Life After Betrayal: A Practical Guide

admin — Fri, 11 May 2007 01:26:00 +0000

Betrayal by a long-term partner is a painful business. Choosing to try to heal and continue a relationship after such a betrayal is very challenging. In her book, Life After Betrayal: A Practical Guide, author Linda Bevan provides a guide for couples who do choose to stay together after a serious betrayal. Pitching itself as “an honest, straightforward book that helps the reader though each step on the road to recovery,” it’s a slim volume, less than 100 pages, and easily accessible with its big type and many bulleted lists.

For anyone who hasn’t been in therapy, browsed the self-help section of the bookstore, or watched The Dr. Phil Show, it may introduce some basic psychological concepts - such as boundaries and self-esteem - and offer some insights into how to recreate trust in a partnership. Overall, however, the book is poorly organized, and, at times, painfully condescending. I found the author’s insistence on referring to the mind as “our memory box” when she explains how childhood experiences inform adult behaviours particularly annoying.

In many cases her “step-by-step” guide felt like nothing more than a series of brainstormed lists with little practical advice as to how wronged partners might actually cope or heal themselves and their off-the-rails relationships. In some cases, she just gives bad advice. For example, in Step Eight, “Managing Jealousy and Control,” we are told: “In moving on, trust is the part of the relationship that must come before anything else. If you cannot trust your partner then you have to face the possibility that the relationship will end.” True, indeed. However, rather than validating the betrayed partner’s feelings of insecurity and putting the onus on the one who did the betraying to re-establish trust, the author suggests that the betrayed partner make a leap of faith and simply trust. Your best friend or, in fact, any stranger on the bus will tell you otherwise.

Finally, though the author gives a quick nod to same-sex relationships, potential readers should note that the book uses exclusively heterosexual examples and appears aimed at a heterosexual (female) audience. While this is not the only self-help book that assumes a heterosexual female readership, I suspect that there are other publications that are more helpful for anyone who’s trying to heal a relationship after betrayal.

Written by: Elaine Beale, May 10th 2007

Life After Your Lover Walks Out: A Practical Guide

admin — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 03:59:00 +0000

By Lynda Bevan

Love Healing Press

This is, indeed, a practical guide; think of it as a seventy-nine-page crash-course on how to get over a breakup.

Bevan, a fifty-nine-year-old charity manager and radio relationship counselor who is on her third marriage, makes no bones about her own past relationships. Throughout this short book, one feels as if Bevan, who lives in Wales, is coaching the reader by saying that if she has gotten through relationship bumps, they can too. Ignore the typos – and the fact that the cover design looks like a heart made out of pieces of dried-out steak – and it's a quick but helpful read for the newly dumped.

When describing the grieving that accompanies the breakup process – the book is specifically for the partner that's been walked out on – Bevan may be a bit melodramatic at times. (A reference to "lovingly touching" an ex-partner's clothes with "tears running down your cheeks" come to mind.) But she offers very specific advice on a variety of topics – sex with a new partner, handling finances, talking about the breakup with children, if there are any – in a refreshingly straightforward way.

The best thing about this book is that, unlike other self-help tomes, it isn't full of Dr. Laura-type, shrewish suggestions about how to change who you are to lure your man (or woman) back. The tone of the book is essentially positive, direct and at times even humorous. In chapter two, for instance, asserting that the dumped partner doesn't deserve to be unhappy, Bevan ascertains that "Unless you are a mass murderer, rapist, or pedophile, you don't deserve to be unhappy."

How's that for affirming your right to bliss?

Written by: M.L. Madison, February 11th 2007