Getting Smart About Love

About the Book

Getting Smart About Love: Creating Practical Magic Through Relationships, by Dr. Garry Francell and psychotherapist Jackye Winter, is a book that goes beyond the talk and delivers the “How To.”  In its opening chapter, the book asks “how can we use our intelligence to find more serenity, peace and love?” and then proceeds to show the reader how to use his (or her) thinking side to understand and heal feelings to create loving relationships.  The authors explain, step by step, how men and women can use their brains to map their deeply felt emotions and follow them to the love that is at the center of their own nature.

The book takes a unique approach, mixing metaphor with linear thinking to speak to both the feeling and the thinking part of the mind.  It uses the male voice, but was written by a loving couple who embrace the book’s concepts and have the pleasure of sharing them with others through their work.

The book moves forward from several premises: First, what men and women most want is to love and to be loved.  Second, the reason we want to be in relationships is because it is through relationships that we broaden our consciousness, that is, become more aware of the fullness of our being.  Third, our consciousness is the duality of thinking and feeling within us and, fourth, the integration of our thinking side and our feeling side is the essential work in both the building of loving relationships and the journey to our expanded consciousness.  Although Getting Smart About Love is not a religious book, it is based in the authors’ shared conviction that, through our relationships, we can experience the love of God.

Let’s Get Smart About Love tells us that the journey to this broader awareness begins with understanding that our feelings are primary.  The book defines specific feelings for us and then, using a “mapping” analogy, the book helps us explore these feelings.  It takes us back to their starting point in our past, walks us through their present manifestations, and leads us to techniques that help us express them, have them understood, and move on to stronger, more loving partnerships.  Just as important, it helps us encourage those we love to express their feelings.  Examples from real life demonstrate for us how to temporarily set our own feelings aside so that we can listen to and hear what our loved ones are saying.  Every chapter shows us how we can rediscover the love we thought we’d lost and bring it to life in our current relationships.  Chapter summaries titled “stepping stones” direct us to the key markers along the path to our expanded consciousness.

Let’s Get Smart About Love shows us how to:

· Follow the signposts provided by so-called “negative” feelings such as anger, sadness, fear and guilt and let them lead us to the love they are masking.

· Uncork the anger that is keeping all of our other feelings from flowing.

· Get unstuck from the “barbed wire fence” of our past which causes our old unresolved feelings to color our current experiences with the people and situations before us.

· Break down our defense mechanisms—hiding our emotions, storing anger, and avoiding our feelings through addictions.

· Develop adult responses to our feelings of betrayal by re-experiencing our childhood hurts and healing them.

· Take off the blinders that create the fantasy of romantic relationships so we can begin to see more of the real person with whom we are beginning to become intimate.

· Create safety in our relationships so that both partners may express their feelings.

· Take 6 specific steps, when the relationship is at a crisis point, toward developing a committed relationship based on an expanded consciousness.

· Try out 11 personally tested approaches for working through conflict and emotional upsets.

· Employ 13

About the Author

Garry Francell has taught seminars about relationships for 15 years. A psychotherapist, Jackye Winter is in private practice specializing in working with couples. She is an Imago Relationship therapist. Together they teach the Heart Seminar and enjoy their lives in their small slice of Paradise.