Linda Carroll - Love Skills: The Keys to Unlocking Lasting, Wholehearted Love

Contents

Praise for Love Skills

Psychologist, couples therapist, and well-known author Linda Carroll combines her deep insight into relationships with an informative and interactive approach. The hands-on and heartfelt questionnaires allow helpful realizations to float to the surface of the readers consciousness. In sharing the answers with a partner, couples will reach deeper understanding, healing, and compassion for each other.

Ann Gadd, author of Sex and the Enneagram and The Enneagram of Eating

As a millennial, Ive observed that everyone tells us to love, but they never tell us how. Love Skills is a candid, readable, and concrete dive into not just how to find love but how to stay in it once youve arrived.

Zak Dychtwald, author of Young China: How the Restless Generation Will Change Their Country and the World

Linda Carroll brings to her book the same warm, wise, and kind presence that she does in person. A truly gifted therapist, she gives us exercises and insights that penetrate self-destructive defenses and allow us to be our better selves and ultimately more loving (and loved) partners. These are love skills to be learned and there is no one better qualified to teach them than Linda Carroll.

Pepper Schwartz, PhD, professor of sociology at the University of Washington and coauthor of Snap Strategies for Couples: 40 Fast Fixes for Everyday Relationship Pitfalls

In a landscape of rare humility and honesty, Linda Carroll weaves together lived experience and clinical wisdom into an exceptional and valuable guidebook on the intricacies of love that is both enlightening and beautifully written.

Peter Yarrow, Peter, Paul and Mary

In Love Skills Linda Carroll provides the map, compass, and survival kit for anyone journeying through the labyrinth of romantic love. Drawing from a range of therapeutic frameworks and tools, decades of clinical experience, and poignant field research from her own thirty-five-year marriage, Linda has distilled the wisdom of lifetimes into a comprehensive modern-day workbook full of growth-inducing to-do lists, insight-awakening questionnaires and quizzes, thought-provoking exercises, and other indispensable self-help tools for couples looking for clarity in their relationships. Love Skills is one of those rare, powerful books that, when used creatively and consistently, can genuinely help couples overcome common obstacles to loving and sustain a lasting bond.

Alicia Muoz, author of No More Fighting and A Year of Us: A Couples Journal

While Love Skills is a workbook companion to her acclaimed Love Cycles and is best used as a study guide to that book, it can also be a stand-alone guide to love. In addition to charts that evoke self-awareness and exercises that develop relational skills, Linda Carroll has included enough theory to illuminate the practice. We recommend this guide and the original text to all couples who want a clear path through the forest of challenges to the sunshine of a thriving relationship.

Harville Hendrix, PhD, and Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD, coauthors of Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples and Making Marriage Simple

A breakthrough among the confusing plethora of relationship books, this book is truly important realistic, deeply personal, and packed not just with the wisdom of a seasoned therapist, but with real, practical tools.

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky, CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, LLC, and author of The Blindspots Between Us

Also by Linda Carroll

Love Cycles: The Five Essential Stages of Lasting Love

Copyright 2020 by Linda Carroll

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, or other without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

The material in this book is intended for education. It is not meant to take the place of diagnosis and treatment by a qualified medical practitioner or therapist. No expressed or implied guarantee of the effects of the use of the recommendations can be given or liability taken.

Text design by Tona Pearce Myers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available.

First printing, February 2020

ISBN 978-1-60868-623-0

Ebook ISBN 978-1-60868-624-7

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

10987654321

For
My Family, who teach me about Wholehearted Love each day,
and for
Karen Lynn Randall, who has been there for all of it

Because I prayed
this word:
I want.

SAPPHO

Contents

People always fall in love with the most perfect aspects of each others personalities. Who wouldnt? Anybody can love the most wonderful parts of another person. But thats not the clever trick. The really clever trick is this: Can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partners faults honestly and say, I can work around that. I can make something out of that? Because the good stuff is always going to be there, and its always going to be pretty and sparkly, but the crap underneath can ruin you.

ELIZABETH GILBERT, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

A n age-old idea maintains that love at first sight or finding the one is the key to a long and successful partnership. Im sure some people have had that experience, managing to turn their first head-over-heels infatuation into a long-term successful relationship. But just as often, it leads to disaster. I speak from experience.

I was eleven when I met him: a boy with gray-green eyes and a smile so endearing I felt my breath leave my lungs. It was the pounding of my heart that helped me remember I was still alive. He had a special affectionate name for me, and to this day I have never said it out loud.

You might be thinking, Isnt this supposed to be a serious book about relationships? Those last lines could have come from a cheesy romance novel. You wouldnt be wrong!

But I did experience that level of intensity at age eleven. He stayed locked in my psyche for twenty-nine years, and even writing about him sixty years later, I feel a tiny pang of longing. It could be the rush of chemicals that still run through my brain at the memory of him, or perhaps I yearn for those moments when I thought the euphoria I felt in his presence meant I could stay in that state forever.

Back in those days, I listened to love songs about finding The One and watched Hollywood movies that always ended with lovers walking off into the sunset. Thats how the story ended: two people finding their other half and finally becoming whole.