Real Love: The Truth About Finding Unconditional Love and Fulfilling Relationships - Rilegato

Baer, Greg, M.D.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 1592400000 ISBN 13: 9781592400003

Casa editrice: Gotham Books, 2003

Riassunto

Furnishes a practical blueprint for successful relationships by detailing the various steps to finding and maintaining love, dicussing such topics as the difference between conditional and unconditional love, how to eliminate conflicts, how to differentiate between imitation love and real love, and the destructive impact of dishonesty and criticism. 30,000 first printing.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Greg Baer, M.D., is the author of a highly successful self-published book, The Truth about Relationships, which became the basis for Real Love. Dr. Baer has appeared on over 800 radio shows, and lectures at Unity churches around the country.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

INTRODUCTION

Like most of us, I was told as a child that if I did all the right things—set my goals high, worked hard, and followed the rules along the way—I would accomplish great things. And it was further implied that, as a result, I would grow up to be happy. All our lives, we’ve heard people declare that they’d be happy if only they had more money, or a better job, or more sex, or a bigger house, or more opportunity to travel, or something else. I was determined to ensure my future happiness by having an abundance of all those things and more, and from an early age I worked hard to earn them.

I was valedictorian of my high school class, finished college in two and a half years, and received the highest honors in medical school. After completing my internship and specialty training in eye surgery, I eventually established one of the most successful ophthalmology practices in the country. I performed thousands of operations and taught other physicians locally and across the country. I was a leader in my church and in the local Boy Scouts organization. I had everything money could buy, and I was a husband and the father of five beautiful children.

By the time I reached my late thirties, I’d accomplished almost every goal I’d ever set for myself, but despite all my successes, I slowly came to the terrible realization that I had not achieved the happiness I’d been promised. When I was standing in front of a group of physicians, teaching the latest surgical techniques, and everyone was admiring me for my knowledge, I felt relatively satisfied with my life for the moment. And some of those expensive vacations were exciting while I was actually in those far-off, exotic places. But when I was all alone, with nothing to distract me, I knew something was missing—I just didn’t know what it was. I couldn’t have worked any harder. I’d done everything I’d been assured would bring me the happiness I wanted, but still something was wanting.

I found it difficult to sleep at night and began to take some of the sleeping pills we kept at the office for postsurgical patients. When those were no longer effective, I took other tranquilizers, and before long I was injecting narcotics every night. I rationalized my drug addiction for a long time, but it increasingly affected my behavior and my emotional health. Then, one evening, as I sat in the woods behind my house with a loaded Smith & Wesson 10mm semi-automatic pressed to my head, I finally realized that I couldn’t rationalize my behavior any longer. I knew I needed to do something about my life.

I went to an in-patient drug treatment facility, and after my discharge I participated in several twelve-step programs for a while. Getting off the drugs saved my life, but it only put me back where I’d been when I started using them. I was still desperately missing something, but this time I was determined to find out what it was. I tried individual and group therapy, support groups, men’s groups, New Age techniques, and Native American spiritual groups, among others. Each had wisdom to offer, but the old emptiness I felt was not being filled.

In my searching, I found many others whose feelings were similar to mine. Most of them hadn’t been addicted to drugs, but they all were missing the profound happiness they’d always hoped for in their lives. We began to meet together in our homes, where we tried a variety of techniques I’d experienced or read about. Gradually, we eliminated the things that didn’t work, and we discovered some principles that were astonishingly simple and effective. People who had been unhappy for a long time, in many cases despite years of therapy, were finding the first genuine happiness they’d ever known.

As we began to figure out what worked, I started writing down what we’d learned, handing out a few pages at a time to the men and women who participated in those early “experiments.” Eventually, my observations became two self-published books that have now been read by thousands. I’ve shared these principles with people all over the country, and as they’ve applied them, their lives have changed in remarkable ways.

When I was trying to fill my emptiness, and later, as I was learning to change my life, I made many mistakes as a person, a husband, and a father. Among other things, those mistakes caused the end of my twenty-two-year marriage. Learning—as I discovered— can be very expensive. Now I’m deeply gratified to see the results of what I’ve learned, and to share it all with you. My second wife and I are the parents of seven children between us, and we’re happier than we’d ever imagined it was possible to be.

Certainly there is a demonstrated need for people to learn something different. Half the marriages in this country end in divorce. One out of three children is now raised in a single-parent home. Ten to twenty percent of us are addicted to alcohol or drugs. One third of all girls and forty-five percent of all boys have had sex by age fifteen (compared with five percent for girls in 1970 and twenty percent for boys in 1972). Twenty-one percent of ninth graders have had four or more sexual partners. Nine percent of adult males will spend some time of their life in prison. I believe those statistics provide overwhelming evidence that we’re unhappy and looking for something that’s missing in our lives. Thousands of people have found that “missing something” as they’ve implemented the principles in this book. And I have great confidence that you, too, will enjoy the same experience.

1
The Missing Ingredient
What Relationships Really Need
Relationships fail all around us every day—between spouses, lovers, siblings, friends, and co-workers, among others. But despite an abundance of self-assured finger-pointing, the people involved rarely have any idea what actually went wrong. As a result, many people seem to be caught in an endless cycle of disappointment and unhappiness, blindly repeating the same mistakes.

Lisa came to see me because she was having problems with her fiancé, Doug. It was obvious that she was angry at him. “We met almost a year ago,” she said, “and we fell in love right away. I knew he was the one for me. We never spent a minute apart that first month. But now he seems to look for reasons to be away from me, and we seem to fight all the time. I don’t treat him any differently, but he sure doesn’t treat me the way he used to. I don’t understand it.”

Lisa had been married once before, to Christopher, and the story was similar. They had fallen in love immediately, and within six months they were married and certain they would be ecstatically happy for the rest of their lives. But in the first year of their marriage, there were already signs that the magic of their relationship was escaping them. They began to find fault with each other over little things. Roses and kisses gradually gave way to expectations and disappointments, each of which left a wound and then a scar. Slowly, the excitement of being in love became a distant memory. Unable to find the happiness they sought, they divorced after eight years of marriage.

Lisa had tried very hard to make her relationship with Christopher work. She’d tried sacrifice, pleading, complaining, compromise, self-help books, professional counseling, and visits to her minister, but nothing she did seemed to help. And because she didn’t see why her relationship had failed, she was doomed to repeat her mistakes with Doug and to continue being unhappy. We can all benefit from understanding Lisa’s experience, because it’s typical of the pattern seen in virtually every unhappy relationship—not only between spouses, but also between friends, family members, people in the workplace, and so on. We’ve all had the experience of starting a relationship that seemed promising, only to have something go wrong that we didn’t understand, and when that happened, we were left feeling disappointed or worse. We must understand what happens in these situations, or we’ll repeat the process again and again.

When we’re unhappy, it seems natural for us to blame a partner—a spouse, a friend, a child, even a relative stranger—for our feelings, mainly because that’s what everyone else does. All our lives we’ve heard variations of statements like “You make me so mad,” or “He makes me so angry,” until we’ve come to believe that other people have the power to determine how we feel. Because other people have often pointed out how their anger was caused by our mistakes, we have learned to justify our anger by pointing out the mistakes of others. And because people are always making mistakes, it’s easy to find justification for our blaming and anger.

Sadly, it’s a common pattern: If we become unhappy in our relationships, we turn our partners into scapegoats for everything we don’t like, and we blame them for all the unhappiness in our lives, including the unhappiness we carried with us for the many years before we even met them. But we are mistaken to blame our partners for our negative feelings. It’s just the excuse we use because we feel bad, we don’t know why, and we need someone other than ourselves to blame. Until we understand that, we cannot learn to have truly loving and lasting relationships.

The Missing Ingredient
Imagine that after a violent storm, you and I are shipwrecked on a barren island in the middle of the ocean. After a week with nothing to eat, I begin to complain that you’re not doing enough to provide food for me, and the hungrier I become, the more I complain. Not an hour goes by that I don’t remind you that I’m starving and you are to blame.

You must think I’m insane. Obviously you didn’t cause my hunger. I’m starving because a storm wrecked our ship and left us stranded on an island without food—and you had nothing to do with any of that. My blaming you is not only wrong, it’s ineffective, because it does nothing to help solve our predicament. Two starving people with no source of food cannot possibly give each other what they need, and no amount of anger or blame can change that....

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Gotham Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1592400000
• ISBN 13: 9781592400003
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 288