Have You Ever Had Feelings Or Sweet Memories That You Have Lost For A While?

It was my 20th wedding anniversary and I was working out at the gym when a friend of mine asked me how I met my husband. I went through the details of every step that happened 20 years prior that led to my decision to marry my husband. I met my husband on Mother’s day in May, 1984 while I was at Cedars Sinai Hospital visiting his uncle (who was also a relative of mine) who was diagnosed with lung cancer. A couple of weeks later it happened that my husband was back in Los Angeles from the Bay Area and asked me to spend that Sunday with him.

At the time, art was my biggest passion in life. I was planning on going to an art show on that particular day. I was very excited to look at amazing pieces and works of art and to share my passion with another person. The only thing that did not happen was talking about art! We started talking about ourselves and our families and what we had done so far and what we wanted to do in the future.

A few hours passed and we were just talking and walking around. I do not remember if we had lunch or not but know that I went home to change into a comfortable summer dress and picked him up again to go grab a bite to eat before I had to take him to the airport. Another few hours later, he looked at his watch and announced that he was going to miss his flight which was leaving in a few minutes. So we decided to take a walk around the marina and later on I took him to my favorite spot to have a mud pie for dessert. This took us to 12:00 midnight when I dropped him off at his aunt’s house to leave in the morning.

My husband kept coming back to Los Angeles almost every other weekend and we got to spend some major quality time with each other. I would take him to different parts of Los Angeles and Southern California’s shores. On our “sort of” official third date, we ended up in front of the ocean in Malibu. We both have water for our zodiac signs and love water and the ocean. While we were enjoying the sunset, he asked me if I would marry him. I said: “Yes.”

A few months later we got married in Los Angeles and moved to Northern California where he was residing.

That morning, when I was working out at the gym and telling my friend the whole story of how I started loving my husband, triggered in me a new sparkle of love for my now husband of 20 years and 3 children later. I remembered my interview with the Dean of the University and what he had told me about the difference between how he would deal with a couple in a shaky relationship and how a psychologist would handle the situation. He was talking about the fact that when a couple goes to a marriage and family therapist, they start talking about the issues and problems they have with each other in a heated way. As a result they feel better and lighter at the time because of the parasympathetic nervous system response.

The therapist will have them looking at each other throughout the session/process while they are at the peak of pouring their differences and problems out, which will only make their negative “anchors” for feeling towards each other  much stronger. Anchors are the unconscious structures of learning that become subconscious reminders of what the person has learned. Due to the parasympathetic nervous system response triggered in the couple, they go home, in the moment, feeling “better.” After few days something happens and re-triggers the negative feelings (now stronger than ever due to what occurred in therapy) and of course they start fighting and sometime later a lot of these people separate from each other.

By contrast to psychology in the case of what we do as Psychoneurologists, first we want to know if both of the parties are interested in rekindling their lost love. We find out how they fell in love in the first place and we intensify those powerful positive anchors so they are much stronger, and when they are at the peak of tearing and remembering the joys of re-experiencing those beautiful feelings, we help them to fully re-associate those feelings once again to each other.

So that day at the gym, I felt an amazing sense of love and connection towards my husband that I had lost for a while. That evening when he came home I hugged him and said that I loved him very much and had decided to start to go back to school. Of course his first reaction was: “You are too old to go back to school and you have three kids to take care of.” I explained to him what had happened in the interview and I wasn’t even thinking when I had shared my story with my friend and how much I had always loved him. If one interview could have had such an impact on me and my life, I was sure that I could make a difference in people’s lives that would come in contact with mine.