Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner's Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship.
by Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT
Wired for Love, published by New Harbinger (2012), with a foreword by Harville Hendrix, is a complete insider's guide to understanding your partner's brain and promoting love and trust within a romantic relationship. You will learn ten scientific principles you can use to avoid triggering fear and panic in your partner, manage your partner's emotional reactions when he or she does become upset, and recognize when your brain's threat response is hindering your ability to act in a loving way. By learning to use simple gestures and words, you can learn to put out emotional fires and help your partner feel more safe and secure. The no-fault view of conflict in this book encourages you to move past a "warring brain" mentality and toward a more cooperative "loving brain" understanding of your relationship. Based in the sound science of neurobiology, attachment theory, and emotion regulation research, this book is essential reading for couples and others interested in understanding the complex dynamics at work behind love and trust in intimate relationships.
Read the Introduction and Chapter One before you buy!
I really enjoyed this book and learned a lot from it that I can use as a therapist. Stan Tatkin is a great innovator. This book is a must for every couples' therapist's library.
John Gottman, author of The Science of Trust
Reading Stan Tatkin's book makes you want to be in therapy with him. With intense and fearless clarity, he takes you into the trenches of the combative human brain and shows you how to make love, not war.
Esther Perel, LMFT, author of Mating in Captivity
In my view, Wired for Love by Stan Tatkin is more than an addition to the vast literature directed to couples. It is more than a brilliant integration of recent brain research with the insights of attachment theory; it is an instance of an emergent literature expressing a new paradigm of couplehood. This is no small achievement: this book will help couples flourish in their relationships and it will aid the professionals who want to help couples be more effective.
Harville Hendrix, Ph. D., Imago Therapy Institute; Author of Getting the Love You Want
This book is grounded in the latest brain science, as well as being wonderfully friendly, encouraging, and practical. It shows readers how to stay out of dead-end conflicts and instead light up the neural circuits of empathy, skillful communication, and love. A marvelous resource.
Rick Hanson, PhD, author of Buddha's Brain
Stan Tatkin shows how our couple relationships would look if we took seriously what attachment theory and neuroscience research has taught us.
Dan Wile, author of After the Honeymoon
Wired for Love challenges partners to experience their relationship in a totally new way. Partners will learn how to engage positively as a couple to help each other feel safe and secure by following the relationship exercises suggested in this exciting new book. In clear, concise language, Tatkin describes the ways that partners can understand and become experts on one another. He suggests building a 'couple bubble' wherein each partner is the most important person in the other's life, the one individual on whom the partner can always count. Tatkin's model, based upon neuroscience, attachment and moment-to-moment arousal, helps couples keep their bonds fresh and alive. Among the messages interspersed throughout this book are: finding ways to become experts on one another, knowing the three or four things that make a partner feel good, spontaneously making the partner feel happy and loved, avoiding the things that make the other feel bad, managing one another's highs and lows, knowing what to do when things go awry, learning how to fight fair and have a win-win relationship that reduces stress. This is a book written for partners who want to be in a thriving relationship, but is also an excellent primer for psychotherapists who want to help their patients engage in and maintain successful relationships.
Marion F. Solomon, director of clinical training at Lifespan Learning Institute and author of Narcissism and Intimacy, Lean on Me, and other books
Read this book to discover a multitude of new ways to enliven your relationship and end needless conflicts. Stan Tatkin is one of the most innovative thinkers in the couples relationship world today. It's impossible to read this book without learning new patterns to enhance your love.
Ellyn Bader, PhD, co-creator of the developmental model of couples therapy and co-director of The Couples Institute in Menlo Park, CA
If you feel lost, confused or alone in your relationship, get this book right now. You will finally make sense out of chaos and pain. This is your map to go from frustration and insecurity to realize the potential of why you initially got together. Stan Tatkin's insightful book will teach you to work as a team to make your relationship journey safe, engaging, and deeply satisfying.
Peter Pearson, PhD, couples therapy specialist and cofounder of The Couples Institute in Menlo Park, CA