Love Skills. Linda Carroll

need to weather all of love’s seasons.

      Awareness comes first. This workbook begins by helping you to answer critical questions about your relationship and yourself. For example: Why do I try to change the very qualities in my partner that most charmed me at the outset? Where did easy loving and juicy sex go? Does it make sense to start all over with someone else? How do my personality type and family history affect my view of myself and others?

      This book then offers specific, effective solutions to the most common struggles that couples face — both the small troubles and the more serious dilemmas of communication gridlock, betrayal, and seemingly intractable differences. I will provide a clear map for moving forward with these issues and address how to most productively approach arguments, including the importance of establishing connection before dealing with conflict. I will also offer several types of quick, well-researched practices to help keep love alive and thriving during all five stages.

      A key message of many of these lessons is “The wave is not the ocean” — that is, the times that feel intolerable between you and your partner do not mean the conflict is an all-encompassing, permanent state. There will always be another wave, another opportunity. When you know how to navigate the storms, conflict can lead to understanding and even closeness that makes your relationship even better than it was before. In most cases, the Love Skills process will help you to rediscover the original promise of your relationship and offer you a road map for traveling this rewarding and challenging path.

      Before you get started, keep one rule in mind: don’t make this book another war in your relationship. Anything can be used as fodder for a fight, even resources meant to assist and enrich. If you invite your partner to accompany you on this journey, make sure both of you are involved only as much as you want to be. A partner’s half-hearted or begrudging attempt to mend a relationship may only end up opening more wounds.

      If you have a reluctant partner, then do the work for yourself. I believe one person’s growth can often initiate change in both people; if not, it will lead you into your own wholehearted best self. As I said, awareness comes first. With any relationship work, the vital first step is to become more aware of our own not-so-healthy behaviors — perhaps our hair-trigger reactivity, a reluctance to forgive, or a tenacious need to be right. Once we understand and acknowledge our own role in our relationship challenges, we can use this awareness to begin to practice more thoughtful and loving behaviors.

      This process is neither quick nor easy. Love is a feeling, intense and joyful. But the practice of loving another person is hard work — the work of a lifetime. And of course, some relationships present more challenges than others. As we begin to learn about our own needs, some of us may find that changes in ourselves resulting from this process actually create more distance in our relationship. If this happens, this book will help you take the healthy next steps forward.

      How to Use This Book

      Love Skills can be completed individually, by a couple, or a mixture of both. Although this is a book about relationships, a significant portion of the work must be done by each person alone first — after all, all couples are comprised of two separate people, who each come with their own unique set of past experiences, ways of thinking, and areas for growth. (Differentiation, the fact that we are two individuals who are both separate and connected and not half of a whole, is a key tenet of wholehearted love, which you’ll soon learn.) If you choose to work on this book together with a partner, you can complete the individual exercises alone and then share your findings with each other; many activities include specific instructions for ways to share. You may each want your own copy of Love Skills, so that you can do the readings separately and have your own space to complete written exercises. Or you may choose to share one copy of the workbook and write responses in separate notebooks.

      Of course, there are many couples-specific exercises throughout this book as well. If you’re working on the program alone, you can invite your partner to join you for specific joint exercises you want to try, or you can simply read through them on your own to glean the knowledge and then move on.

      Love Skills is crafted to be accessible, relatable, and easy to understand no matter where you are in your self-development and relationship journey. That said, it’s no walk in the park. Completing these exercises, particularly with a partner, will push you to confront raw emotions and difficult experiences from your past, and it will require you to treat yourself with honesty, patience, and compassion. That vulnerability may come easily for some and feel challenging, upsetting, or even threatening for others. Move slowly. Be mindful of your partner’s limitations and your own.

      Importantly, this book is not intended as a replacement for therapy. It will not heal domestic violence, serious breaches of trust, or severe psychological wounds. In cases of depression, addiction, affairs, trauma, and/or abuse, always seek the help of a professional.

      An ideal time to use this workbook is during moments of inner quiet, when your mind is open to growing and learning. But it can also be helpful in times of relationship trouble or when you want to address bumps and snags in a largely satisfying connection. Some may gravitate toward the book out of natural curiosity and a desire to demystify the concept of wholehearted love, while others might dive into the Love Cycles approach as part of a larger ongoing effort to more consciously sustain an important relationship.

      There’s no “right way” to use this manual. You might set aside a single evening for you and your partner to dig into a handful of exercises relevant to your particular relationship, or the two of you may decide to return to the material once a week to delve into the program gradually. Alternately, you might prefer to explore every section and activity on your own and complete small portions on a daily basis. Feel free to delve deeply into the sections that particularly intrigue you, jump from chapter to chapter, or regularly return to the same instruction page because it’s the one that really works for you. If you get stuck on something or if it’s simply not clicking with you, move on to another section.

      Finally, remember that the guidelines contained in these pages are just suggestions. They’re based on decades of experience and training, but they are not a science. Love never is. Although all relationships may journey through the same cycles, every union is unique, and the people within them are constantly changing. The particular skills that work for some will not work for all, and the skills that work sometimes won’t work all the time. Choose the exercises that create positive movement between your souls. Save the rest for when the seasons change.

      The Quest for Wholeness

      In addition to reestablishing intimacy with our partner, we will explore the barriers and the bridges to becoming wholehearted as individuals — a necessary personal journey we’ll each need to take alone in order to eventually access a place of wholehearted love together.

      As you move through this book, never forget that we are in this world to become more whole ourselves. Although our intimate relationships can be a powerful catalyst for the development of that wholeness, it is our connection with ourselves that matters most, no matter how much we might love another. This isn’t about indulgence or self-preoccupation; it’s about being determined to become the best human we can. Renowned vulnerability researcher Dr. Brené Brown describes wholeness (or wholeheartedness) as having the courage to be imperfect, embracing our story as the right journey for us no matter how difficult it may be, practicing empathy for ourselves and others, and authentically connecting with those around us. All of this book’s teachings on love are grounded in developing and deepening these qualities.

      The truth is, the quest to create a thriving relationship is inextricably intertwined with the individual’s quest for wholeness. In her book Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow, Omega Institute founder Elizabeth Lesser tells us, “When there is nothing left to lose, we find the true self — the self that is whole, the self that is enough, the self that no longer looks to others for definition, or completion, or anything but companionship on the journey.”

      A New Way to Love

      A few decades ago, when people began to talk about “soulmates,” unconditional love was considered a permanent state of being rather than an ever-evolving one. Many of my clients wonder if their relationship