Mapping the Terrain of the Heart: Passion, Tenderness, and the Capacity to Love

As a consultant and facilitator who helps groups find ways to be more cooperative together, I learned long ago that one on one relationships are the foundation of organizational effectiveness, and life in general. This book presents a model of six competencies that enable a couple to understand how to work together to create a truly intimate, mutually supportive bond. No relationship is static, it is a system, and all systems are always either improving or declining in effectiveness. By understanding these competencies and working together, anyone can continuously improve their relationship, and help each other grow in awareness and confidence in general.

Very interesting but takes sometime to plow through. Worth fighting through!

This is a great book for those who'd like a deeper understanding of love relationships. Basically, we all have unconscious "maps" of interpersonal relationships based on our childhood relationships. Our map intersects with our partners, and then it's on. Also a nice discussion of the capacities needed for health love relationships and how they can be stunted, and how they can be nourished. This is a book for the psychologically minded. The only complaint I have about this book is that all the case discussion focuses on people who grew up in two parent households,

perhaps the best book i have read on marital dynamics. Not always an easy read, but i have recommended the book to lots of couples.

I don’t have the time or articulation capabilities to fully express how wonderful this book is. I also recently completed a day-long workshop with Wallin and he was just as deeply knowledgeable and interesting (and awesomely quirky) as you might imagine- and so refreshingly honest. The book is captivating as it describes (in my opinion) much better than those by the new leaders in the field, how our earliest experiences with attachment figures influence us on all levels of our being. It’s extremely interesting, well researched and informative. If you want to understand yourself or your psychotherapy clients at a new level, don’t miss this book.

This book claims it is written for people who have problems in relationships, but it is a book for ALL relationships boyfriend, mother, father, sister and friends. This book will help you with all your relationships. It is not an easy read, but it is a page-turner. During my reading of this book, there were paragraphs so powerful, I had to close the book just to reflect on the paragraph before I moved on.This book is a guide, it is not a 100% solution or answer to your problems. It merely shines a light on the cobwebs in your mind. You will really have to let it guide you as you search within yourself to find your answers for why you are the way you are in a relationship. It is really somewhat interactive, in that it asks you to ask yourself some pretty tough questions. It is thought provoking. It will turn the way you think about relationships upside down. Many issues, I thought I was entitled to, basically painted a grim future....I am pretty certain, or maybe naïve, that this book has saved me from many future bad relationships, has helped me understand my past relationships with boyfriends, friends and most importantly, family. Thank god, because I ALMOST lost the love of my life, until (as cheesy as this sounds) I read this book.

The first thing that struck me about Mapping the Terrain of the Heart was a sense of having come home to a place that really understood and clarified the beauty alongside the struggles of committed relationships. The next thing that struck me was the sense of hope and direction to be able to thrive in a relationship that has flaws as well as fortune. And finally, I was thrilled to learn how to turn anger into empathy, disappointment into clear-eyed forgiveness, and a developing love affair into a lasting committed relationship with happiness and certainty despite the anxieties that come with human love. I have been reading and re-reading and marking up and highlighting and learning from and gifting this book ever since I was given a copy. This book works! And I am convinced it is due to the writers' encouraging belief that each of us has passion, tenderness and the capacity to love, love long, love well, love brilliantly.

In my personal quest to find romantic intimacy I have read dozens of books. This is simply the most profound, dead-on, flat-out brilliant book I have ever come across. "Mapping The Terrain of the Heart" will help you clarify if your ideals of romantic love are realistic or simply serving as a defense against finding intimacy. It will help you to understand your style of relating - whether you are a "merger hungry" or "merger wary." It will help you understand how you find "chemistry" with some people while others leave you cold. It will help you to understand why what excites you is healthy and how not to simply "find" the right relationship - but to "build" it. In an extremely readable and clear way the authors explain how psychoanalytic theory is a powerfully clarifying microscope for understanding the patterns that you may find yourself limited by. I have been re-reading this book for over ten years now and have come to think of it as my "romantic compass" for finding out if I may be heading for true north, or whether I'm lost in the desert. This book has transformed my knowledge of my self and and of those I have gotten close to.Buy this book, it will help you to find what you're looking for. It really will.

Very interesting read for both singles, married and/or geting ready for a marriage. great!