 Welcome to this week's book review. Each week I review a book I believe would be helpful to the general public and or clinicians. I'm never paid to do the reviews. However, in some instances, I may receive a small commission if you purchase the item, which helps defray the cost of our podcast and providing the free educational videos. The cost to you remains the same regardless. This week we're talking about love me, don't leave me, overcoming fear of abandonment and building long, lasting, loving relationships. Love me, don't leave me combines ACT or acceptance of commitment therapy, schema therapy, and dialectical behavior therapy or DBT techniques to help you identify the root of your fears, learn how automatic behaviors rooted in childhood experiences can take over and cause you to sabotage your current relationships. By recognizing behaviors and understanding their cause, you'll gain powerful insights into your own mind and into the minds of those around you. So the book has a pretty fast paced progression. And when I say fast paced, it doesn't go super in depth on any one thing, but it definitely gives you a lot of information to think about in a very succinct package. It starts out by helping you understand what fear of abandonment is and the four core beliefs that you learned when you were younger that trigger abandonment fears. She moves on to exploring cognitive distortions and people and behaviors that trigger negative core beliefs and defensive reactions and helps you understand how, while you may have learned this stuff in the past, there are probably people, things, and behaviors from people that trigger your memories of the past and trigger fears of abandonment that you may need to deal with. She helps you learn how to stay present with mindfulness and introduces the concept of informal mindfulness and relationship mindfulness exercises for daily practice. Instead of in-depth mindfulness and meditation, she really talks about focusing on staying present in the present moment and being attuned with all your senses to what you are doing right now. Relationship mindfulness exercises help you look at your relationships every day to identify in what ways they are triggering your abandonment issues or they are being supportive and healthy and helpful. The next step is enhancing your motivation for change by identifying what's most important to you because it's easy to say that my relationships are challenging but actually changing relationships and changing your thought patterns and addressing those schemas takes a lot of work. So it's important to enhance your motivation and understand why is it that you want to invest this energy in the change process. Once you're motivated, she helps you identify, understand and label your thoughts, deal with the inner critic and develop self-compassion. She moves on to helping you manage your emotions by developing distress tolerance skills because sometimes things are going to happen, especially in relationships with people and instead of acting with that knee-jerk reaction, she wants to help you develop the ability to tolerate the distress until you can get into a clearer frame of mind and make a decision that's in concert with your values. She ends by helping you figure out how to change your values, change your behaviors, I'm sorry, by becoming mindful, exploring options and choosing thoughts and behaviors that get you closer to the things you value. So when you get angry at somebody instead of saying, you know what, nevermind, we're not friends anymore, being able to use your distress tolerance skills, accept the anger, let it go past and then decide, is it what you want to cut off this relationship or is this relationship worth investing the energy to try to clarify whatever this disagreement was about? Like most of the books that I present to you, it's written in plain language with practical tools and I find this very useful because many people don't have two, three, four hours a day to devote to counseling or maybe even two or three, four hours a week. So this gives you information in small chunks and every chunk is a practical tool that you can get something out of in order to improve your life and your happiness. It's also useful as are many of these books as a tool for individual or group therapy. And like I said, it may go over some of the concepts a bit too quickly or superficially to make it useful exclusively as a self-help book but it is an excellent resource in therapy and it is an excellent sort of framework for discussing abandonment issues. And having the text in front of you, if you're a client also gives you the ability to go back and review it between counseling sessions and review the techniques and the concepts that you talked about in sessions. So there's a lot of benefits to having a workbook even if it isn't a comprehensive 500 page tool. This is one that will help you deal specifically with this issue of abandonment fears.