The Heart of Relationship: Five Ultimate Truths
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For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
From the beginning of love, through the passing of the years, five truths describe and explain the world of committed, intimate relationship. When everything else is stripped away from the confusion and stories surrounding the life of a couple, five truths remain.
These principles lead developmentally from one to the next.
The first truth is that relationship, by its very nature, consists of struggle and suffering.
The second truth is that our fundamental fear and need are the cause of struggle and suffering in relationship. On the psychological or human level these underlie everything else: fear and need drive us; and fear and need drive relationship.
The third truth is that all efforts to resolve struggle and suffering begin with awareness: awareness of our needs and fears and of how we interact in relationship. A key element of awareness is the development of emotional literacy: learning how to read our own feelings and mental processes.
The fourth truth is that self-care, the compassionate tending of our own neediness and fearfulness, of our over-all vulnerability, is essential to genuine, healthy interaction.
The fifth truth is that the ultimate capacity for deeply satisfying relationship is a seeming paradox: it is the capacity to manifest personal power in combination with genuine selflessness.
The third, fourth and fifth principles of love all point to the way out of struggle and suffering.
Through greater awareness, self-care, and ultimately dynamic personal power and selflessness, we slowly move out of struggle and suffering into an unsurpasasable fulfillment and joy.
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About the Book
The Heart of the Relationship delineates five essential truths that underlie all couplehood: the inescapable fact of struggling and suffering, the fundamental cause of struggle and suffering, and the three evolutionary steps out of suffering are: awareness, self-care and the twin capacity for both personal power and selflessness.
Straight-forward, elegant, and entertaining, The Heart of the Relationship is based on almost twenty years of the author's work with couples and thirty years of his own marriage.
About the Author
Jonathan Goodman-Herrick, LCSW, is one of the leading couples therapists in the Northeast and one of the foremost Voice Dialogue teachers and practitioners in North America. In private practice in Weston, Connecticut and New York City, he has led workshops on both coasts. For more information about working in couple, individual or group therapy with Jonathan Goodman-Herrick, LCSW, call 203.222.7676. After receiving his Masters in Clinical Social Work from NYU in 1985, Jonathan trained with many of the country's foremost therapists in family systems, trance work, and Voice Dialogue. He also trained with several of the world's leading Zen and Advaita masters, and has practiced meditation for thirty years. He has been married thirty years and has two daughters.