Intimacy and Solitude
How to give love and receive it
Published on 27. August 2014
368 pages
978-1-74343-815-2 (ISBN)
Description
Why do we behave as we do - if it doesn't get us what we want? Can we balance our needs for closeness and for independence? Can we understand our emotional history - and go beyond it? How do we negotiate our needs with those of other people? Can we become the lover, partner or friend we long to be?Gay, straight, old, young; we want our relationships 'to work'. Through a variety of moving, personal stories, a rare breadth of well-founded ideas and her own inspiring belief in the rewards of love, Stephanie Dowrick shows how possible it is to experience the pleasures of self-acceptance - and the last joy of satisfying connections with others.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
NSW
Australia
File size
0,59 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-74343-815-2 (9781743438152)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
08/2014
Allen & Unwin
€22.00
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Content
- Cover
- About the author
- Also by the author
- Title page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- Part One - Self: Is that who I am?
- 1
- Meeting your own self
- Beyond masks and personality
- An inner reality
- A gentle discovery of self
- Is self-confidence the answer?
- Relating intimately
- Inner and outer conflict
- Remembering who you are
- 2
- An inner sense of safety
- How trust develops
- A disappearing self
- Replaying the past
- 3
- The beginnings of self
- Having someone in their absence
- Learning as you go
- Symbiosis: fact or illusion?
- Loss of self or no self at all
- What narcissism is
- Celebrating the Golden Age
- Know what others are feeling
- 4
- Reclaim your power
- The power of self-encouragement
- Leaving your self behind
- Part Two - Women and men
- 5
- A girl or boy?
- 6
- Why gender still matters
- Expressing your gender
- Childrearing questions
- Empathy restricts destructive feelings
- Conditions for change
- 7
- The first eighteen months
- Connecting with Father
- Learning what gender means
- Mothers and daughters
- Who is this girl?
- Mothers and sons
- Fathers and sons
- 8
- Patterns of childhood in Man
- Women as caretakers
- Clinging mothers, disappointing sons
- Changing tactics
- Make your complaints less personal
- Woman as 'safe place'
- Women and men: a new alliance?
- Women envying men
- Meeting each other's needs
- 9
- Reviewing the myth of Mother
- Coming out human
- Living alongside one another
- Part Three - Solitude: Knowing your self
- 10
- What solitude is
- Seeking distraction
- 11
- Solitude or loneliness?
- Not taking mother in
- At ease with yourself
- Needing solitude
- An absence of intimacy
- Tangling thought with feeling
- Fear of death
- Fear of loneliness
- Caring for yourself
- 12
- Locked into yourself
- Your inner conflicts
- Alone - and safe
- Choosing solitude
- 13
- Knowing less, learning more
- Part Four - Intimacy: Knowing the other
- 14
- Knowing the other
- From toad to prince
- 15
- Connecting with your own aliveness
- Alive in your body
- Good at intimacy
- What intimacy might be
- 16
- Listening is essential to intimacy
- 17
- Other people experiencing you
- 'Otherness' supports intimacy
- Achieving intimacy
- 18
- Discovering the other
- My version - the true version
- Sucking someone in
- 19
- When intimacy has a chance
- No intimacy without isolation
- One self accomodating to the other
- Boundaries are good for intimacy
- 20
- Unconscious limitations on intimacy
- Understand your motives
- The past in the present
- Overloading intimate relationships
- Part Five - Desire: The language of your inner space
- 21
- Wanting intimacy, wanting solitude
- Falling in love - again
- Less sex, more desire
- Sexual contact: the ultimate revelation?
- 22
- Desiring who and what?
- What supports desire
- Self-understanding
- The acceptable face of desire
- Wanting you all to myself
- Acting with restraint
- A positive use of conflict
- 23
- Beyond wanting
- 24
- Knowing what you need
- Competing desires
- Negotiating desire
- Rage, envy, destruction
- Mourning what you cannot have
- 25
- Bringing intimacy to solitude
- Straight? Gay? Should it matter?
- Feeling understood
- Closeness and spaciousness
- 26
- Living in love
- Open to love
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Also by the author
