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
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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
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