Love Skills. Linda Carroll

as an individual as a commitment to the relationship.

      Centering the Self

      Understanding the five stages of the Love Cycle and how to navigate through the painful and limiting ones can help you transform a good relationship into a great one. This framework can help everyone — from those starting a new relationship with the intention of avoiding some of the sinkholes of the past to those in a committed partnership with long-standing conflicts they haven’t been able to resolve as yet. It will help you re-create the trust, humor, and intimacy that first brought you together and teach you that conflicts — even the hardest ones — don’t need to take away love. In fact, you can use them to deepen your connection, heal your own historical wounds, and expand your empathy and insight.

      Ultimately, the entire point of the Love Cycles philosophy — in a relationship and in all of life’s cycles — is to continually move ourselves toward a state of wholeheartedness. It involves developing deep, mindful self-awareness and self-compassion as well as a willingness to work on the parts of ourselves that are small-hearted, closed-hearted, or brokenhearted — behaviors that stop us from accessing generosity, vulnerability, trust, and joy in our lives.

      In relationships, wholeheartedness also means practicing the art of differentiation: understanding your partner is not you and accepting that you have no control over the other person’s choices. As intimate as we may feel at times, we are not one another. Even so-called soulmates who spend decades in love will eventually part, if not through life’s challenges, then through death. That means true wholeness cannot come from another person. It must come from within.

      In the chapters that follow, you will learn skills to help you realize your full potential and that of your intimate relationship. An important side benefit is that these skills will also help you better navigate other vital relationships in your life, including, most importantly, your relationship with yourself.

       5

       How Did I Get Here?

       If we hope to preserve our loving connections over a longer period of time, we must become more aware of the impact that our family traditions have on our lives. Powerful forces within our family begin to shape our sensibilities and sensitivities from the earliest days of our development and continue to exert enormous control over the way we think, feel, and behave throughout our lifetime.

      — JOHN JACOBS, psychiatrist and author of All You Need Is Love and Other Lies about Married Life

      “Who am I?” It may be the oldest question in the world. It was written on the walls by our earliest cave-dwelling ancestors and sung in ancient ballads, and the edict “Know thyself” was carved on the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. Almost two thousand years later, William Shakespeare told us, “This above all: To thine own self be true.” The journey to understand the self drives the deliberations of philosophers, the musing of poets, and the endless chicken-or-egg debate among psychologists about whether we are formed by nature or by nurture.

      For some people, the answer is simple. “It’s just the way I am,” said the Brooklyn cabdriver when I commented on his kindness in giving a homeless man a free ride to a health clinic. Conversely, “It’s just how I was raised,” said my client in response to his wife’s question about why he didn’t want the family dog in the house. “Dogs belong outside.”

      Understanding who we are and how we got this way is essential to the success of our connections with other people because, at the end of the day, relationships are an inside job. Your past and the forces that have shaped you go on to shape how you love and where you struggle. When you understand these forces, you can begin to work on changing the ones that get in your way.

      Nature versus Nurture

      A healthy relationship requires a lot of yielding and bending as well as establishing and honoring healthy boundaries. Understanding what’s inherent in our character based on biology (“nature”) and what is learned from our lived experience (“nurture”) can help us to more skillfully develop the flexibility that is a necessary part of relationships — and manage sensitivities that may be hard or impossible to change.