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The Self and
Relationships
My top
recommended book:
In a world of self-improvement books, the simple
methodology of this one has stood out as truly useful.
With four simple questions and what Katie calls "the
Turnaround," learn to examine the thoughts that give
rise to the feelings that afflict you. And be let
go by them. The
Road Less Traveled by
Scott Peck.
This book has sold
more copies than any book but the Bible. It's
still valid and incisive, 25 years after its
publication. The definitions of healthy (and
unhealthy) love are priceless.
Art
of Loving by Erich Fromm. Fromm,
scandalously, isn't cited in Peck's book, but Fromm
hovers in the background as someone who defined love
just as well and much earlier. This is a short,
easily-read gem.
Getting
the Love You Want and Keeping
the Love You Find by Harville Hendrix.
In spite of suffering
from gimmicky names imposed by the marketing people at
Pocket Books, these books by Hendrix offer some of the
most enlightening explanations I have ever seen for how
and why we choose our relationships. I would call the
first one, for example, "The Conscious Relationship,"
or, to be more accurate and more awkward, "The Mutually
Conscious Relationship." The insights of Hendrix,
and their immediate usability in daily life, are simply
astonishing.
Why
Marriages Succeed or Fail . . .and How You Can Make
Yours Last by John Gottman,
Ph.D.
Gottman has researched
thousands of couples for over 20 years en route to
perfecting a method of determining with 95% accuracy
which relationships (he focuses on marriages) will
succeed, which will fail, and why. And in this
mandatory book, he explains those factors that make or
break a couple. Gottman was recently featured in
Malcolm Gladwell's Blink.
Listening
to Prozac by Peter
D. Kramer. This book isn't really about
Prozac. It's really about the very nature of the
self, and what certain drugs have now shown us how
utterly little we know about it. This has had me
thinking for nearly ten years.
Should
You Leave? by Peter D. Kramer.
Perhaps the best prose stylist in psychology brings his
considerable eloquence and wisdom to examining an
age-old question about relationships -- and, in a breath
of fresh air compared to the usual self-help books, he
will leave you with lasting provocations on the
propriety of anyone even trying to give others advice at
all. There are no easy answers here, just what any
good coach provides: new ways of thinking.
Emotional
Intelligence by
Daniel Goleman. This book will change the
way you think about emotions, intelligence, self-control
-- and, if you're paying attention, how and what we
teach our children. Goleman makes a persuasive case that
emotional intelligence, or EQ, is more important to our
happiness and success than IQ and its
equivalents.
Destructive
Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai
Lama, edited by Daniel Goleman. In
which top scientists discuss the nature of self and
emotion, and their recent research, with the Dalai
Lama. Fascinating.
The
Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice
Miller. This is the book that patients give
their therapists, saying, "This is me." The title
is misleading, because it has little to do with "gifted"
as in "gifted and talented": rather, if, for any
reason, you were "gifted" with excessive responsibility
or autonomy at a premature age, you could find this book
changes your view of how and why you are. The work
has its flaws (an over-emphasis on serious abuse
obscures her thesis on the creation of the false self
even in children not "abused' per se; some may
read in it an invitation to a victim mentality), but
it's been a classic since the Swiss psychologist first
published it in the 1970s.
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