Act With Love: Stop Struggling, Reconcile Differences, and Strengthen Your Relationship With Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Kindle Edition)
February 9th, 2010
Product Description
Popular myths about love set us up for a struggle with real life. The inconvenient truth is there’s no such thing as a perfect partner, all couples fight, and feelings of love come and go like the weather. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have a joyful and romantic relationship. Through a simple program based on the revolutionary new mindfulness-based acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), you can learn to handle painful thoughts and feelings more effectively and engage fully in the process of living and loving together.
With your partner or alone, ACT with Love will teach you how to:
- Let go of conflict, open up, and live fully in the present
- Use mindfulness to increase intimacy, connection, and understanding
- Resolve painful conflicts and reconcile long-standing differences
- Act on your values to build a rich and meaningful relationship
From the Publisher
In ACT with Love, therapist and medical doctor Russ Harris shows couples how developing psychological flexibility–the ability to be in the present moment with openness, awareness, and focus, and to take effective action in line with one’s values–can help them build more compassionate, accepting, loving relationships.
I think this is a great book. Russ Harris writes in a clear style that gets right to the point. He shows how all couples are bound to struggle at some time and become disconnected from their relationship values. I think this is an important point, because we often go into relationships with the fairy tale idea that relationships should be easy (happily ever after). I think “ACT with Love” does a good job of showing how easy it is for all of us to lose contact with our partners and no longer see them as they really are. It describes how a once loving, caring relationship can become a war.
The book proposes an anecdote based on Acceptance and Commitment therapy. Basically, it shows how couples can become more mindful, accepting of things they can’t change, and values driven. I believe these three skills are essential for love and intimacy.
I like the format of the book. I found it easy to skim and find topics I was most interested in. I found the exercises to be helpful. I liked that the book was both serious and humorous (e.g., in one section Dr. Harris discusses destructive relationship tactics such as “exhuming the corpse ” and “springing the ambush”
I strongly recommend this book, both to relationship counsellors and to people in relationships. I don’t think you need to wait till you are having problems in a relationship to get it. It probably would make for some good preventative medicine
I have recommended this book to several of my clients. I and they have found it to be quite helpful. The author provides additional worksheets online that are worthwhile “homework” or in-session assignments. Dr. Harris does an excellent job of applying the ACT model to couples therapy in a way that is understandable and with experiential exercises that help treatment to generalize to real-life settings.
Once again Russ Harris has written a book that is well worth reading. It is accessible and sensible and a pretty interesting read. I work as a psychologist so read a fair few books and I can honestly say that I thoroughly enjoyed this one – and found a lot of useful tips that I would use. I’ll be recommending this book to anyone who seeks a better relationship!!