Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship (Goop Press)

Fierce intimacy is the essential capacity to confront issues, to take each other on.

We position ourselves as apart and above in many relationships. We attempt to control our partners, our kids, our bodies, and even the way we think (“I will not be so negative”). Take a step back, and you’ll see that running your relationships from a place of power and control is lunacy. Even with that awareness, the minute the emotional temperatur

We will never experience collective healing until we undo the dissociation and compartmentalization that is required of us to do collective harm.

One of my great mentors, Pia Mellody, spoke of the Adaptive Child as a “kid in grown-up’s clothing.” The Adaptive Child is a child’s version of an adult,

When we find ourselves facing a partner who is core-negative-image-triggered, we usually fight them.

Functional actions in a relationship are moves that empower your partner to come through for you. Dysfunctional actions are those that render your partner paralyzed.

And that essential mistake that mankind has enshrined is the fiction of an independent self—a self over all, over nature, over groups that we marginalize, over the partners and children we crazily try to control, over the neighbors with whom we compete, over the planet we disrespect. That is our potentially fatal error. We will awaken, or we will h

First, repair is not a two-way street. Almost everyone gets this wrong. When you are faced with an upset partner, this is not your turn. This is not a dialogue. Liz doesn’t air all her grievances as an invitation for Phil to then air his. You must take turns. Repair goes in one direction. When your partner is in a state of disrepair, your only job

But as anyone who has worked with issues of so-called codependency knows, accommodation, while overtly self-denying, is in fact, also a form of control—trying to “not set him off.” I define codependent behavior as occurring when you back away from perfectly reasonable behavior—like telling the truth—for fear of your partner’s unreasonable response.