This book seems designed to put couples therapists out of business, offering experiential advice on a wide range of relationship situations and issues. The author — a psychotherapist himself, as well as a clinician and teacher — focuses on how we all need to see the ways that “we are in each other’s care.”
Communication, memory, and perception make up chapter 1. Chapter 2 deals with a range of issues, from “blending versus congealing” to how to take care of yourself and your partner at one and the same time.
Twelve more chapters take readers through every conceivable topic of difficulty, conflict, or interest involved in spending one’s life with another person. These topics include “structural issues” such as what if one of us is monogamous and the other is not? Or, what if one of us wants a child and the other does not? The final chapters concern intimacy and sex.
Tatkin often offers dialogue, based on what he has heard in sessions with couples in various situations. Interspersed with these exchanges is advice, such as: “This fight will repeat ad infinitum because the couple architecture is all wrong, or not coconstructed. The mistake is organizational.”
He deals with bullying partners definitively, and he addresses messy partners gingerly. He takes seriously arguments about money.
No topic seems off-limits, all to the good of relationship health. We believe you will find a lot of good advice here for the spiritual practices of nurturing and listening, which are often lacking today in our relationships — even with those who are supposed to be closest to us.
