Optimal Relationships

The author describes what creates, nurtures and sustains healthy relationships, and what undermines relationships. Based on decades of experience as a minister and psychotherapist, and using many examples from his experience with people in a wide variety of settings, the author presents a way to understand how to achieve productive and constructive relationships. Relationships are viewed from a spiritual, emotional, biological perspective for an in-depth picture of what supports, and what hinders, healthy relationships. The book explores the dynamics of relationships within a variety of conditions: the one to one relationship of marriage or a serious committed relationship, relationships in the context of family and settings that involve an institutional or group setting. The author shows how the baffling complexity of human relationships, both when they are satisfying and when they are not, fall into certain basic patterns. We can understand these patterns, and by doing so begin to achieve greater satisfaction and peace in the relationship systems we participate in.