Because I was successful as a psychotherapist and marriage counselor, i.e. my couples got better, I held to the belief that any marriage can be fixed if the partners really want to fix it. That’s what I said on Oprah. That’s what I said on CNN.
Thus, it was a shock to discover that my own marriage was so troubled that nothing I said or did helped even though my husband and I loved each other in many ways. We couldn’t cooperate to buy furniture. Our dining room table was piled so high with papers that we never ate at it. We’d only had sex three times in the last thirteen years.
This was a risky book for me to write because psychotherapists listen. We don’t reveal what has happened in our own lives—even if that is how we learned to be good at what we do. In LOVE SHRINKS, I do reveal as I explore the theme that, for some, love isn’t always meant to last forever and hoping that it can is a painful mistake.
As I began to compare my patient’s lives to my own, I was forced into the self inquiry that transformed me. I invite the reader to take this journey which interweaves my patient’s stories with my own and to learn more about the emotion that is central to all of our lives: love—what goes right and just how much can go wrong.
— Sharyn Wolf