Most experts agree that love has three major components. Psychologist Robert Sternberg calls it the love triad, anchored by passion, , and commitment. Though all three are necessary for consummate love, they take on particular importance at specific stages of relationships.

Passion forges emotional bonds but wanes somewhat in the development of genuine intimacy. That’s a good thing. When passion is strong, we’re prone to . It may be impossible to perceive with any accuracy the depth and complexity of intimate partners when passion is high.

"Passion" refers to intensity and depth of feeling. The more intense and longer-lasting the exchange of emotions between two people, the stronger the bond grows. Because it burns at such a high level, the passionate flame is self-consuming and relatively short-lived in most relationships. There’s a Native American saying: “If you put a pea in a pot every time you make love in the first year of , and take a pea out every time you make love after that, you’ll never empty the pot.” In successful love relationships, the waning of passion enhances the rewards of intimacy (which we'll take up in the next post.)

Although it must wane from its initial torch points, passion should never decrease to anywhere near zero. Even long-term love relationships can abound with sexual passion supplemented by intimacy, commitment, and other kinds of passion.

Kinds of Passion

The experience of shared passion can take the following forms:

artistic

religious



anguish

joy

sexual (excitement or sensually-dominated)

sexual (intimacy-dominated)

Regardless of what form it takes, passionate experience requires surrender to the intensity and depth of the emotional state. Unfortunately, a discussion of “passionate surrender” is complicated by a wealth of confusing metaphors. For example:

“You must lose yourself to find yourself.”

This saying, like so many others, points to the profound experience of passionate surrender, though in a less than clear way. The saying means something like:

“Lose your defenses (the hurt parts of you that resist love) to discover your full potential as a loving and lovable person.”

However, it also implies there is something to lose in passion.

Passionate surrender is not surrender of self but surrender to depth of feeling. The self – , defenses, autonomy, and everything else about it – emerge from passionate surrender stronger and more powerful. Far from losing something in passionate surrender, we gain a a richer self.

of passionate surrender is rooted in an underdeveloped sense of self. The sense of self never fully develops when people are stuck in a negative feedback loop of Toddler brain coping mechanisms: blame, denial, and avoidance.

An unintended, but not surprising response to Soar Above: How to Use the Most Profound Part of Your Brain under Any Kind of is the report from so many readers that it improved their sex lives. In fact, it barely mentions at all. The book’s focus on developing Adult brain habits of improving, appreciating, connecting, and protecting breaks Toddler brain habits that impair development. Passionate surrender is a joyous function of a fully realized Adult brain.

Yet even with a well-exercised Adult brain, passionate surrender doesn’t always come easy.

Barriers to Passionate Surrender

The required of passionate surrender is difficult when physiological resources are taxed. Self-care is crucial to maximizing passion, with attention to , exercise, and sleep. Love is not just mental; it’s very much of the body.

Distractibility and frustration are also barriers to passionate surrender. Except for genuine cases of (which I believe are less common than the current for the diagnosis indicates), distractibility is most often low frustration tolerance. The Toddler brain has learned to avoid the and engendered by failure to meet a goal, in this case, passionate surrender. It habitually shifts attention before anything but the most superficial interest can take hold. The ultimate solution to this avoidance-wrought habit is to raise your personal tolerance of frustration. (See Emotion Reconditioning at CompassionPower.)

More formidable barriers to passionate surrender are dissociation and . Dissociation is tuning out or becoming numb to experience, as in “autopilot sex,” a sense of “not being there” or “going through the motions.” An extreme form of dissociation is depersonalization - leaving one’s body, as if the experience were happening to someone else.

Dissociative symptoms are ways to avoid painful experience. Unfortunately, the dissociative response is a blunt instrument, incapable of distinguishing positive, life-enhancing intensity of feeling from that which is destructive or intrusive. Eventually any sort of intensity will trigger the dissociative response and short-circuit passionate surrender.

Dissociation requires conscious attention to attenuate. Most of the time, the mere act of looking within centers the self physically and emotionally. Focus on sensory data, particularly touch, sound, and odor. Focus conscious attention: I WILL NOT DISSOCIATE. I FEEL MY BODY FEELING MY LOVER. I LIVE FULLY AND FULLY APPRECIATE THE EXPERIENCE OF MY LOVER. This sets the stage to fully experience physical sensation, as well as interest, excitement, and joy.

Fear of disappointment or rejection greatly inhibits passionate surrender, due to a pair of easily sprung traps. The first is misinterpreting your partner's temporary reduction of sexual arousal (a perfectly normal and common occurrence) as rejection. Diminished sexual arousal seems to diminish the sense of self:

“My partner doesn’t think I’m good enough.”

The second misinterprets the resolution stage of sexual experience (decline of intensity) as a devaluation of the entire experience.

“This wasn’t as good as it could have been; therefore, it was no good at all.”

Anxiety and inhibit passionate surrender through anticipation of negative experience. Anxiety serves as an internal alarm system signaling something bad about to happen. Depression is loss of hope.

Various physiological and psychological factors may explain these and other barriers to passionate surrender. If they have been repeated many times, they have probably formed habits. Once a habit is formed, understating why or how it was formed will not change it. Only a new habit – acquired through practice and repetition - can take its place.

The hardest thing about developing a new habit of passionate surrender is the awkwardness and dread likely to occur at the beginning. It helps to practice like a baseball player who was hit in the head with a pitch. He must step up to the plate and take the high inside fastball, while controlling the reflexive flinch, which, uncontrolled, would end his . If he can regulate the impulse to back away the first few times at the plate, each subsequent at bat becomes easier and more likely to make him a greater player.

Passionate surrender is regulating the impulse to back away in order to become a greater person and intimate partner.

Soar Above