Book Summaries
21 books on relationships and psychology, each summarized so you can get the main ideas in a few minutes.
Sex and desire
For couples whose sex life has gone quiet, or who want something better than what they have.
-
Passionate Marriage
Sex, intimacy and differentiation in long-term marriage, and why the hard parts are how couples grow.
-
Intimacy & Desire
Why desire fades in committed couples and how to rebuild it by becoming more of your own person.
- Resurrecting Sex Sexual problems are normal, and turning them around means holding on to yourself while you deal with the body and the relationship together.
-
Come As You Are
The science of sexual response, stress, and why context matters for desire.
-
Mating in Captivity
Why desire needs distance, and how security and erotic energy pull against each other.
Fighting and reconnecting
How couples get stuck in the same fights, and how they find their way back to each other.
-
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
Gottman's research on what marriages that last have in common, from friendship to handling conflict.
-
Us
Getting past you versus me to build a relationship that both partners look after.
-
Hold Me Tight
Emotionally Focused Therapy for couples: the pursue and withdraw cycle and seven conversations for reconnecting.
-
Getting the Love You Want
Imago theory: how childhood wounds shape who we choose and how partners can help each other heal.
Growing up and the family you came from
How the family you grew up in still shapes the way you love, and how to grow past it.
-
Bowen Theory's Secrets
Bowen family systems theory: differentiation, anxiety, and how families shape their members.
-
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
What it does to you to grow up with emotionally immature parents, and how to stop waiting for what they cannot give.
- Living at the Bottom of the Ocean His unfinished last manuscript on emotional regression and how to climb out of it.
People-pleasing and codependency
For people who lose themselves trying to keep everyone else happy.
Anxiety and trauma
How old pain and anxious thinking show up in a relationship, and what helps.
The brain and the mind
Longer books on how the brain works and what it means for how we relate to each other.
- Brain Talk Mind mapping, the brain's habit of picturing what is going on in another person's head, and how it drives conflict.
-
The Master and His Emissary
The two halves of the brain and how the balance between them has shaped Western culture.
-
The Matter with Things
His follow-up on what the two hemispheres mean for how we understand reality, science and meaning.
Abuse and control
If you are afraid of your partner, call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 before you try anything in a book.
