Partner Development

Coercive control will see an abuser dominate their victim's life, from the food they eat, the people they see, the places they can go, and the things they can say. A controlling partner, through fear and intimidation, will seek to ensure their victim is subdued, to the point of accepting any and all abuse that's fired their way.

If you were brought up in the Western world, you've been trained on fairy tales of love and relationships that are misleading at best, and at worst have you making mistake after mistake in starting relationships with the wrong kinds of people who will waste your time and keep you from finding a loyal partner. Science has the answer! Or at least a guide to save you the time and effort of discovering for yourself how many wrong types of romantic partners there are.

In Vindicated: Confessions of a Video Vixen, Ten Years Later, Karrine takes listeners into the belly of the beast as she harrowingly chronicles the systematic breakdown of her mind, body, and spirit at the hand of one man and the events that propelled her back to prosperity after losing everything. She candidly shares her struggle to be what others demand, her obsession with the American dream, her desperation to appear normal, the lengths to which she went, and the price she paid for it all.

Conflict is a natural part of any intimate relationship. Yet most couples either avoid it or try to smooth over their differences. This often results in at least one partner compromising their integrity—and stunting their own growth. Monsters in Love challenges the idea that conflict between partners is unhealthy or something to avoid. Instead, it encourages both people to stand by what they need and who they are—but to do so with compassion rather than competitiveness or vengefulness.

Are you constantly feeling emotionally tortured by someone you used to love? Do you see no point in trying to get out because your abusive partner has taken control of your life? Abuse survivor turned domestic violence advocate, Marjorie Lise, knows this all too well. In her audiobook, she talks about how she was able to successfully stop suffering in silence and finally escape her abusive partner whom she had stayed with for an entire decade, with the hope that her experience will inspire you to take back control of your life, too.

Electroshock therapy, child abuse, and modern-day slavery... just another day in Christine's life. Take a heart-wrenching yet inspiring ride through one woman's incredible journey that is so compelling that you are simultaneously trying to look away and unable to stop yourself from listening on. Christine's father is a wealthy, tyrannical man renowned in the diamond business. At the age of just five, little Christine is cast aside into a boarding school where she is ridiculed for two embarrassing problems. She grows up in a never-ending circle of traumatic experiences.

Are you a parent and partner who is struggling to maintain your identity in your life? Do you feel disconnected from your partner, feel overwhelmed by your parental or marital responsibilities, and yearn for some sense of balance through it all? If you’ve been looking for a book that will help you reclaim power over your life, discover yourself, and build healthy relationships, then look no further; this is the book for you!

Mari A. Lee is the founder of Growth Counseling Services, a counseling and recovery center in Southern California specializing in working with sex and porn addicts, and partner and spouse betrayal trauma. With over 10 years of clinical experience, Mari has written Healing Betrayal for the partner or spouse who has just learned that their significant other may be dealing with sex and/or porn addiction. Having had her own personal journey as a former partner, Mari knows how heartbreaking and emotionally draining it is to be in relationship with a person who is sexually deceptive.

Rumination—obsessive thinking about an idea, situation, or choice that can interfere with normal life—is a common and destructive issue that can negatively impact romantic relationships. You may feel anxious, worried, hopeless, and frustrated, but even if you know your overthinking is a problem, it can be seriously hard to stop. In Stop Overthinking Your Relationship, certified couples therapist Alicia Muñoz draws from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and mindfulness to offer an effective, four-step approach to reduce rumination and change negative thinking patterns.

When our partner is a narcissist, only those who've actually experienced the madness will ever understand what we're going through. When Love Is a Lie is a straight-up, tell-all book about narcissism in relationships that skips the clinical bullshit to focus solely on the personal experience. A narrative that holds nothing back, Zari Ballard's story will educate, enlighten, and empower you to evaluate (and fully understand) the mind-boggling dysfunction in your own relationship.

The behavior of people with Asperger's can be hard to understand and easy to misinterpret, which is why it's so important to learn more about your partner's condition. The tools presented in Loving Someone with Asperger's Syndrome will help you build intimacy and improve the way you and your partner communicate. This book will teach you how to understand the effect of Asperger's syndrome on your partner, practice effective communication skills, constructively work through frustrations and fights, and establish relationship ground rules to help you fulfill each others' needs.

More than 60 million people have been in a pathological love relationship with someone who has an impaired conscience. Using the stories of survivors and social psychological research on compliance, cognitive dissonance, and thought control, Why Can't I Just Leave? explains how relationships with pathological partners can create impossible dilemmas that trap you in a distorted dream state and hijack your thoughts and emotions. Learn what those who are conscience-impaired don't want you to know and find out how to wake up and walk out of your partner's invisible prison forever.

Your partner's attention deficit disorder (ADD) may not seem like a big deal at first, but eventually, the dynamics surrounding his or her impulsivity, forgetfulness, distractibility, and restlessness can really strain your relationship. You don't want to act like a parent, yet you may feel like you can't rely on your partner to get things done. Loving Someone with Attention Deficit Disorder is your guide to navigating a relationship with someone with ADD so you can create healthy boundaries while remaining sympathetic to your partner's symptoms.

An inspirational call to build deep business and personal relationships as the foundation of a meaningful life and purposeful collaborations, drawing from the wisdom of legendary partnerships including Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, Ben and Jerry, Desmond and Leah Tutu, and the collective who saved...

If you have an anxious attachment style, you may struggle to believe you will ever be worthy enough for potential partners, and you may doubt that relationships will ever work out. While it takes hard work to change an insecure attachment style, research shows that people can create secure attachment by doing work on themselves and facilitating better communication with partners. All you need is to learn the tools that this book provides and begin to apply them to your life.

If you are in the midst of depression, you may worry that you aren't good enough for your partner, or become irritable around them. You may even push them away when you feel like your emotions are beyond your control. In addition, your sense of intimacy may diminish, and your sex life may fizzle as a result of fatigue, medications and feeling disconnected from your partner. The hard truth is that feelings of isolation, worthlessness, and tiredness can all take a hefty toll on your love life. But you don't have to let depression be the demise of your relationship.

Coupling stories of abused women and abusive men from her own case studies, Patricia Evans here gives you the tools you need to transform your relationship. Most important, she assures you that such a transformation is possible—given the right circumstances. Evans also helps you determine if your abuser really has changed—or if he’s merely creating the illusion of change. And if he hasn’t changed, Evans helps you decide whether it’s time to leave the relationship—and what to do when it is.

Therapist Beverly Berg offers powerful tools for the partners of recovering addicts. Based in mindfulness, attachment theory, and neurobiology, this book will help listeners sustain emotional stability in their relationships, increase effective communication, establish boundaries, and take real steps toward reigniting intimacy. With more than 25 years in the field, she has developed a unique set of exercises that address the issues faced by couples in recovery.

In this one-of-a-kind guide, dad, doula, and certified lactation counselor Brian Salmon and perinatal mental health and relationship expert Kirsten Brunner offer practical, modern-day survival tips for expectant dads and birth partners. Based on Salmon’s Rocking Dads childbirth course, this book provides everything dads need to know about supporting their partner through labor, birth, breastfeeding, and beyond.

Do you feel guilty when you’re not able to help someone who completely depends on you? Are you feeling like you don’t have the freedom to explore opportunities for growth? Do you feel like you can’t live up to your full potential because you have to take care of everyone’s needs before your own? Margot Fayre, doctor of psychology, knows this all too well.