Product Description

Your dream of finding a partner is a natural and normal human instinct and your dream is perfectly achievable. Whatever your history, whatever your heartbreak, as a single person you are in an ideal position to learn what you need to know and what you can do to greatly improve your chances for finding, and keeping, love. With KEEPING THE LOVE YOU FIND, renowned relationship therapist and bestselling author Harville Hendrix will help you to: * IDENTIFY your Imago - the fantasy partner that your unconscious mind, which has a hidden agenda of its own, has chosen for you * BREAK FREE from those patterns in your parents' marriage that you have unknowingly accepted as your relationship model * CREATE hope in place of despair, companionship instead of loneliness * DEVELOP communication skills to turn conflict into contact - and togetherness * TRANSFORM every past relationship into a source of positive growth * DISCOVER the rewards of real love - and the little things that make it last ...and more. Filled with wisdom and compassion, KEEPING THE LOVE YOU FIND will help get your next relationship off to the best start and keep your love strong for a lifetime.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #32216 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Customer Reviews

A great read.
This is one great read in that it gives good, sound advice for the person who has had trouble in the loe department. I think that, for all of us, acheiving long love is the goal of life, and this book can set you on that path. I recommend it, along with How To Be Wanted: Use the Law of Attraction to Date the Man You Most Desire and Live the Life You Deserve.

Useful guide for any person seeking a lasting relationship
The tenet of this book, as is that of the other Hendrix books, is that we carry 'wounds' from childhood into our adult relationships. In order to have lasting, fulfilling, 'whole' adult relationships, we must understand our own wounds and how they affect the type of person we have become and the type of person we are attracted to. Unfortunately, the person we are attracted to is often exactly the type of person who cannot help heal those wounds of childhood: The premise of the book is that we are looking exactly for the type of person who has the NEGATIVE qualities that our care-takers had, so that we can try to 'resolve' the issues we had with those negative qualities. The only solution is that each of the partners in a relationship must learn to 'grow', in order to understand themselves and to help offer their partners the healing 'wholeness' they are seeking. A single person has the advantage in that s/he can do some of this introspective work (with assistance from Hendrix's usually insightful, helpful exercises) before meeting the (next) potential partner. While I do not fully agree with the theoretical basis for Hendrix's position (I think that who we are attracted to is a mix of the 'familiar' and the 'novel'--this only makes it LOOK as if we are searching for someone with the qualities of our caretakers), his exercises are right on the mark. Every single person who is hoping to develop a new, this time lasting, relationship should consider going through the hard work that this book entails; it promises in the long run a healthier, happier loving relationship in the future.

Should come with a warning
I cannot comment on how helpful this book is likely to be to other readers, but I would like to give my experience of it as a balance to the other reviews here and offer a word of warning.
I would firstly like to state that for me, reading this book a damaging - and definitely not growing - experience. The basis of Hendrix's book is the 'Imago', 'the fantasy partner that your unconscious mind... has chosen for you', and for me he gets a point for giving me tasks to identify mine (but this wasn't new to me, I have come across exercises to do the same in books I've previously read). But he loses that point immediately for the repeated message that, no matter what, we are destined to end up together with someone who fulfils that image. In other words, this book isn't about trying to break those patterns of ending up with the same type of person, quite the opposite, Hendrix states (as if it were fact) that that is exactly what is necessary. It is necessary to do this, according to him, to heal the wounds of our childhood which gave rise to aspects of the Imago. I say `according to him', because he doesn't really justify these theories or statements. Excepting I have come to this book because in the past I have often been in badly abusive and damaging relationships; and Hendrix has said I cannot escape this, that I must stick with my Imago, I must seek it. And he doesn't really say how I should identify the worst aspects of the Imago and avoid them, the best he offers is some advice to try some self-healing to `take the edge off' the Imago.
What he certainly doesn't seem to believe we can decide for ourselves what dominant personality traits we want in our long-term partner (and which ones we definitely don't!) and I felt very very grateful that I know people who have done just that, and gone from the same type of abusive partner, to a very different loving and caring person, otherwise this book would have made me feel even more vulnerable and scared.
I also really dislike he states opinion as fact, and yet doesn't provide any proper evidence apart from subjective anecdote. For me this tone is often patronizing, and potentially damaging, and therefore dangerous. For example, he states early on (and repeats) that all people have to marry; not live together, not be in a loving, committed lasting relationship; they have to have a piece of paper stating they are married, otherwise they will never be, and can never be, whole. I don't believe this, and he fails to convince me of it, he just states it. For him, it doesn't need to be questioned, and implicit in it is the terrifying proposal that if you don't believe in marriage (just as I don't), and never get married, you will never be healed and whole. And unlike other self-help books I have read that state things I don't believe myself, they at least still leave me to decide for myself whether I should accept it or not, or give me the chance to see how it might be accurate, or accurate at least for some people, or some aspect of myself etc etc, there is no chance of any of that here. It is Hendrix's way, or no way; and it is all his way, just because he says it is so.
And sometimes I do not even understanding what he is saying; on rape he writes; `the depersonalization of the other, in rape, is an expression of a split self, a desperate attempt to connect with the hated opposite in oneself. A rapist suffers from sensory deprivation, from the repression of eros, from a deep self-hatred acted out upon a hated object - the perfect formula for violence.' I think this statement would require careful reading, analysis and study for even the above-averagely sussed reader.
For me there was a (very) little relevant good advice in this book (at 301 pages it is not surprising), but for me reading it was like having someone whisper my worst fears over and over to me. I wish I had never picked it up.