We already rely on science to tell us what to eat, when to exercise, and how long to sleep. Why not use science to help us improve our relationships? In this revolutionary book, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Amir Levine and Rachel Heller scientifically explain why some people seem to navigate relationships effortlessly, while others struggle.

Are you unable to leave a love relationship even though it gives you more pain than joy? Your judgment and self-respect tell you to end it, but still, to your dismay, you hang on. You are addicted - to a person. Now there is an insightful, step-by-step guide to breaking that addiction - and surviving the split.

Challenging accepted theories about what makes for terrific sex, The Erotic Mind is a breakthrough exploration of the least understood dimensions of human sexuality - the psychology of desire, arousal, and fulfillment. Sex therapist Dr. Jack Morin offers a new perspective that celebrates the joys of Eros without denying its risks. Based on an in-depth analysis of over 1,000 provocative stories of peak sexual experiences, The Erotic Mind offers clear, accessible guidance on how anyone can utilize their own peak encounters and fantasies as powerful tools of self-discovery.

In this expanded third edition, Brenda Schaeffer draws on years of feedback and new developments to foster an understanding of love addiction: what it is and what it is not, how to identify it, and, even more important, how to break free of it. Stories of real people struggling to develop sound relationships illustrate the characteristics of healthy love and help listeners to free themselves to find real intimacy.

From our earliest years, teaches Diane Poole Heller, we develop an attachment style that follows us through life, replaying in our intimate relationships, with our children, and at work. And traumatic events can deeply affect that core relational blueprint. With Healing Your Attachment Wounds, a pioneer in attachment theory and trauma resolution brings together these two fields to help us understand and benefit from their complementary principles and methods.

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent more than three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.

Statistics show that 50 percent of what determines divorce is genetic temperament. And, if you are one of the 20 percent of people who are born highly sensitive, the risk of an unhappy relationship is especially high. Your finely tuned nervous system, which picks up on subtleties and reflects deeply, would be a romantic asset if both you and your partner understood you better. But without that understanding, your sensitivity is likely to be making your close relationships painful and complicated.

Through 12-step work, exercises, and journal-keeping, Facing Love Addiction compassionately and realistically outlines the recovery process for love addicts. Mellody’s fresh perspective and clear methods work to comfort and motivate all those looking to establish and maintain healthy, happy relationships.

Healing the Shame That Binds You is the most enduring work of family relationship expert and New York Times best-selling author John Bradshaw. In it, he shows how unhealthy toxic shame, often learned young and maintained into adulthood, is the core component in our compulsions, co-dependencies, addictions and drive to superachieve.

The causes of Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder range from severe neglect to monstrous abuse. Many survivors grew up in houses that were not homes-in families that were as loveless as orphanages and sometimes as dangerous. If you felt unwanted, unliked, rejected, hated, and/or despised for a lengthy portion of your childhood, trauma may be deeply engrained in your mind, soul, and body. This book is a practical guide to recovering from lingering childhood trauma. It is copiously illustrated with examples of the author's and his clients' journeys of recovering.

In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. So what is really “normal” when it comes to health?

The Covert Passive Aggressive Narcissist: Finding Healing After Hidden Emotional and Psychological Abuse is the most comprehensive and helpful audiobook on the topic of covert narcissism. This type of narcissism is one of the most damaging forms because the abuse is so hidden and so insidious. You can be in a relationship that can last for decades and not realize you are being psychologically and emotionally controlled, manipulated, and abused.

Once an affair comes to light, many unfaithful persons "wake up" and want to save their marriages. Yet they usually make terrible mistakes in their bungled attempts to win back their partners' trust. Linda J. MacDonald, an infidelity specialist for 23 years, has identified behaviors and attitudes that determine unfaithful persons' success or failure to mend their marriages after the wrecking ball of an affair. How to Help Your Spouse Heal from Your Affair offers practical advice for those who've strayed and want a second chance.

He says he loves you. So...why does he do that? You've asked yourself this question again and again. Now you have the chance to see inside the minds of angry and controlling men---and to change your life. In this groundbreaking book, a counselor who specializes in working with abusive men shows you how to improve, survive, or leave an abusive relationship.

From the New York Times best-selling author of Chasing the Scream, a radically new way of thinking about depression and anxiety. What really causes depression and anxiety - and how can we really solve them?

John Bradshaw is arguably the most accomplished and well-known leader alive today in the addictions field. He taught us about functional and dysfunctional families, showed us how shame could become toxic and poisonous to our core selves, and helped us understand and heal the wounded, vulnerable "inner child" conceived by, and thriving in, that environment. In Post-Romantic Stress Disorder (PRSD), Bradshaw gives readers a clear explanation of the difference between falling in love, lust, and true love.

Next to the death of a loved one, the ending of a relationship is the most painful experience most people will ever go through. Coming Apart is a first aid kit for getting through the ending. It is a tool that will enable you to live through the end of your relationship with your self-esteem intact.

The summer Lisa A. Phillips turned 30, she fell in love with someone who didn't return her feelings. She soon became obsessed. She followed him around, called him compulsively, and talked about him endlessly. One desperate morning, after she snuck into his apartment building, he picked up a baseball bat to protect himself and began to dial 911. Her unrequited love had changed her from a sane, conscientious college teacher and radio reporter into someone she barely recognized.

Poets, philosophers and artists have been trying to explain romantic love for centuries, but it remains one of the most complex and intimidating terrains to navigate. Most people are afraid to be open and honest about their relationships...until now. For Love Understood, Laura Mucha has interviewed hundreds of strangers, from the ages of 8 to 95 in more than 40 countries, asking them to share their most personal stories, feelings and insights about love.

Men are right. The "relationship talk" does not help. Dr. Patricia Love’s and Dr. Steven Stosny’s How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It reveals the stunning truth about marital happiness: Love is not about better communication. It's about connection.

The internationally best-selling author of Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart, Dr. Gordon Livingston here helps readers discover fulfilling happiness. By recognizing and understanding particular character traits in ourselves and others, we can all learn who best to love - and who best to avoid.

At thirty-two years old, everything in Nona Willis Aronowitz’s life, and in America, was in disarray. Her marriage was falling apart. Her nuclear family was slipping away. Her heart and libido were both in overdrive. Embroiled in an era of fear, reckoning, and reimagining, her assumptions of what “sexual liberation” meant were suddenly up for debate.

More than a million couples can't be wrong! And with this updated edition of their award-winning book, Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott help you launch lifelong love like never before. This is more than an audiobook - it's an experience. Get ready for deeper intimacy with the best friend you'll ever have. Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts, in more than 15 languages, is the most widely used marriage prep tool in the world.

Full of things we may know but have not articulated to ourselves, Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart is a gentle and generous alternative to the trial-and-error learning that makes wisdom such an expensive commodity. For everyone who feels a sense of urgency that the clock ticks and still we aren't the person we'd like to be, it offers solace, guidance, and hope.

We congratulate ourselves when we resist the donut in the office breakroom. We celebrate our restraint when we hold back from sending an email in anger. We feel virtuous when we wake up at dawn to get a jump on the day. We put others’ needs ahead of our own and believe this makes us exemplary. In On Our Best Behavior, journalist Elise Loehnen explains that these impulses—often lauded as unselfish, distinctly feminine instincts—are actually ingrained in us by a culture that reaps the benefits, via an extraordinarily effective collection of mores known as the Seven Deadly Sins.

The challenges smart and creative people encounter - from scientific researchers and genius award winners to best-selling novelists, Broadway actors, high-powered attorneys, and academics - often include anxiety, overthinking, mania, sadness, and despair. In Why Smart People Hurt, natural psychology specialist and creativity coach Dr. Eric Maisel draws on his many years of work with the best and the brightest to pinpoint these often devastating challenges and offer solutions based on the groundbreaking principles and practices of natural psychology.

So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.

Author David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity and beauty of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose.

For much of the 20th and 21st centuries, women’s sexuality was an uncharted territory in science, studied far less frequently - and far less seriously - than its male counterpart. That is, until Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are, which used groundbreaking science and research to prove that the most important factor in creating and sustaining a sex life filled with confidence and joy is not what the parts are or how they’re organized but how you feel about them.

What is love? Aside from being the title of many a popular love song, this is one of life's perennial questions. In What Love Is, philosopher Carrie Jenkins offers a bold new theory on the nature of romantic love that reconciles its humanistic and scientific components.

In this expanded third edition, Brenda Schaeffer draws on years of feedback and new developments to foster an understanding of love addiction: what it is and what it is not, how to identify it, and, even more important, how to break free of it. Stories of real people struggling to develop sound relationships illustrate the characteristics of healthy love and help listeners to free themselves to find real intimacy.

Are you unable to leave a love relationship even though it gives you more pain than joy? Your judgment and self-respect tell you to end it, but still, to your dismay, you hang on. You are addicted - to a person. Now there is an insightful, step-by-step guide to breaking that addiction - and surviving the split.

Jackie Baker likes to pretend. She pretends she's happily married to her handsome, successful husband. She pretends she's the perfect mother to her two beautiful children. She even pretends that her secret job as a phone-sex operator is noble and fulfilling. But after years of pretending, Jackie's life is about to unravel. Her husband may be having an affair. Her mothering skills may be less than stellar, and her new client with the alluring voice is about to send her spiraling.

In Love Is a Choice, best-selling doctors Robert Hemfelt, Frank Minirth, and Paul Meier walk you through their 10 proven stages to recovery from codependency that results from external circumstances. Humans are susceptible to codependency because of our sinful tendency to use defense mechanisms to fool ourselves. In codependent relationships, deceitful games are played, and important Christian principles are often taken out of context and abused.

Through 12-step work, exercises, and journal-keeping, Facing Love Addiction compassionately and realistically outlines the recovery process for love addicts. Mellody’s fresh perspective and clear methods work to comfort and motivate all those looking to establish and maintain healthy, happy relationships.

In Addiction to Love, recovering love addict Susan Peabody explains the variety of ways this disorder plays out, from the obsessively doting love addict to the addict who can't disentangle from an unfulfilling, dead-end relationship. Peabody provides an in-depth and easy-to-follow recovery program for those suffering from this unhealthy and often dangerous addiction and explains how to create a loving, safe, and fulfilling relationship.

In I Love You, but I'm Not in Love with You - a real-life relationship guide from couples' counselor Andrew G. Marshall - partners and individuals who have "fallen out of love" or want to rekindle the love that once was will learn how to use Marshall 's program with impressive results. This is a much-needed book to help men and women of all ages in any type of committed romantic relationship to truly understand love and to point out the everyday habits that undermine growing together.

The summer Lisa A. Phillips turned 30, she fell in love with someone who didn't return her feelings. She soon became obsessed. She followed him around, called him compulsively, and talked about him endlessly. One desperate morning, after she snuck into his apartment building, he picked up a baseball bat to protect himself and began to dial 911. Her unrequited love had changed her from a sane, conscientious college teacher and radio reporter into someone she barely recognized.

Everyone thrives on love, comfort, and the safety of family, friends, and community. But if you are denied these basic comforts early in life through a lack of physical affection or emotional bonding, you may develop intense fears of abandonment that can last well into adulthood - fears so powerful that they can actually cause you to push people away. If you suffer from fears of abandonment, you may have underlying feelings of anger, shame, fear, anxiety, depression, and grief.

In this provocative and inspiring audiobook, David Richo distills 30 years of experience as a therapist to explain the underlying roots of unhappiness - and the surprising secret to finding freedom and fulfillment. There are certain facts of life that we cannot change - the unavoidable "givens" of human existence: (1) everything changes and ends, (2) things do not always go according to plan, (3) life is not always fair, (4) pain is a part of life, and (5) people are not loving and loyal all the time.