Receiving Love : Letting Yourself Be Loved Will Transform Your Relationship - Softcover

Harville Hendrix

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743263642 ISBN 13: 9780743263641

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2005

Synopsis

IT'S EASY TO GIVE LOVE, BUT HOW DO WE RECEIVE LOVE, ABSORB IT AND LET IT CHANGE US? Rather than learning HOW to love, perhaps the greatest test of an intimate relationship is learning to receive love. Such is the teaching of the bestselling author/relationship therapist team, Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt. In their newest book, they argue that many of us have trouble accepting and integrating the affection and appreciation we so deeply desire. We tell ourselves that we're not getting what we want and need because other people are either not loving us enough or not loving us in the right way. But the truth is that we are loved, we just don't see it. Instead we brush away the compliments and praise, and we don't even know we are doing it. In RECEIVING LOVE, the focus is on how this phenomenon operates in intimate relationships, shaping conflicts and disappointments, and on the steps needed to dissolve the barriers to enable us to open our hearts to love.

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From Publishers Weekly

In an intelligent and insightful volume, Hendrix and Hunt, cocreators of Imago Relationship Therapy and coauthors of Getting the Love You Want, share their solution to a common relationship problem: the difficulty of accepting love, expressed by, for example, criticizing a gift from one's partner or spurning an intimate gesture. The authors, husband and wife, begin by talking painfully about how their own marriage nearly ended because Harville, despite obvious evidence to the contrary, didn't feel loved by his wife. As the authors note, there are many ways "to defend yourself against someone else's desire to encourage, help, or love you," whether because you overvalue your partner and feel unworthy of his or her love, or because you devalue that partner and see him or her as unworthy of giving love. The authors instruct readers to examine their childhood dynamics for unconscious influences on their view of relationships, such as uncomfortable feelings of self-rejection. And taking a page from Martin Buber, they also focus on what is "between" the I and Thou in a relationship, "the sacred space between two individuals" that can unite them or serve as a "dumping ground" for anger. These complicated concepts become clear as illustrated through in-depth looks at three heterosexual and same-sex couples. And through their Imago dialoguing technique, the authors also provide concrete steps to learn how to have a truly empathetic conversation that gets beneath the surface of a couple's problems. With this wise and sophisticated book, readers can learn to receive love and, in doing so, "reclaim [their] own desires, dreams and abilities."
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Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0743263642
• ISBN 13: 9780743263641
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 320