Loving Choices: A Experience in Growing Relationships

In Loving Choices: An Experience in Growing Relationships, Dr. Bruce Fisher and Nina Hart start with the premise that your relationship with yourself is the foundation of all your other relationships. Accordingly, the first section of their latest book is devoted to "the process of bringing your heart and your head into balance to make loving choices." This involves recognizing and accepting your feelings. They provide extensive guidance and examples for doing their "self-encounter" exercise. Self encounters provide a way to communicate honestly and skillfully with yourself. Fisher and Hart emphasize the importance of this, saying that "you cannot effectively communicate with another until you are clear about what's going on inside yourself and what it is you are trying to communicate." Once people learn to communicate with themselves, they are ready for the "Healing Encounter," where they practice communicating with others. Many conflicts with others are rooted in power struggles. Fisher and Hart describe how people can recognize and defuse the internal conflicts leading to power struggles. They also explain the importance of internal and external boundaries in relationships and offer guidance on forming appropriate boundaries. The authors say that "we tend to create relationships like the ones we observed in childhood, yet most of us don't want that kind of relationship." They explain how to determine the extent to which you're influenced by your early observations and experience, and how you can use that information to build the kind of relationship that your truly want now. Relationships are meant to be teachers and to assist in our personal growth. That growth is built on three skills: communication, awareness, and commitment. Loving Choices teaches readers how to develop those skills and build happy and healthy relationships that contribute to the well-being of all those involved.

Out of all of the books which talk about different relationship issues, this is the only one that I have found which helps people to realize their contributions to all relationships in their lives, whether they be marital relationships or friendships or even business relationships. There are tools for communicating very well with yourself and others, so that one truly has a feeling for where one stands within a variety of situations. I have used their "self encounter" technique many times, and have found out some amazing things as a result. I now communicate much more effectively with my partner, and can say happily that we have very few misunderstandings from applying the ideas which I have learned from this book. I have wholeheartedly recommended this book to many friends, and feel that anyone who applies the ideas outlined here will be much happier in their interpersonal dealings.