Forging Healthy Connections
How Relationships Fight Ilness, Aging, and Depression
It’s well known that people with happy relationships and marriages tend to live longer and face fewer health problems. In Forging Healthy Connections, authors Trevor Crow and Marilyn Karinch advise us of the research showing the harmful effects of fear on health, as well as the benefits of a life lived in joyful partnership: “Health and healing have their roots in emotions,” they write. Moreover, the authors also warn that if an “attachment injury” is suffered in childhood, it is very difficult to recognize the qualities of a happy marriage and healthy communication, and the existing emotional problems must be resolved before growth can begin.
The book focuses on heartwarming stories of couples who had major breakthroughs thanks to Crow’s Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT) methods in her marriage and family-therapy practice. Besides helping people recognize negative patterns, the authors point out how trust issues and emotional trauma can be reversed through empathy and forgiveness, even if we have a genetic disposition toward handling stress poorly. Readers won’t be overwhelmed with too much research on how ineffective or bullying communication styles can and will wreck people’s health, just enough to stop making excuses for a bad marriage. Healing a marriage is usually possible if both partners are hopeful.
Reviewed by
Carrie Wallace
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
