Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples, 20th Anniversary Edition
Posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 6:36 am
- ISBN13: 9780805087000
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
REVISED AND WITH A NEW FOREWORD
ARE YOU GETTING THE LOVE YOU WANT?
Originally published in 1988, Getting the Love You Want has helped millions of couples attain more loving, supportive, and deeply satisfying relationships. The 20th anniversary edition contains extensive revisions to this groundbreaking book, with a new chapter, new exercises, and a foreword detailing Dr. Hendrix’s updated philosophy for eliminating all negativity from couples’ daily interactions, allowing readers of the 2008 edition to benefit from his ongoing discoveries during his last two decades of work.
Harville Hendrix, Ph.D., in partnership with his wife, Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD., originated Imago Relationship Therapy, a unique healing process for couples, prospective couples, and parents. Together they have more than thirty years’ experience as educators and therapists and their work has been translated into more than 50 languages, with Imago practiced by two thousand therapists worldwide. Harville and Helen have six children and live in New York and New Mexico.
Originally published in 1988, Getting the Love You Want has helped millions of couples attain more loving, supportive, and deeply satisfying relationships. The 20th anniversary edition contains extensive revisions to this groundbreaking book, with a new chapter, new exercises, and a foreword detailing Dr. Hendrix’s updated philosophy for eliminating all negativity from couples’ daily interactions, allowing readers of the 2008 edition to benefit from his ongoing discoveries during his last two decades of work.
Getting the Love You Want is also available on CD as an unabridged audiobook. Please email academic@macmillan.com for more information.
“Hendrix provides much insight into how spouses can mature through one another.”—Booklist
“Harville Hendrix offers the best program I’ve seen for using the love/hate energy in marriage to help a couple heal one another and to become whole together.”—T. George Harris, Editor-in-Chief, American Health
“I know of no better guide for couples who genuinely desire a maturing relationship.”—M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled
“Getting the Love You Want is a remarkable book—the most incisive and persuasive I have ever read on the knotty problems of marriage relationships.”—Ann Roberts, former president, Rockefeller Family Fund
“Getting the Love You Want provides a road map for partners seeking a path to intimacy and passionate friendship.”—Marion Solomon, Ph.D.
“This book will help any couple find the love they want hidden under all the concealing confusion of a close and intimate relationship. I have seen these principles in application and they work!”—James A. Hall, M.D.
When Harville Hendrix writes about relationships, he discusses them not just as an educator and a therapist, but as a man who has himself been through a failed marriage. Hendrix felt the sting of his divorce intensely because he believed it signaled not only his failure as a husband but also his failure as a couples counselor. Investigating why his marriage dissolved led him to start looking into the psychology of love. Marriage, he ultimately discovered, is the “practice of becoming passionate friends.”
As a result of his research, Hendrix created a therapy he calls Imago Relationship Therapy. In it, he combines what he’s learned in a number of disciplines, including the behavioral sciences, depth psychology, cognitive therapy, and Gestalt therapy, to name just a few. He expounds upon this approach in Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples. His purpose in writing the book, he says, is “to share with you what I have learned about the psychology of love relationships, and to help you transform your relationship into a lasting source of love and companionship.”
Divided into three sections, the book covers “The Unconscious Marriage,” which details a marriage in which the remaining desires and behavior of childhood interfere with the current relationship; “The Conscious Marriage,” which shows a marriage that fulfils those childhood needs in a positive manner; and a 10-week “course in relationship therapy, ” which gives detailed exercises for you and your partner to follow in order to learn how to “replace confrontation and criticism … with a healing process of mutual growth and support.” The text is occasionally dry and technical; however, the information provided is valuable, the case studies are interesting, and the exercises are revealing and helpful. By utilizing his program, Hendrix hopes you too will be able to solve your marital difficulties without the expense of a therapist. –Jenny Brown
This self help book ignores the truth of love and makes love out to be something that people are capable of doing. No one can love and satisfy anyone without knowing that love comes from God. I suggest you read the Bible and skip this mess.
Rating: 1 / 5
i felt it was very demening i read the first few chapters and got very upset i would not recomend it at all
Rating: 1 / 5
Lafia was my first love she knows everything about me.I ask her once to marrie me but she say that she want to finish college first.Iam so into her.Well I could wait tha long if I very into her.She everything that I wanted in my life.We both always talk about our feature all the time.I hope it turn out right,cause I love her alot. She always think that I have someone in my mine. just want to tell everyone that I love her very much. Always C.V.H
Rating: 5 / 5
In this study by Dr. Hendrix, his hypothesis was that people marry their opposites, one example was the account of Lynn and Peter. I beg to differ as I have in my years seen many married couples who are so much alike you would think they were brother and sister. We are always thinking that there is something better out there. And we search until we find it, or die trying.
There is no greater happiness than the days of romantic love between a man and his girl. The first few months or years of a relationship when we are filled with the delicious expectation of wish-fulfillment. Life has meaning again in a positive, exciting, fun way. It had substance in the form of a person we adored who shared mutual feelings. The good feelings radiated outward; they felt more loving and accepting of absolutely everyone. They saw the world fresh and natural (no artificial facade) as they had as children. They shared moments of ectasy, not only sexually. They see all things in a brand new way.
People in love are high on natural hormones and chemicals which flood their bodies with a sense of well-being. Dopamine causes a rosy outlook on life, hightened perception. Endorphins are natural narcotics and enhance a person’s sense of security and comfort. Seratonin creates a feeling of oneness. The universal language of love is the creation of the unconscious mind. “I know we’ve just met, but somehow I feel I already know you;” “I can’t remember when I didn’t know you.” “When I’m with you, I no longer feel alone;” I feel whole, complete (felt fulfilled).” There is a feeling of oneness, a sense of ‘deja vu,’ a feeling of familiarity. “I can’t live without you.” They feel that they have finally found someone to take care of them, and security.
When we find the person we decide to marry, we transfer our need for protection from parents to our ‘dearly loved’ one (who sometimes, but not always, turns out to be our soul mates), who awakened our “eros” senses to save us from “thantos,” the ever-present fear of death. For a while, lovers cling to the illusion of romantic love and that’s the fun part. But it doesn’t last, and things at home become a drudgery instead of a haven. That’s when we start looking at and for others. Our true soul mates may come along later in life, and it hits you like a ton of bricks. That doesn’t mean you have to marry that person. You can love many in your lifetime, always in a different way, but just as intense as your first love.
The majority do not marry their first loves for one reason or another. When I see photos in the paper of couples who’ve been together fifty or sixty years, I think “how sad.” They just don’t know what they’ve missed. For some odd reason, they look gloomy — hardly ever happy. Love loses its luster pretty quickly when disagreements and arguments continue over the years and intensify. Why stay together for the sake of the children? I learned the hard way that they pick up nuances and know when their parents no longer love or need each other, and they become the injured victims.
Back when the song, ‘Torn Between Two Lovers,’ was popular, I was in that predictament and wondered how things would end. Then, later the song ‘You’re Having My Baby’ happened to me, too; “Mandy” became popular at the same time and I was going to name my love child Miranda (everyone else chose Amanda) and call her Mandy. He became Justin, but now one of his daughters is named Miranda, looks just like him. Our little mistakes affect the way the rest of our lives will play out. Some turn bitter, but for most it is a blessing as it lets us out of a miserable lifestyle.
You can fall in love when you’re older, but it’s not the same as young love (title of another Fifties song). It is a deeper bonding and does not have to involve sex. For me, love has always been about emotions. Men don’t understand that difference; that some of us love them as an individual who can be our “soul and inspiration,” a Righteous Bros. song.
William Congreve wrote “Heaven has no rage like love to hate turned, nor Hell a fury like a woman scorned.” Once in a lifetime, a mis-understanding can turn into a difficult situation but, with God’s help, things can be turned around and, eventually, hate turns into love again. It takes a very special person to be able to forgive the other’s shortcomings and over-reactions to a minor occurrence. You don’t have to be a saint to give the person who hurt you another chance. It’s human to act bad at times when tensions mount.
Repressed anger is worse than the explosive kind. After the problem is brought to light, you can work together to overcome obstacles — if the relationship (you truly love and admire him) is worth saving. Sometimes you have to work hard to get on an even keel again and be able to trust and be open to discussions of what you did wrong. Mainly, we must be on the alert not to do it again. We all make mistakes, but their purpose is to learn from them. All is fair in love and war, although the passion you’re feeling for an unrequited love might not feel just. Embracing your passionate nature is a good thing, but don’t lose yourself in your emotions right now. It’s time to wake up from daydreams and value yourself enough to face reality. If someone doesn’t value you as much as you value him or her, don’t waste any more energy on the relationship. Get things back to being equal — it’s the only way you can find balance.
Growing up without a mother, I’ve always thought more like a man since I was constantly around them all my life. Problem is, I also had the feelings and emotions of a woman. “I have the right to be angry” never gets you anywhere. We tend to hide intense feelings like sadness, fear, anger — we hide behind a mask. Some of us just can’t learn to behave and end up making the same mistakes over and over. None of us are perfect, or we would be God.
Rating: 3 / 5
Recommended by a counselor. Book stunk, so did counselor. Typical tome of the gender, an advertisement for his institute complete with case histories and mumbo jumbo. Lots of insight into imago and not a clue as to what love is and isn’t.
Typical of the book. Exercise 8 He has the participant to draw a rectangle in which the four corners represent catastrophic exits, ie suicide, divorce, murder and insanity.
He says ” …if you are comtemplating leaving the relationship through any of these four corner exits… I urge you to make a decision now to close them for the period of time that you are working together on these exercises.”
Gee Mr. Ph.D I didn’t know so many people had the option of selecting a time to go insane! Not to mention that the statement gives tacit approval of suicide or murder as an option after the exercise is complete.
The book is full of such babble. Not worth the paper its printed on.
Rating: 1 / 5