Keeping the Love You Find: A Personal Guide Paperback – February 1, 1993

I am a new therapist and I purchased this book as a reference for dealing with couples. It is very interesting and provided a lot of insight for a new therapist. I highly recommend it for those struggling with how they relate to others.

Keeping the Love You Find A Guide for SinglesHarville Hendrix Ph.D.Selected Quotes from a Great Book:"I believe in the transforming power of love.""Love is hard -life is hard.""Everything that lives, lives not alone nor for itself." William Blake"They reject prospective partners, finding them defective in one way or another,not realizing that the fault is in themselves, the rejectors.""... what is going on in mate selection is not love, but need.Love, if it appears at all, appears in marriage, as a result of our commitment to our partner.""The ingredients necessary for full growth and healing-attention, concentration, security, time, deepest intimacy and full mirroring of ourselves through our partner--are possible only in marriage.""Marriage is a spiritual path.""A conscious relationship is not your goal. Not at all; it is the path.""If you cannot remember your childhood, you probably had a childhood you cannot bear to remember.""The idea of the disposability of the troubled partner is dangerous and destructive.Relationship problems are a dynamic between two people:until you are perfect, there is no perfect partner."When we fall in love we feel whole again, for in our beloved we annex the qualities dormant and missing in us.""...the people you are drawn to and admire possess qualities that you long for or that were dismissed and disdained in your home.""..finding in each other what is lacking in themselves.""Since we can't live with a bad image of ourselves, we project our inadmissible negative traits onto our partner.""The painful wounds of our early years.. ...are the "dowry" we bring to our adult relationships....those partnerships have not delivered the love and healing we so trustingly sought; rather, they have echoed the pain of the past.""But love is blind, and lovers cannot seeThe pretty follies that they themselves commit." William Shakespeare"A conscious relationship... is in fact the most effective path to psychological and spiritual wholeness.""Every marriage moves inexorably from romantic illusion to the disillusionment that heralds the onset of the power struggle.""Romance is just the launching pad.""No one works on a relationship when the endorphins are rushing.""When romantic love dies it clears the way for real love.""...we ourselves possess the negative traits we criticize in our partners.""Blame and criticism are characteristic of the power struggle stage in a relationship.What we are seeing is the flip side of the coin of romance: same agenda, opposite tactics.""You must be willing to grow and change and commit yourself first and foremost to the healing of your partner.Being the right partner is more important to a good relationship than picking the right partner.""Our partners are mirrors in which we see reflected those parts of ourselves that we disown.""In a conscious relationship there are no exits.""In a conscious relationship there is no criticism.""This is a revolutionary view of marriage:that rather than leaving it to find yourself, you find yourself through it.Marriage itself is in essence therapy, and your partner's needs chart your path to psychological and spiritual wholeness.""It is important to remember that your habituated patterns are not you. They are your defenses.""Criticism is the most common reaction to frustration in a relationship,and it is the most destructive, a perverse and counterproductive attempt to get one's needs met...""Criticism is the frozen cry of childhood, now put into language; it doesn't work, but our hardwired old brain lamely persists.""When you change your behavior in response to other's requests, you begin to change hidden aspects of your character.""Yet there be some that by due steps aspireto lay their just hands on that golden keythat opens the palace of eternity." John Milton

Great book but not an easy read. Lots of hard work involved!

This book is for those who what to truly explore themselves. There are a lot of assignments throughout the book. If you can't handle doing them then the book is quite a waste of your time. I will admit is is not something you are going to complete in a week. I had to set the book down and step away for a week or so a few times. but it is worth the time and effort. I have learned and am continuing to learn (I'm on chapter 10) a lot about why it is I choose who I chose to bring into my life. I am hoping to have greater insight and therefore greater love.

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If you are willing to do some work on yourself to improve your relationships, this book is a robust guide that will get you there. After you complete its many written exercises, you will know why the same stuff happens in all your relationships, and you will see how you have the power to unhook the painful parts and do something different.Have you ever wondered why you are specifically attracted to one particular person or type of person instead of all the others? Dr. Harville Hendrix has figured it out - that we are acting out unhealed childhood wounds from childhood in our current relationships while our partners are doing the same with us. To that end, we seek out, without realizing it, partners who will stimulate those old wounds to create an emotional "re-run" so that long-sought healing can occur.It sounds complicated, but it's not. It is quite elegant, and brings into view the underlying dance that goes in in every relationship, and gives you the ability to change the parts of the dance that hurt. If you read the book and really do all the exercises, you will have a lot of understanding about how you do relationships, plus practical tools to make them better, and you will have saved many therapy hours and dollars in getting there.

My feeling is that he spends to much effort on constructing and trying to support a thesis that early and middle childhood "hurts" by basically your "parents" are the basis for making bad mate selections. I'm not sure it applies to me. I'm 70 and was divorced by my one and only wife of 45 years - 3 yrs ago. So I'm dating again, my live-in of 7 months is nothing like my ex- and my current one of 6 months is also nothing like my ex-, and I'm nothing like either of their deceased husbands of 41 and 44 years.I'd say he has some good advice in places - but I ignored the analysis of why I choose - and focused on how to keep.Would be better if he had separated the two issues.

I read this book 4 years ago when my marriage of 11 years ended. My goal was to understand what happened in my relationship and make sure I didn't make the same mistake again. This was one of about 20 books I read and literally the only one that I still practice what I learned everyday. I would love to boil it down to the key elements, but I strongly recommend taking this book to heart and going through the entire process. Also, it is important to be honest with yourself when Hendrix asks the tough questions. I also advise keeping this book and the notes you will write in a private place. If you're honest with yourself, you will be looking at yourself from the outside in. You will be completed and "whole" yourself and ready to be in a relationship. I also recommend that when you do find that next person, to encourage them to read this book, if not, at least employ some of key tactics, which you will pick up through reading the book. This is truly one of those books that has had a dramatically positive affect on my life.

Excellent book to understanding yourself and your partner. It may take some time to work through it, and it may be emotionally challenging at times. But wort it. The exercises are informative. Although I haven’t read a lot of self help/relationship books this one is the best book I have come across so far and helped with facilitating real and lasting change. This might be the last book on the topic you will need to read to find your path to healing.I think it is a must have for anyone in or seeking a relationship.

Fabulous seller. Excellent service. Would recommend this book, or the couples guide to anyone and everyone on the planet.

Great book

Amazing book - great delivery! love it

I've recommended this book to a lot of people who are wondering why their relationships fail. I did the exercises years ago and it gave me surprising clarity in my patterns that had produced unsuccessful relationships.