The Proper Care and Feeding of Marriage by Dr. Laura Schlessinger

This is our book club book for the month and my first experience with Dr. Laura.  I like her approach and the relevance to all relationships in this book.  Another book that seems to summarize so much of what I have been learning about relationships over the past few years.  Some quotes from the book that I thought were particularly powerful:

- "I don't think that many marriages are stuck on communication problems, whatever they are.  I think that most marriages are stuck on people needing or hurting so much (from their childhoods, primarily) that they forget to or resist giving love."

- "...the past has tentacles that squeeze the life out of today when we have unresolved hurts and disappointments."

- "It's amazing how capable people are to place blame anywhere else but with themselves...the only control each one of us has in our relationships is over ourselves."

- In response to calls regarding spouses not telling each other things, Dr. Laura says it is a fear of the repercussions - "The repercussions mostly have to do with the communication being filtered through one's own insecurities, assumptions, and perceptions, without truly hearing the message of the other person.  What is the solution to this hypersensitivity? Manual override.  That means you work very hard to keep your fears out of the way of your ears."

This last one was a most amazing quote to me.  I've been studying a great diagram of this exact thought for the past few years and trying to learn how to deal with my "grid," as it's called in the diagram.

I hope to have time to read some of her other books and maybe even listen to her occasionally.  

As a side note, I am appalled that our library here does not carry even one of Dr. Laura's books.  The books are considered best sellers yet our library is so liberal minded they won't let any of her books pollute their shelves!  What a disservice to the people of this city that MUST pay $80 a year for the library whether they use it or not (it's all lumped into our property taxes and if you live outside the city and want a card you need to pay that amount on your own).