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(Repeating the same mistakes in your relationships? Learn why and how to break the trail!)
This easy to use, self-help book can help you: take personal responsibility, create a safe environment, keep your battery charged, listen with your heart and adopt a no loser policy. Maybe you think you don’t need help in these areas? Well, the sum of these equals the DNA of every relationship. Read on.
What exactly is the DNA of relationships?
First, we must understand that we are made for relationships, in fact, God created us for three kinds of relationships – relationships with others, our relationship with ourselves, and of course, our relationships with our Creator.
Second, we are made with the ability to choose. How can we choose everyone we have a connection with? Well, we can’t. Parents/siblings/family are not chosen by you, but you do have choices in how the relationships are with those who should be closest to you. We have to make the right choice in all our relationships – even with those we don’t like.
Third – what about your relationship with you? It should be healthy. Not in the egotistical sense of the word, but in that if we don’t have a good concept of who we are in God, and if we don’t like whom we are, then our relationships with others cannot possibly be healthy. We need to embrace who we are.
Last but certainly not least, we must seek and respond to a good relationship with God.
All of these are woven together. If we have a rift in our human relationships we can’t have a healthy relationship with God, if you have a bad relationship with yourself, you can’t have a good relationship with others. All aspects of the relationship must be balanced.
Sometimes we feel powerless in our relationships, we love, but the love is rejected, we try to ‘love’ ourselves but one look in the mirror shatters the illusion. We struggle with relationships with our mothers, our fathers, our children. Friendships are difficult to maintain, no dating relationships lasts longer than 4 months. Why?
Dr. Smalley gives us tools to overcome even our biggest relationship fear, widest flaw, deepest – well, you get the picture. The most helpful thing in the book is Appendix A. It is a Core Fear Identifier chart and helps us, yeah, identify our fears, but more than that, it gives us suggestions on how to deal with the fear flaw. Sometimes the chart shows that the conflict arising from the core fear takes two to build, but often times we build the fear alone, face it alone and have to fix it alone.
DNA for Relationships will be helpful for just about everyone. If you have relationships (and we all do), this book could be just the thing your looking for to help you maintain and grow healthy connections. I can see this book would be a good help to teachers, counselors, pastors and those in leadership positions. For the individual, like me, this book will help us better understand folks, identify the relationship trouble and helps us remedy the situation. Certainly a good book and a much needed tool in the troubled culture we are a part of.
Recommended, indeed!
Reviewed by Linda Mae Baldwin
for The Road to Romance
October 18, 2004
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