Patricia Hudson O'Hanlon

Pat Hudson distills her twenty-plus years of psychotherapy and radio counseling down to four essential solutions that can help women create the lives they want. These are the thinking solution, the action solution, the dreaming solution, and the feeling solution.The thinking solution focuses on the questions you ask yourself about problems, helps you identify the stories you construct around them, and guides you to ways to alter those stories or create new ones. The action solution operates from the assumption that the way to change your life is to communicate for actions, change what you do, and change your patterns with others. The dreaming solution teaches you how to use imagery, self-hypnosis, and dreams to engage your unconscious mind in change. The feeling solution, used when you feel sad or unresolved about an issue, involves creating a ritual to leave the past behind and embrace the future. Hudson offers examples of how to apply these solutions to the main aspects of a womans life: relationships, parenting, and work. She also covers the more difficult challenges of recovering and escaping from violations and violence.

Even if you've discovered from the talk shows and the self-help books that you're afraid of intimacy or prone to self-destruction because of a miserable childhood, has it really helped? If not, it's time for action; it's time for Love Is a Verb. Here is a fresh, new approach to relationships. The book goes beyond analyzing relationships to changing them, even if one partner isn't interested. Using a solution-oriented approach, humor, stories, and good common sense, Bill O'Hanlon and Pat Hudson (marriage counselors and husband and wife) show readers how to: break free of old patterns in days and weeks, not months or yearsquickly and easily solve relationship problemsimprove their sex lifeincrease feelings of love and closenessget over past hurts Lively, upbeat, and future-focused, Love Is a Verb shows readers how to change today's dreams of more romance and happiness into tomorrow's reality.

In a radical departure from traditional marital therapy approaches, the authors use the power of validation and solution-oriented strategies to break marital deadlocks. Rather than becoming mired in blame and analysis, they help couples find problems that can be solved, move toward collaboration and accountability, and change destructive patterns. Their approach—hopeful, positive, and often humorous—has been well received in their workshops for couples.