Making Your Crazy Work For You

In Irrelationship and Relationship Sanity, Mark Borg, Grant Brenner, and Daniel Berry posit that a hard lesson for many is learning to turn to others for the support and affection necessary for survival. Instead, we cut ourselves off from the ones we purportedly love the most and enter a state of irrelationship, a defensive mechanism to avoid true intimacy. This may temporarily alleviate our anxiety, but eventually leaves us living tepid and numbingly predictable lives. Over time, these carefully managed lives begin to wear thin, and we may experience break-through panic and damaging conflict.

Making Your Crazy Work For You introduces a new concept: self-irrelationship, in which we inhibit ourselves from realizing our potential by shutting down our emotions and creativity. When we are cut off from ourselves—our feelings and desires—this state leads to a crazy-making, self-imposed isolation. We are making our crazy work against us, leaving us without an authentic sense of our own needs and without a capacity for true self-compassion and self-love.

Each chapter features new case studies, exercises, and tools for addressing what effects self-irrelationship has on an individual who hasn’t been successful in forging or keeping a relationship but wants to be in a healthy one. This book answers questions the authors often receive on their popular blog, such as:

• How can I better understand irrelationship if I am single?
• How can I use what I’ve learned so I don’t repeat the irrelationship cycle in the future?
• What if I’m the only one in my relationship who sees irrelationship as a problem?

Drawn from the authors' experience in clinical practice, this book will help readers to reverse unhealthy behavior patterns so they can feel good about themselves by learning to access their genuine emotions, needs, and ideas.