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Find the Love of Your Life
A Step-by-step guide to finding a great love relationship, the book is based on strategies the author used to find her husband, plus other real-life strategies. "I met Dave, just three weeks after I created a powerful goal to find a great love relationship. Three weeks! And then I learned that he was blind - which taught me to be careful what you ask for! But always ask!" Readers are taught to create their own goals for love, clarifying what they really want in their relationship, healing past relationships that might be getting in their way, and affirming and rehearsing their best selves to attract the love they want. The book is additionally poignant because the author's husband died suddenly just after the manuscript was completed. The book contains a touching tribute to his memory and the lasting legacy of his love.
Preview Website - 7-Jan-2003 - Hits: 529 - Rate This | Details

Getting to Commitment
Do your relationships always crash? Do your married friends wonder what's wrong? "They write sitcoms about people like us," says "commitmentphobia" expert Steven Carter, "but it looks a lot more fun on the small screen than it feels in real life." The problem may be your fear of the risks of intimacy and commitment. Carter himself was a closet "commitmentphobic" when he wrote Men Who Can't Love. Now, in Getting to Commitment, he explains how to break those patterns and forge intimate connections--as he has done in his own life.

Carter sees eight hurdles between you and the relationship you deserve. He deftly analyzes each problem, points out self-destructive nonsolutions, and explains the steps necessary to break the barrier. For example, one hurdle is blaming your partners' shortcomings for the failure of previous relationships. Breaking the pattern involves seeing how you choose particular partners and self-destruct in relationships--going from blame to responsibility. Other hurdles include relationship-history ghosts, living in fantasy, and ineffective behavior patterns. "If we are to experience intimacy, our hearts have to be brave as well as loving," says Carter. Getting to Commitment will help you find that courage.
Preview Website - 7-Jan-2003 - Hits: 375 - Rate This | Details

How Good Do We Have to Be? A New Understanding of Guilt and Forgiveness
Kushner, best known for his best-selling When Bad Things Happen to Good People (1985), here deals with an equally vexing topic, overcoming shame and guilt. As in his other books, Rabbi Kushner turns to the Bible to find answers to hard questions, and when it comes to guilt and shame, there is no better place to start than at the beginning, with the story of Adam and Eve.
Preview Website - 7-Jan-2003 - Hits: 479 - Rate This | Details

Loving in Flow: How the Happiest Couples Get and Stay That Way ^{Top Rated}
Loving in Flow: How the Happiest Couples Get & Stay That Way, by Susan K. Perry, Ph.D., a social psychologist and bestselling author, is based on intensive interviews with 3 dozen exceptionally happy couples, as well as the author's own marriage (that hit bottom before recovering to reach a state of "flow").
Preview Website - 1-Aug-2003 - Hits: 232 - Rate This | Details

Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus ^{Top Rated}
This timely classic by John Gray, Ph.D. is a must-read for anyone who is in a relationship and feels unsatisfied. In fact, I'd recommend it for anyone who has ever been in a relationship or currently is in one. It explains in straight-forward, easy-to-understand language everything you ever wanted to know about how the opposite sex communicates. Yes, it helps to know what they're thinking if you want to do this right.

So much of relationship problems, I've found, can be boiled down to simple miscommunication between two partners. Men and women, quite simply, don't usually have the language it takes to communicate effectively with one another. We place different values upon different emotions, different ways of being. And then we get so frustrated when our significant other doesn't behave the way we think they should!! How frustrating and difficult for our relationships. And how very unnecessary.

After having a horrendous relationship, I re-read this book and realized all the things we did wrong. And that made all the difference in my current relationship, let me tell you. Now yes, John Gray makes a lot of generalizations and perhaps oversimplifies important concepts to get down to the brass tacks. But the end result is a concise, direct book which gives everyone who reads it down-to-earth advice about what to do to improve your relationship, and how to improve its quality. Buy it today, read it this week, lend it to your significant other next week, and by the end of the month, you will start seeing results.
Preview Website - 17-Feb-2003 - Hits: 319 - Rate This | Details

Passionate Marriage ^{Top Rated}
Keeping Love, Sex, and Intimacy in Emotionally Committed Relationships
by David Schnarch, Ph.D.

This is not a "how-to" book on creating a passionate marriage. Rather, it is an insightful book which gives couples a guide to sexual fulfillment and intimacy via emotional maturation. It helps a person learn to achieve mutual passion through understanding of one's own emotions and those of one's partner. It is not quick or easy read, because to work on the subjects covered in the book, the reader has to seriously think about their emotions and behaviors, and then decide to take risks in order to progress to the next level of emotional maturity in their relationship. It is a frank book which discusses sexuality in an open manner.

The book is divided into three moderate sections: The Basics, Tools for Connection, and Observations on the Process. The first section lays the groundwork for the book and acquaints the reader with an understanding of Schnarch's theoretical model of sexual and emotional development. The second section, Tools for Connection, offers the reader specific examples of where and how to begin in making changes in your life and marriage to realize Schnarch's model. It is engaging and well-written, and will challenge you to think differently about your relationship.

The final section is probably the most powerful section of the book. It ties the model all together and helps the reader look at life, and their relationship, in a broader, encompassing perspective. It is sometimes painful, heart-wrenching, and sad to read, but Schnarch shows us that by achieving greater intimacy, we also achieve greater meaning in our lives.

If you're interested -- really interested -- in improving your marriage, this is a must-read. It will challenge your way of thinking about your relationship in every important way possible. The book is 432 pages in length, published in 1998, and both paperback and hardcover editions are available.
Preview Website - 4-May-2000 - Hits: 297 - Rate This | Details

Sex Smart
SexSmart: How Your Childhood Shaped Your Sexual Life and What to Do About It is an award winning explanation of how the non-sexual events which happened in your family life combined to create your sexual personality and your tendency--or not--to be able to experience feeling sexual and emotional intimacy with the same person.

The site contains the map of the Milestones of Sexual Development, along with screening questions to help you determine whether issues in your family life may have created obstacles to your sexual happiness (http://www.sexsmart.com/solvingproblems.htm).
Preview Website - 25-Jun-2005 - Hits: 125 - Rate This | Details

Too Good to Leave, Too Bad to Stay:Step-By-Step Guide to Helping You Decide ^{Top Rated}
A psychotherapist offers guidelines to help folks decide whether to leave a relationship or whether enough good remains to make it worth working through conflicts. I personally used this book to help me and a significant other decide whether there was anything worth saving in our relationship (there wasn't). The book is written in a clear, concise manner with case studies and plenty of examples to help you make the decision whether you should stay or leave.
Preview Website - 7-Jan-2003 - Hits: 953 - Rate This | Details

Website of prolific Autistic Author and Artist, Donna Williams
Contains articles, on-line galleries, music, and resources associated with Autism Spectrum Conditions, Dissociative Identity Disorder, Bisexuality, and Intimacy issues.
Preview Website - 22-Oct-2005 - Hits: 207 - Rate This | Details