Bonds That Make Us Free: Healing Our Relationships, Coming to Ourselves

I walked into a bookstore with a collegue looking for a book on parenting. Being the parent of two current teens and two eventual teens, I am always seeking to understand them and finding ways to be a better parent. However when I told my collegue what I was looking for he recommended "Bonds That Make Us Free" and when I asked the young clerk if they carried the book, she said she read it herself and that it helped her strengthen her friendships. I was thoroughly pleased with the book. The most powerful concept I learned was about self-deception, and how it can define who we are and the decisions we make. The book is filled with many, many short examples to help understand the principles being taught which I found extremely helpful. This is not a simple feel-good book. I loaned the book to an older friend of mine and she had a hard time understanding it all. I read a few of the stories to my wife and she had a hard time appreciating the significance of the principles through my explanations. You have to be committed to reading and understanding the book to get everything out of it. Mind you, these are not faults with the book -- like any significant breakthrough in understanding it requires work on the reader's part to think about the principles being taught and honestly assessing your own behavior, and then applying the principles to your life. For anyone seriously interested in improving their own personal happiness I highly recommend this book. It's one of the bst self-help books I've ever read.

I struggled through the first 100 pages of this book. Not because it was difficult to read or understand, but it was difficult to look at myself the way the author suggests. Like struggling through a narrow entrance to an underground grotto, the struggle was worth it. Warner's book presents a tough pill to swallow: Most of our problems with relationships can be improved if we will only look to see how we are poisoning the relationship. The major premise is that when we are disappointed in our actions, we often will then modify our perceptions in order to make us feel better. Get through those first 100 pages with a lot of self-reflection and you will then find tools to improve your relationships. These are not things that you must convince OTHERS to do. These are tools to help you poison less and heal more.

Perhaps the most compelling question Warner asks us to take up in this book is: Am I in the wrong? In a world where war comes before political leaders admit their own faults and where 50% of marriages end in divorce, often because partners can only see the problems with their spouse this question could have powerful effects. I believe Warner has chosen his title carefully using the word "free," which is so loaded today. Being "free" today has been confused with being able to choose between 10 brands of VCR or do whatever you want with no thought of the consequences. What Warner advocates is a real freedom, freedom from your human self and its weaknesses. Warner's book will not ensure you won't make bad decisions but it will teach you about the courage to admit when you are in wrong and how to change for the better. That is real freedom.

This book is, with out a doubt, the singular most important book to be read, studied and applied to one's life there is available in the wide market of "self-help" books. I have a very much used and cherished copy of his manuscript that this book was based on and Terry has delivered so much more with this book than was even promised in "Bonds of Anguish, Bonds of Love". Buy it, read it and share it. There are but a few moments in life as precious and sacred as those where what we read moves us to the next level of understanding, wholeness, connectedness and love. This book has brought several of these moments to me.