Melanie Joy - Getting Relationships Right: How to Build Resilience and Thrive in Life, Love, and Work

Getting Relationships Right offers a wise, practical, and wellresearched template for creating healthy relationships of any kind. While reading it, I kept thinking, This is like an encyclopedia of relationship wisdom. I recommend this book to all those wishing to expand their social-emotional intelligence!

Susan Campbell, PhD, author of Getting Real, Truth in Dating, and Five-Minute Relationship Repair

Read this book if you want to have healthy, mature relationships. Dr. Joy provides the tools, insight, and research to get the job done.

Dr. Jenn Mann, author of The Relationship Fix and host of VH1s Couples Therapy with Dr. Jenn

This brilliant treasure of a book is a guide on how to communicate effectively, to love well and deeply, to lead with success, and to evolve as a human being. This guide is not just for couples: Dr. Melanie Joy expertly and elegantly explains everything youll ever need to know about how to successfully navigate any kind of relationship.

Kathy Freston, New York Times bestselling author of Quantum Wellness, The Lean, and The One

The research is in. Nothing is more important than getting relationships right because healthy relationships are a necessity, not a luxury, for happiness, health, and longevity. In her book, Dr. Joy shows you just how to do that in a clear and comprehensive way and the outcomes you can expect from her process. I recommend this book to couples for their edification and to therapists to help couples become informed of their relationship potential.

Harville Hendrix, PhD, and Helen LaKelly Hunt, PhD, coauthors of Getting the Love You Want and Making Marriage Simple

Getting
Relationships
Right

Copyright 2020 by Melanie Joy
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

Ordering information for print editions

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First Edition

Paperback print edition ISBN 978-1-5230-8850-8

PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-8851-5

IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-5230-8852-2

Digital audio ISBN 978-1-5230-8853-9

2019-1

Production manager: Susan Geraghty; Interior design: Paula Goldstein; Cover design: Adam Johnson; Composition: Westchester Publishing Services; Copyeditor: Michele D. Jones; Proofreader: Cathy Mallon; Indexer: Carolyn Thibault; Author photo: Matthias Schillig

For those of you who are working toward relational growth and who are therefore helping create a more relational world.

And for my beloved husband, Sebastian Joy, whose relational magic has been my personal elixir.

Building Resilient Relationships

If you think back over some of the greatest joys and gravest sorrows of your life, chances are many of them have to do with your relationships: the deep fulfillment and gratitude of finding your life partner, the lifesaving comfort of your best friends support during a crisis, the heartbreaking feud that ruptured your family.

Our relationships have a profound impact on our lives, for better or worse. From the moment were born, our relationships are setting the stage for how our lives will unfold, and they continue to powerfully influence virtually all aspects of our experience. Research shows that people who have healthy, fulfilling relationshipswith romantic partners, friends, colleagues, family members, and so onfare better in pretty much all areas of life. They live longer, theyre at reduced risk for a variety of physical diseases and psychological problems, theyre happier, and theyre more likely to be successful in what they set out to do. Furthermore, many of the most serious problems in the world today, such as war and corrupt political regimes, are caused largely by problematic ways of relating.

Yet despite the vital role relationships play in our lives and world, most of us have never been taught even the most basic principles and skills for effectively managing them. So we end up hurting, and hurting othersoften those we care for the most in spite of our best intentions.

One of the most important things any of us can do, for our own well-being and for the well-being of those whose lives cross our path, is to improve our ability to relate. In so doing, we can significantly improve our quality of life. On top of this, we can grow toward our better selves, as we also help create a better world.

Healthy relationships are like healthy bodies: they thrive when their immune system is stronger than the germs they are exposed to. Creating a healthy relationship therefore requires keeping the relationships immune system strongwhich includes knowing how to identify and treat the germs, or external stressors, that challenge it.

A strong relational immune system is resilient. Resilience is the ability to withstand and bounce back from stress. In relationships, resilience is made up of two main features: security and connection. The more secure and connected a relationship is, the stronger or the more resilientit is. When a relationship is resilient, its better able to resist the relational germs its exposed to, just as a resilient body is less likely to get sick when its exposed to a physical germ. If were exposed to a germ, physical or relational, thats strong enough, our immune system can become depleted trying to fight it. We can end up weakened or sick, and we (or our relationship) may even die.

There are countless germs that can threaten the security and connection of a relationship, such as financial problems, addictions, psychological disorders, and the loss of a job. Once we know how to recognize and respond to such germs, we are less at risk of our relationships being weakened by them. One type of relational germ is especially insidious, largely because its invisible to even many relationship experts and so can remain undetected and unaddressed for a lifetime. This type of germ is psychosocial, meaning that it affects our psychology and it stems from widespread social systems (which most of us are unaware of). This germ causes us to think, feel, and act in ways that disconnect us from each other and also from ourselves and the world, without our realizing what were doing. Because of the negative impact this germ can have on even the most resilient of relationships, a chapter of this book is dedicated to discussing it.