BOOK REVIEW: Living and Loving Well after Divorce

    Joseph Stuczynski was at a crossroads in 2000. He'd had several failed relationships. He wasn't certain why. So the project manager of Information Technology at a Fortune 250 company made a decision that he says changed is life -- to take six months off dating and find out why he kept dating the same kind of person and expecting a different result. If he found the key, he thought, he'd actually be able to have a relationship that worked.

From the searching of self came "Living and Loving Well," a four-step method to examine your core values, determine your life statements and encourage more fulfilling relationships. Since delving into his own relationship patterns, Stuczynski has given up his day job, published his book and become a relationship coach, who offers workshops and seminars to others seeking positive life change. He thinks his book, and the exercises in it, can offer a lot to people who are thinking about divorce, getting divorced or divorced and looking for a new, happier relationship.

Divorce360: What made you decide to write this book?  
A: I was tired of attracting unhealthy relationships...Even though I had gone through therapy and read many self-help books, it was perfectly clear that my patterns had more power over my decisions than I did. More importantly, no one could explain how to stop these patterns from recurring. In other words, I was attracting relationships that were carbon copies of one another. I wasn’t attracting bad people, but between the two of us, we created an unhealthy union. This was absolutely baffling. So I decided to take a six-month hiatus from dating and relationships so I could I solve the elusive puzzle myself. “Living and Loving Well’ is the result. It’s a simple field guide that explains why we find ourselves in unfulfilling relationships even though we know better, and provides the tools to redefine life on your own terms.  

Divorce360: Does LLW have any founding principles?  
A: LLW is founded on the general principle that as children, we adopt the roles, dynamics and decision-making skills that we observed in our parents or caregivers relationship. This means that most of us are not taught how to love, or how to define either a personal set of core values, or the qualities we desire in relationships.  This lack of personal awareness creates the anxiety you feel when continuing to find Mr./Miss Wrong, making the same mistakes even though you know better, or being in a marriage but not being able to figure out what needs to be improved.    

Since you haven’t learned to define what it is you DO want, you seek out relationships based on what you observed. In other words, love is a pattern you learned. We learned to survive in relationships by our observations as children. A good example of this is when someone says, “He was so different when we were dating; he changed the minute we got married.” As a child, this person didn’t observe what it meant to be a dating person, so he could be himself, but the minute he was committed to someone, he switched tracks and began living out the role he observed in his parents, whether good or bad.  

This also explains why people repeat bad relationships over and over. You can only attract, seek or find, people that have the same patterns. The type of relationship can’t change because you haven’t altered the your definition of a fulfilling relationship. This is also true in other areas such as work or friends. You may spend years learning through trial and error, and often times repeating the same mistakes.  

Divorce360: How do you define loving well?  
A: Loving well means having a strong level of self-awareness so that you can attract the relationships that are true to your spirit. It means being aware of your impact in the world. 

Divorce360: How do you define living well?  
A: Living well means attracting friends and colleagues that are aligned with your spirit. Living wells also means having the tools and self-knowledge but on a grander scale. It means knowing the values, or guiding principles that drive your decision and actions, being aware of the qualities that you desire in relationships, then acting accordingly.         

Divorce360: You talk about attracting the same kinds of relationships. What do you mean and how do you stop it?  
A: This means dating the same type of people over and over, or finding yourself in relationships that exhibit the same patterns. In my case, I repeatedly got involved in relationships with lots of criticism, even though I knew that they were unhealthy for me. I had never taken the time to define what I did, so I adopted the critical dynamic that I observed in my parents.   

In order to stop attracting the same kinds of relationships, you must redefine what it is you do want. Erase the images you see in the media and of your stereotypes of love. The “Living and Loving Well” field guide offers a solid method that walks you through four simple exercises to create ones spiritual foundation. It includes developing your top 10 core values that will guide future actions and decisions; it builds supportive Life Statements; and a relationship model that is specific to your desires. The best thing about it is that it’s designed for the modern hectic lifestyle, so it’s short and gets to the point so that you can get on with your life.      

Divorce360: Have you heard from people who used the book to change their lives? Give us a story about how they used it to improve their world.  
A: I regularly coach people on the "Living and Loving Well" process that is the exact method I created in the book, so I see success stories all of the time. A recent client, who I’ll call Patty, is a divorced mother of three whose always gotten herself into unhealthy relationships. This means giving up her self to appease her husband, being disrespected, isolating herself from friends and being emotionally and verbally abused. This isn’t the full list but you get the idea. She quickly fell into relationships with men after only one or two dates and turned a blind eye to the obvious red flags she saw, which by the way, were carbon copies of the ones in her earlier relationships.   Interestingly, she’s also a very spiritual woman so she had another whole layer of internal conflict that she couldn’t resolve. She finished going through the method six months ago and recently called to say her life has completely changed because her relationship with herself had changed.    

The process consists of four exercises that support one another to form the basis of who you are or your spiritual blueprint. The first exercise is designed to raise awareness of the health factor in your relationships. After completing exercise one, Patty realized that she only attracted 5 percent of the qualities she found important in a relationship. She was married for 10 years and unable to fulfill 95 percent of her relationship needs, which demonstrates the power of our patterns. It also made it crystal clear that she had some work to do.