Lauren Reitsema - Relationship Essentials: Skills to Feel Heard, Fight Fair, and Set Boundaries in All Areas of Life

Relationship Essentials is the essential guide to crucial relationship skills that are needed in every important relationship. You will apply what you learn here to your relationships with family, friends, and coworkers. Practical and user-friendly, this book will significantly raise your relationship IQ.

Ron L. Deal, therapist, speaker, and bestselling coauthor of Building Love Together in Blended Families (with Dr. Gary Chapman) and author of The Smart Stepfamily

When couples come for counseling, they are frequently explicit with their request: I need tools to build a stronger relationship. Relationship Essentials responds to this request in a comprehensive way by providing ways to respectfully draw effective boundaries and other skills that are essential to the creation of meaningful relationships. Consider this book a practice manual for taking any or all of your relationships to a higher level.

Linda Bloom, LCSW, coauthor of 101 Things I Wish I Knew When I Got Married

If there was ever a time when people were dying to feel known, seen, and heard, it is now. Relationship Essentials provides the tools that can lead people to healthy, rich relationships. Thank you, Lauren and Joneen, for this gift!

Julie Baumgardner, senior director of WinShape Marriage

Relationships form the foundation of a meaningful, fulfilling life. Relationship Essentials is an extremely helpful guide to enhancing relationships and dramatically improving communication. It offers practical and effective methods to heal, deepen, and enrich relationships so that you can attain your highest quality of life.

Dan Willis, police captain (ret.) and author of Bulletproof Spirit: The First Responders Essential Resource for Protecting and Healing Mind and Heart

Relationship Essentials is a wise and practical guide to living and working with others. Its a fun, easy read yet amazingly comprehensive with tips and tools that range from difficult topics like conflict and boundaries to everyday habits like gratitude and respect.

Susan Campbell, PhD, author of Getting Real and From Triggered to Tranquil

Strong, healthy, positive relationships are an important foundation of human flourishing. But cultivating such relationships takes wisdom and skill. Relationship Essentials offers practical guidance, delivered in an engaging and down-to-earth style, for developing the satisfying relationships necessary for a vibrant, generative life. Highly recommended!

Matthew T. Lee, director of empirical research at the Harvard Human Flourishing Program

Copyright 2021 by Lauren Reitsema and Joneen Mackenzie

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. 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, November 2021

ISBN 978-1-60868-761-9

Ebook ISBN 978-1-60868-762-6

Printed in Canada on 100% postconsumer-waste recycled paper

10987654321

For everyone who knows what it feels like to be isolated, alone, and longing to be known. Relationships can be challenging, but they are worth working for. May the tools in this book make building strong connections a little easier.

For our community of family and friends who have nurtured authentic relationships with us. Thank you for creating space to experience true belonging. We love you!

We are the granddaughter and daughter-in-law of an architect. He always said that with the proper tools, he could build anything. When it comes to homebuilding, crews follow a detailed blueprint and use a toolbox packed with supplies to make the architects vision a reality. For building human relationships, most of us start without any blueprint or toolbox. Strong relationships are the foundation of life success, yet people are left to their own devices to build them. In navigating relationships we are often told to follow your heart, but without a map and guideposts, this advice can often lead us astray. What if we approached a road trip with this same serendipitous plan just get behind the wheel and drive? Would we reach our destination?

Lauren: My first solo cross-country road trip took me from Denver to Dallas in a 97 Nissan Sentra. As I took the wheel, I pictured commercials of smiling people in aviator sunglasses with their windows rolled down, wind-blown hair, and rock ballads blasting from the speakers. These commercials often show a car presumably one with much more appeal than my Sentra on a winding road into the great unknown. I could not wait for this experience.

This drive took place before the days of GPS navigation and Siri, so my AAA road map sat beneath the steering wheel with my route highlighted in yellow. Heading out, I breezed through the first three songs burned onto my mix CD: You Can Go Your Own Way, by Fleetwood Mac. Next, a Deadhead favorite, Truckin, and the Cochrane chorus of Life Is a Highway. Then I glanced at my digital dashboard clock and noticed that twenty-two minutes had passed, and I was almost a third of the way through my soundtrack. Texas was still more than eleven hours away, yet I was already feeling the need for a stop. By the end of the trip, I realized that I am not someone who likes the journey. I much prefer the destination.

Have you ever considered what those car commercials do not show you? What about the research required to chart your course, or the financial planning needed to budget for gas and pay for hotels? Do the images on TV show the luggage you struggled to cram into your trunk or the police cars in the medians waiting to catch speeding drivers? Do they prepare us for flat tires, blizzards, or crawling through construction zones? For a successful road trip you need a plan, a road map, a reliable car, snacks, gas, and good company.

Healthy relationships, too, require a road map, but this information alone is not enough to change behavior: we need guided practice. With limitless information available on the internet, it might seem that we can teach ourselves everything we need to know. Information without application, however, falls short. Think about a surgeon. If someone made it through medical school, memorizing all the information from a textbook, but never put their knowledge into practice, they would never gain the skills necessary to perform life-saving surgery. If professional athletes watched videos of every previous championship team and spent hours studying playbooks without trying those plays on the field, they would never develop the skills and teamwork needed to win.