The title of this book: Romantic Relationships The Greatest Arena for Spiritual & Emotional Growth - is a Truth that it is vital to recognize if you ever want to have a functional romantic relationship. We were set up to fail in romantic relationships by the dysfunctional perspectives and expectations of love and romance we learned growing up, according to the author Robert Burney. Robert is a Spiritual Teacher and pioneer in the area of codependency recovery / inner child healing whose first book Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls has been called "one of the truly transformational works of our time." His second book Codependency Recovery: Wounded Souls Dancing in The Light - Empowerment, Freedom, and Inner Peace through Inner Child Healing was published in the summer of 2011.
Here is what he has to say about his third book that is being published in the September of 2012.
Our perspective of love and romance dictates our relationship with love and romance - and that has been the problem, that has been why we have had a lousy relationship with love and romance. There is no happily-ever-after that we can reach when we find our prince or princess. As an adult you obviously know that intellectually - but emotionally you are still looking for it because it is what we were taught as children, it is part of the foundation programming that determines how we relate to life. On some level you are probably judging your self because you haven't reached happily-ever-after.
As I state on my website in the section on Romantic Relationships, "The thing that is so important about the issue of Romantic Relationships is to realize how we were set up to "fail" in romance - to really get it on a gut level, so that we can forgive ourselves." It is very important to start realizing how we were set up, so that we can change our attitudes, definitions, and expectations of romantic relationships into ones that are more functional - into ones that can help us start to learning how to approach love and romance in healthier ways.
Once we start letting go of feeling responsible for something we were powerless over, letting go of the false guilt and toxic shame about our "mistakes" and "failures" in romance - then we can start to learn how to take healthy risks and make better choices. It is better to love and lose then never love - but we need to change what we are expecting from love and romance in order to even have a chance of being able to start learning how to have an interdependent relationship that can work for us.
You can learn to be more loving to your self and open to the possibility of having a loving interdependent relationship with another person. Loving is the greatest adventure available to us - give your self a chance to experience how wonderful it can be by being willing to do the work to change your programming and heal your emotional wounds. It is very much worth it to learn to love - and reading this book could be a huge step in helping you to become available to have a healthier romantic relationship.
This book is a primarily a compilation of writings from my website that I have edited, rewritten and expanded upon to fit together in this work - that expansion ended up involving writing another 30,000 or so new words to add to those web articles.
About the Author: Robert Burney is an author, counselor, and a pioneer in the field of inner child healing / codependency recovery. His book Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls has been called "one of the truly transformational works of our time" - and he has been referred to as "a metaphysical Stephen Hawking." A therapist and Spiritual Teacher whose work has been compared to John Bradshaw's "except much more spiritual" and described as "taking inner child healing to a new level," Robert has developed a holistic strategy for emotional healing that is the next level of recovery / healing / consciousness raising / enlightenment that so many people have been seeking. He has pioneered an inner child healing paradigm that offers a powerful, life changing formula for integrating Love, Spiritual Truth, and intellectual knowledge of healthy behavior into one's emotional experience of life - a blueprint for individuals to transform their core relationship with self and life.
Robert, whose work is firmly grounded on twelve step spiritual principles and emotional energy release / grief process therapy, learned in his own personal recovery that developing internal boundaries was the key to empowerment and freedom from the past. His unique approach and application of the concept of internal boundaries, coupled with a Loving spiritual belief system, make the work innovative and powerfully life changing. It does not matter how much Spiritual Truth, how many mystical experiences of oneness, how in tune with Love, you can feel in certain moments - if you cannot integrate it into your life in a way which changes your emotional experience of life on a moment to moment, day to day basis. You can go to therapy - or be in recovery - for many years, read all the Spiritual and self help books, go to workshops and seminars and lectures, compile encyclopedic intellectual knowledge of what healthy behavior is - and still be reacting to old wounds in the relationships that mean the most to you. In order to start to Truly be more Loving to self, and more open to giving and receiving love from others, it is necessary to change how you relate to your own internal process. If you want to learn how to relax and enjoy life in the moment, while you are healing and learning to Love your self, you want to read his books.