Communion Heals

Dee has struggled for years with voices, urges to cut, multiple personalities and suicidal impulses. She has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals. She has suffered every winter with severe depression. I have been seeing her for years.
            Here we were again. It was late fall and she was decompensating.

            “I found a box of cutter blades left by the carpenters,” she began, “I want to cut. I hear my father’s voice telling me to ‘go ahead.’ That’s what he used to say when I told him I felt like killing myself. He and my mother had eight living children and four children that were miscarried or died before they were strong enough to leave the hospital. We were poor. He would have been just as happy to have one less mouth to feed. He would yell at me or slap me when I didn’t move quick enough for him. I always felt he hated me.

            “Right now I feel like I want to die. It would be such a relief if I could cut myself.” As we talked her speech and tone were becoming more childlike.
            “Would you like to draw a picture with me,” I asked.
            She shook her head in assent like a little girl. I got out an artist’s sketch pad and crayons out from a cupboard in my office. I put them on the floor and sat down across from her. I chose a brown crayon and made an elliptical mark with the crayon and I asked, “Can you make something of that?”
            Immediately she chose another brown crayon and she began drawing fiercely with purpose. What she drew looked something like a snake with a large head. When she finished she wrote the word BELT on the page. Clearly she was implying that this was a belt with a large buckle like one her father used to beat her. When she was finished she was staring at the floor, unable to look up.
            I turned the page to a new blank page and I said, “I am not your father. Look at me. I am sitting over here. I will not move closer to you. That would scare you. I will not hit you or punish you. Look at me. Can you see I’m not moving and that you are safe now? And if you are making me into your father at least can you see I am a different father?”
            Then I turned to my dog, Greco, who had been lying on the floor during this session.
            “Greco,” I called.
            Greco got up stretched and came to me. I patted my left leg and Greco laid down with his head on my leg. I began to pet him.
            “See,” I said. “Greco is not afraid.” I continued to stroke Greco as I talked. Then I selected a green crayon from the crayon box and drew a different elliptical mark.
            “Can you make something of this?” I asked.
            She selected a lighter green and began to draw a scene. Her movements were slower and less frantic than the rapid forceful strokes she made while drawing her last picture. She drew a scene of a blond girl riding a bicycle, smiling. With each stroke of her crayon I spoke encouraging words like an adoring parent. Words like, “that looks good,” and “this is a happy scene” and “I see a bicycle emerging.” and “that’s a blond girl, like you,” and “she is smiling.”
            When she was finished I said. “I asked you to draw with me so that we could share something together. What I really imagined was that if you were a five year old girl and I were your father that I could try to tickle you and you me. We could laugh together. But I’m sure the thought of that scares you.”  

 She nodded in assent.

            “But I would still like to laugh with you,” I said. “So let’s play the silly goose game.”
            “What’s that?” she asked.
            “I will go first,” I said. “I will say I am a silly goose because…and then I will say why and you can laugh at me and I will laugh with you. Then you will say I am a silly goose because…and you will explain why and I will laugh with you.
            “Okay, me first. I’m a silly goose because I tried to plant grass seed and I forgot to rake the ground so the seed could not take root. No grass grew. I’m a silly goose.”
           She laughed a small laugh and I laughed with her.
            “I’m a silly goose for drawing a belt and thinking that you were going to beat me,” she said and then she looked at me and laughed and I laughed with her.
            Then I said, “I’m a silly goose because I drove too fast last week and got a speeding ticket,” her smile and laugh were growing now and I laughed and smiled with her.
            “It’s my turn,” she said. “I got a good one. We just got a new screen and I’m not used to it being there and sometimes I don’t see it and sometimes I walk into it and get knocked back.” She laughed a strong laugh, putting her hand to her face as if to cover her embarrassment. And I laughed along. “This was a good laugh we had together.”
            “Is this better than cutting?” I asked.
            “Yes,” she said. “I was looking for some way to release the tension and we did that when we laughed together. First, you helped me feel safe by sitting on the floor and drawing with me. I liked seeing you pet Greco. There was something about that that was very calming. And then you made fun of yourself and we laughed and I made fun of me and we laughed and the tension somehow left me. And I don’t have a scar on my arm and I don’t have the memory of hurting myself. This was better than cutting.”
            Dee is a devout Catholic so I used the imagery of her faith to explain what we just shared together.

“This is communion,” I said. “It is what you do every Sunday in church. It begins with the confession that we all make messes. It is modeled after the last supper where Jesus was laughing and drinking with his friends. This is what we just did. We confessed that we make messes and we laughed together, forgiving each other for the mistakes we make and sharing our human frailty with each other.”

            “Communion is much better than cutting,” Dee said.

Developing Appreciation Skills

 Annie came to see me in hopes that she could avoid a divorce. The problem was clear and it was her. She is living up to the role of the wicked stepmother in a blended family. The mother of the children died two years before she met their father, Tim. She met Tim while the children, Trip, then seven and Sarah then nine, were visiting their maternal grandparents for the summer at their summer house on Lake Michigan. She and Tim reveled in the private time they had that summer. They developed into a playful, passionate, sexual team.
            Immediately when the children returned she found herself jealous and resentful of the time they stole from her intimate relationship with Tim. When the children returned home, it was as if Tim suddenly transformed from her lover to an acquaintance. She felt as if she was kept at arm’s length by Tim every time the children were around. She told this to Tim and Tim responded with a marriage proposal.
            They married. Things between Annie and Tim began to deteriorate. Annie had little patience for the children. According to Annie, Trip now nine, was an ADHD child who demanded constant attention and enjoyed irritating her. Sarah was a jealous cold fish who was mad at Annie because Tim loved her. According to Annie, Sarah, now eleven, resents every attempt Annie makes to tend to her or even connect with her.
            Tim sees Annie’s treatment of his children as abusive and disrespectful. She has come to me because Tim told her that if she does not find a way to be less angry and rejecting toward his children that he would take his children and move out and perhaps file for divorce.
            I had taught Annie the HEART ritual. She used it effectively. Things were better between her and the children and between her and Tim. This was about our tenth session.
            “Things are better. I don’t react to them with anger like I used to. I don’t raise my voice. I don’t call them names. I haven’t lost my temper with them in a long time. Instead of being at minus ten, I think our relationship is close to zero, maybe a minus one. It is not in the plus range. I’ve changed but they haven’t.
            “Trip still taunts me with his constant tapping on the table. It’s not just me that is aggravated by this. It is also his grandparents. I used to scream at him about this. I don’t do that anymore. His grandparents still yell at him when he starts his tapping.
            “I watch him tap, tap, tap, on the table and look at me waiting to see if I will explode. Now since seeing you, I imagine that he is giving me a character test by taunting me and I’m careful not to take the bait.
            “With Sarah she is so ungrateful. We gave her a new cell phone for her birthday. I gave it to her wrapped as a birthday present. She unwrapped it, pulled it out of its box, ran away with it into her bedroom, and shut the door, leaving us with the mess to clean up. No ‘thank you.’ No questions about how to use a cell phone respectfully. This is typical of her and Tim doesn’t seem to notice. Tim and I were left to clear up the mess.”
            “Was Sarah excited about her new phone?” I asked.
            “Oh yes she was,” Annie said. “She screamed with excitement when she opened it. Yes she wanted it very badly and she was happy to have it, but she showed no gratitude. Don’t you think she should be taught to say ‘thank you’. I can’t imagine that if her biological mother had observed this that she would not have said something. I feel like something should be said to her about how she takes things from us for granted. Her phone was placed on my cellphone contract. I’m paying for her phone. It’s only fifteen more dollars a month. I’m willing to pay that but I would expect someone to notice and say ‘thank you’. I’m able to avoid making make an issue of this but I’m not able to avoid my resentment.”
            “If you try to parent her about this, what will happen?” I asked.
            “She will act hurt, complain to her father and Tim will be mad at me.”
            “Sounds like a bad idea and a waste of your energy,” I said.
            “Yes, totally,” Annie said. “It is hard for me to avoid these challenges that Sarah’s ingratitude presents, but it is getting easier for me to just not care. Sarah thinks I’m on a power trip just trying to control her.”
            “How does she do in school?” I asked.
            “She and Trip both get good grades and good reports from their teachers. People say they are good kids but I don’t see it.”
            “I don’t think that you and this family are stable at zero or minus one,” I said. “I think for you to become part of a stable working family that you need to get well into the plus category.”
            “How do I do that?” Annie asked. “I’ve stopped yelling at them. What more can I do?”
            “A parent’s primary job is to take delight in their child,” I said. “It appears to me and I think to the children that you don’t enjoy them. At best you appear to tolerate them. They bring a special unique spirit into the world that most adults enjoy. These children see other adults enjoy their interactions that they share, their mother, their father, their teachers, their coaches, their grandparents. They also see that you don’t. Until you work to reorient yourself toward the children, your relationship with these children will remain near the edge of collapse or explosion.”
            “So what do I do?” she asked.
            “You tend to see things in the negative more often than the positive,” I said. “If things happen that you don’t foresee or expect, you tend to react critically. With the children this needs to change. Because along with children comes the unexpected to which you must adapt. It is part of the package.”
            “You’re right, I am too negative. I don’t do well with surprises,” She admitted. “How do I change this?”
            “Well, all of us are hard wired to look for what’s wrong first,” I said. “It is part of our natural instincts that help us survive. It is hard-wired in our brains and our biology. If we hit our little finger with a hammer, we are not thinking about other fingers that don’t hurt and are there to serve us. We are not even aware of our good ears, eyes and nose that function well. We take these things for granted and ignore the good in our lives so that we can tend to what is wrong. This tendency helps us clean up spilled milk, fix what needs fixing and tend to our hurts. This tendency taken to its extremes creates a dark world because we can always find something wrong with anything around us.”
            “Yes that’s right,” Annie said. “I do that. When there isn’t something to fix, I look for something that needs fixing. I am not conscious of my good fortune.”
            “Part of your good fortune may be that you have the opportunity to enjoy watching and participating in the development of Sarah and Trip.”
            “That makes some sense to me,” Annie said, “but I still don’t know what to do.”
            “When I was in graduate school, I developed this whole way of thinking about this in my head. I called it ‘appreciation skill.’ I planned to measure it by taking a person back through their memory of the setting that they passed through during the previous day. I would ask them about what they noticed about these settings, the details, like the furniture, the windows, the color of the walls, the books on the shelves. I would consider those who remembered a great many details to be good perceivers of their world.
            “Then I would ask them to rate each detail as something that they liked or did not like. I would consider a person who was able to notice and like a great many things to be high in appreciation skill and a person who was most likely to appreciate the good in others.
            “What I want you to do with Sarah and Trip is exercise your appreciation muscles. First, at the end of each day, I want you to make a list of things you noticed about Sarah and Trip. I want you to rate these things as a ‘like’ or a ‘dislike’. I want you to challenge yourself over time to increase the ratio of ‘likes’ to ‘dislikes’. When your ratio of ‘likes’ consistently becomes higher than your ratio of ‘dislikes’ I want you to begin telling Sarah and Trip the things you notice and like about them. Everybody needs to be noticed and appreciated. If you are able to do this, I am confident that you will begin taking delight in them and they will correspondingly enjoy and appreciate your attention.”
            “I will need help with this,” Annie said. “Like you said my mouth finds it easier to say ‘no’ than to say ‘yes’.”
            “Your mouth is not the only mouth that finds no easy to say,” I answered. “Children as they develop go through a stage of saying ‘no’ to everything. Saying ‘yes’ takes a great deal of thought. Saying ‘yes’ commits us to move with or toward.  Saying ‘no’ means we don’t have to change or accommodate. It is easy for our brains to become frozen in the negative.
            “It is harder for us to risk wanting, liking and exploring whatever the thing is to which we say ‘yes’. ‘Yes’ takes confidence, strength and courage. ‘No’ is a closed door we can hide behind.
            “Seeing good in Sarah and Trip will be hard. But I’m sure that there is much good to see. I can understand why Tim would be hurt that you cannot see the good in his children as he does.”
            “Me too,” Annie said. “So what do I do?”
            “Again tonight start making your list of things about Trip and Sarah that you noticed during the day. Challenge yourself to look for things you value, but for right now it is enough to notice and remember things about them and make a list.”

            Annie did this and returned the next week.

            “I started off with a list of only three things for Sarah and four for Trip. For Trip they were all negative. By the end of the week, I was noticing that Trip’s tapping on the table had a good rhythm. Sometimes the beats that he created were very unique and interesting. I realized that he was absorbed by this drum beat art form and that his tappings on the table were not at all intended to irritate me. It’s funny how, when you really try to pay attention, you see things differently.”

            Weeks later she said, “I get a high positive to negative ratio of likes over dislikes now when I consider things I notice about Sarah and Trip. I’m ready to take my appreciation skill on the road and begin to mention the good things I see in Trip and Sarah.”

             The next week she said, “Trip and Sarah don’t know what to make of me. I suppose they think I’m pretending to be nice. I’m not. All of what I say that’s positive about them is what I see. I’m not lying. I guess I understand why they don’t trust this. I’m not sure they will ever come around. I don’t blame them if they don’t. But I like me better this way. I’m not so depressed. I’m not so angry all the time. I feel happier. I like looking first for the good. This has been good for me.”

             Eventually Trip and Sarah did begin to trust that Annie did mean the good things that she said about them. They did come around. Tim and Annie became partners in raising these children.

            While this story has a happy ending, some step-parents who try this may not have such an outcome. The role of step-parent is the most difficult and unappreciated role in a blended family. It requires the patience of a saint and the tact of a diplomat.
            Whether or not the children come around, if you work to build your appreciation muscles you will like yourself and your life better.

Sue and Alf: Entrances, Exits and Rituals

Sue and Alf were a power couple of some reputation. They have seen me off and one for years and they place a great deal of trust in me. She was an attorney who advertised on television for people who had lawsuits against insurance companies. Alf was a writer of novels and a most of the time a stay at home parent of their three year old child. Often Alf has to leave for a book tour or to meet with agents, publishers or screenplay writers.

            “When I come home,” Alf began, “It’s like I’m, at worst, the enemy to Sue or at best, an unwanted intruder. She is always angry when I come home. While I’m away, I miss my family. When I come home, I am excited to return or I used to be. Now I dread coming home because when I walk into the door, I receive a machine gun blast of ‘why are you late?’ ‘Alice missed you. Did you bring her a gift?’ ‘I am so tired. Can you call Carrabas and go pick up supper?’ My daughter greets me with a hug when I walk in the door. I don’t get a hug or a kiss from Sue and forget about sex, at least for a week.”

            “He comes home as if he is the conquering hero,” Sue said. “He wants a wife waiting with his slippers, pipe and beer, dressed in a French maid’s outfit ready to satisfy his every desire. He has no idea what I’ve been through. I’ve had to keep many balls in the air. There is our child to care for, my law practice and my clients who all act like children. I have to do all this and take Alice to her dentist and pediatrician’s appointments. I bring work home because I can’t get it all done during the day. I can’t get to that until Alice is down at night. That’s usually just before 9:00. Alf often calls around 9:30 just when I getting started on my work and he wants me to be chatty Kathy with him on the phone. I’m lucky if my head hits the pillow before 12:30 A.M. And Alice is in my face at 6:00 saying, ‘Mommy I’m hungry.’ When Alf comes home he meets an exhausted overwhelmed wife and mother who needs help desperately. When he comes home, he thinks I’m the lucky one because I didn’t have to leave home.”

            “Well book tours are grueling and lonely,” Alf said. “I have to put on a smile and make up something new to write for every reader’s book that I sign. Then, there are the local talk show interviews where I try to make the hosts seem intelligent when they haven’t even read my book. Yes, I have been cut off from the people I love, forced to appear to be best friends with hundreds of people I don’t know. I’m a writer and an introvert. I hate being in the spotlight. I can’t wait to be safe at home with people who love me. I imagine that to be my wife but it is not. She seems to feel resentment bordering on hatred.”

            “That’s a bit extreme don’t you think,” Sue said.

            “You haven’t been the one who walks in the door desperate to be home and then have his wife glare at him as if he were a snake and then shout orders at him as if he were an ungrateful servant or a disobedient dog.”

            “That’s why he’s such a good writer, Dr. McMillan,” Sue said. “He has a flair for the dramatic.”

            “It seems that you both want the same thing,” I said. “You are competing for who gets to have the entitlements that go along with the suffering hero role. You are competing to see who is suffering the most and who is entitled to the grateful nurture and comfort from the other who you consider to be the beneficiary of your suffering. Both of you are blaming the other for the tragedy which you conceive your life to be.

            “It seems to me that you are both heroes and that you are both suffering for the good of the family. I think you both deserve comfort and gratitude. It seems that you are so hungry to be appreciated that you can’t see that you might need to offer thanks before you can expect to be thanked. Why can’t you step away from your personal pity parties and look and see that your partner needs something from you.”

            “He has had a good night’s sleep with no child to wake him up, no work waiting to be done. All he has to do is get to the airport on time and take a taxi home. He has been loved and adored by his fans and you expect me to feel sorry for him.”

            “Now do you see what I’m coming home to,” Alf said.

            “Yes Sue, I suppose I do,” I said.

            “So you are taking his side,” Sue said.

            “No, I’m trying to side with both of you, but that’s not working,” I said. “So let me try another approach. Yvonne Agazarian is a famous system centered group psychotherapist. She often warned her group participants with this phrase, ‘There is always turbulence at the boundary.’ Entrances and exits are difficult systems’ events for any social system, including families and couples. All couples have entry fights and exit fights.”

            “Yes, that’s right, now that you mention it,” Sue said. “Alf always picks a fight before he leaves town.”

            “Perhaps that’s because he loves you and Alice so,” I said, “and he can’t bear the burden of sadness that comes with leaving you. He needs the protection of anger. So he picks a fight so that he can say to himself, ‘I’m glad to be leaving.’”

            “I wasn’t aware I do that,” Alf said, “but now that you mention it, perhaps I do. I do hate leaving and it seems we always have a fight just before I go.”

            “And you also have an entry fight,” I said. “Sue has begun to develop a rhythm in her daily routine that just barely works, more or less and she has done this without having to negotiate with you. And here you come, pushing your way into her machine that is running, sputtering and coughing, but running and now you expect her to accommodate you too. Of course, she resents you. She resents you for leaving and dumping all this responsibility onto her and then she resents you for coming back, expecting more of her.”

            “Yes that’s it,” Sue said. “That’s exactly how I feel. And Alf, introvert dependent Alf, has been forced to pretend to be happy when he is not. He has been cut off from his roots and he missus us terribly. And I see what you were saying earlier. Now that I feel understood, I can move out of my resentment and see Alf from his perspective.”

            “Turbulence at the boundary,” Alf said. “Entry and exit fights. It’s not our fault. It’s not just us. Does this happen to most families where one person travels?”

            “Yes,” I agreed.

            “So I shouldn’t take it personally, like I do,” Alf said.

            “That would be nice,” Sue said. “Because I don’t mean for you to.”

            “What can we do about this turbulence at the boundaries?” Alf said.

            “You can develop some rituals for entries and exits,” I suggested.

            “What do you mean?” Sue asked.

            “Well every time you come home, as you land, Alf, you might call Sue and ask her if you can pick up something for her on the way home, a carton of milk, some bread or she could order Chinese and by the time you got to the restaurant, it might be ready.”

            “Yeah and if you offered to help me like that,” Sue said. “I might have time to pour us a glass of wine and meet you at the door when you come in.”

            “That would be nice,” Alf said.

            “And before you leave Alf,” I said. “You could tell Sue how much you dread going and how sad leaving makes you. Sharing your sadness is better than covering it up with anger.”

            “That’s a compliment to me that you are sad to go,” Sue said. “Knowing that will make it easier for me to think about you when you are gone without resenting you.”

            “I can do that,” Alf said.

            “That will help you with the turbulence at the boundary,” I said.

Conclusion

This story makes two important points. The first is that often a couple’s conflict is a system’s event. There are ordeals that present themselves like coming upon a bear in the forest. If you are going to walk in the woods, sometimes you will come upon danger. The same is true of the relationship journey. Parting and returning is one universal relationship ordeal. The fact that tension exists at the boundaries is no one’s fault. It is simply what happens when boundaries are approached and crossed.

            The second point in this story has to do with rituals. Rituals are well practiced steps. We use familiar rituals to help us reduce emotional tension. J.K. Rowling raised ritual up to the level of magic in her Harry Potter books. When Harry was in trouble he simply pulled out his wand and spoke some well-practiced ritualistic words and his problems disappeared. Rituals are not that powerful but they serve the same purpose. They help us cope with stress.

            In a relationship they place both parties in a well-rehearsed dance. Each of them has a part to speak or do. The point of the ritual is to remind one another that they have a partner who cares and who is present with them as they face life’s stresses together. And somehow, magically, this brings us comfort. It interrupts blame cycles and helps us focus on being partners.

Preface

A Man’s Guide to Relationships is for women too. The principles for healing and maintaining relationships are the same for all of us, of course. What makes this a Man’s Guide is how it is presented and the tone of the book.

            Most relationship books are written for women readers because women buy most of the books in the genre. Men often respond either with disinterest or with hostility to this subject. Men are often intimidated by women’s emotional vocabulary or by their social competence. Men need a book with down to earth stories and easy to follow steps and exercises that will help them build relationship skills.

            Men are usually not interested in psychobabble theories about their parents or in new age eastern philosophy. They need a straight forward, how-to approach. This is the aim of this book.

            Several things qualify me to write this book: I am a man’s man. I love sports. I come from the male-oriented culture of the small-town rural South. I try to write so that my Arkadelphia, Arkansas brother could read what I write. I distrust esoteric language.

            I adore women. I especially adored my mother and I think my love for her was returned to me in overflowing abundance.

            And that was my problem. I assumed all women were like my mother. I assumed that if I could ever find a woman that I was attracted to and win her heart, she would love me back just like my mother.

            My attempts at finding love were pathetic. I always appeared desperate. By thirty-eight I had many failed relationships and two divorces. As I approached my next marriage to my now wife of twenty-five years, Marietta, I was determined to learn from my past failures and from the mistakes I made with her. It is this determination and work to learn how to love a woman that most qualifies me to write this book.

            I have been helped by the more than thirty years of couples who have come to see me in my clinical practice. Their struggles, triumphs and failures have taught me much of what is written here.

            Some of their stories are here. Some of mine are too, but all the stories are written so that no one’s identity is compromised and no confidences revealed.

            I started the journey of writing this book some five years ago. I was writing exploring the edges of the battle between the sexes. In my relationships I found myself mostly in the wrong, constantly apologizing. Writing this book was to be my way of balancing the sexual scales. I hoped to blame my sins on being male and to also expose the less visible feminine sin.  In my mind the male sin was narcissism. I had and have an abundance of that. And the female sin was over-nurturing.

            What I found is that, yes, there are, of course, sexual differences in general between men and women, but they breakdown in the particulars of individuals. We as individuals are more alike than we are different. (If that weren’t true, a book like this one could not be written). And individual differences are more profound than sexual differences.

            What a disappointment. After all this researching, thinking and writing, I was forced to conclude that sexual differences cannot justify my mistakes and that whatever corresponding female sin there is, does not allow me to shift blame onto women.

            It’s more complicated than that and yet it is very simple. I am, you are, we are accountable to learn, grow and change. Our failures are our teacher. Blaming others is a dead end. We have work to do and that work never ends.

            That’s the bad news. The good news is that there are things we can do. These things are within our grasp to learn. And when we learn them and practice them our relationships get better.

This book is straight talk. And it is grounded in scholarship with a strong theoretical frame. This book is meant to be read easily. The goal of the book is to speak to therapists and clients. I offer tools for therapists to teach their clients. These tools are illustrated by stories of people with real problems and strong dialogue. For those of you who are interested in the derivation of my ideas, you will find my references at the end of each chapter, footnoted to the idea in the chapter.

            The book has exercises that you can use to internalize the concepts presented and to practice the skills that you are learning. It is helpful to have a therapist with whom you will work while using the tools presented here. If you have trouble in working with an exercise, stop and wait until you can discuss the exercise with a therapist or a third party.

For serious scholars it should be noted that I come from the humanistic emotion-focused therapy school of Jules Seeman, J. R. Newbrough, Leslie Greenberg and Rhonda Goldman. The Greenberg book Emotion Focused Therapy (2001) and the Greenberg and Goldman Emotion-Focused Couple’s Therapy (2008) do an excellent job of describing the theoretical underpinnings of my book with only a few exceptions. This book is a more hands-on practical, how-to book that bridges the gap between serious students and real couples who are ready to get to work. Both will find this book useful.

This book is not about focusing on the past. It is about discovering new problem-solving skills. Part of the book offers ideas like creative listening that psychologists have been promoting for a long time. People of faith will resonate with many of the tenets I promote here. Yet, this is not a religious book. There are several ideas new to the couple’s psychotherapy world, e.g. communion, the third position and confessional communication. The first two chapters explain the theory of balance, describe relationship types and give examples of how balance works in relationships. The following chapters introduce the reader to a variety of relationship tools. They are structures or processes that stop blaming, passive withdrawal, name calling and fault-finding and encourage honor, compassion, trust and respect.

            If you are a therapist, this book will help you become more competent at helping couples and it will help you become more competent as a partner in a healthy relationship. It is written assuming that healers are people first and all of us can become healers and receive help with our own healing. If couples consult this book, they will discover where to begin. With work and practice they can tune-up their relationship so that it runs on all cylinders.