The Secrets of Successful Families. Артем Толоконин

there. Ironically, partners can develop and learn to love only in a real family relationship! If they simply divorce, the true crisis roots will remain unexplored. A change of partner, like a change of a facade, does not change anything inside.

      You can mend and restore absolutely any family relationship! There are no prejudices here. If you believe in it, you can break any deadlock, given the will. Even if an army of mistresses intervened in a family relationship, spouses hate each other and send each other off to a lunatic asylum – such things happened too! – you can get the situation well in hand and return everything to a natural, calm state of partnership, understanding, and care in six months or a year.

      My method is to put a person in a state of love, so that their eyes open and light up. This is work with human energy. It is only my own spiritual practice that helps me do therapy effectively.

      Without it you can only speculate or, even worse, manipulate. You have to help a person realize the feeling of love within themselves, help plunge into it – then they will understand where they need to move and what to work on in themselves. Love as a gift is given to any person, and the development of this gift is the most important challenge for a person, the meaning of their life! The most important thing is for everyone to learn how to love; then there will be fewer divorces, fights, and wrecked lives. I want everyone who is reading this book to feel responsible for their feelings, make love a guiding light of their lives, and advance steadily along this route through their life!

      When people seek my help in salving their marriage, I recommend taking a break in considering a divorce for a while and then develop an individual program to overcome the crisis. It includes both personal work with each of the partners and general family therapy. In a while, each of the spouses realizes their contribution to family problems and learns to treat themselves and their partner in a different way, based on love. Slights and claims go away! When a person sees their own unique inner world, they start to see how unique their partner is. Natural interest in each other and mutual understanding are regained, and then the issue of divorce becomes irrelevant.

      There are occasions where only one of the partners seeks advice, the other one may not know about it. This is not an obstacle to family changes. Even if one of the partners starts changing, renounces slights and learns to love, this affects both spouses. Thus, their relationship improves naturally.

      If you cannot consult a specialist, then this book will help you sort out your situation on your own and will direct your thoughts and actions in a creative way. It is based on many years of my private practice and my own life experience.

      Part 2

      On Love. The Main Answer to the Main Question

      Stages of Development of a Feeling

      Love is a feeling that unites a person and the big wide world they live in. It is love that symbolically connects a human and their spirit and provides them with an alternative look at the outside reality. Love is the cornerstone of anyone’s life; it is the norm on which any relationship should be built. It is when adults fall in love, they decide to create a family. Lovers unite, realize their feelings in sexual intercourse, and then they have a child. Love is a phenomenon. However, love is also something that inspires people to develop and to move ahead. Even if we are talking about the professional sphere, one should not expect much success in any profession without love for their trade.

      So, love is the foundation for building any normal family relationship. When feelings arouse in teenagers, they tend to enter into partnerships – yet outside the family, before the family. Therefore, you need to understand the laws of love development in a person because then you can determine at what level of development they are. If this level is not enough to form a strong and reliable family relationship, then I, as a professional, help the person correct their behavior model, awaken a feeling that would allow them to create a harmonious family relationship and a feeling of unconditional love.

      Unconditional love is totally different from addicted love. Addicted love says, “I cannot live without you, you are everything for me, and you do something that I cannot accept.” This creates problems in family life and everything they entail.

      There is a concept of psychosexual age (see the graph). Very often it does not coincide with the person’s biological age. Psychosexual age is determined by the level of gender relationships that a person forms and demonstrates. A person may be 50–60 years old, and they behave like teenagers in gender relationships: they often change partners, fall in love, and lose their head. An analysis of how love was formed in a particular person throws a light upon their problems.