for the curious minded, addendum to the last post

[threeplusfire]

The books she wanted me to read are Getting the Love You Want and Keeping the Love you Find by Harville Hendrix. I suddenly see where she picked up a good chunk of her preconcieved notions about my life.

For the record, I'm sure childhood experiences and our parents go a long way towards shaping what we are. But I absolutely do not believe that we are fated to seek out people like our parents, and that it is some inviolable law of relationships. That's just absurd. We are more complex than that.

Also, not all single people are single because they are immature. I flipped through these books in the store, and I'm not impressed. I dislike books like this for the most part. I would rather read an academic text ont he nature of communication than perform doofy exercises under someone's supervision for $200/hr.

Comments

Re: You don't strike me as particularly immature...

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

I don't doubt that a lot of people have unvoiced expectations of their partners and relationships that stem from the way their family lived. I was a pretty responsible little kid with an overinflated sense of importance attached to those responsibilities. I'm definitely the more responsible on in my marriage in a lot of respects.

What really turns me off of these books and my therapist is this attitude that you have no real say in the matter. Okay, it would be impossible for me to find a person who didn't possess some of the traits of my parents. That doesn't mean though that my husband is my mother, or whatever line of nonsense I was fed today.

Yargh. Therapist shopping is worse than car shopping.