Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships: Healing the Wound of the Heart

At one time or another, most of us have experienced the beauty and perfection of love. So why is it that our relationships usually don't live up to love's sublime potential? If love is so great, why are relationships so impossible? In Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships, John Welwood offers fresh and penetrating insight into our relationship problems. In eloquent and encouraging terms, he explains that most of us carry an unaddressed emotional wound he calls the wound of the heart--a deep-seated, unconscious belief that we are not lovable as we are. This core wound must be acknowledged, examined, and healed before successful relationships are possible, and this book shows us how.

Welwood challenges the sea of self-help books that offer quick relationship fixes of one type or another. Many readers have found that the popular methods and gimmicks tend not to work for very long, if at all. In this book Welwood explores relationship problems at a deeper and more fundamental level. He explains that our hidden belief that we are not worthy of love creates the mood of unlove, a dark emotional state that suffuses our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Kept out of conscious awareness, the mood of unlove quickly becomes the mood of grievance: a perennial sense of dissatisfaction with our relationships and with our whole world.

In Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships, we learn how the wound of the heart causes us to close ourselves off from others. Welwood shows us that the problem is not the love we are or aren't getting, but our limited ability to fully receive the love that is available. Our wounding prevents us from letting love all the way in, and our work is to healourselves so that we can finally receive love.

Written in a fresh, lyrical, literary style that honors the complexity, subtlety, and sacred depth of love itself, Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships shows us the work we can do to free ourselves from grievance and unlove. With practical exercises and engaging stories drawn from Welwood's private practice as a couples' therapist, Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships helps us to heal our hearts so that we can receive love in a way that we never have before.

A nationally known couples therapist reveals the single root cause of all relationship problems and offers revolutionary advice on what to do about it.

While most of us have moments of loving freely and openly, it is often hard to sustain this where it matters most—in our intimate relationships. Why, if love is so great and powerful, are human relationships so challenging and difficult? If love is the source of happiness and joy, why is it so hard to open to it fully and let it govern our lives? In this book, John Welwood addresses these questions and shows us how to overcome the most fundamental obstacle that keeps us from experiencing love's full flowering in our lives.

Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships begins by showing how all our relational problems arise out of a universal, core wounding around love that affects not only our personal relationships but the quality of life in our world as a whole. This wounding shows up as a pervasive mood of unlove—a deep sense that we are not intrinsically lovable just as we are. And this shuts down our capacity to trust, so that even though we may hunger for love, we have difficulty opening to it and letting it circulate freely through us.

This book takes the reader on a powerful journey of healing and transformation that involves learning to embrace our humanness and appreciate the imperfections of our relationships as trail-markers along the path to great love. It sets forth a process for releasing deep-seated grievances we hold against others for not loving us better and against ourselves for not being better loved. And it shows how our longing to be loved can magnetize the great love that will free us from looking to others to find ourselves.

Written with penetrating realism and a fresh, lyrical style that honors the subtlety and richness of our relationship to love itself, this revolutionary book offers profound and practical guidance for healing our lives as well as our embattled world.

In Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships, John Welwood offers fresh and penetrating insight into our relationship problems. In eloquent and encouraging terms, he explains that most of us carry an unaddressed emotional wound he calls “ the wound of the heart” — a deep-seated, unconscious belief that we are not lovable as we are. This core wound must be acknowledged, examined, and healed before successful relationships are possible, and this book shows us how. With practical exercises and engaging stories drawn from Welwood’ s private practice as a couples’ therapist, Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships helps us to heal our hearts so that we can receive love in a way that we never have before.

As a psychotherapist, teacher, and author, John Welwood has been a pioneer in integrating psychological and spiritual work. Welwood has published six books, including the best-selling Journey of the Heart (HarperCollins, 1990), as well as Challenge of the Heart (Shambhala, 1985), and Love and Awakening (HarperCollins, 1996). He is an associate editor of the Journal for Transpersonal Psychology. He leads workshops and trainings in psychospiritual work and conscious relationship throughout the world.