One night during his divorce, after one too many vodkas and a call with a phone-in-therapist who told him to “journal his feelings,” Matthew Fray started a blog. He needed to figure out how his ex-wife went from the eighteen-year-old college freshman who adored him to the angry woman who thought he was an asshole and left him. As he pieced together the story of his marriage and its end, Matthew began to realize a hard truth: even though he was a decent guy, he was a bad husband.

Just as Masters and Johnson were pioneers in the study of human sexuality, so Dr. John Gottman has revolutionized the study of marriage. As a professor of psychology at the University of Washington and the founder and director of the Seattle Marital and Family Institute, he has studied the habits of married couples in unprecedented detail over the course of many years. His findings, and his heavily attended workshops, have already turned around thousands of faltering marriages.

Relationships are usually the most important part of a person’s life. But they’re often stressful and frustrating, or simply awkward, distant, and lonely. We feel the weight of things unsaid, needs unmet, conflicts unresolved. It’s easy to feel stuck.

Bonds That Make Us Free is a groundbreaking book that suggests the remedy for our troubling emotions by addressing their root causes. You'll learn how, in ways we scarcely suspect, we are responsible for feelings like anger, envy, and insecurity that we have blamed on others. Even though we fear to admit this, it is good news. If we produce these emotions, it falls within our power to stop them. But we have to understand our part in them far better than we do, and that is what this remarkable book teaches.

Did you know you can beat stress, lift your mood, fight memory loss, sharpen your intellect, and function better than ever simply by elevating your heart rate and breaking a sweat? The evidence is incontrovertible: Aerobic exercise physically remodels our brains for peak performance. In Spark, John J. Ratey, MD, embarks upon a fascinating and entertaining journey through the mind-body connection, presenting startling research to prove that exercise is truly our best defense against everything from depression to ADD to addiction to aggression to menopause to Alzheimer's.

What if making one tweak to your day-to-day conversations could immediately improve every relationship in your life? In this three-hour, conversational listen, you'll discover the whats, whys, and hows of one of the most valuable (yet surprisingly little-known) communication skills - validation.

Our unconscious thought patterns determine our relationships, our spiritual life, and our connection to God to a much greater extent than we know. That’s an alarming thought, because the subconscious mind is a mysterious realm that is really difficult to access and influence...right? No. It’s really not! And it’s the most urgent and impactful thing we can do. This book will show you how.

Being in a relationship without knowing how to share your feelings and receive your partner’s feelings in useful ways is like jumping into a pool without knowing how to swim. You can flail around all you want, but it’s not going to keep you afloat for very long—you need to be able to move in any direction at will. Like swimming, knowing how to share your feelings and respond to your partner's feelings will move your relationship in the direction you want: toward more intimacy, closeness, connection, and trust.

Tired of arguing with your spouse over the same old issues? Longing for a marriage with less conflict and more intimacy? Struggling under a load of resentment? In How We Love, relationship experts Milan and Kay Yerkovich draw on the powerful tool of attachment theory to show how your early life experiences created an "intimacy imprint" - an underlying blueprint that shapes your behavior, beliefs, and expectations of all relationships, especially your marriage.

A five-step guide for building better connections with family, friends, and lovers, The Relationship Cure offers a simple but profound program that will fundamentally transform the quality of all the relationships in your life.

Navigating the challenges of long-term commitment takes effort - and it just got simpler, with this empowering, step-by-step guide to communicating about the things that matter most to you and your partner. Drawing on 40 years of research from their world-famous Love Lab, Dr. John Gottman and Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman invite couples on eight fun, easy, and profoundly rewarding dates, each one focused on a make-or-break issue: trust, conflict, sex, money, family, adventure, spirituality, and dreams.

What makes love last? Why does one couple stay together forever, while another falls apart? And most importantly, is there a scientific formula for love? Drs. John Gottman and Julie Schwartz Gottman are the world’s leading relationship scientists. For the past forty years, they have been studying love. They’ve gathered data on over three thousand couples, looking at everything from their body language to the way they converse to their stress hormone levels. Their goal: to identify the building blocks of love.

Based on Stanford University psychologist Kelly McGonigal's wildly popular course "The Science of Willpower", The Willpower Instinct is the first book to explain the science of self-control and how it can be harnessed to improve our health, happiness, and productivity. Informed by the latest research and combining cutting-edge insights from psychology, economics, neuroscience, and medicine, The Willpower Instinct explains exactly what willpower is, how it works, and why it matters

The Work is simply four questions that, when applied to a specific problem, enable you to see what is troubling you in an entirely different light. As Katie says, "It's not the problem that causes our suffering; it's our thinking about the problem." Contrary to popular belief, trying to let go of a painful thought never works; instead, once we have done The Work, the thought lets go of us. At that point we can truly love what is, just as it is.

Practical, proven self-help steps show how to transform 40 common self-defeating behaviors, including procrastination, envy, obsession, anger, self-pity, compulsion, neediness, guilt, rebellion, inaction, and more.

We are designed for relationships, yet they often bring us pain. In this paradigm-shifting book, Gary Smalley unravels the DNA of relationships: we are made for three great relationships, with God, others, and ourselves, and all relationships involve choice. Gary exposes a destructive relationship dance that characterizes nearly every relationship conflict, and he offers five new dance steps that will revolutionize relationships.

You don't have to be controlled by difficult people! Strange as it may seem, other people are not nearly as committed to our happiness as we are. In fact, sometimes it seems like they’re on a mission to make us miserable! There’s always that one person. The one who hijacks our emotions. The one who seems to thrive on drama. If we could just “fix” that person, everything would be better. But we can’t fix other people. We can only make choices about ourselves.

Based on 25 years of clinical experience and new, groundbreaking research involving more than 1,000 individuals, Feeling Good Together is filled with helpful examples and tools, such as the Relationship Satisfaction Test, the Blame Cost-Benefit Analysis, the Relationship Journal, Five Secrets of Effective Communication, the Intimacy Exercise, and more. Using these techniques, Dr. Burns shows you how to resolve virtually any kind of relationship conflict almost instantly.

It's a fact that parenting is hard enough in a family where two parents love and respect each other. After divorce, when the respect has diminished and the love has often turned to intense dislike, co-parenting can be nearly impossible, driving one or both parents to the brink of insanity. Joint Custody with a Jerk offers many proven communication techniques that help you deal with your difficult ex-husband or ex-wife.

When stakes are high, opinions vary, and emotions run strong, you have three choices: avoid a crucial conversation and suffer the consequences; handle the conversation badly and suffer the consequences; or check out Crucial Conversations and discover how to communicate best when it matters most. Crucial Conversations gives you the tools you need to step up to life's most difficult and important conversations, say what's on your mind, and achieve the positive resolutions you want.

We Love Each Other, But... offers simple, practical tips that will help you restore and strengthen a relationship that has gone off track. It lays out the nuts and bolts of building relationships so they continue to be gratifying over the long haul. Dr. Ellen Wachtel shows how, even when you feel like giving up on a relationship or marriage, you can recapture why you fell in love in the first place. Dr. Wachtel promises that there is more and suggests simple ways to keep vitality in relationships.

The coauthors of the New York Times best-selling Difficult Conversations take on the toughest topic of all: How we see ourselves. Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen have spent the past 15 years working with corporations, nonprofits, governments, and families to determine what helps us learn and what gets in our way. In Thanks for the Feedback, they explain why receiving feedback is so crucial yet so challenging. They blend the latest insights from neuroscience and psychology with practical, hard-headed advice.

This guide provides a simple blueprint for achieving solutions to everyday disagreements without having to have a "winner" and a "loser". By learning how to listen empathetically, respecting each other's ideas and feelings, and understanding why some issues are so important to your spouse, not only will those daily problems be worked out successfully, but both of you will end up feeling appreciated, respected, and loved.

Finally, you can understand her! If you're like most men, you've burned up lots of energy trying to figure out what a woman wants, what makes her tick, and how to make her happy. The good news: success is simpler than you thought. In their groundbreaking classic, For Men Only, Shaunti and Jeff Feldhahn reveal the eye opening truths and simple acts that will radically improve your relationship with the woman you love.

Based on the most detailed survey of long married people ever conducted, 30 Lessons for Loving shows the way to lifelong, fulfilling relationships. The author, an internationally renowned gerontologist at Cornell University, offers sage advice from the oldest and wisest Americans on everything from finding a partner, to deciding to commit, to growing old together.

Love Is Never Enough explores the most common problems in marriage: the power of negative thinking, disillusionment, rigid rules and expectations, and miscommunication. These issues can be approached through cognitive therapy, in which thinking through and reasoning are used to counteract the poor communication that so often erodes relationships. With eloquence and accessibility, Aaron T. Beck, MD, shows how effective communication can restore and strengthen the ties and bonds between couples.

Best-selling author Dr. John Townsend teaches you that love can actually be learned and gives you the steps and tools to become skilled in love. Using his trademark stories to flesh out the important principles, Dr. Townsend covers receiving love, connecting love, healing love, confronting love, romantic love, and surrendering love. Through his teaching, listeners will discover - and start enjoying - the words, actions, and experiences of authentic love.

In this supportive and straightforward guide, Lundy Bancroft, the author of Why Does He Do That?, and communication specialist JAC Patrissi offer a way for women to practically take stock of their relationships and move forward, with or without their partners.

Hosts of the award-winning Whine Down podcast, Jana Kramer and Michael Caussin explore the raw and real moments of their marriage - what it means to love, to fight, and to sincerely forgive - with spiritual guidance and practical advice for anyone seeking stronger, more fulfilling love.

With Dr. Harley's expert guidance, couples will be able to avoid the major causes of marital unhappiness and disappointment. Instead of tearing their marriage apart, they will learn to build it into the marriage they had needed and wanted. This book is a perfect companion to His Needs, Her Needs and will be useful to pastors, counselors, and couples.