Love's Unseen Enemy: How to Overcome Guilt to Build Healthy Relationships

Is your love getting sabotaged? Too often efforts to build loving relationships are unwittingly sabotaged by an unseen enemy: guilt. In LOVE'S UNSEEN ENEMY, Dr. Les Parrott shows how to build healthier relationships by overcoming the feelings of false guilt and by dealing forthrightly with true guilt.

How you respond to guilt deeply affects your ability to love. Parrott deals with the ins and outs of false and true guilt, and the potentially devastating impact shame can have on your life. And then he identifies the four relationship styles created by the combination of love and guilt:

--PLEASERS love with their hearts, not their heads. They do loving things to relieve their guilt. --CONTROLLERS can identify the problems with their minds, but don't always exude warmth and love. --WITHHOLDERS carry their guilt but are afraid to love. They're often survivors with a PhD in pain. --LOVERS have learned to tap their capacity for genuine empathy. They strive to be loving, not simply to do loving things.

Parrott shows how your relational style affects your friendships, your marriage, your children, your work, and your relationship with God. But he doesn't leave you there. He also gives you road maps on how to change. God wants everyone to develop into whole, loving, mature people--Lovers, all.

To spur your growth, LOVE UNSEEN ENEMY contains self-tests to help you assess your level of guilt, better understand others, and establish relationships that are healthy and loving.