
Learn to Love: Guide to Healing your Disappointing Love Life by Thomas Jordan PHD is a delve into the world of the subconscious, analyzing the way in which our learned experiences affect our beliefs and feelings about love relationships. Why do 50% of marriages end in divorce? Why do so many of us struggle to find love relationships that work? Why do we often end up perpetuating the same mistakes in our love relationships, over and over again? Why does it seem that so many men marry a woman just like their mother or why do so many people who are abused, end up marrying abusers, or are abusers themselves? Dr Jordan examines what motivates us when we become involved in a love relationship. He looks at what experiences we have had of “love” from those within our life experience and concludes that our beliefs and feelings about what love is, are a learned experience. As such, these experiences can be unlearned and new, positive, expectations of love relationships can be learned and acted upon instead. The author draws on not just his thirty years of clinical experience in dealing with patients who have relationship issues but also on his own personal failure to form successful love relationships and what he learned about himself through counselling and psychotherapy.
This book is one that is long overdue in the world of love relationship forming, especially now, with the internet and online dating becoming such a large part of finding that perfect partner for us. In Learn to Love: Guide to Healing your Disappointing Love Live, author Thomas Jordan PHD takes the reader through some practical and easy to follow steps to turn your love life around. What I particularly found enlightening and useful in this book was the author didn’t just tell us the negative things we seem to seek out in a partner, from our own life experiences, such as; abandonment, abuse, control, dependency, dishonesty, etc, but he also explained the opposite feelings that we needed to relearn or learn to replace the beliefs we were rejecting. These feelings included; attachment, respect, freedom, independence, honesty etc. The text was easy to read and understand from a lay perspective, with little psycho jargon and I think the author did a tremendous job of clearly laying it out. If I had a couple of takes from this book that will serve me wonderfully in life it would be; 1/ there is no point in looking for the “perfect” partner – that person simply doesn’t exist and 2/ you can NEVER change someone else – the only person you can ever change is yourself. Those two thoughts alone should improve your outlook on dating and love relationships. This truly is a self-help book we could all use. I can highly recommend this book to all readers.
