The Life That Belongs to You: 3 R's Recognition-Reckoning-Recovery

The Life That Belongs to You. >Harmful relational patterns do not always announce themselves dramatically. They can develop gradually, through accommodation, confusion, the movement of boundaries, the assumption of responsibility for another person's emotional state, and the progressive loss of confidence in our own perceptions. The Life That Belongs to You is about understanding that process-and, importantly, about what can happen afterwards. At the centre of the book is a framework I call the Three Rs: Recognition. Reckoning. Recovery. Or, expressed more simply: >Recognition is concerned with seeing patterns clearly. Reckoning allows us to understand what those experiences have meant and what they may have cost us. >This is not a book about diagnosing or labelling other people. It is concerned with patterns, not people. Nor is it intended to tell anyone what they should do. Its purpose is to offer an informed and compassionate way of thinking about relational experience-one which I hope enables readers to understand themselves more clearly and recover confidence in their own judgement and choices. I have called the book The Life That Belongs to You because ultimately that is where I believe recovery leads: not back to the person we were before, but towards a life increasingly determined by our own values, choices and sense of self.