Cultivating Love: Choosing Change

Cultivating Love: Choosing Change is actually two books in one, with the focus of attention in the first 9 chapters on achieving personal change, so you and others in the systems you live and interact in (i.e., home, school, work, church, etc.) benefit from your decisions and actions as you live out your changes in their presence. Here’s what you’ll find in the first half of Choosing Change:Choosing Change #1 (Safe People, Safe Places and Safe Processes) guides you to create your own personal safe place to generate calm and focus immediately, especially when emotional triggers or emotional flooding processes threaten to dysregulate and derail you from experiencing safety or being a safe person.Choosing Change #2 and #3 (So what’s my reasonable contribution to your change process?) presents the “66% - 33% solution,” which is a self- and other empowerment model to help you deliver "reasonable responses" to facilitate healing with others without overextending or losing yourself in the process.In Choosing Change #4 (Gardening with Intention) and #5 (Traveling with Intention) you’ll read how change and growth is a process and how to take steps to nurture, grow and "fertilize" change in your own life. In Chapter 5 you'll read how the development and intentional application of specific character values helps you to move toward healthy and functional outcomes versus lapsing into misdirected behaviors associated with emotional regression.In Choosing Change #6, #7 and #8 (Schemas, Defenses, Distortions and Resolution, Parts 1 – 3) you’ll identify how dysfunctional psychological processes thwart your own maturation, and how the application of the “A-C-T-I-V-E Model” facilitates progress and resolution when these saboteurs threaten to disintegrate your good efforts. (Choosing Change #9 repeats the A-C-T-I-V-E Model in the latter part of #8).The second half of the book is based on Matthew 7: 24 -25 invites you to capitalize on your personal growth and make qualitative interpersonal changes by building yourself and others up in your home. Here’s what you’ll find in the second half of Choosing Change:In Choosing Change #10 (Blueprints and Building Change) you’re encouraged to identify, integrate and live by principles that lay a strong foundation and breathe life into the other inhabitants of the home you're seeking to build.In Choosing Change #11 (Building Character and Building People, Part 1) you’ll focus on basic communication principles and processes to assist you and your partner as you enter your new home (or rebuilt relationship).In Choosing Change #12 (Building Character and Building People, Part 2) you’ll visit the psychological and theological “River of Integration,” which takes you into the Living and Dining rooms of your home. In these rooms, you'll identify relationship goals and engage in activities to develop skilled behaviors that strengthen those who congregate in these "centers of activity."In Choosing Change #13 (Building Character and Building People, Part 3) you’ll discover specific principles to bless and nurture your children, and how the application of the Wheel of Awareness (developed by Dr. Dan Siegal and Dr. Tina Bryson) provides practical and valuable insights to assist you in the psychological development of your children.In Choosing Change #14 (Living, Loving and Leaving a Legacy) you’ll visit the last two areas of your home: Your Bedroom, to look at multiple factors that culminate in strengthening your primary relationship, and finally your Front Porch, where “rocking chair moments” inspires you to reflect on the life you’re living and the legacy you’ll leave behind.Cultivating Love: Choosing Change is an integrated and thorough resource for you (in addition to Clinicians, Pastors, Newlyweds and others) to access over the course of your life to assist you to make good, sound, constructive, and therapeutic changes in your life and relationships.