G31 Anxious in love how to manage your anxiety, reduce conflict & reconnect with your partner
Author: Carolyn Daitch & Lissah Lorberbaum
Publisher: New Harbinger Publications
Publishing Date: 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60882-231-7
Summary:
Healthy relationships require trust, intimacy, effective communication, and understanding. However, if you suffer from chronic anxiety you may have trouble dealing with everyday conflicts and tensions that can arise in relationships. No matter how committed you are, anxiety can leave you feeling distanced from your partner. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to overcome the anxiety-fueled reactions that keep you from achieving true closeness in your relationship.
Written by two experts on anxiety disorders, Anxious in Love offers easy-to-use techniques for calming anxieties and strengthening communication in your relationship. With this book, you will learn to stay centered when faced with conflict, understand your partner’s perspective, and become more independent. By changing the way you react to triggers and stress, you will be able to focus on enjoying time with the one you love, without anxiety getting in the way.
Other Works:
Carolyn Daitch wrote Affect Regulation Toolbox: Practical And Effective Hypnotic Interventions for the Over-Reactive Client and Anxiety Disorders: The Go-To Guide for Clients and Therapists, while Lissah Lorberbaum wrote only that book.
Background of authors:
Carolyn Datich:
She's a licensed psychologist and certified Imago relationship therapist. She is the author of Affect Regulation Toolbox: Practical And Effective Hypnotic Interventions for the Over-Reactive Client and Anxiety Disorders: The Go-To Guide for Clients and Therapists. She is also a contributing author in Clinical Pearls of Wisdom: 21 Leading Therapists Offer Their Key Insights and Ten Commandments for Couples. She specializes in treating anxiety disorders; trains health professionals internationally on hypnosis, anxiety disorders, affect regulaton, and relationship therapy; and is the director of the Center for the Treatment of Anxiety Disorders in Farmington Hills, MI. Dr. Daitch lives in West Bloomfield, MI.
Lissah Lorberbaum:
She holds a master's degree in clinical psychology with a specialization in somatic psycholoy and treats affect dysregulation across a wide range of clientele. She lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
Theme:
"The purpose of this book is to provide you with a variety of techniques to help you ease your anxiety, reduce conflict, and foster connection with your partner." (2-3)
Problems addressed:
"Gaining a better understanding of the rifts in your relationship, and learning specific techniques and skills that will help you enhance your sense of connection, begins with learning more effective ways to manager your own anxiety...once you are able to modulate your anxiety levels, you are ready to turn your attention to your relationship." (3)
Summary of content:
This book is brief and is designed to help you control your anxiety by giving you specific things such as breathing exercises, a time out space and so on. Later on you are given couple tools on how to move towards interdependence and ways to acknowledge your partner.
Thesis of book:
There are ways to manage anxiety and not lose your relationship, but instead become and move towards a healthy one.
Main Points of book:
Part 1: Dialing Down Distress
1. Understanding your anxiety
2. Recognizing your anxiety triggers and plugging the dam
3. Lowering your baseline level of anxiety: the daily stress inoculation
Part 2: Connecting with the one you love
4. Understanding your partner
5. Changing how you handle conflict
6. Increasing compassion, empathy and connection
Part 3: Taking it to the next level
7. Moving toward healthy interdependence
8. The wise relationship
9. Maintaining the fruits of your labor
Why its interesting and informative:
Unfortunately I have a resistance towards breathing exercises, or for that matter, anything that involves me calming down and closing my eyes and being alone while I do that. This book gives breathing exercises and not any other alternatives to people who can't stand breathing exercises. Besides the breathing exercises, this book tries to get people who have anxiety to see what effect they have on their partner and also they encourage the couple be interdependent on one another instead of the other being the "rock."
Successfully supports thesis:
I believe the book does successfully support thesis and I can imagine that it does help people with anxiety, or at least helps them feel less alone.
Addressing Issues:
I can imagine that if a person suffers from a disorder that involves anxiety, may it be post traumatic stress disorder to phobia to whatnot, they experienced broken hearts and unhappy relationships many times, and they also felt helpless and crippled by their anxiety. I'm not a doctor and stuff, but for those who worry it might involve medicine, there is no mention of anxiety medication. Instead it shows a way to cope without the medicine. Again I'm not a doctor, and this is simply my observation.
Book Ideas vs larger ideas:
The authors advocate breathing exercises and mention ways to try to deepen one's connection with the partner. Anxiety disorders can be controlled, although it will be hard work and won't involve medicine.
Agree/disagree:
Unfortunately I'm not a close my eyes breathing person when I get upset or angry. In fact if anyone mentions or tells me to do that, I get even more upset. I was really happy when I won this book on goodreads in hopes of getting some non-breathing ways of controlling anxiety. I used to be in a relationship, but because the person left, I'm no longer in one, although if an opportunity arises, I will try to use some advice from the book to see if the advice will work.
Sources:
The author gives resources for what the person or couple could do, as well as websites for various organizations dealing with anxiety, but from what I could see, no sources are given in the book.
Conclusion:
I cannot say whether or not it has helped me because I'm not in a relationship, but the advice does valid and helpful towards people who have anxiety disorders. At the moment I guess I'm not ready to deal with trying to figure out myself.
Quick notes: I won this book on goodreads.com thus this review will appear in its entirety on goodreads as well as the blog
4 out of 5
(0: Stay away unless a masochist 1: Good for insomnia 2: Horrible but readable; 3: Readable and quickly forgettable, 4: Good, enjoyable 5: Buy it, keep it and never let it go.)
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