Games People Play


Eric Berne - 1964
    More than five million copies later, Dr. Eric Berne’s classic is as astonishing–and revealing–as it was on the day it was first published. This anniversary edition features a new introduction by Dr. James R. Allen, president of the International Transactional Analysis Association, and Kurt Vonnegut’s brilliant Life magazine review from 1965.We play games all the time–sexual games, marital games, power games with our bosses, and competitive games with our friends. Detailing status contests like “Martini” (I know a better way), to lethal couples combat like “If It Weren’t For You” and “Uproar,” to flirtation favorites like “The Stocking Game” and “Let’s You and Him Fight,” Dr. Berne exposes the secret ploys and unconscious maneuvers that rule our intimate lives.Explosive when it first appeared, Games People Play is now widely recognized as the most original and influential popular psychology book of our time. It’s as powerful and eye-opening as ever.

The Voice of the Heart


Chip Dodd - 2001
    Chip Dodd teaches us how to begin to know our hearts so that we better know ourselves and are better equipped to live in relationship with others and, ultimately, with God.

Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life


Karen Armstrong - 2010
    Here, in this straightforward, thoughtful, and thought-provoking book, she sets out a program that can lead us toward a more compassionate life.The twelve steps Armstrong suggests begin with “Learn About Compassion” and close with “Love Your Enemies.” In between, she takes up “compassion for yourself,” mindfulness, suffering, sympathetic joy, the limits of our knowledge of others, and “concern for everybody.” She suggests concrete ways of enhancing our compassion and putting it into action in our everyday lives, and provides, as well, a reading list to encourage us to “hear one another’s narratives.” Throughout, Armstrong makes clear that a compassionate life is not a matter of only heart or mind but a deliberate and often life-altering commingling of the two.From the Hardcover edition.

The Seven Secrets to Healthy, Happy Relationships


Miguel Ruiz Jr. - 2018
    They provide unlimited ways for us to learn, grow, thrive, and have fun! Yet, as we know, relationships aren’t always a “bed of roses”—especially romantic ones. They don’t make themselves, nor do they continue happily on autopilot once they begin. In this one-of-a-kind book, bestselling authors don Miguel Ruiz, Jr. and HeatherAsh Amara share their seven secrets to healthy, happy relationships: Commitment Freedom Awareness Healing Joy Communication Release Understanding and enacting these principles can help you at any stage in your intimate partnering, whether you’ve been with someone for many years or are currently single and want to prepare for a relationship. The authors make clear that the principles in this book aren’t secrets because they are hidden away, but are more akin to undiscovered focal points that can lead to deeper, more meaningful connections. Part of the secret, as you will see, is in the art of putting these ideas into practice day after day and year after year.

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression - and the Unexpected Solutions


Johann Hari - 2018
    He was told—like his entire generation—that his problem was caused by a chemical imbalance in his brain. As an adult, trained in the social sciences, he began to investigate this question—and he learned that almost everything we have been told about depression and anxiety is wrong. Across the world, Hari discovered social scientists who were uncovering the real causes—and they are mostly not in our brains, but in the way we live today. Hari’s journey took him from the people living in the tunnels beneath Las Vegas, to an Amish community in Indiana, to an uprising in Berlin—all showing in vivid and dramatic detail these new insights. They lead to solutions radically different from the ones we have been offered up until now.Just as Chasing the Scream transformed the global debate about addiction, with over twenty million views for his TED talk and the animation based on it, Lost Connections will lead us to a very different debate about depression and anxiety—one that shows how, together, we can end this epidemic.

How to Be an Adult in Love: Letting Love in Safely and Showing It Recklessly


David Richo - 2013
    Loving ourselves and others is in our genetic code. It’s nothing other than the purpose of our lives—but knowing that doesn’t make it easy to do. We may find it a challenge to love ourselves. We may have a hard time letting love in from others. We’re often afraid of getting hurt. It is also sometimes scary for us to share love with those around us—and love that isn't shared leaves us feeling flat and unfulfilled. David Richo provides the tools here for learning how to love in evolved adult ways—beginning with getting past the barriers that keep us from loving ourselves, then showing how we can learn to open to love others. The first challenge is that we have a hard time letting love in: recognizing it, accepting it from others. We're afraid of it, of getting hurt. The second, related problem is that we're unable to share love with those around us--and love that isn't shared isn't truly love. The first step to learning to love and be loved, according to Richo's model, is to identify the different levels of love so that you can hit each one separately. He breaks it down to three:   • Level One: Positive Connection. As simple as being courteous, respectful, helpful, and honest, and decent in all our dealings. Pretty basic, but it makes the world a better place, and it's the essential foundation for growing in love.    • Level Two: Caring and Personal Connection. Intimacy and commitment to friends, family, partners, lovers. Commitment to others.    • Level Three: Unconditional and Universal. Transcending the love of individuals to the love of all beings; self-sacrificing. The love expressed in the Sermon on the Mount and the Bodhicharyavatara. This level of love isn't for a heroic few, it's everyone's calling. He then shows us how to incorporate these varieties of love into our lives. It's a relief to know that even just aspiring to incorporate them really changes things. He also provides exercises and guided meditations for identifying and getting through the things that keep you from getting and giving love at each of these three levels.Through the lens of these types of love, Richo covers topics such as: how to still be yourself while loving another; how to embrace your dark side; what to do when the one who loves you dies; need versus fear; clinging; healthy sexuality, including fantasies and how to experience pleasure without guilt; how to break distructive patterns in your relationships; and how to have safe conversations with your loved one.Richo provides wisdom from Buddhism, psychology, and a range of spiritual traditions, along with a wealth of practices both for avoiding the pitfalls that can occur in love relationships and for enhancing the way love shows up in our lives. He then leads us on to love’s inevitable outcome: developing a heart that loves universally and indiscriminately. This transcendent and unconditional love isn’t just for a heroic few, Richo shows, it’s everyone’s magnificent calling.

The Good Girl's Guide to Great Sex: And You Thought Bad Girls Have All the Fun


Sheila Wray Gregoire - 2012
    Far fewer have made love. In The Good Girl's Guide to Great Sex, author Sheila Wray Gregoire helps women see how sexual intimacy was designed to be physically stupendous but also incredibly intimate.Whether you're about to walk down the aisle, newly married, or you've been married for decades, The Good Girl's Guide to Great Sex will lead you on a wonderful journey of discovery toward the amazing sex life God designed you for.With humor, research, and lots of anecdotes, author Sheila Wray Gregoire helps women see how our culture's version of sex, which concentrates on the physical above all else, makes sex shallow. God, on the other hand, intended sex to unite us physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Gregoire walks through these three aspects of sex, showing how to make each amazing, and how to overcome the roadblocks in each area we often encounter.Drawing on survey results from over 2,000 people, she also includes lots of voices from other Good Girls, giving insight into how other women have learned to truly enjoy sex in marriage.

10 Commandments of Dating


Ben Young - 1999
    This guide will help you keep your head in the search for the desire of your heart.

Spiral Dynamics


Don Edward Beck - 2005
    Focusing on cutting-edge leadership, management systems, processes, procedures, and techniques, the authors synthesize changes such as: Increasing cultural diversity.Powerful new social responsibility initiatives.The arrival of a truly global marketplace. This is an inspiring book for managers, consultants, strategists, and leaders planning for success in the business world in the 21st century.

The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship


David Whyte - 2009
    David Whyte knows there are three crucial relationships, or marriages, in our lives: the marriage or partnership with a significant other, the commitment we have to our work, and the vows, spoken or unspoken, we make to an inner, constantly developing self. In The Three Marriages, the bestselling author, poet, and speaker argues that it is not possible to sacrifice one relationship for the others without causing deep psychological damage. Too often, he says, we fracture our lives and split our energies foolishly, so that one or more of these marriages is sacrificed and may wither and die, in the process impoverishing them all. Whyte looks to a different way of seeing and connecting these relationships and prompts us to examine each marriage with a fierce but affectionate eye as he shows us the importance of cherishing all three equally. Drawing from his own struggles to achieve this goal as well as exploring the lives of some of the world's great writers and activists—from Dante to Joan of Arc, from Austen to Dickinson—Whyte reveals that our core commitments are irrevocably connected. Only by understanding the simultaneously robust and delicate nature of the three marriages and the stages of their maturation, he maintains, can we create a real portrait of what makes us tick and a real sense of finding a place in the world. In prose that's at once lyrical and inviting, Whyte investigates captivating ideas for bringing a deeper satisfaction to our lives, one that goes beyond our previously held ideas of balance.

It's Not You: 27 (Wrong) Reasons You're Single


Sara Eckel - 2014
    Even the most self-possessed singleton may come to doubt herself. ?"You're too picky. Just find a good-enough guy and you'll be fine." "You're too desperate. If men think you need them, they'll run scared." "You're too independent. Smart, ambitious women always have a harder time finding mates." "You have low self-esteem. You can't love someone else until you've learned to love yourself.""You're too needy. You can't be happy in a relationship until you've learned to be happy on your own." It's Not You is structured around the many messages that singles, especially single women, get about who they are and who they're supposed to be. Supported by the latest psychological and sociological research, as well as interviews with single women, Eckel creates a strong argument for why you should love yourself as you are--no change necessary. By debunking the myths that have kept single women doubting themselves, Eckel encourages singles to stop picking apart their personalities and to start tapping into their own wisdom about who and what is right for them, as they begin to understand and accept there's no one reason they're single--they just are.

The Essential Enneagram


David N. Daniels - 2000
    In this book, Stanford University Medical School clinical professor of psychiatry David Daniels and counseling psychologist Virginia Price offer the only scientifically developed Enneagram test based upon extensive research combined with a self-discovery and personal-development guide.The most fundamental guide to the Enneagram ever offered, this book features effective self-tests to determine simply and accurately what your personality type is. Daniels and Price provide step-by-step instructions for taking inventory of how you think, what you feel, and what you experience. They then guide you in your discovery of what your type means for your personal well-being and your relationships with others, and they show you how to maximize your inherent strengths. Brimming with empowering information for each of the nine personality types--Perfectionist, Giver, Performer, Romantic, Observer, Loyal Skeptic, Epicure, Protector, and Mediator--this one-of-a-kind book equips you with all the tools you need to dramatically enhance your quality of life.

Enough: Finding More by Living with Less


Will Davis Jr. - 2012
    But how much is enough? And how do we know when we have too much of a good thing? In this provocative, paradigm-shifting book, Will Davis Jr. challenges readers to discover the peace that comes through contentment with what we have and compassion for those in need. Through surprising statistics, scriptural insight, and real-life stories, Davis gently leads readers to consider living with less in order to do more for the kingdom. Thought-provoking discussion questions and short chapters make this a perfect study for small groups. No one will come away from this powerful book unchanged.