I have been reading “Receiving love : transform your relationship by letting yourself be loved” by Harville Hendrix & Helen LaKelly Hunt. New York: Artria, 2004. The title caught my eye because some years ago I felt God was saying to me, “Let yourself be loved.” So I was curious to see what a secular book had to say about receiving love.
Early in the book they say, “The common wisdom is that romantic relationships would stay happy if people did a better job of giving to each other. But that’s not what we’ve discovered. We’ve found that many people need to do a better job of receiving the gifts their partners are already offering.” pg.17
Their most startling discovery was this: “Our unconscious leads us to a person who offers us the greatest opportunity to heal our childhood wounds … The person we are most attracted to will very likely share some significant traits or characteristics with the parent who gave us the most trouble in childhood. … Unconsciously, we do choose the psychological dynamics that are most familiar to us from our youth.” Pg. 55 I’ve been thinking about whether this is true. It would explain why so many children of alcoholics marry alcoholics – something I’ve always struggled to understand.
And this is quite thought-provoking: “the things I say about you, say more about me, than you.” Pg.62
I must confess to skipping a few chapters but overall it was an interesting book.
