Article 1:  Why The First Love Experience is So Potent
Article 2:  Cultural Differeces in Treating Traumatic Stress and PTSD


Why The First Love Experience is So Potent
By Kathy Mohr-Almeida, Ph.D.

The first love experience is a powerful one, which often haunts people throughout their lives, assuming the first love is also “the one that got away.” Being “in love” is a specific psychological phenomenon. When it happens, we feel as if we have found the missing parts of ourselves.

Memories of the first love or the love that got away become enhanced with each recall, until the first love reaches a status within the psyche that no human partner could ever emulate. Why is first love such a deep and enduring experience?

The answer to this question, at least part, lies in neurophysiology. First love usually happens to individuals with immature brains, as the brain does not reach physical maturity until age 24. During the young adult life stage, people have less responsibility than at other times in adulthood, thereby affording time and energy to really focus on the love relationship. This ample time allows for a firm cementing of the love experience within the brain through neural networks, becoming the matrix for all future relationships. These entrenched neural networks may make the experience of future love very difficult to have without being stimulated to recall at least some aspects of the first love relationship. Certainly, the first love relationship becomes a benchmark for both good and bad for all relationships that follow, if you are not lucky enough to marry your first love.

Another factor that makes the first love experience so potent is that it happens during a stage of life when people have nothing to offer – no assets, no impressive skills to speak of, no connections - other than body and soul. In the first love experience, there is no question what makes you loveable, because there are no labels or stuff associated with you.

The other piece of the puzzle about why the first love experience is so potent lies outside the conscious awareness of most mature adults. This is unfortunate, as understanding the meaning of the first love experience can reveal a great deal about unmet psychological needs and keys to personal fulfillment. Instead of coming to terms with these unmet needs, people seek happiness through serial monogamy or addictive behavior.

Carl Jung said that if you find the psychic wound in an individual, you will also find the path to their consciousness and healing. Such is the case with first loves wounds. The answer lies directly within the psyche of self-same individual. Often, the specific unmet emotional and psychological needs are revealed to the individual through dreams.

The material in dreams is a highly rich source of information for the dreamer. The subconscious uses dreams to help the individual cope with unresolved issues. Sometimes dreams help bring forth these issues to consciousness, which is what happened for me when I started paying attention to the meaning of my dream material.

I found myself experiencing reoccurring first love dreams with themes of gut-wrenching longing and rejection. The actors in these dreams were former loves, and I would invariably awaken just before experiencing romantic or sexual fulfillment in the dream. When I grew tired of experiencing longing and pain upon awakening, I worked with this dream material and was able to identify my unresolved feelings and unmet needs, and moved past the constant dreamtime replay.

What I discovered through this healing process is that my dreams weren’t about the loves lost. The painful longing I was experiencing was truly a reflection of what I was missing in my inner, emotional life as an adult, not about any “dream man.”  

I was neglecting my emotional needs, though not consciously. I came to understand that I absolutely must feed and acknowledge and fulfill my emotional needs or pay the price of longing for some thing outside of myself. I learned that I must be mentally, physically, emotionally, sexually and spiritually fed in order to remain whole, and that I am responsible for making sure I am fed in these ways. Perhaps the most fundamental way of doing this is not allowing who I really am to get lost in the hustle and bustle of daily life.  I must remember that the many roles I play, including mother, wife, doctor, educator, and psychologist, are merely labels and not who I really am.

In order to heal your first love or the love that got away wounds, ask yourself, “Who am I, really?” If you can’t access that information easily, ask yourself who you were at the time of your first love experience, including your values, forms of relaxation, spirituality, sexuality, and intellectual needs. Ask yourself if the needs that were fundamental to you at that time are being met in your here and now experience, if they remain important to you now. If these needs are unmet, acknowledge it and make meeting them a priority. In so doing, your “consciousness,” as Jung referred to it, will be healed.  


Cultural Differeces in Treating Traumatic Stress and PTSD
By Kathy Mohr-Almeida, Ph.D.




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