IRRELATIONSHIP: How we use Dysfunctional Relationships to Hide from Intimacy

IRRELATIONSHIP: How we use Dysfunctional Relationships to Hide from Intimacy
Author: Mark B. Borg
Publisher: Central Recovery Press, LLC
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2015-09-28
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1942094019

No matter how committed two people are to being together, why can't they get away from feeling something is missing? In this important and transformative guide, three experienced practitioners identify the widespread dysfunctional dynamic they call "irrelationship," a psychological defense system two people create together to protect themselves from the fear and anxiety of real intimacy in a relationship. Drawing on their wide clinical and life experience, the authors examine behavioral "song-and-dance routines" repeatedly performed by couples affected by irrelationship. Readers will find a valuable framework for understanding their challenges with action-oriented tools to help them navigate their way to fulfilling relationships. Mark B. Borg, Jr., PhD, is a community psychologist and psychoanalyst, and a supervisor of psychotherapy at the William Alanson White Institute. Grant H. Brenner, MD, is a board-certified psychiatrist in private practice, specializing in treating mood and anxiety disorders and the complex problems that may arise in adulthood from childhood trauma and loss. Daniel Berry, RN, MHA, has practiced as a Registered Nurse in New York City since 1987 and has worked for almost two decades in community-based programs.

Making Your Crazy Work for You

Making Your Crazy Work for You
Author: Mark B. Borg
Publisher: Central Recovery Press
Total Pages: 163
Release: 2022-02-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1949481549

From the authors of the Irrelationship series comes an insightful guidebook for enhancing the most vital relationship in every person's life—the one they have with themselves. Making Your Crazy Work for You adopts the irrelationship model to present a step-by-step program for self-understanding and catalyzing change. Our "crazy" refers to our unique reaction to our own pain, fear, and anxiety brought on by isolation from others and ourself. This unrecognized isolation can occur even when we are surrounded by other people in our daily lives. However, by learning to listen to our craziness, we can use it as a tool for ending isolation and opening up to love. Drawn from the authors' personal experience and clinical practice, each chapter features new case studies, exercises, and tools to help readers to reverse unhealthy behavior patterns learn to access their genuine emotions, needs, and ideas create better relationships

Belonging Through a Psychoanalytic Lens

Belonging Through a Psychoanalytic Lens
Author: Rebecca Coleman Curtis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 345
Release: 2020-12-29
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1000331652

Watching people protest, one hypothesis is that underlying these actions for specific justifiable causes is a sense of wishing to belong, of wishing not to be alone. Recent knowledge from patients and empirical research shows the importance of belonging to groups to both psychological and physical well-being. The problems of many students, minority group members, immigrants, terrorists, and lonely people are linked to an insufficient sense of belonging. Whereas psychoanalytic theory has focused on the need for a secure attachment to a primary caretaker, it has failed to note the importance of a sense of belonging to the family group, a friendship group, a community, a religious group, a nation-state, etc. This book demonstrates the difficulties faced by those who immigrate, those who never feel a sense of their true selves as belonging in a family or a cohesive professional group, and the difficulties of psychoanalysts themselves in knowing where they belong in patients’ lives. The problems of breaking up marital and professional relationships as well as our relationship with the Earth are also discussed. Freudian theory rejected the idea of a sense of "oneness" with humanity as being infantile. Recent developments regarding the similarities between meditational practices and psychoanalysis have questioned Freud’s idea. This book shows the importance of an interpersonal/relational psychoanalysis focusing on real relationships and not simply one that examines inner conflicts. It will be useful to psychologists, other mental health practitioners, social scientists, and anyone with normal struggles in life.

I Don't Know What to Believe

I Don't Know What to Believe
Author: Ben Kamin
Publisher: Central Recovery Press, LLC
Total Pages: 109
Release: 2016-02-01
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1942094051

Americans—especially young people—are more un-churched and less affiliated with organized religion than at any other time in our history. I Don’t Know What to Believe addresses that decline and presents an insightful examination of authentic spirituality for those who desire answers, guidance, and perspective regarding an important aspect of their lives: their beliefs, and relationship to, a higher power. Rabbi Ben Kamin addresses questions he has received from real people over the thirty years of his ministry, such as: Why does my parents’ religion have to define me? Am I God’s child even if I don’t go to religious services? Does scripture include me in its ideology regardless of how much scripture I know? How do I follow my own spirituality while still respecting my parents’ traditions? Ben Kamin is the award-winning author of ten books and is a scholar on the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He has led congregations in Toronto, New York, Cleveland, and San Diego since his ordination in 1978.

Don't Be A Dick

Don't Be A Dick
Author: Mark B. Borg
Publisher: Central Recovery Press
Total Pages: 204
Release: 2019-11-19
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1949481034

The single book therapists everywhere will recommend to all of their patients, because at some point or another, we all behave like dicks. Why this book? Because you might be a dick: a mean-spirited, self-focused individual who thinks and acts as though everyone else in the world can only be understood—and whose only importance is defined—in terms of their relationship to you. Being a dick might feel powerful in the short term, but it is not helping you in the long term because this flawed character trait is exactly what’s keeping you from attaining what you may want most: personal fulfillment, satisfying work, a loving committed relationship, and lifelong friendships. Anyone, at any time, can be a dick. Yet Don’t Be a Dick is especially for people who have noticed how their own behavior tends to backfire, leaving them feeling isolated and unsure why their seemingly justified actions consistently yield such poor results. If you’re constantly using the refrain, It’s not me, it’s them whenever something goes wrong, Mark Borg is here to tell you that it is, in fact, you. The good news is there is something you can do to reverse these behaviors and live a happier, more fulfilling life.

Dirt Roads and Diner Pie

Dirt Roads and Diner Pie
Author: Shonna Milliken Humphrey
Publisher: Central Recovery Press, LLC
Total Pages: 165
Release: 2016-07-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 194209423X

Against a backdrop of highways, diners, and cheap coffee, one couple finds peace through the redemptive power of love. Told from a wife’s perspective, Dirt Roads and Diner Pie is the story of one couple’s struggle to confront the long-reaching effects of childhood sexual abuse. Musician and former lead singer of the United States Air Force Band, Travis James Humphrey lived for thirty months in a culture of childhood sexual abuse while studying at New Jersey’s prestigious American Boychoir School. After his tenure, Travis buried his memories deep. Years into the marriage, these memories began to surface and threaten their relationship. In an effort to resolve the problems, Shonna and her husband hit the road and navigated their way through the treacherous terrain of mental illness, sexual dysfunction, and shame. She details their journey within a month-long road trip throughout the southeastern United States taken shortly after Travis made his experience public. While the effect of child sex abuse informs nearly every aspect of their shared life, it does not define their relationship. That is the message Shonna offers: Sexual trauma may dominate, but it need not define the relationship. Shonna Milliken Humphrey’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Salon.com, Down East, and Maine magazine. For two years, she wrote regular food, restaurant, and lifestyle columns for the Maine Sunday Telegram. She holds an MFA in Nonfiction Writing and Literature from Bennington College.

Understanding the Sexual Betrayal of Boys and Men

Understanding the Sexual Betrayal of Boys and Men
Author: Richard B. Gartner
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 407
Release: 2017-08-15
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1317375572

Understanding the Sexual Betrayal of Boys and Men: The Trauma of Sexual Abuse is an indispensable go-to book for understanding male sexual victimization. It has become increasingly clear since the 1980s that men and boys, like women and girls, are sexually abused and assaulted in alarming numbers. Yet there have been few resources available to victims, their loved ones, or those trying to help them. Richard B. Gartner was in the vanguard of clinicians treating male sexual victimization and has written extensively about it, initially in professional papers, then in his landmark 1999 book for clinicians Betrayed as Boys: Psychodynamic Treatment of Sexually Abused Men, continuing with his 2005 work Beyond Betrayal: Taking Charge of Your Life after Boyhood Sexual Abuse. He has been a tireless teacher, clinician, and advocate for male victims of sexual abuse in the classroom, the lecture hall, and of course the consulting room as well as in newspaper, television, radio, and online interviews. Dr. Gartner has gathered together expert colleagues from the trauma, psychoanalytic, medical, and survivor treatment fields. Together, they have created a comprehensive guide to what was once thought to be a rarity but now is clearly an all-too-common occurrence. Understanding the Sexual Betrayal of Boys and Men looks at the realities of male sexual victimization, guiding clinicians and lay people alike to understand the complexities of the devastation it causes in victimized boys and men. It considers topics as diverse as: sexual assault in institutions like the military, sports teams, schools, universities, and religious organizations; sex trafficking of boys and adolescents; neurobiology and brain chemistry of male survivors of sexual abuse; gender and sexual dysfunctions and confusions resulting from sexual exploitation and trauma; physicians’ treatment of sexually abused men’s medical problems; socio-cultural influences on processing and treating men’s and boys’ sexual victimization. Understanding the Sexual Betrayal of Boys and Men is required reading for anyone working with male victims of sexual abuse and assault at any level – psychotherapists, rape counselors, attorneys, journalists, guidance counselors, physicians, clergy, graduate students, and lawmakers – and helpful to lay people interested in this often-unrecognized problem.

Relationship Sanity

Relationship Sanity
Author: Mark B. Borg, Jr., PhD
Publisher: Central Recovery Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2018-11-20
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1942094825

A vital guide to overcome the barriers to achieving intimacy and meaningful connection. People in resilient relationships are co-owners, experience reciprocity, and are better prepared to meet challenges authentically and effectively. In this sequel to the best-selling Irrelationship, the authors use examples from their clinical practice to review the concept of irrelationship and expand the DREAM Sequence, a tool used by affected couples to address perennial relationship issues. By mutually and mindfully viewing the relationship as a third entity, separate from each individual, couples will learn how to live in and with the ambiguity of empathy, intimacy, vulnerability, and emotional investment and view relationship sanity as a deliberate and joyful undertaking to maintain and deepen connection.

Why We Suffer

Why We Suffer
Author: Peter Michaelson
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2015-02-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9781882631209

Why We Suffer is the amazing story of what mainstream psychology has failed to teach the world. The author, Peter Michaelson, is a former journalist and science writer who has been in private practice as a psychotherapist for more than 25 years. This book reveals how we hide from our awareness--through resistance, denial, and psychological defenses--the existence of a hidden flaw in our psyche. This unconscious, mental-emotional processing dysfunction is a grave danger to each of us personally and to all of us collectively. Through our defense system, we cover up awareness of this inner dysfunction.This flaw in human nature produces irrationality, self-defeat, and negative emotions. It gets the best of us only when we fail to become conscious of it. When we expose it, we begin to remedy the problem. When this flaw no longer contaminates our inner life, we feel, just for starters, our goodness and our value more fully, and we're more respectful of the goodness and value of others.Most of us have problems or challenges we would like to resolve. Collectively, we also have challenging national and worldwide problems that need to be corrected. We may not be up to these challenges if we're not conscious enough of our inner dynamics. Handicapped by a lack of self-knowledge, how can we trust ourselves to avoid conflict and self-defeat? We will fail repeatedly to learn from history.A lot of good ideas are in circulation for making ourselves and the world a better place. But good ideas aren't enough in themselves. This hidden flaw can keep good ideas from being acted on because it compels us, at best, to be indecisive, confused, and prone to dissension. At worst, it produces self-defeat and self-destruction. This negative effect consistently trumps our good ideas and best intentions.This book reveals essential knowledge that humankind has been reluctant to accept. This knowledge involves our hidden, unconscious collusion in producing self-defeating emotions and behaviors. The key to taking charge of our life involves seeing more clearly than ever how our emotional nature is processed within us.

Overcoming Fears of Intimacy and Commitment

Overcoming Fears of Intimacy and Commitment
Author: Herb Goldberg
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2016-10-17
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1442266856

Romantic relationships can be difficult, but to browse the shelves for advice, readers are mostly introduced to the woman’s viewpoint and concerns. Seldom do books address the innermost thoughts, feelings, fears, and concerns of men in relationships. Through the use of in-depth psychological insights, noted author-psychologist Herb Goldberg, takes the reader through twelve phases of romantic relationships. From the initial excitement to the time when things fall apart, he explores the “gender undertow,” prescribes remedies, and describes the healthy relationship from both perspectives, offering tips and advice for both men and women. Taking his starting point from the perspective of men in relationships, Goldberg lays out the concerns many men have – from fears of intimacy to the recognition that one’s partner may not be perfect. Addressing the most common problems that may stem from these relationship troubles, he guides readers through the fears and troubles that may arise and offers cogent advice in an effort to bring men and women together in healthier and more intimate unions.