Living on Automatic: How Emotional Conditioning Shapes Our Lives and Relationships

Homer B. Martin, Christine B. L. Adams | English, 2018

Two veteran psychiatrists unravel the mystery of how thought and emotional patterns are passed from parents to children, generation after generation, “conditioning” each of us in ways that endure throughout our lives and affect all of our relationships. Living on Automatic explores a groundbreaking concept developed by two psychiatrists with 80 years of combined experience in dynamic psychotherapy with almost 2,000 patients. The book offers strategies to help readers liberate themselves from limiting ways of relating to others, avoid automatic emotional responses, live life with intention, and create happier relationships. The authors bring to life the principles presented through vignettes from dynamic psychotherapy treatment. The book is inclusive of the LGBT experience. This book provides discoveries about the development of parents’ personalities that lead to parental alienation. Personalities of both the alienator and targeted parents are described. Living on Automatic reveals how relationship conflict arises because of the two distinct personalities that are common in marriages.