Recommendations based on "What Makes Love Last?: How to Build Trust and Avoid Betrayal"

God has given us a specific, compelling reason for each of the four seasons of relationships: singleness, dating, engagement, and marriage. This book unlocks each season’s God-given purpose and shows you how to thrive within it.In a society where everyone is supposedly more connected, why do people feel so lonely? Even as marriage rates decline, recent studies find the overwhelming majority of single adults still hope to get married. But how can we navigate life and love in this disconnected culture? Has social media eroded the institutions that brought us together—and the deeper emotional intimacy they provided?Pastor and bestselling author Ben Stuart will help you navigate through the four stages of a relational life and show you how to look at the truths and intentions God has established for each.As you embark on this journey, you will discover how to: Use singleness to make an impact for the kingdom of God Pursue dating with clarity and purity Use the season of engagement wisely to prepare for marriage Maximize your life as a married couple for shared ministry Continually seek God and His will throughout each stageDiscover how to embrace God's design, invest your life in what matters most, and find meaning in whatever season of life you're in.

A groundbreaking guide to sexuality that dispels the stale cultural attitudes about sex that leave too many feeling inadequate, and offers an expansive, attachment-based framework to free us and develop bolder, more satisfying relationships with our sexual selves. When it comes to sex, most people feel insecure. But it’s not because we’re deficient; it’s because we’ve been under-resourced and miseducated.       Certified sex therapist Casey Tanner argues that our sex lives are a microcosm of every untruth we’ve internalized about gender, sex, relationships, our bodies, and ourselves. Most of us were taught that healthy sexuality is only for a certain kind of person, in a certain kind of relationship, with a certain kind of body. As a result, the way we’ve learned how to define “good sex” is reflective of how good, worthy, and loveable we see ourselves. Feel It All is a comprehensive guide to help everyone uncover their personal misconceptions about sexuality and relationships. Tanner helps you recognize and assess your core beliefs surrounding relationships, sexuality, gender, and more; identify past trauma; find pathways to healing that work for you; and redefine sex based on knowledge and possibilities, rather than potential consequences. Comprehensive yet accessible, informative, warm, and nonjudgmental, Feel It All provides a pathway for personal healing, creating stronger relationships, and achieving deeper intimacy.

A sanity-saving guide that cuts through the sky-high expectations of modern love and helps you build healthier and more fulfilling relationships, from the creator of viral Instagram account YourDiagnonsense“Witty, practical, fun, and deeply honest.”—Terrence Real, New York Times bestselling author of UsYou’re not crazy. You’re human.Modern love is a mess and life is (spoiler alert!) very hard. Whether you’re in a committed relationship or on the apps, buckle up, there’s a lot to unlearn.How to Love Someone Without Losing Your Mind is your guide to sanity in a culture gone mad. Psychotherapist and sex therapist Todd Baratz blends sharp humor with raw insight as he challenges us to break every rule about love. It’s time to move beyond the relentless pursuit of the perfect partner, to challenge the stigma against neediness, and to rethink our obsession with diagnosing common challenges as disorders.Instead, he offers an empowering new perspective: Embrace challenges, feel deeply, make mistakes, learn, and grow. Drawing from his extensive experience as both a therapist and a patient, Baratz shares stories of navigating his personal traumas and guiding others through theirs.This book is an invitation to understand your life as part of a larger cultural narrative. It encourages you to delve into your history, cultivate self-awareness, and take responsibility in your relationships. By doing so, you can move beyond the fairy tale and transform your approach to love.

The Evolving Self focuses upon the most basic and universal of psychological problems―the individual’s effort to make sense of experience, to make meaning of life. According to Robert Kegan, meaning-making is a lifelong activity that begins in earliest infancy and continues to evolve through a series of stages encompassing childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. The Evolving Self describes this process of evolution in rich and human detail, concentrating especially on the internal experience of growth and transition, its costs and disruptions as well as its triumphs.At the heart of our meaning-making activity, the book suggests, is the drawing and redrawing of the distinction between self and other. Using Piagetian theory in a creative new way to make sense of how we make sense of ourselves, Kegan shows that each meaning-making stage is a new solution to the lifelong tension between the universal human yearning to be connected, attached, and included, on the one hand, and to be distinct, independent, and autonomous on the other. The Evolving Self is the story of our continuing negotiation of this tension. It is a book that is theoretically daring enough to propose a reinterpretation of the Oedipus complex and clinically concerned enough to suggest a variety of fresh new ways to treat those psychological complaints that commonly arise in the course of development.Kegan is an irrepressible storyteller, an impassioned opponent of the health-and-illness approach to psychological distress, and a sturdy builder of psychological theory. His is an original and distinctive new voice in the growing discussion of human development across the life span.

Heralded by the New York Times and Time magazine as the couple therapy with the highest rate of success, Emotionally Focused Therapy works because it views the love relationship as an attachment bond. This idea, once controversial, is now supported by science, and has become widely popular among therapists around the world. In HOLD ME TIGHT, Dr. Sue Johnson presents Emotionally Focused Therapy to the general public for the first time. Johnson teaches that the way to save and enrich a relationship is to reestablish safe emotional connection and preserve the attachment bond. With this in mind, she focuses on key moments in a relationship-from Recognizing the Demon Dialogue to Revisiting a Rocky Moment-and uses them as touchpoints for seven healing conversations. Through case studies from her practice, illuminating advice, and practical exercises, couples will learn how to nurture their relationships and ensure a lifetime of love.

NEW YORK TIMES, WALL STREET JOURNAL, AND USA TODAYBESTSELLER • Stop working on yourself as an individual and start working on your relationship as a couple, with the help of the renowned family therapist and author of The New Rules of Marriage“This book is a road map for all of us who seek true intimacy.”—GWYNETH PALTROW, founder and CEO of goopONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Wall Street JournalNot much is harder than figuring out how to love your partner in all their messy humanness—and there’s also not much that’s more important.At a time when toxic individualism is rending our society at every level, bestselling author and renowned marriage counselor Terrence Real sees how it poisons intimate relationships in his therapy practice, where he works with couples on the brink of disaster. The good news: Warmer, closer, more passionate relationships are possible if you have the right tools.In his transformative new book Us, Real brilliantly observes how our winner-takes-all culture infiltrates families with devastating results: repetitive fights that go nowhere, or a distant relationship in which partners end up living “alone together.” With deft insight, humor, and charm, Real guides you to transform your relationship into one that’s based on compassion, collaboration, and closeness.Us is a groundbreaking guide to a new science-backed skillset—one that will allow you to get past your knee-jerk reactions and tap into your wiser, more collaborative self. With a novelist’s flair, Real shares the stories of couples whose relationships have been saved by these skills and pans out to the culture that reinforces our dysfunction. If you and your partner are backed into separate corners of “you” and “me,” this book will show the way back to “us.” With Us, your true relationship can begin.

NATIONAL BESTSELLERFrom licensed therapist and popular Instagram relationship expert Vienna Pharaon (@mindfulmft, +683K followers) comes a profound guide to understanding and overcoming wounds from your Family of Origin—the foundation of how we relate to others, ourselves, and the world around us.None of us had a perfect childhood; we are all carrying around behaviors that don’t serve us—and may in fact be hurting us. But it doesn’t have to be that way, says licensed marriage and family therapist Vienna Pharaon. Our past might create our patterns, but we can change those patterns for the better...with the right tools.In The Origins of You, Pharaon has unlocked a healing process to help us understand our Family of Origin—the family and framework we grew up within—and examine what worked (and didn’t) in that system. Unhealed pain (or “wounds”) in that Family of Origin will manifest in our adult behaviors in surprising ways, from work challenges to interpersonal struggles. But the good news: armed with the knowledge about our past, we can actually rewire our programming to meaningfully improve our relationships and our lives, right now and in the future.It doesn’t matter whether you’ve been in therapy for decades, or whether therapy isn’t for you. It doesn’t matter if you had a great childhood, or a terrible one. You can create change and resolve things from the past that need your attention. Complete with guided introspection, personal experiences, client stories, frameworks for having difficult conversations, and worksheets to complement each chapter, The Origins of You will teach you how to break family patterns and help you liberate the way you live and love.

Safe People will help you discover why good people can get tangled in bad relationships, how to avoid repeating your own mistakes, and how to pick safe, healthy people for the friends you make and the company you keep. Too many of us have invested in relationships that have gone wrong. Maybe you've been judged, manipulated, or controlled. Or maybe you've trusted the wrong people in the past. It's easy to make the same mistakes of judgment over and over--or, worse, to give up on trying to have great, authentic relationships again. But it doesn't have to be that way. In Safe People, Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend teach you that being with an unsafe person can be damaging to your confidence, your trust in others, and even your health. You'll learn that you have the power to surround yourself with accepting, honest, and safe people who draw you closer to being the person God intended you to be. Drs. Cloud and Townsend, authors of the New York Times bestseller Boundaries, are here to share the lessons they've learned in their years of practicing psychology and studying the patterns and practices that support clear, biblical boundaries. In Safe People, they offer guidance for making safe choices in all of your day-to-day relationships, from family and friends to colleagues and partners. Safe People will give you the tools you need to recognize what makes people relationally safe, form positive relationships, and even become a safe person along the way. Drs. Cloud and Townsend share expert insights that will help you ask important questions: How can I learn to pick better friends Why do I choose people who let me down How did I end up with this critical boss How do I attract irresponsible people Why did I invest money with that unscrupulous person What is it about me that draws the wrong types of people to me Why am I drawn to the wrong types of people It's time to revitalize your connections and finally start enjoying the healthy, balanced relationships that you deserve.

“Why are so many of us at times completely baffled by a relationship? How can we think we know someone so well and admit in the end that we hardly knew that person at all? Why do many people who work diligently and strenuously to gain wholeness and balance still feel so frustrated about having a fulfilling relationship?Why have so many people given up on love?”—from the PrologueJohn Bradshaw’s bestselling books and compelling PBS series have touched and changed millions of lives. Now, in Creating Love, he offers us a new way to understand our most crucial relationships—with our romantic partners and spouses, with our parents and children, with friends and co-workers, with ourselves, and with God.Bradshaw’s compassionate approach shows that many of us have been literally “entranced” by past experiences of counterfeit love, so we unknowingly re-create patterns that can never fulfill us. Here he provides both the insights and the precise tools we need to keep those destructive patterns from repeating in the present. And then he shows how we can open ourselves to the soul-building work of real love—and create healthy, loving relationships where we can be fully ourselves in every part of our lives.

In Love That Lasts, New York Times bestselling author of Jesus > Religion Jefferson Bethke and his wife, Alyssa, expose the distorted views of love that permeate our culture and damage our hearts, minds, and souls. Drawing from Jeff’s “prodigal son” personal history and from Alyssa’s “True Love Waits” experience, the Bethkes point to a third and better way. Blending personal storytelling with biblical teaching, they offer readers an inspiring, realistic vision of love, dating, marriage, and sex. Young people today enter adulthood with expectations of blissful dating followed by a romantic, fulfilling marriage only to discover they’ve been duped. They learned about love and sexuality from social media, their friends, Disney fairy tales, pornography, or even their own rocky past, and they have no idea what healthy, lifelong love is supposed to be like. The results are often disastrous, with this generation becoming one of the most relationally sick, sexually addicted, and divorce-ridden in history. Looking to God’s design while drawing lessons from their own successes and failures, the Bethkes explode the fictions and falsehoods of our current moment. One by one, they peel back lies such as, the belief that every person has only one soul mate, that marriage will complete you, and that pornography and hook-ups are harmless.