Through a rare interweaving of ideas and personal stories, this absorbing and immensely accessible international bestseller offers an unparalleled chance to explore, understand and balance two key emotional concerns in everyone's life: intimacy and independence. We all want to be able to give love and receive it. We want to feel easy and confident with friends, family and the people we work with. We also want to be able to enjoy and benefit from our own company. Yet sometimes things go mysteriously wrong. In this wise, inclusive and genuinely healing book, we learn that at the heart of many of our most painful problems is a need to strengthen our confidence from within so that with a more dependable and mature sense of self, we can relate to others without feeling invaded, anxious or insecure, and we can be alone without feeling off-balance or needy. In this book - six years in the making -Stephanie Dowrick offers a uniquely insightful and compassionate understanding of how to live with a far greater sense of inner security, immediately and positively changing the way we relate to others and to ourselves. 'Intelligent, eloquent and wise' METRO 'Offers penetrating insights into some of the most basic paradoxes of human relationships' THE GUARDIAN 'A book of tremendous depth and power' MAXINE McKEW 'She leads the reader from restriction to freedom through self-reliance' THE AUSTRALIAN 'Like the great sages, Dowrick is aware that...true wisdom comes from experiencing all that life can bring, and reflecting deeply upon it' ANNE FRENCH, THE LISTENER