Giving the Love That Heals: A Guide for Parents

"One of the leading therapeutic voices of the 1990's" (Deborah Mason, New Choices) Harville Hendrix has illuminated the paths to healthy, loving relationships in his New York Times bestsellers Getting the Love You Want and Keeping the Love You Find. Now, with his coauthor and wife, Helen Hunt, he at last brings us to a new understanding of the most profound love of all — by helping parents nurture their own development as they encourage emotional wholeness in their children.

How we parent our children reveals a great deal about how we were parented. When a particular parent-child interaction reveals how strongly we resemble our own mother or father, that insight can be extremely disheartening. But it can also be a catalyst for exploring unresolved issues that originated in our own childhood. Giving The Love That Heals offers a unique opportunity for personal transformation that will lead us to a conscious, and thus healthier, relationship with our children.

Harville Hendrix and Helen Hunt help us explore:

•The Imago — the fantasy partner that our unconscious mind constructs from those we loved as a child, a that has guided our search for a life partner

•Maximizer and Minimizer parents — the defensive styles that internally shape what we say and how interact with our children

•A Parenting Process that all parents can use to end the "cycle of wounding" — the handing-down of wounding we received as children — as we parent our own children, regardless of their age

•The most effective way to nurture the stages of our child's growth while remaining mindful of how each stage affects the child's relationships, both to us and to their world and their future

•Safety, Support, and Structure — how to give children what they really need from us

•Modeling Adulthood — recovering our innate wholeness to provide a model of adulthood for our children that will preserve their innate wholeness.

In this profound, groundbreaking book, Harville Hendrix and Helen Hunt lead us through an extraordinary process of growth as we help our children to become healthy, responsible, and caring people.

Includes bibliographical references (p.347-350) and index.

Harville Hendrix, Ph.D., has spent more than thirty years as an educator and therapist, specializing in working with couples, teaching marital therapy to therapists, and conducting couples workshops across the country. Dr. Hendrix is the cocreator, with his wife, Helen Hunt, of Imago Relationship Therapy, which is known and practiced internationally; and the cofounder and president of the Institute for Imago Relationship Therapy based in Winter Park, Florida. He is the author of Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples, and Keeping the Love You Find: A Guide for Singles, and has coauthored, with Helen, The Personal Companion: Meditations and Exercises for Keeping the Love You Find and The Couples Companion: Meditations and Exercises for Getting the Love You Want. Harville and his wife Helen Hunt have six children, and live in New Mexico.