Emotional Intelligence for Couples: Simple Ways to Increase the Communication in Your Relationship

by John Lee

Overview

From best-selling relationship expert comes a common-sense guide to help you and your partner increase your emotional intelligence, teaching you practical ways to express your feelings and strengthen your relationship.

What makes a relationship healthy? Most men and women will respond that it's good communication to be able to openly express their own thoughts and feelings, and to better understand their partner's. Emotional Intelligence for Couples explains basic principles of emotional intelligence to equip you with common-sense ways to express your feelings, allowing you to enjoy greater intimacy, clearer communication, and a deeper connection than you have ever known. Discover answers to questions like:

• What actions and behaviors will make our relationship healthier?
  
• How can we practice healthy arguing and recognize healthy anger?
  
• How can we prevent our criticism, manipulation, and blame games?
  
• Why do I need personal boundaries?
  

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781596528284
Publisher:	Turner Publishing Company
Publication date:	09/06/2011
Pages:	133
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

After 25 years of working with thousands of men and women at conferences, workshops, and in clinical settings, John Lee is an internationally recognized leader in relationships and men’s issues, and was a founder in the men’s movement. A trainer, speaker, consultant, teacher, and coach, John is the best-selling author of The Flying Boy: Healing the Wounded Man, The Anger Solution: The Proven Method for Achieving Calm and Developing Healthy, Long-Lasting Relationships, and 17 other titles. He has been featured on Oprah, 20/20, Barbara Walters’ The View, CNN, PBS, and NPR. John lives with his wife in Alabama.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction xiii

1 Establishing boundaries: taking the first step to increase emotional intelligence 1

2 Stopping boundary errors and violations from occurring 9

3 Defending your boundaries 13

4 Knowing your limits 19

5 Recapping: boundaries and limits 25

6 Discovering how codependency still affects your life after all these years 29

7 Practicing a four-step model of grief work that increases emotional intelligence 33

8 Understanding boundaries, limits, and grief work through an adult fairy tale 41

9 Experiencing and expressing anger appropriately 49

10 Stopping confusing anger and rage 61

11 Identifying the en-rager and the out-rager 69

12 Recognizing emotional regression 73

13 Eliminating the triggers for regression 77

14 Seeing the signals that you or someone else is regressing 83

15 Working our way out of passivity: the hidden element that limits emotional intelligence 93

16 Becoming a more compassionate person 99

17 Engaging in active loving 103

18 Understanding that wanting and needing are two different things 107

19 Identifying and pursuing your passion 111

20 Getting out of the triangle tangle 115

21 Separating versus isolating 119

22 Making an appropriate apology 123

23 Making amends and becoming emotionally mature 127

24 Being happy rather than right all the time 131

Editorial Reviews

John takes very sophisticated material that is very important to understand and makes it wonderfully simple!” —John Bradshaw, New York Times bestselling author of Homecoming

From the Publisher