Mark B. Borg Jr - Relationship Sanity: Creating and Maintaining Healthy Relationships

Special Praise for Relationship Sanity

Relationship Sanity is a roadmap to a thriving relationship. In their preceding book, Irrelationship, Borg and his colleagues located relationship insanity in couples mutual fear of intimacy and all the ways they defend against closeness and vulnerability. In this book, to help couples face and transcend that fear, they make available a rich, detailed, and ultimately simple and doable process that helps couples to become present to each other, thus achieving and sustaining intimacy. Any couple will be enriched by using the myriad insights and exercises, and any therapist will be empowered to help couples by using them in their practice.

Harville Hendrix, PhD and Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD, best-selling authors of Getting the Love You Want and Making Marriage Simple

Borg, Brenner, and Berry have presented in this volume an accessible yet complex and sophisticated road map to assist couples, both those seemingly doing well and those in trouble, on the challenging journey to an intimate, rewarding, and sane relationship. Skillfully illuminating how early attachment strategies shape our adult assumptions about intimacy, the authors offer astutely designed exercises to be done by couples, alone and together, that will deepen understanding and awareness, for the self and for one another. Exposing and making sense of the hidden insecurities and conflicts most of us harbor about intimacy, the authors open up a compassionate path toward healing and growth. The wealth of knowledge and expertise here is immensely impressive and will certainly be of tremendous benefit to those couples ready to open themselves to the innate human potential for deeply satisfying intimacy.

Daniel Shaw, psychotherapist and author of Traumatic Narcissism: Relational Systems of Subjugation

Filled with tips, exercises, and case studies, Relationship Sanity is a solidly researched approach to improving relationships through mindfully viewing your relationship as a third entity, separate from yourselves individually, which requires care and nurturing. Its a valuable tool whether you are beginning a relationship with a new partner or have been married and assumed you knew everything about your spouse.

Diana Kirschner, PhD, bestselling author of Love in 90 Days

RELATIONSHIP

SANITY

RELATIONSHIP

SANITY

Creating and Maintaining Healthy Relationships

Mark B. Borg, Jr.
Grant H. Brenner
Daniel Berry

Central Recovery Press (CRP) is committed to publishing exceptional materials addressing addiction treatment, recovery, and behavioral healthcare topics.

For more information, visit www.centralrecoverypress.com.

2018 by Mark B. Borg, Jr., Grant Hilary Brenner, and John Daniel Berry

All rights reserved. Published 2018. Printed in the United States of America.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

Publisher: Central Recovery Press

3321 N. Buffalo Drive

Las Vegas, NV 89129

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Borg, Mark B., Jr., author. | Brenner, Grant H., author. | Berry, Daniel, author.

Title: Relationship sanity : creating and maintaining healthy relationships / Mark B. Borg, Jr., Grant H. Brenner, Daniel Berry.

Description: Las Vegas : Central Recovery Press, [2018] | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018018096 (print) | LCCN 2018020441 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942094821 (ebook) | ISBN 9781942094814 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Intimacy (Psychology) | Interpersonal relations. | Interpersonal conflict.

Classification: LCC BF575.I5 (ebook) | LCC BF575.I5 B674 2018 (print) | DDC 158.2--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018018096

Photos of Mark B. Borg, Jr., Grant Hilary Brenner, and John Daniel Berry by Eric Lee

Every attempt has been made to contact copyright holders. If copyright holders have not been properly acknowledged, please contact us. Central Recovery Press will be happy to rectify the omission in future printings of this book.

Publishers Note: This book contains general information about relationships, recovery, and related matters. The information is not medical advice. This book is not an alternative to medical advice from your doctor or other professional healthcare provider.

Our books represent the experiences and opinions of their authors only. Every effort has been made to ensure that events, institutions, and statistics presented in our books as facts are accurate and up-to-date. To protect their privacy, the names of some of the people, places, and institutions in this book may have been changed.

Cover and interior design and layout by Deb Tremper, Six Penny Graphics

To Jonathan and Charlotte Rysanek, who have always lived in relationship sanity and have, therefore, shown me how to love and be loved.

Mark

For all who dare to love.

Grant

To Jack and Wilma, from whom Im still learning about love.

Danny

Table of Contents

Introduction

What Is Relationship Sanity?

Many of us believe we want an honest, open-hearted relationship, but who really knows how to go about building one? In reality, this is a challenge for anyone who tries it.

Our first book, Irrelationship: How We Use Dysfunctional Relationships to Hide from Intimacy, explored that challenge in depth. In this follow-up, we will focus on proven, practical techniques for learning how to build the antithesis of irrelationship, called relationship sanity.

Many of us know the experience of feeling alone even while in romantic relationships. This may be related to feeling that were doing all the giving while our partner is completely checked outor vice versa! What had been mutual, intense excitement somehow gave way to something else. Where did our love go? Can we get it back?

Here youre going to read about couples who found themselves in that situation but learned to use the tools in this book to find their way back to a place of resurgent lovea place where love is able to thrive regardless of a history of disappointment, fear, and trauma.

We have found in our work that there is a common but seldom articulated reality for many people: frightened as we may be of rejection and loneliness, many of us are even more frightened of what may happen if were discovered and accepted for ourselves as we really are. The interdependence this implies often becomes intolerable, driving us into an irrelationship song-and-dance routine. How this maladaptive technique works will be explained in the pages that follow, but, as mentioned, it is covered in greater depth in Irrelationship.

This book, then, is for those of us seeking relationships of greater depth, honesty, and openness to what happens when we become vulnerable to one another in ways we may have considered impractical or even undesirable.

Here are examples of the couples featured in this book whose relationships changed dramatically as they discovered the way of relationship sanity.