Welcome back!
We’ve been exploring our relationship with Love in Loving Difference this month and I’m wrapping it up with a short video for you!
I’m passionate about Loving Difference members feeling and experiencing more love and connection as soon as possible after they join! Members arrive hungry for love; famished, thirsty, like you’ve been living in a desert that’s bereft of love and connection. I know because I lived there too for so long!
I love to see clients and Loving Difference members discover ways to let more and more love in and express love in ways that are healthy and fulfilling.
Understanding the Love Languages framework in terms of native and foreign love languages has been so helpful for me so I’m sharing some highlights with you in the video. It’s helped me to experience more love from more people more easily, including myself!
What’s your love language?
There are five love languages:
- Quality Time
- Touch
- Gifts
- Words of Affirmation and
- Acts of Service
What’s your’s? Take the quiz here!
Remember… knowledge alone doesn’t create change. Doing the quiz is fun and quick but knowing your love language invites action and practice if you really want to have a different feeling or experience. The results of your quiz are a clue and beyond that there are ways to use this treasure of information to create a whole new experience!
I’ve taken knowing my love language into practicing it, discovering it’s unique dialect and step by step speaking it fluently on a daily basis. Then beyond that finding ways to expand my love experience to include the gifts of foreign love languages too! It’s been life-changing! You can do all this too!
The idea of native and foreign love languages is one of the ways I’ve developed for integrating the knowledge of the official ‘5 Love Languages’ framework into my everyday life and subsequently into coaching and mentoring with clients in their neurodiverse relationships.
Native and Foreign Love Languages
Your Native Love Language are your Top 2 love languages when you complete the quiz. Remember to answer the quiz questions without reference to another person or what you think others can or can’t do! Answer from your best instinct or self-knowledge.
Foreign Love Languages for you are the other three love languages.
We love most easily and most often in our native love language. If our native love language is different to that of our partner, children or other family members, they feel most loved in languages that are foreign languages for us. We may be loving them loads in our native language and they may not be feeling loved from what we’re doing because it’s foreign to them! We may struggle to love them in their love language because it is foreign to us! They may struggle to love us in our love language because it is foreign to them! We may struggle to feel loved by them because they are loving us in a language that’s foreign to us!
There can be a lot of loving going on and a lot of love that’s lost in translation!
Can you see how frustration and resentment can be created from this situation without the awareness and knowledge of what is going on?
Stories that we should all somehow know how everyone feels loved and how to love everyone, when we’re all so different, are unhelpful! Stories that it’s not really love if I’ve had to ask for it or tell someone aren’t helpful either! All of those stories create the very hunger we’re so desperate to satisfy!
Getting to know more and more specifically what makes you feel loved in your native love language, loving yourself like that and communicating that to others can create more likelihood that others can love you in ways that make you feel loved.
Getting to know more and more how others love easily in the love languages that are foreign to you increases the opportunities for you to experience feeling loved if you can acknowledge and begin to expand your ‘rules’ for what makes you feel loved, even asking for love in their native language, which may be foreign to you!
This is about an expansion of what makes you feel loved, not changing or reducing the ways you feel loved to fit what others can do. If your partner or loved ones can’t love you in all the ways that are best for you – and there are loads of reasons why that could be happening, find others who can and make sure you’re loving yourself to the max that way as well!
Many of us are expecting a partner or loved ones to know and love us in our native love language all the time when we don’t even know and/or aren’t giving ourselves the same kind of love!
So native and foreign languages help us get more specific and more expanded at the same time!! It’s like a magic wand for love and connection!
How does thinking about native and foreign love languages help you with the connection challenges you’re facing in your relationship?
Beginning to love yourself and others using the wisdom of the Love Languages framework can create new energy, capacity and connection really fast.
Ways to Turn Toes from here and begin to experience something different…
- Do the quiz and discover your native love language. Do ONE thing to love yourself in that language and contact me if you can’t think of anything you could do! Are you hoping or expecting others to know?!
- Ask me any of your Love Languages questions in Loving Difference – I’m a Love Languages super fan and look forward to supporting your discovery of how it can support you too.
Want More Coach Support?
Book a call to discuss how I can assist you to make the changes you desire or access support from me and other travel companions join Loving Difference, with transformational and surprisingly fun coaching adventures that support your step by steps to reverse the impact of unknown neurodiversity, be YOU again and flourish – in your relationships and your life.
See you soon!
