Customer Reviews

Power of the Middle Ground: A Couple's Guide to Renewing Your Relationship

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THE POWER OF THE MIDDLE GROUND: A COUPLE'S GUIDE TO RENEWING YOUR RELATIONSHIP provides a fine self-help book from a seasoned couples therapist and educator, who explains strategies for handling relationship difficulties. The focus here is on creating a place that brings love and compassion alive - a place where neither partner dominates, and each approaches problems productively. This key to learning the 'middle ground' oasis is a pick for any library, from health collections to general-interest lending libraries.

Power of the Middle Ground: A Couple's Guide to Renewing Your Relationship
Marty Babits has written a terrific book, for both couples and therapists. It is a user friendly guide
that has many practical exercises and unique examples that both make sense and work. As a couple's
therapist, and also someone in a relationship, I can attest to this. Mr. Babits gives communication, anger
and keeping love alive a new framework. The "Middle Ground", is, indeed, powerful.

With this important, intelligent, and accessible book, Marty Babits does more than demonstrate his expertise in helping couples heal; he suggests a rich and meaningful theoretical concept--the Middle Ground--that will resonate with and give hope to anyone who has ever felt trapped, stymied, or at a loss about how to connect with a partner. The stories of real couples transitioning from pain to progress with the author's compassionate and insightful guidance, will move you; and the author's interventions and suggested exercises will not only motivate you to take action, but also show you how to go about it. The book will also help you to truly know yourself and your partner, no easy thing and the key to building a lasting, flexible and strong relationship that grows as partners do. As someone who has interviewed many dozens of couples for my own research, I believe that The Power of the Middle Ground has important lessons to impart, not only to the lay reader, but also to therapists, researchers, and relationship experts. Moreover, it is rare that a book for couples suggests a paradigm so rich that it can also be helpful to couples in a remarriage or reparternship with children, that most fragile of unions. The Power of the Middle Ground is just such an unusual book, and I recommend it highly and without hesitation to couples in general, and also to the many people who seek information about how to resolve conflict and find fulfillment and mutual understanding in their remarriages with children. *****
Wednesday Martin, Ph.D.
Author, Stepmonster: A New Look at Why Real Stepmothers Think, Feel, and Act the Way We Do

The book, Power of the Middle Ground: A Couple's Guide to Renewing Your Relationship is a self-help book that teaches couples how to settle differences, point out the positive, look at each person's point of view, reduce anger, and refresh the relationship. So what is the Middle Ground? According to the author, it is a place where a person can share their emotions freely and feel very safe with their partner. There are numerous exercises in the book that help couples to identify the positives in their relationship and teach them to appreciate each other. The author explores each topic with a case scenario, and shares the feelings of the couple to help explain the topic. The book is easy to read and teaches us that communication is important in maintaining a relationship that is honest and fair. (Reviewed by Eileen, Melissa's mom)


I received a free copy of the book from FSB Associates for my honest review. I was not compensated for the review.

Marty Babits' book The Power of the Middle Ground is a find! This insightful book on couple communication will motivate and teach couples how to pave the way to more open and supportive relationships.

Mr. Babits is a communications expert par excellence as well as a skilled couples therapist. His book is chock full of stories and examples that couples can relate to easily. He offers a creative strategy for guiding them to the "middle ground." His method breaks down the impasse of anger and reactivity. With Babits' technique, described very clearly, the couple can begin to listen and hear each other in a different way. There are moving examples of couples relating in a deeply caring and respectful way, which before reaching the "middle ground," seemed impossible.

This book is an important contribution to couple counseling. I will certainly recommend it to stepcouples where the challenges of adjusting to stepfamily life are difficult and dicey. This will be a valuable resource for them.

I give it a five star rating without a doubt!

Susan Wisdom LPC
Author of Stepcoupling, Creating and Sustaining a Strong Marriage in Today's Blended Family

Fantastic book - should be an invaluable resource for couples (of all kinds) who wish to bring renewed vitality to their relationships and to reconnect with the feelings of love and attraction that brought them together in the first place. Mr. Babits has devised a novel and highly effective model that can be used by couples to create a safe space (his Middle Ground), where communication, understanding, trust, and mutual acceptance can flourish free from the light-blocking canopy of anger, fear, frustration, and hopelessness that so often obscures the still viable bond between partners. While the Middle Ground paradigm Mr. Babits has constructed is a profound one, with the potential to be applied wherever there has been a breakdown in communications - even on a global scale - this remains a practical book, a nuts-and-bolts approach complete with step-by-step instructions, exercises, and stories of couples who have used the Middle Ground concept to their benefit. For anyone who feels that his/her relationship has stagnated in an atmosphere of cynicism and despair, this book, The Power of the Middle Ground, is serious medicine. With a true commitment to applying the principles it outlines, couples can restore a feeling of openness and possibility to their shared lives - and rediscover the room to breathe.