How to Be the Love You Seek: Break Cycles, Find Peace, and Heal Your Relationships

"A practical, reader-friendly, and inspiring primer on how to extend true connection and love to others.” —Gabor Maté M.D., New York Times bestselling author of The Myth of Normal

From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller How to Do the Work comes this paradigm-shifting guide to healing your relationships, beginning with the one you have with yourself.

Relationships have always been essential to human survival. Our bodies and brains are programmed to seek out connection, whether familial, romantic, or platonic. And yet, these vital bonds are often at the root of our deepest suffering. While our hearts are primed for compassionate connection, our nervous systems—which store all our past hurts and disappointments—are wired for threat and negativity.

For decades, leading relationship advice has maintained that successful relationships require a specific compromise—that we must change our authentic expression to better meet the needs of others, and vice versa. It may sound reasonable in theory, but as Dr. LePera explains, this approach is nothing less than a recipe for a lifetime of resentment.

In How to Be the Love You Seek, #1 New York Times bestselling author Dr. LePera—whose integrative, holistic approach to psychology has attracted an international audience of millions—offers a new path to healing our relationships. Harnessing the latest scientific research, she teaches us to recognize how unmet needs from our earliest relationships create our current, dysfunctional relationship patterns, and leave us in a state of constant internal threat, even with those closest to us.

This book, the last in her “How To” trilogy, illuminates the way out of trauma bonds and into relationships rooted in mutual respect and compassion. In it, you will learn how to create safety in your own body and mind; identify your unmet needs; develop emotional resilience; cultivate heart coherence to build deep emotional connections with others; and maintain healthy interdependence in our communities.

Whether you struggle to maintain the kinds of relationships you want, or are facing a specific challenge with a spouse, partner, parent, sibling, child, friend, or colleague—Dr. LePera teaches us how to break painful cycles and reconnect with the wisdom, appreciation, and compassion that lives in each of our hearts. It is our heart’s innate capacity to love that is the true source of all healing. When we tap into that power, we can become the love we seek.

Complete with stories, exercises, journal prompts, and other practical tools, How to Be the Love You Seek offers a healing roadmap for all generations of cycle-breakers.