This book is a result of my years-long practice of helping people to resolve their family relationship issues and of family experience: my family helped me understand simple principles of building balanced relationships. I wish each reader of this book would find harmony and family happiness and see a way to resolve their family issues if there are any, to decrease the number of divorces and increase the number of happy families. To my mind, love is the reason for building family relations and the relations themselves are the consequence. Love is the only right shining beacon for your thoughts, feelings, and actions. The main secret of a successful family is developing the feeling of love in an individual during all their life.
I would like to express my gratitude to Aleksandra, my beloved wife, to Eva, Alla and Artem, my children, as well as to my clients for their trust, and to God for the gift of love!
Opponents or Partners? A Dismal Trend
Nowadays, the issue of family culture is essential. Books about adultery and dissipation have grown popular, their authors scavenge marital mistakes, put human vices on show, turning problems within a family into an essential attribute of married life. At its core, this is literature for teenagers that stirs emotions and disturbs mind. It is eagerly bought to experience these emotions. People escape to a fictional pathological world instead of facing the truth.
To realize that a family is not a domestic tyranny, not a prison, not a code of prohibitions and restrictions, a different, evolutionary view of family relations is needed. Leo Tolstoy’s famous quote “Happy families are all alike” gives rise to a controversial and, in fact, incorrect conclusion in modern public eye: all of them are equally boring. Nevertheless, at my psychotherapeutic sessions, almost all my clients admit dreaming of a happy family life and love. This book is exactly about love, too! It is about what most people are truly concerned about: how to create a happy and balanced family!
The Waiting Room: self-fulfillment or love?
A lot of people buy yellow press to look for the answer to their problems there, “Oh, and that one has already had an affair? Has Abramovich left his wife, too? Why, I am doing fine, actually. I am normal.”
The Author: This mass trend shows how global family problems are in modern society.
The Reader: You mean, anybody can save their marriage?
The Author: Of course, they can, given the will. This is exactly the situation you have to work out. There is no wish to do so because a tradition to fight for the family has not been developed in our culture. People get divorced because this is the easiest way.
Young people who are getting married do not usually think about the deep meaning of what they are doing. Then, as children and grandchildren are born, they pick up the family scenario, and a chain reaction happens. Only a change in the way of thinking will help overcome deep-rooted family problems.
The Reader: It seems that family members used to be very closely economically-linked with each other. The woman was absolutely dependent on the man, she did not have her own money, she had nowhere to go. There was no even need to. Accordingly, people considered marriage necessary and somehow even inevitable, while divorce was the last resort. Now there is no such dependence. Neither the husband nor the wife feel bound or consider it necessary to conceal their dissatisfaction with each other. However, dysfunctional relationship within a family serve as a constant source of stress, take away a lot of energy, that you would prefer to invest in self-fulfillment or in something else because you only live once and…
The Author: What does such “self-fulfillment” provide for love?
The Reader: Well, I don’t know. The self-fulfillment opportunity is the chance of the same self-enrichment, development.
The Author: That’s it. Some people plunge head over heels into such spiritual practice and forget about reality. They lose track of life.
The Reader: Can’t work or activity become a spiritual practice? Doesn’t an individual expand their horizons this way?
The Author: Your craving to self-fulfillment indicates that deep in your soul you want to have a family.
The Reader: Everybody wants it, for sure!
The Author: Then what are you afraid of? Go ahead and build a family relationship. You need to get out of the power of the scenario you are now ruled by. Analyze accurately, consider what comes from what and change yourself – that’s it. From my point of view, family life is the most powerful spiritual practice!
