Product Description

Love is the most "natural" thing in the world. Yet we make and break relationships routinely, often without understanding why. Unravelling the desire for rewarding relationships, we must start with ourselves. Stephanie Dowrick offers a penetrating insight into how we can feel crowded in a relationship and yet miserable when alone. She reveals the underlying basis of many paradoxes of human relationships. Dowrick invites us to understand the choices we have already made, while also exploring new possibilities. Love, as she shows, is what opens us to others but it is the one thing that also helps us discover the very best in ourselves.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #97666 in Books
• Published on: 2002-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Review
'Sympathetically and with a rare clarity, it offers penetrating insights into some of the most basic paradoxes of human relationships' Guardian

About the Author
Stephanie Dowrick was co-founder and managing director of The Women's Press from 1977 to 1982. She has training in analytic psychotherapy and psychosynthesis, as well as in Gestalt therapy and marital and individual counselling.

Excerpted from Intimacy and Solitude: Balancing Closeness and Independence by Stephanie Dowrick. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
This book opens on a resounding note of optimism.
Many of us are caught in emotional traps that are agonising, diminishing or even frightening. Seeking intimacy, we find disappointment. Seeking comfort from our time alone, we experience loneliness. Inevitably our sense of personal power is reduced. Sometimes it disappears. We look with envy at those who appear to be happy. How do they do it? Is love something they can have, but we cannot?
It's true that we come into this life with differing capabilities and temperaments. Good fortune also plays its part. Yet, for almost all of us, satisfying relationships with other people are within reach. And so is a sense of acceptance and contentment about who and what we are.

Customer Reviews

Intimacy and solitude - the secret to gaining insight into yourself and coping with relationships
I bought this book for an assignment for my Diploma in Counselling. Looking at our own issues from a lifeline we constructed, I discovered that one theme that kept repeating itself throughout my life was a struggle between being happily in a relationship with someone and being happy in my own space, as a single person. After stumbling across this book on Amazon, it seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. Having now dipped into it with a purely academic eye, I can say that it is far better than I was expecting.

I think my initial reservations about the book were in regard to how it would be written. I rarely buy self-help books, as I often find them patronising and I question the authority of the authors. With INTIMACY AND SOLITUDE, I really didn't need to worry.

The book is written in such a way that it makes it very easy to read. Dowrick does not sound as though she is taking some high horse stance, looking down on you for having the problems that you may have. Instead, she explains why you may be encountering problems relating to initmacy and solitude, and how to balenace these within personal relationships. What I also liked about this book was that it didn't take an overly feminist viewpoint - although women may be more inclined to pick up this book, men could easily get something out of it, and whilst I was reading it I didn't feel that Dowrick was trying to turn me into a man hater for making me the way I am through inequality. Another very strong plus to this book was that it is obvious Dowrick knows her stuff. As I mentioned, I used this book for an academic essay, and so I first approached it with a critical eye. Having read other books on human development and personality for use in my essay, I was finding that links could easily be made between sound counselling or psychology books and INTIMACY AND SOLITUDE. Dowrick referenced theory and critical perspectives, yet she did so in a way that even if you had never studies psychology or cousnselling before, you would easily be able to follow the arguments.

This is a great book. Whether you are turning to it for academic reasons or for personal insights, you are bound to get what you are looking for. If you are a woman, and enjoy this book, I found that a good companion to it is Carol Gilligan's IN A DIFFERENT VOICE. Highly recommended.

Excellent
An excellent book for anyone coming out of a serious relationship and struggling with being alone and loneliness. I keep having to give my copy away to friends and buying new ones! Written in an accesible style, with lots of real life scenarios.