Taking Space: How To Use Separation To Explore The Future Of Your Relationship

by Robert J. Buchicchio

With the high rate of divorce and breakups, marriage and family experts point to the fact that people don’t learn from the mistakes of a failed relationship and assume the next relationship will be better and make little effort to “fix” or understand what didn’t work. There are plenty of self-help books for committed couples on how to enrich a marriage and scores of guidebooks on how to manage through a divorce, but very few focus on partners with differing degrees of commitment where the separation process itself is viewed as an opportunity for self growth. Taking How to Use Separations to Explore the Future of YourRelationship, provides struggling couples and individuals with a step-by-step process for managing separations. This model allows people to view and use separations as a proactive way to get space, reduce conflict and focus on self-growth.This method can even work with a non-cooperating partner. This problem-solving “road map” teaches partners how to design a separation plan that addresses their specific issues by pinpointing 10 essential tasks necessary to maneuver through an often highly stressful experience. The steps are applied through “real life” couple situations. Skills, techniques, and coping strategies to empower individuals to overcome feelings of helplessness and victim thinking, help create choices where none have been seen previously.

Genres: Nonfiction, Relationships

340 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 2006

Reviews

[Tricia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trigger Warning: the author uses the words “stroke” and “child” in the same sentence many times. The concept is a metaphor the different parts of ourselves and how they work together or against each other. I wish different verbiage was used.

The book talks about how to set goals for a separation and different types of separations.

There are a lot of examples of long-term relationships where people got to the point of wanting to separate - how they got there, what they did. There are discussion questions in every chapter.

I didn’t get much from the stories. Learning about the different types of separations was the most helpful part. The questions were somewhat helpful.