Love Starts Here

Avrum Nadigel, Aliza T. Israel

Description

Are you ready for a relationship? How can you meet the right person? How do you know it’s right? Will this last?
Thanks to Internet dating and instant global communication, it’s become easier and easier to meet people. So why is it so hard to find the right person? So hard that you may have, almost, given up. Who needs a long-term committed relationship anyway?
The exercises in this workbook are designed to help you thrive in the relationships you have, or hope to find. Created by a married couple – a family-and-relationship therapist and a clinical psychiatrist – this book will provide you with tools to navigate the highs and lows of emotionally-committed relationships. Whether you fear commitment, or find yourself blinded by your love of falling in love, this workbook will help you begin to make changes, to chart a path toward lasting, committed love.
Commitment is hard. But there is meaning in the struggle: You are capable of building a relationship that is far better than the ones you've seen.

Informations

• Publié par: Self-Counsel Press
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781770404748
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

LOVE STARTS HERE
Becoming your best self to find your best match
Avrum Nadigel, MSW and Aliza T. Israel, MD, FRCPC
Self-Counsel Press (a division of) International Self-Counsel Press Ltd. USA Canada

Copyright © 2017

International Self-Counsel Press All rights reserved.
Contents

Cover

Title Page

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION

Chapter 1: Love Starts Here: The Process

1. Why the “Quick Fix” Fixes Nothing

2. Love Starts Here: The Process

3. The Three-Step Commitment Process

4. Begin at the Beginning: Self-in-Relationship Inventory (SIRI)

5. How to Use This Workbook

Chapter 2: Thinking Like a Scientist

Chapter 3: The Self-in-Relationship Inventory (SIRI): Your Differentiation Roadmap

1. Defining Differentiation

2. The Self-in-Relationship Inventory (SIRI)

Exercise 1: Your Own Self-in-Relationship Inventory (SIRI)

3. Interpreting the SIRI

PART TWO: STARTING WITH YOU

Chapter 4: Your Best Self

1. Defining Your Principles

2. Your Personal Constitution

Exercise 2: What Are Your Five Core Values?

Exercise 3: What Are Your Principles?

Exercise 4: My Personal Constitution

3. Wrapping Up

Exercise 5: Track Your Activity for One Week

Chapter 5: Reframing Anxiety

1. No Pain, No Gain

2. Harnessing Emotions for a Meaningful Life

3. Anxiety: Friend or Foe?

Exercise 6: Finding Your Stress Response

4. Growing Pains

Exercise 7: Finding Your Anxiety Zone

5. Giving Anxiety a Little SPACE

Chapter 6: Creating SPACE

Exercise 8: Emotional Reactivity

1. The SPACE Process

Exercise 9: Making SPACE

Example 1: Making SPACE (1)

Example 2: Making SPACE (2)

2. Keeping Your Cool: Centering Practices for Emotional Self-Regulation

3. Anxiety “911”: “I need to calm down — now!”

Exercise 10: A Contract for a Contract

4. Your Best Self, Moving Forward

PART THREE: DRAWING YOUR MAP

Chapter 7: Family Diagrams

1. A Family Diagram

Exercise 11: Predicting Family Patterns

Example 3: Ashley’s Family Diagram

Exercise 12: Drawing Your Family Diagram

2. Analyzing Your Family Diagram

Example 4: Jim’s Family Diagram

Exercise 13: First Impressions

Exercise 14: Setting Priorities

Exercise 15: Themes and Patterns

Exercise 16: Marriage Dynamics

Exercise 17: Extended Family

Exercise 18: Fighting and Growing

Example 5: Triangle

Example 6: Emily’s Triangle

Example 7: Josh’s Triangle

Exercise 19: Josh’s Focusing on Triangles

Exercise 20: Josh’s Birth Order

Exercise 21: Major Events Timeline

Example 8: Devin’s Timeline

3. What Now?

Chapter 8: One-to-One Relationships

1. The Path to Differentiation

2. Developing One-to-One Relationships

Exercise 22: One-to-One Relationships

Exercise 23: Field Notes

PART FOUR: FINDING LOVE

Chapter 9: Postmodern Romance

1. Assumptions versus Reality

2. Postmodern Romance

Exercise 24: Anxiety-Based Dating

3. Chemistry: Shared Principles, Plus … ?

Exercise 25: You Complete Me

Chapter 10: Dating for Real

1. My Best Self: Online and in Person

Exercise 26: Dating Faux Pas

2. Putting Your Best Self Forward

Exercise 27: Letting Anxiety Write Your Profile; Rewriting with Values

3. Personalizing the Process

4. Beyond the First Date

5. Becoming Your Best Self to Find Your Best Match

Exercise 28: Becoming Your Best Self in a Relationship

6. Relationships over Time

PART FIVE: WRAP-UP

Chapter 11: Taking It with You into the World

1. Begin Again

Appendix: Timeline Template

Resources

Download Kit

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Notice to Readers

Self-Counsel Press thanks you for purchasing this ebook.

Chapter 1
Love Starts Here: The Process

Welcome to the Love Starts Here Workbook . The exercises in this workbook (which are also available on the download kit that came with this book) will take you step by step through a comprehensive exploration of who you are, where you have come from, and what tools and strategies will best help you find a partner who’s right for you.
This workbook is based on ideas from the book Learning to Commit: The best time to work on your marriage is when you’re single (Self-Counsel Press, 2015). While we’ve written this workbook to stand on its own, we do suggest reading Learning to Commit to hear a first-person account of these concepts in action.
Before you begin, you may be wondering who we are and why it’s a good idea to trust us when it comes to love, marriage, family, and relationships. We’ll be asking a lot of you, so it’s only fair we introduce ourselves briefly before we begin.
Aliza is a psychiatrist at Women’s College Hospital, a teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Toronto, and Avrum is a family and relationship therapist in private practice. We are also a married couple, and the parents of two boys. While the material in this workbook is rooted in decades of theory and research, everything included within these pages has also been tested in the real world of our personal and professional lives.
For stylistic purposes, and for ease of reading, we will often fuse our voices into the pronoun “we” in the book when referring to how we think about things, the clients/patients we see, and how we work. It’s important to note that, in real life, our journeys and practices differ quite a bit, though all the major concepts here resonate for both of us.
For Avrum, as you’ll already know if you’ve read Learning to Commit , it took years of wrestling with commitment, with many fits and starts, to understand that a robust and deeply meaningful relationship is possible, but only if you learn to tame your emotional reactivity, whether to too much closeness, or too much distance. A contrarian by nature, he slowly discovered that some of the most popular and enduring ideas about love — such as the view that relationship success invariably requires more compromise, or more communication — create more problems than they solve. Finally, after a journey which may (or may not) resemble your current one in some ways, he discovered a path where loving another didn’t require losing oneself. Once married, he fulfilled a promise to himself to gather all that he had learned to help others struggling with commitment by writing Learning to Commit .
For Aliza, while working with children and adolescents over the past decade, she has often seen families come to her office to talk about a troubled child, only to find that longstanding difficulties in the parents’ relationships are clearly contributing to the problem. Digging deeper, those relationship difficulties almost always have their roots in previous generations. When people recognize how their families’ unfinished business is affecting their own children, they invariably wish they had dealt with it sooner.
Could there be a way to help people enter relationships with more insight into their family patterns, and more of a framework for recognizing and dealing with the problems that inevitably come up, so that these difficulties might not get so big or need quite as much intervention down the line? This workbook is our attempt to make that wish come true.

1. Why the “Quick Fix” Fixes Nothing
Many relationship books and advice columns offer a “quick fix”: a surefire way that promises to help you find love, or six easy steps to a blissful marriage. Unfortunately, through our lives and our practices, we have learned that there’s no shortcut to finding and cultivating healthy relationships.
You should know, right up front, that this workbook demands a lot of you. It’s not enough to just read the material, even if you agree with everything you read. To create long-lasting change in your life, you need to act differently, over and over again.
At the beginning of a therapy session, Avrum often asks returning clients: “What did you work on this week?” The question helps quash any fantasy that the therapist’s office is where the change occurs. Instead, he expects them to leave sessions with a roadmap for doing the work “out there,” in the real world. Deep, lasting change must occur within the sturm und drang (storm and stress) of your relationships (often, this will be with those who are closest to you). Though it may seem like an indirect route, it’s only through changing those relationships that we gradually become able to pick better dating partners, and find more success and fulfillment in our intimate relationships.
1.1 The patterns of our lives
Many