Nancy Dreyfus Psy. D. - Talk to Me Like Im Someone You Love, revised edition

Talk to Me Like
Im Someone
You Love

NANCY DREYFUS, PSY.D.

Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.New York

Talk to Me Like
Im Someone
You Love

Relationship Repair in a Flash

J EREMY P. T ARCHER /P ENGUIN
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright 1993, 2009, 2013, by Nancy Dreyfus
A small portion of the book appeared in an edition with the same title published by Celestial Arts in 1993.
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Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dreyfus, Nancy.
Talk to me like Im someone you love : relationship repair in a flash / Nancy Dreyfus.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-101-65784-3
1. CouplesPsychology. 2. Married peoplePsychology. 3. Couples therapy. 4. Marriage counseling.
5. Man-woman relationships. I. Title.
HQ801.D762 2009 2009042763
646.78dc22

BOOK DESIGN BY AMANDA DEWEY

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

To my daughter, Carly Raphael,
a constant reminder that no words
can match the love underneath.

I ve been told by everyone I know in the publishing worldand anyone who knows what publishing is like these daysthat being given the opportunity to expand and update ones book is, without a doubt, an increasingly rare and fortunate honor. To put it mildly, I feel incredibly honored, deeply gratefuland occasionally just plain giddy.

Yet as someone whose life has revolved around personal growth, this development, while dramatic in itself, feels more like the natural next step in a project that has been re-creating itself for more than two decades. A relationship rupture may indeed be repaired in a flash, but the journey to Selfhood is a lifelong trek. My hope is that the ideas in this bookwhich largely have to do with choosing transparency when things get tensewill, however slowly, continue to be absorbed into mainstream culture until the day that there is peace on earth. In the meantime, this new version reflects a few new flashes I have had regarding the maintenance of even friendlier relationships.

To appreciate where we are now, first a quick recap of Talk to Me Like Im Someone You Loves trajectory: The entire incident is detailed in the introduction, but I created the first Flash Card for Real Life in 1991 when I was rendered virtually mute in a difficult couples session with a verbally abusive wife who happened to remind me of my mother. I handed to her worn-down husband a scrap piece of paper upon which I had written, Talk to me like Im someone you love and whispered to my father look-alike, Hold it up to her. The woman became flustered, then genuinely nice, and responded to her husband kindly. The rest is history.

Over the next two weeks, I compiled about forty handwritten messages with Magic Marker on lined notecards, bound them with a loose-leaf ring and asked a few clients to go experiment with their spouses (a word more common then than partners). In 1992 I had Kinkos print up a basic, no-frills set, shrink-wrapped with a loose-leaf ring taped to the bottom. My practice at the time was mostly women, and they would come back the week after being given a set and report, My husband finally heard me! (It seemed one of the most helpful cards in the deck, hands-down, was I dont feel heard.)

I had no entrepreneurial vision, and never thought these cards would leave my office, until I was at a large family gathering where I playfully stopped two quibbling relatives with a flash card. This feat was observed by my brother-in-law at the time, Michael E. Gerber, small-business wizard and author of the best-selling E-Myth business books, who shouted out, Its a book! and encouraged me to go public. This was a totally foreign idea, so on a lark I started selling the shrink-wrapped version at a therapy seminar, where the idea was picked up by consciousness writer Meredith Gould for a blurb in what was then New Age Journal. More than three thousand requests to buy copies in less than a month led quickly to the first formal publication of fifty-five flash cards with a simple introduction, Talk to Me, in a mini-book by Celestial Arts/Ten Speed Press in 1993, and then a reprint in 1995.

By 2000, that version was out of print, and I was going through enough of my own marital challenges, enough so that until I got my own bearings, I recused myself from offering the world one more piece of relationship advice. Then in 2006, I curiously began to get a slew of requests for copies of Talk to Me and discovered that my Flash Cards for Real Life had been registered in the Global Ideas Bank and were featured in their compendium, 500 Ways to Change the World (HarperCollins, 2006).

Through a series of synchronistic events, which would be hard to believe occurred in the same week I had heard about my formal recognition, two people I had done favors for years before (for which I expected no repayment) reappeared independently in my lifeone now a search-engine expert and the other an intellectual property lawyer. The latter wanted to help me get my publishing rights back in my own hands, and the former wanted to educate me on the power of the Internet to get my ideas circulated. After more than a dozen other agents personally communicated to me that they loved my thinking but didnt want to involve themselves with a previously published book, Joelle Delbourgo had the foresight to see, instead, that this was a retread whose time had come.