Keeping the Love You Find: A Personal Guide

Anyone who claims they have read this book and completed all the exercises in their entirety has to be either a flat out liar or an individual with a remarkable threshold for pain.

I started this book in March 2011 and have been struggling to finish it ever since.

That isn't to say that the book isn't a good one. There are actually many, many favorable things about this book.
1. It is flammable (jk...sorta)
2. Hendrix has many interesting things to say about the Imago and why we are attracted to people we are. In the first half of the book, he goes into the various stages of human development and explains how all of us, have become "stuck" as it were, in one of the stages. Within our quest to unstuck ourselves, we are constantly attracted show more to individuals who will help perpetuate that stage of childhood and development in the hopes that this time we can actually overcome it. This is why we fall into patterns of relationships which repeat themselves. According to Hendrix, the relationship is intended to be a vehicle by which one heals their childhood wounds. This is very contrary to the popular idea that an individual needs to be "whole" and all "worked out" in order to be in a healthy relationship. Hendrix also goes into other ways in which people become "stuck" and how they end up psychologically in the relationships they do.

Hendrix's ideas are well written, interesting and very, very deep. I found myself going through the pages with highlighters and pencil and taking notes. Every page a different realization occurred to me and the book, overall inspired me with its ideas and enlightened me.

So, why was it painful? It was the exercises. Almost every chapter, Hendrix devises these tedious "exercises" which were generally long, painful, and incredibly boring and repetitious. I am sure that the exercises were meant to help one achieve self-realization and all that, but there just has to be a better way. I am not opposed to the idea of the exercises per se, but these just seemed drawn out and exhausting and they destroyed the rhythm of the book for me. For instance, the third chapter had an over 100 questionnaire. Do you know how many hours it took for me to do that? Midway through the book, I just kept putting off and putting off the exercises. It was painful and annoying to do them. And then I started skipping them. In the last chapter, unfortunately, you have to utilize all of the exercises and bring them together. Unfortunately, It was at that point that I just gave up on the book without reading about how one actually does overcome their childhood wounds through the relationship :/

After struggling through this book for 9 months, and fighting my way through the ridiculous and boring exercises, I think I deserve to mark it as "read" even though I didn't read and complete every single word. Good luck to anyone who tackles this and a trophy for anyone who actually succeeds. show less