The Decision to Belong: An Adlerian Framework for the Relationships You Actually Want (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798234081513)

We have never had more information about relationships and never felt less equipped to be in them. We name our attachment styles, recite our love languages, and diagram every fight-and still find ourselves stuck inside the same painful loops, reverting in the moments that matter most to the same protective strategies we built decades before we ever picked up a self-help book.

The problem is not a lack of information. It is a lack of capacity.

In The Decision to Belong, psychotherapist Bart Golub introduces Relational Capacity Therapy-an Adlerian framework that moves beyond classification toward development. RCT identifies five measurable, buildable capacities that determine the health of every relationship in your life: Vulnerability, Emotional Intelligence, Compersion, Relational Confidence, and Agreements.

Through eight intimate portraits of people you will recognize-the Guardian who never asks for help, the Analyst who can explain every feeling but cannot have one, the Sovereign who has perfected a life designed for one-Golub shows how patterns that once protected us become the walls we live behind, and what it actually takes to dismantle them.

Drawing on Alfred Adler's century-old insight that human beings are built to belong, The Decision to Belong is written for anyone-therapist or not-who has wondered why insight has not been enough. It is a book for the partner exhausted by the same recurring fight, the reader who has come to suspect that real change is less about understanding what is wrong and more about building what has always been missing, and the clinician seeking a more developmental framework for relational work across the full spectrum of relationship structures.

For readers of Dossie Easton, Jessica Fern, Esther Perel, Brené Brown, Stan Tatkin, Sue Johnson, and Bessel van der Kolk.

Belonging is not a feeling that arrives. It is what you build.

And it begins with the decision to belong.