Codes of Love: How to Rethink Your Family and Remake Your Life Hardcover - 1999

From the publisher

"What if you were loved more than you know?"

Mark Bryan's work is bringing families together. He was a member of Oprah Winfrey's 1999 "Change Your Life" team and a regular on her show, where he reunites parents and children. Now, counselor, educator, and cofounder of The Artist's Way Workshops, Mark Bryan offers a book that will help all of us get closer to our family members and achieve deeper intimacy by cracking the

"Codes of Love"

As a counselor, Bryan reconnects parents and grown children despite the pain, bitterness, and anger when the work begins. In helping families find buried closeness, Bryan has learned many lessons about what it takes to open people's hearts. He shares these lessons here -- as well as his own family story, which he weaves throughout the book, a story that poignantly illustrates how reconnection is more than possible, even after years of separation.

Bryan's key insight is that families often communicate love in code, using words, actions, and behaviors that not only may obscure love but sometimes get interpreted as love's opposite. Messages of affection, caring, and concern may be sent in ways that other family members read as negative judgments, efforts to control and undermine. Gaps in communication cause the messages to get lost or distorted in transit. These gaps result from generational and life differences, contrasting emotional and conversational styles, "interference" from a legacy of past conflicts, and other factors. If you can decode your family's messages of love and affection, from the past and from today, you can open the door to richer family ties.

"Codes of Love" is a guidebook that offers the basic tools for creatingbetter relationships with parents, siblings, grown sons and daughters, spouses, even old friends -- all the loved ones in your life. Bryan explores why family affection so often gets buried or forgotten, then shows us how to recover warmth and rebuild family bonds. He gives readers the necessary tools to crack the codes of love in their own families and discover intimate connections they may not have known existed.

"What if you can love more than you know?"