Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples: Third Edition

Outside your awareness, her absence triggered feelings you had decades ago when you were being raised by working parents.

When you and your partner are operating out of your new brain, you can help manage and quell some of the emotional responses coming from your old brain.

we think we are alike in significant ways, and when that does not check out, we object to our partners, or the world, being different from how we see it.

Instead, you will begin to see that you are partners suffering from past hurts and also partners in the project of helping each other create safety in your relationship and respond to each other’s needs. This way, you both can experience the sensations of feeling fully alive and joyful connecting. You are allies on this journey, not competitors. Yo

When we fall in love, this unconscious, trapped in the eternal now and having only a dim awareness of the outside world, is trying to re-create the environment of childhood.

Safety is nonnegotiable, and it is created by structure. Safety makes it possible for couples to be vulnerable with each other, drop their guards, open up, and become what we call present to each other.

Outside of their awareness, however, each one is being compelled by an unwritten agenda that was formed early in life: to recover the sensations of being fully alive and joyfully connecting with which we came into the world.

compelling need to heal old childhood wounds.

site of most of your cognitive functions. We will refer to the cerebral cortex as the new brain