CENTERING AND THE ART OF INTIMACY [Paperback]

Gay Hendricks (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Fireside; 1st Firesd edition (January 2, 1985)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0671762133
• ISBN-13: 978-0671762131
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,668,440 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Gay Hendricks has served for more than thirty years as one of the major contributors to the fields of relationship transformation and body-mind therapies. Throughout his career, Dr. Hendricks has coached more than eight hundred executives, including the top management at firms such as Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, and KLM. Along with his wife, Dr. Kathlyn Hendricks, he has coauthored many books including Conscious Loving, The Corporate Mystic, and his latest, the New York Times bestseller Five Wishes, which has been translated into seventeen languages. Dr. Hendricks received his Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Stanford University. After a twenty-one-year career as a professor at the University of Colorado, he founded the Hendricks Institute, which offers seminars in North America, Asia, and Europe. He is also the founder of a new virtual learning center for transformation, www.gaiailluminationuniversity.com,
and The Spiritual Cinema Circle.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars an amazing learning journey, January 9, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Centering and the Art of Intimacy (Hardcover)

My mother gave me this book years ago. It has been a wonderful guide in my journey towards healthy relationships. It has shown me my co-dependent ways of relating and given me different options as I have matured.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Relationship insights in a nutshell, April 6, 2008

By 

Teramis (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

This review is from: CENTERING AND THE ART OF INTIMACY (Paperback)

I think this book is the single most profound, direct and on-point summary of fundamental relationship pitfalls and traps I've ever read. It points things out so they can be recognized, dealt with, and remedied. Book introduces a healthier way to be in relationship; it provides great and effective guidelines for living and communicating that have become a cornerstone not only of my personal life but also of counseling and mediation I have done for over 20 years. If you want to improve your relationships on any level, this is a must-read.

2 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A profoundly stupid book, May 27, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Centering and the Art of Intimacy (Hardcover)

Do you have a fear of intimacy? Find it difficult to get "close" in relationships? If so, this book has the answer. Unfortunately, it's the wrong answer. Based on Freudian theory (i.e., that present behavior is the determined by profound childhood experiences), this book leads the reader through a morass of dangerous assumptions, muddled concepts, and nonsensical explanations for why we do what we do in relationships. Although two of the assumptions the book emphasizes, that childhood experiences can make people engage in intractably destructive behaviors in relationships, and that unconscious feelings drive certain behaviors, are true to some extent, overemphasis on these ideas is inherently dis-empowering. After all, what can you do about your childhood or your subconscious thoughts and feelings? Nothing. To view your behavior in relationships through such a myopic lens runs the real risk of making change for the better seem almost impossible. In explaining their thesis the authors drop in a number of ill-defined terms and concepts: A good example is "we must learn how to let love in, feel it, let it polish our inner bodies..." Polish our inner bodies? I suspect that some authors resort to this kind of breezy language to make their rather ordinary concepts seem fresh and new, or give them a veneer of profundity. In this case such language belies its purpose: to clarify and inform. Some behavioral explanations are self-contradictory. One example of "going numb" to avoid closeness in a relationship the authors suggest "you subconsciously feel very angry at your partner but do not let yourself feel it or talk about it." Well, if you are aware of it it's not exactly "sub" and if you're not aware of it how can you feel it or talk about it? The authors suggest that we get into "entanglements" (poor relationships) because we're trying to meet some unfulfilled need. For example, "I cannot love myself, so I link up with someone who assures me I am lovable." Wait a minute, doesn't Freudian theory also suggest you might also do the opposite? That is, because you're unlovable you link up with someone who won't provide love? (Yes, it does. Which is much the problem with Freudian psychology in the first place. That is, it's tautological.) The authors pepper the book with examples from their case files. One of the most bizarre stories is how a man, fearing the intimacy of his impending honeymoon, loses a hubcap on the road to the honeymoon, goes into the bushes to fetch the hubcap, and comes down with a head-to-toe case of poison ivy (thus making his feared wedding night impossible). Actually, this is an example of how we can come down with illnesses rather that face the scary prospect of being intimate. The authors' convoluted explanation for what happened was that this man's subconscious feelings made his car malfunction! Furthermore, he was able to have has car "malfunction" near some poison ivy so he could get sick and avoid his honeymoon! Where's Occam's razor when you need it? Freud never considered all accidents as expressing some kind of unconscious desire, but these authors apparently do. For a self-help book the authors are surprisingly scant on solutions, and what solutions are offered are generalized bromides or simplistic exercises. Chapter 5 (How to create enlightening relationships) offers only the following "how-to" advice: ask yourself and your friends and family if they notice any links between your current behavior and your childhood. Incredibly poor advice considering how complex memory and subconscious feelings may interact. Another especially trenchant piece of advice is to sit your partner down and ask "are you willing to have our relationship be about having fun instead of having problems?" Stop, my head is spinning. This book, in summary, is intellectually vapid, ill-conceived, poorly presented and profoundly stupid from start to finish.