Get Your Hands On Getting The Love You Want: A Guide For Couples Drafted By Harville Hendrix Published As EPub

sister a social worker/therapist recommended this book years ago and I bought it, It sat on my "to read" shelf for years until a Marriage and Family professor mentioned again in his talk at Sunstone, It has a clear and powerful premise, Our childhood and relationship with our parents subconsciously influences who we are attracted to and marry, We have the feeling this person will make us whole, After the romantic phase wears off and most couple slip into the power struggle phase where it is painfully clear that this person is not making us as whole as we would like to be.


The author is a psychologist who has worked with couples for many decades, The method he has developed it to help couples identify what it is that they crave most in their lives, He spends most of the book leading you to his conclusion that I found very powerful, It is that what will become most whole when we are able to learn what are partner needs and provide it for them, He suggests that we may have subconsciously picked a partner that can best help us change to become a more complete person, That this process of transformation that we undergo to meet our partners needs will make us whole, This was a unique and powerful concept that I had never considered before,

There are also a number of exercises in the back of the book to help married couples through this process, To me these were less important than the message and the thought process and self recognition that the book led me through, مشاكلنا التفسية العميقة ردود أفعالنا المبهمة و تصرفاتنا أمام الصراعات الزوجية هل يعقل أن كل هذا سببه جراح الطفولة و مشاعرنا حين كنا براعم صغيرة
هذا ما فصله الكاتب بشكل سلس و محبب بأن صراعاتنا الزوجية و أساس انجذابنا لشركاء حياتنا يكمن في تجارب الطفولة ولكي نحظى بعلاقة تتميز بالالتحام الروحي والحب فيجب على كلا الشريكين معالجة جراح الآخر وحين يفعل هذا سيكون قد عالج بعضا من صفاته الذميمة في نفس الوقت.
أرفق الكاتب تمارين عملية في نهاية الكتاب ليطبقها الأزواج وهذا أضاف قيمة للكتاب بالنسبة لي لان معظم كتب المساعدة الذاتية تكون عادة مقالية.
كتاب يستحق الاقتناء ويستحق قراءة ثانية This book was so eye opening for me, I love the solid mix of psychological theories the author has a great handle on the psyche and has explained his ideas and beliefs in clear common languange.
This book is for anyone! For couples, for single people looking for a relationship, for married individuals searching alone to better their relationship, . . basically anyone could benefit from reading this book,

My husband and I are reading through the book and though it has only been a short time, my eyes have been open to the way we treat each other and the reasons we react as we do to the other persons actions.
I loved it! Meh I began reading the "updated and revised" edition before putting it down, The authors attempt to be more "inclusive" and portray the material in a more politically correct fashion sensitive to modern societal norms and alternative relationships is a huge letdown, particularly regarding a subject as ancient, unchanging and traditional as marriage.


Also, the author admits changing an entire chapter from the previous publication, because he had later concluded he was completely wrong, Thus, it would be difficult at this point to take seriously any of the Getting the Love You Want's content, Pseudo science This was an assigned book and not one that I would normally read, The officiant my fiancee and I chose for our wedding is both a minister and a therapist and he asked that we read this book as part of the counseling he requires for all couples he officiates for.


It is not a dreadful book and there are some good thoughts in it, However, as a sociologist, I have substantial issues with certain aspects of this book, of which I will outline three below,

First: the authors tend to use "global" terms like "everyone", However, their analysis is based not on a random survey of individuals either in the US or globally but on couples that came to them for marriage counseling.
In the social sciences this is called "selecting on the dependent variable", That is, they are generalizing across couples who are seeking help, not all couples whose marriage is in trouble or let alone all couples including happily married ones.
Their model should be tested against happily married couples, If happily married couples are inherently doing the kinds of things the authors think that all couples should be doing, this would strengthen their hypotheses,

Second: as a sociologist, I am frustrated with the individualist orientation of the authors, This is a common cultural trait of Americans in general and Baby Boomers in particular, The authors at time come close to recognizing that married couples are not separate from their home culture but are intimately bound up with it, This is to say,

what couples think of as feasible and desirable isn't just a product either of individual history and/or biological factors but also comes down from observing media, what friends are doing, and so forth.


Third: I do respect the authors' attempts to move beyond the "selfactualization" paradigm, I think that in the coming decades American culture will continue to critique and move past the ideology of hyperindividualism reigning especially from the latess.
I am not a communitarian or a libertarian I think that neither pure individualism or pure communitarianism is the answer, That this book made an effort to do so is commendable, but there is much farther yet to go, Again, I think this book is speaking primarily to Baby Boomers, and I wonder how different Gen Xers and millennials are with respect to marriage,

These criticisms aside, and putting to one side also the "pop psychology" tone of the book, I was on the whole satisfied that whatever the merits and demerits of the authors' ideas and examples, this book contains little that is really dangerous.
The advice is generally good and is not by itself likely to cause problems, if read carefully and critically, .