It’s best to have your tools with you. If you don’t, you’re apt to find something you didn’t expect and get discouraged. –Stephen King
Years ago, a client left me a very special gift. A small tin toy toolbox with miniature tools glued to the outside. Inside were index cards written with many of the therapeutic tools and interventions we had shared. It is one of the inspirations for this book – the toolbox. We need to take in information repeatedly and in a variety of ways before we truly learn and integrate it into our brain. For something to become a habitual way of thinking takes weeks or even months. Most of us are visual learners and many of us learn best by experiencing or “doing”. To that end we will be working with different methods of assessing relationships and doing it repeatedly. If one gets in the habit of thinking about relationships based on the three essentials while using these tools, it may help avoid unforeseen pitfalls.