“Our feelings tend to trail along behind our actions,” says Jim Roberts ’67. This insight led over the course of a decade to his new book Deliberate Love: How Couples Can Deepen and Sustain Intimacy with the Mindful Use of Attention.
“I had a compulsion to write things down, the things I’ve learned,” Roberts relates, adding that while the book’s title refers specifically to couples, the philosophies discussed will work for all relationships.
The book draws on Roberts’ Kansas City-area marriage and family therapy practice and on two forms of Japanese psychotherapy, Morita and Naikan, which he blends with modern principles of Western psychology.
Morita, explains Roberts, is based on principles of accepting both feelings and circumstances as they are; it teaches how “to do what needs to be done. Reality will tell us what we need to do, but only if we pay attention.”
Naikan, “seeing oneself with the mind’s eye,” is founded on ideas of gratitude and looking within for answers to one’s relationships. Roberts notes, “Naikan trains us to appreciate people around us even if they’re very imperfect. It’s really about reality — very few people are all bad or all good.”
Available at Amazon.com, Roberts’ book is fundamentally about “attention,” the author says. “It’s attention redirection training.”
