A skimpy take on defective relationships.
This debut self-help work aims to aid readers who give all their attention, understanding, and love to male partners who fail to reciprocate.
Many self-help books have been written about unhappy relationships since the influential bestsellers Women Who Love Too Much (1985) and Codependent No More (1986). The new outlook this volume offers, explain Hosier, a clinical psychologist specializing in relationship counseling, and Conger, is to put aside painful, pathological labels like “dysfunctional,” “codependent,” or “narcissistic” for partners and instead focus on “growing and changing their perspectives.” The authors prefer the term “one-person relationship” to describe a one-sided situation where, for example, “You give up your self to go along with everything he wants and needs….He becomes your life.” Rather than being trapped by tags, assert the authors (who are sisters), readers with this viewpoint can gain opportunities for personal growth through learning to love themselves. (While this book is addressed to people in relationships with men, a 2017 companion volume, You’ll Do Anything for Her, for those with female partners, is also available.) In five chapters composed of chatty, mostly one-sentence paragraphs, the authors describe how one-person relationships develop; why people give themselves up in liaisons; and how families contribute to ideas about bonds. They also remind readers that they have a choice, recommend self-care strategies, and describe the possibilities of a two-person relationship. There isn’t much that’s really new in this guide. Harville Hendrix, whose books and Imago therapy are recommended by the authors, also stresses the importance of giving up judgments, for example, and it would be a rare relationship self-help manual that didn’t advise learning to love oneself. Some readers will likely respond to the authors’ warm, encouraging one-on-one tone and find nuggets of useful advice, such as thinking about options before automatically saying yes. Examples from actual relationships, though, would have given a stronger foundation to the authors’ broad pronouncements, which can also be shallow; for example, “mistakes are really just situations that you would have preferred to have handled in a different way.”
A skimpy take on defective relationships.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62901-448-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: Inkwater Press
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.
More life reflections from the bestselling author on themes of societal captivity and the catharsis of personal freedom.
In her third book, Doyle (Love Warrior, 2016, etc.) begins with a life-changing event. “Four years ago,” she writes, “married to the father of my three children, I fell in love with a woman.” That woman, Abby Wambach, would become her wife. Emblematically arranged into three sections—“Caged,” “Keys,” “Freedom”—the narrative offers, among other elements, vignettes about the soulful author’s girlhood, when she was bulimic and felt like a zoo animal, a “caged girl made for wide-open skies.” She followed the path that seemed right and appropriate based on her Catholic upbringing and adolescent conditioning. After a downward spiral into “drinking, drugging, and purging,” Doyle found sobriety and the authentic self she’d been suppressing. Still, there was trouble: Straining an already troubled marriage was her husband’s infidelity, which eventually led to life-altering choices and the discovery of a love she’d never experienced before. Throughout the book, Doyle remains open and candid, whether she’s admitting to rigging a high school homecoming court election or denouncing the doting perfectionism of “cream cheese parenting,” which is about “giving your children the best of everything.” The author’s fears and concerns are often mirrored by real-world issues: gender roles and bias, white privilege, racism, and religion-fueled homophobia and hypocrisy. Some stories merely skim the surface of larger issues, but Doyle revisits them in later sections and digs deeper, using friends and familial references to personify their impact on her life, both past and present. Shorter pieces, some only a page in length, manage to effectively translate an emotional gut punch, as when Doyle’s therapist called her blooming extramarital lesbian love a “dangerous distraction.” Ultimately, the narrative is an in-depth look at a courageous woman eager to share the wealth of her experiences by embracing vulnerability and reclaiming her inner strength and resiliency.
Doyle offers another lucid, inspiring chronicle of female empowerment and the rewards of self-awareness and renewal.Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0125-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
