Product Description
In her first book in over 10 years, Pia Mellody—author of the groundbreaking bestsellers Facing Codependence and Facing Love Addiction—shares her profound wisdom on what it takes to sustain true intimacy and trusting love in our most vital relationships.
Drawing on more than 20 years' experience as a counsellor at the renowned Meadows Treatment Centre in Arizona, Mellody now shares what she has learned about why intimate relationships falter—and what makes them work. Using the most up–to–date research and real–life examples, including her own compelling personal journey, Mellody provides readers with profoundly insightful and practical ground rules for relationships that achieve and maintain joyous intimacy.
This invaluable resource helps diagnose the causes of faulty relationships—many of them rooted in childhood—and provides tools for readers to heal themselves, enabling them to establish and maintain healthy relationships.
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Excellent, readable and comprehensible., 2008-09-05
Offers great insights that are realistic and aligns with the feelings of today's women. Marriage is hard work, but serves a much different role in our lives than that of our Mothers.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
Compassionate, informative, useful, 2007-08-29
Excellent book for both layman and professionals for overcoming a dysfunctional childhood. Compassionately written narrative of origins of the inability to form healthy relationships. Complete with examples of how to work through the constraints to extending and experiencing respect, love, compassion, and intimacy.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Great book: For you who think you don't have issues as well as you who think you do, 2007-07-30
This is the book I'd want everybody to read and that I think everybody can learn from to become a happier, healthier partner. No matter whether you think you are already perfectly healthy and functional or not, this book will brush up your already good relational skills at worst or set you on the road to becoming a functional partner at best.
The key to being intimate as much as possible is to understand that love is a continuum ranging from very warm regard to something as theoretically simple as respect. Pia says that holding on to the other person's inherent worth even in difficult situations, being respectful towards them (as well as yourself of course) is what enables you to be intimate even if you disagree or have been hurt by your partner.
How do you achieve this? Pia gives you tools to show love and respect towards yourself and your partner: boundaries for the physical as well as the intellectual/emotional. Just learning about the speaking and listening boundaries would have made the book worthwhile for me. Do you know how to speak and listen in a functional manner? I'd postulate that most of us tend to be busy formulating a response/defense when listening to our partner in an argument. And conversely when we are the one speaking we will attempt to at least indirectly and covertly manipulate our partner so that he or she agrees with us. I didn't even know that there was an option to this behavior. I didn't know that it could and should be done differently. I honestly thought that my partner and I were supposed to compromise on any issue and that if we didn't or couldn't one of us was wrong and by implication bad. Oh boy, have I learned differently! And I am so glad I did, too.
There would have been two problems with the book for me:
Number 1 is right at the beginning. In the introduction Pia talks very emphatically about her relationship to the christian god and again does so in chapter 1. If that bothers you try to ignore it and go on reading because then she lets off.
Number 2 is the fact that I believe if I hadn't had additional instruction on Pia's ideas through individual therapy and workshops on boundaries I would not have learned to apply her ideas to my own life. I don't think it's the book's fault but my own. Even before reading this book I knew a lot about myself, my issues, my issues in interaction with other people but it seemed to me that the information was in bits and pieces in different `rooms' in my head and I just couldn't fit it together into a coherent picture. Only through the additional instruction in therapy, the workshops and in many talks with my closest girl-friend (who has also read the books and gone to the workshops etc.) did I begin to get an understanding of boundaries, the issues of my codependence and my problem with shame. So keep in mind that you may want to read this book with a friend and discuss it to help you understand it better.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
New rules and guidlines, 2007-03-11
I've read other books on co dependency and this one has a unique approach that was developed in The Meadows in Wickenburg, Ariz. I think it is an excellent approach to communication skills and ways of relating that are less toxic and worth reading and trying. I will recommend it to my clients - so many of whom suffer from this condition. Deb
29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
Great Book for Co-Dependents, 2003-12-18
I've read all of Pia's books. They are all great, especially the first one (Facing CoDependence) and this one. The first book explains the symptums and the mechanics of how and why. This book drills into details of the key concepts from the first book. It touches the how and why briefly, but focuses on the real life examples of dysfunctional behaviors and contrasting it to functional behaviors. This book really manifests the concepts in the first book into practices and guidelines.This book turns out to be a great handbook even for parenting skills.
I also attended a few CoDA meetings. Those meetings are good, but Pia's books helped me much more.
I highly recommend Pia's books, I also recommend reading them in the order of published dates.