that I had unconsciously established. Never questioning what was familiar, never wondering whether I could do something different. This absence of consciousness led to repeated disappointments and delay, which I unfortunately learned little from. I would now like to offer people interested in improving their love-lives, an opportunity to reflect and become conscious of their love-life psychology so that disappointments become opportunities to learn, not just repeated experiences of frustration and unhappiness.

Learning from our successes and failures, and helping others with what we have learned, there is nothing better in this life. Thank you for the opportunity to help you with your love-life. 

Dr. Thomas Jordan
Founder, Love-Life Workshops

Click here to view Dr. Jordan’s Professional Statement.