Relationship Saboteurs: Overcoming the Ten Behaviors that Undermine Love

by Randi Gunther PhD

Overview

Do you seek a healthy romantic relationship, but continue to find yourself repeating the same negative behaviors that may have ended your relationships in the past? Have you already identified destructive patterns, yet continue to repeat them despite your desire for a strong and lasting romantic relationship? If so, you are not alone.

Relationship Saboteurs is an easy-to-follow guide that will help you identify and end your relationship-destroying tendencies once and for all. The book explores the ten most common relationship-undermining behaviors and shows you how to overcome them. By understanding and addressing the patterns that erode romance, you can learn to stop sabotaging your love life and prepare yourself for the healthy romantic relationship you deserve.

Learn to overcome these toxic emotions and behaviors: •Insecurity•Needing to control •Fear of intimacy •Needing to win •Pessimism •Needing to be center stage •Addictions •Martyrdom •Defensiveness •Breaking trust

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781608820436
Publisher:	New Harbinger Publications
Publication date:	06/03/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	373 KB

About the Author

Randi Gunther, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and marriage counselor in Lomita, CA. She has given multiple workshops and lectures, inspiring hundreds of couples to go beyond their limitations to create successful relationships. A practical idealist, she encourages her patients to give up their deadlocked limitations and to create the relationships of their dreams. In more than forty years of practice, she has spent over 90,000 face-to-face hours helping individuals and couples.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments v

Prologue vii

Introduction 1

1 What Causes Relationship Sabotage? 5

2 The Process of Healing 25

3 Insecurity: "Will You Love Me Forever?" 39

4 Needing to Control: "I Run the Show" 55

5 Fear of Intimacy: "I Need You, but Not That Close" 69

6 Needing to Win: "I Dare You to Challenge Me" 85

7 Pessimism: "If You Don't Expect Anything, You Wont Be Disappointed" 99

8 Needing to Be Center Stage: "Pay Attention to Me" 113

9 Addictions: "I've Got to Have That" 127

10 Martyrdom: "Maybe It'll Be My Turn Someday" 143

11 Defensiveness: "It's Not My Fault!" 157

12 Trust Breakers: "I Never Really Agreed to That" 169

13 Revisiting the Seven Steps to Recovery 183

14 Troubleshooting: Questions and Answers 201

Suggested Reading 209

Editorial Reviews

“Relationship Saboteurs is for anyone who wants long-lasting love and can’t figure out how to find and keep it. Randi Gunther’s honest, illuminating, and straightforward approach helps us to understand something so basic yet so complex: how to love and be loved.”

—Lori Gottlieb, bestselling author of Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough

“Once you know where the land mines are, it’s much easier to avoid them. Randi Gunther’s Relationship Saboteurs is the guidebook you need to defuse and disarm the behaviors that implode relationships.”

—Barton Goldsmith, Ph.D., psychotherapist and author of Emotional Fitness for Couples and Emotional Fitness for Intimacy

“Randi Gunther is a lifesaver. She has saved mine a few times over. With this book, she puts her decades of experience and her phenomenally deep and intuitive knowledge of couples dynamics into an easily digestable and applicable form. Whether one does the included exercises or not, a careful reading of this book will give you a roadmap to get on the path towards a healthy relationship or marriage.”

—Larry Klein, Grammy-award winning record producer, musician, and composer

From the Publisher

Sooner or later, insightful people will discover a common denominator in their unsuccessful relationships—themselves. Clinical psychologist and marriage counselor Gunther supplies insights into ridding negative behaviors that tend to undermine healthy connections with others. Some of the culprits are a need for control, fear of intimacy, martyrdom, and trust breaking. She provides an explanation for each saboteur, examples from case studies, and exercises for handling situations more positively. She offers seven steps for breaking a behavioral habit, including observing one's own behavior without judgment, identifying triggers, and seeking a new vision. While difficult to put into practice, Gunther's prescriptions are easy to understand, practical, and assure improvement.

Library Journal