Disentangle: When You’ve Lost Your Self in Someone Else

In this updated second edition, the author presents a sensible, easy-to-follow method for changing the course of one’s relationships. Anyone who has struggled with balancing his or her own needs and desires with those of the other person will appreciate and benefit from the easy-to-implement suggestions. Its format combines psychoeducation, personal anecdotes, anonymous clinical case vignettes, and skills-building exercises.

Working with individuals and groups on this topic of loss of self in others, author Nancy L. Johnston identifies four areas of recovery work that can help an individual cultivate a healthy self: facing Illusions, detaching, setting healthy boundaries, and developing spirituality.

Emotional over-involvement in relationships can throw even otherwise well-functioning people out of balance - thoughts become focused on the other person in ways that are unhealthy for both the individual and the relationship - commonly leading to feelings of anxiety, agitation, helplessness, depression, anger, and resentment.

Johnson provides a detailed description of ways to turn this self-destructive cycle around with current best practices and research data, and includes self-assessments and experiential exercises designed to address essential aspects of self-awareness, distortions in thinking, communication style and tools, and spirituality. Disentangling is the process of creating enough emotional space between oneself and another person in order to better see the realities of any relationship and make healthier conscious decisions about it.