Customer Reviews

The Power of Unconditional Love: 21 Guidelines for Beginning, Improving and Changing Your Most Meaningful Relationships

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
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This book has a lot of easy techniques for improving your quality of life in a relationship. It talks about converting "addictive demands" to "preferences", accepting your partner and creating an "us" relationship. Just practicing the first two techniques can completely change the feeling in your marriage whether your partner reads the book or not.

The book borrows from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy techniques (many of which have good experimental efficacy studies) but is written in an easy to understand, interesting and readable style.

I highly recommend this book to anyone in his/her journey of self-actualization. Mr. Keyes speaks of the "aha experience", and I must say that I had many while reading it. You do have the power within to be happy and to have rewarding relationships. This book gives you the tools to get started. I can't say that I'm all the way there, but it's nice to have a reference place to remind me where I'd like to be.

The writer describes the proven key to a satisfying and joyful life in simple, understandable terms.

This book changed all of my realationships, including my marriage..but especially my relationship with myself...it taught me how to depersonalize other peoples behavior and gain my emtional independence...the suggested techniques truly brought balance to my thoughts and emotions. I have since pursued a certification in Anger Management, after accomplishing that goal i am now pursuing a degree in Psychology...if you can get past the bad programming in your life or the lives of others that you are surrounded with....life is a pretty sweet experience! This book is easy to read and will help you accomplish that goal! I highly recommend this book!

Being raised in a co-dependent and asocial household where I never really learned how to bond, connect, form friendship or show love to others, I've been looking around to learn the ropes of connection and intimacy/bonding. I was looking more for a 'how to unconditionally love'. The subtitle gives somewhat of the impression that this is applicable to relationships other than a spouse, and I didn't really feel that was true. Perhaps 'most meaningful relationships' meant only the people in your daily life, ie family, close friends, etc.

I was looking more on how to be more loving and caring about people in general - which is what I would consider to be 'unconditional love'. Not just unconditionally loving a specific person. I found this book was more oriented towards primary relationships when I would like to learn more how to connect/bond with people in general, how to be generous, caring, how to listen, how to forgive, etc... How to bond with people and bring out the best in them. How to form new friendships effortlessly. This book didn't really go into anything outside of how to stop imposing conditions upon primary relationships.

I think one primary issue for why we bring conditions to others is that our society imposes the crazy idea that we are really only meant to have a few connections in our lives. We become intimacy starved. So we demand too much from too few people. Or suffer when we don't get any love at all.

I don't think we can be totally intrinsically happy (though not expecting too much does help), as when we live in prolonged isolation, we lose motivation and ambition and difficulty feels worse. I do think however that we can realize that our happiness is something that depends on varied and diverse experiences, so that we ensure we have enough simultaneous experiences (even if some are subtle) that distribute our need for connection and feeling a part of something meaningful/larger, onto more people. We feel happy not from receiving love from specific people, but from feeling connected to others in general, part of a large system of interflowing energy. When we don't allow ourselves to be open to that large of a system, we become starved and then expect too much. We have to find satisfaction from somewhere, even if it's unconditionally loving others and seeing our ability to create happiness and goodness (that in itself is what makes us happy).

We live/work among strangers, have a handful of friends, a best friend or two, a partner, and that's it. Whereas I think if we shifted how we sought connection and intimacy, and focused on loving everybody, taking a concern for everybody, and taking advantage of opportunities to connect with people even at a subtle level, to stir those feelings of intimacy, connection, bonding, etc where people feel loved, validated, heard, accepted, understood, and you find happiness in taking concern for the well-being of everybody (along the lines of Mahayana Buddhism's Boddhisattva ideal). The first chapter of this book gave that impression, but after that it started to really go into self-love and then lost my interest. It seemed useful, just not for me right now.

I was given this book and thought "yea right" it lay under the car seat for years. I discovered it there at a time when I'd run out of reading matter. It's a top book. Up there with the "Tao of Pooh". Read it!