Undefended Love

As I am writing a book on relationship and have a relationship myself that needs evolving, I have not only read but carefully studied the majority of the most important English speaking teachers of relationship in our time. Among the very impressive giants of the field, I found Marlena Lyons and Jett Psaris to be the most helpful. They are extremely thorough and clear in telling you why you need to take responsibility for your reactions to your partner whether or not their behavior is a problem in itself (not just that you do) and how to do it at the deepest core level possible. They go beyond telling you what it means to treat your partner in a conscious way and the importance of knowing yourself and validating yourself, rather than seeking to get that from your partner, to telling you what you need to do and how to do it to actually achieve that holy grail. The book explains a concept, gives you guided self inquiry questions that enable you to identify where you are in relationship to the concept, and then gives exercises that enable you to do the work of understanding and healing yourself. As the process unfolds through the course of the book, you learn the skills to heal yourself and your relationship, one layer after another. The interplay of the writers beautiful languaging skills and the depth of their perceptions means that this book is peppered with memorable, quotable quotes on most pages. My book is underlined all over the place. It is deep book without being a difficult read. I couldn't put it down. I was mesmerized and read it over a couple of days. In the middle of the book I looked up the authors web-site and signed up for their next workshop. That's how powerful it was for me. Undefended Love is a very helpful book for both therapists working with relationships and for people seeking to save and heal their relationships. It is also an immensely helpful book for people seeking either to use their relationships to heal themselves and or take their relationship from an emotionally healthy place to a really exciting transformative place. For those who wish to take that journey of spiritual partnership into conscious living, conscious relating, this is an amazing guidebook. It is also an excellent book for anyone who is not in a relationship who wants to heal their deep childhood wounds and free themselves of their conditioning. Esther Perlis, in her book Mating in Captivity, speaks of the need to bring mystery,the unknown and uncertainty into relationships in order to keep the passion alive. Undefended Love tells the most fundamental way to do this. I am now telling people that if they can only read one book on relationship to read Undefended Love. Anastas Harris, Ph.D.

This is one of the most profound, deep, and powerful books I have ever read. There aren't many books out there like this. Many of the self-help books seem to only scratch the surface. This book requires much more if its readers. And it is RADICAL!! REVOLUTIONARY!! This book has totally changed my perspective about the goal and purpose of relationships. All my life, I sought people who could meet my core needs. Finding someone who could love me unconditionally and who could give me what I needed: I thought that was the ultimate goal and point of a relationship. The authors suggest otherwise. Closeness, reciprocity, and getting needs met are not the purpose of relationship. The point of relationships is to mirror back our cracked identities so that we can heal and reconnect with our essence, our own core. This seems counterintuitive: that relationships are suppose to agitate us, to reveal our "broken toes." But if I really take in what they're saying and do this work of excavation, what I'm realizing is that I have the capacity to meet my own needs, to give myself what I've been searching for in others. There is a whole lot of unlearning and relearning. And I'm still trying to wrap my head around this new definition of relationship because it is antithetical to everything that our society teaches us about the purpose and goal of relationships. Another reason why this book is revolutionary is because doing this work DEMANDS an excavation of pain and fear. According to the authors, pain and fear (or any "negative" reaction, for that matter) become the doorway to freedom, wholeness, and affirmation. Again, it all seems counterintuitive because we've been taught to run away from "negative" feelings. But the authors argue otherwise, claiming that we must embrace those feelings--that in that pain, in that fear, resides our liberation, which is why this work is so radical. And which is why this work is so hard and scary. But I'm ready to jump into the Black Hole with both feet because I know doing so is the path to my own liberation.

Undefended Love is a rare and wonderful book. It speaks with timeless wisdom about the nature of our true self, and of how we relate to ourselves, our lives and our loved ones. This book can free you and enhance you - providing a deeper and compassionate understanding of the reactive and compensating patterns we all develop to protect ourselves. It is these very patterns that so often cause us to contract in our lives and in our relationships, and that cost us the full experience of feeling open, safe, and connected to life and others. With a wonderfully balanced mix of concepts, examples and solutions, the authors take us on a journey into our deepest selves - into both our timeless essence and into our deepest and most fiercely protected fears. They then lovingly illuminate the path beyond those fears into greater wholeness, peace and open-heartedness. This is a book about true strength - the strength to face and fully experience those parts of ourselves which we so often deny and turn away from, the strength to be open and experience ourselves and others absent our usual constricting defenses. It is so often the same walls we think protect us that deny us the full experience of the wonder of our own life and of connecting with others. This book is one of the most elegant maps of the territory beyond such defenses that I have ever encountered - a place of texture, nuance and richness that most people believe is reserved for just a few special moments in their lives. I have read many books on psychology, conditioning, communication, relationship and the like. Very few have touched me as deeply as this one. Do yourself a true favor and read this book. It will enrich your life.

What if the world isn’t flat. What if we could expand our perspective beyond the simplest explanation for our world and expand our understanding to the point we can imagine our world as a big ball like structure that spins around at a thousand miles and hour while spinning around a much bigger ball that burns hot enough to heat our planet. What if there is a force so subtle that we do’t even notice it but it is strong enough to hold us on this spinning ball and make us feel like we are still. If the world is flat we notice there are unexplained things that happen to us. Imagine instead of the world, there were things about ourselves that were equally complicated and interesting with far reaching implications for our every day lives. What if our happiness seems to be dependent on how other people treat us. That we need others to make us feel whole and good and of value. What if this outside stimulation is only a small part of who we are but we think of ourselves as flat and of only of this one dimension. Imagine that our outside world stimulates deep places inside of us. Imagine that we think the love we feel when we are with someone close comes from them and that we need them to feel deeply connected. Once you feel that way it is pretty lonely with out it. Just for a second imagine that it was the situation that allowed us to touch a place inside that holds this deep love and our friend gave us the mysterious combination of insights and permissions to open ourselves to this deep pool of love and harmony that is who we actually are. What if our very lives, growing up separated us from this internal round spinning ball and that if we face the ways we have misunderstood what and who we are, we can access these deep expressions of our selves, brining this love and compassion into our every day lives to share with the ones we care about rather than holding them responsible for making us feel that way. Its hard work. It is full of ironies that are confounding. There are so many times the biggest feeling is one of it being impossible to survive. But like any good adventure, it is completely doable. It is the most fascinating extreme sport because it is of our mind and our lives and what we recover are the parts of ourselves we left behind because they were unwelcome fitting into a world we happened to arrive in. Undefended Love is terrifying in it’s ability to penetrate every defense while creating the idea of a holding environment that allowed me to stay with my feelings, be completely over whelmed and then release the energy from my past giving me back parts of myself I looked to others to satisfy. It takes courage to work with this material full strength but the outcome is really worthy of the effort. I went through a difficult divorce and found that this book is clever enough to allow me to work directly on myself even if I didn't have access to my old partner. Over the course of a year I read this book three times and had the good fortune to work for a time with one of the authors as my therapist and also did a work shop. I am still stunned by the depth of my good fortune. Someone once told me the truth just exists, only lies have to be argued for. Weather reading this book as a curiosity or like me needing to be thrown a life jacket to keep my head above my confusion and longing, there are so many insights embedded in this text that took my breath away. A wise person once told me not to worried about doing work that is to challenging, they believed I would only face past trauma that I was ready for so I could allow myself the freedom to immerse myself in my process. Working alone with this material felt like free climbing by myself, but I was already on the cliff face and needed to get through. Great book.

Great book! I learned a ton. Put it into practice quickly. Alas, it didn't work with my then partner but the info and the techniques are solid. This has and will, change my future relationships.

This book was recommended to me over 17 years ago by a dear friend. Over those years I have purchased about 30 copies of this book as I gladly keep on giving my copy away to friends, family and clients. Every time I give away my copy, I do so with the knowledge of the impact this work has had on me, my relationship and my career. When i encounter a difficulty in my life, I have learned to turn that conflict or problem into an opportunity for depth-full self inquiry. What does this bump in the road give me an opportunity to learn about myself? Rather than blaming, shaming or vilifying the "other", I can see how my reaction leads me right back to a place within myself that needs tending. Since I have encountered the book, i have also become a psychotherapist. I use this book in my work to help individuals and couples to take responsibility for their reactions and learn more about themselves, open and grow. Through all of my studies of theories and approaches to therapy, I found this work to be the most direct route to enduring change. Every time I reread a section, i am also struck by the many layers this book has to offer. When i first read it, I was new to self inquiry and I got a tremendous amount from that read...but as i continue to grow and learn about myself i find the book offers new and surprising insights with every subsequent read. As I peel back yet another layer of my defenses, I am so grateful to have this book on my nightstand. It is the gift that keeps on giving.

The material in this book is very good. Reading it underscored my awareness of my own personal behavior well. It also taught me many new things. It does so in a good conversational style without becoming over-the-top verbose or too chatty. I find that many books about self-help go into extensive, lengthy, and arduous detail of the story underlining the one line sentence at the end of the chapter which they are attempting to convey to you. This book does not do that. It goes into more detail than I would prefer and that I felt would be necessary to get the jist of things, but it doesn't do so by such a wide margin as to feel unuseful. My partner and I also took the author's course of the same title. Know that if and when you go to that course, you will not be working together with your partner. It is not a "couples course". It's a course on personal self exploration using a step-by-step procedure to open your eyes to how you personally invite the difficulties you complain about into your own life. I would recommend it, though I had to wait a couple of years for it to be offered. There was also a waiting list. The author has incredible insight and awareness. This was clearly evidenced in the course, which I took in 2016, many years after she wrote this book. The book has all of the seeds of this awareness, though IMO not quite the depth of spiritual understanding and intuition which she exhibits today. By the way, by "the author" I mean Jett Psaris. I have not met Marlena Lyons. So if you're looking to expand your own personal self awareness, and are not afraid to look within for the cause of the difficulties in your life, then this book can help you. I have read many books on self-help and personal awareness, and this is one of the top 15-20% of those.

I appreciate the work itself. I believe it’s a quality method with aspects I’ve encountered before in other self help works. Namely, it reminds me of Katherine Kerr’s Four Principles, which is technically an acting book. The gist of one of the principles is being present enough to ~Feel your feelings~. Gold star, that. There’s also a sense of rooting out desires, similar to Danielle LaPorte’s work. The gist of the work is to be in touch with the subtleties of your reactive emotions instead of reacting negatively to a partner. If something triggers an unwanted emotional response, explore it. The response probably is based on a subconscious belief stemming from childhood. Feel it without the need to intellectualize or explain it. You’ll likely respond with a defense mechanism to avoid it, but don’t. Sit with it. Feel it more. Eventually you discover a greater sense of your core, positive (called “essential”) self. This concept deserves, max, 10-15 pages. That’s it. There are maybe 30-something pages of examples from clients who worked through it. I enjoyed these. However, the problem is that there are about 180-something pages when the concepts (including the examples) can be expressed in 40-45. Who has the time for redundancy? It’s really a plague among self help books these days. It can work well to repeat confidence boosting material, such as, “You are enough,” just to let the concept soak into the subconscious. But this....I’m almost impressed that writers can say exactly the same thing for 140pages without an editor taking a sword to it. Again, concept - good; repetition - irritating.