Overview: What do healthy relationships look like? Most of the difficulties we face on a daily basis have to do with our relationships - be it with our partners, families, children, parents - or with our friends, neighbors or colleagues at work.

This is why most of us really want to know how we can best get along with other people. What do healthy couple relationships look like? What do healthy families look like? What are the characteristics of respectful, constructive conversations?

How can we best navigate through the challenges we meet in our daily lives and disagree with our friends, colleagues and families in a respectful way without running away or going on the attack? Is it possible to speak respectfully and reach compromises which function for everyone involved?

In short, what do healthy relationships look like?

Verdict: Barbara Berger’s answer to these important questions are her Healthy Models which describe what healthy relationships look like in practice. The value of these Healthy Models is that when we have clear models of how healthy behavior looks, we can then compare our own relationships to these models and identify what is not working in our relationships.

And this can be a big help because then we can begin to work to improve our relationships. And thus, Healthy Models for Relationships: The Basic Principles Behind Good Relationships With Your Partner, Family, Parents, Children, Friends, Colleagues and All the Other People in Your Life (phew, now that’s a title) by author Barbara Berger, is genuinely packed with practical techniques and exercises for us all to take on and learn from.

So, do you ever wonder what healthy relationships look like? Well, they involve honesty, trust, respect and open communication between partners and they take effort and compromise from both people. Furthermore, there is no imbalance of power. Partners respect each other’s independence, can make their own decisions without fear of retribution or retaliation, and share decisions.

Much of my own journalistic life/career has involved speaking, writing, and interpreting research, albeit not wholly linked to how to handle relationships that have gone wrong, where partnerships that are controlling or toxic, for instance, or where trust has been broken, of course.

Scenarios like that often lead to infidelity, betrayal, or emotional upheaval within a relationship and as we all know, it can be heartbreaking how widespread those issues tend to be.

But just as important is learning to identify when a relationship is going well. Many people are unsure of what to look for, or worse yet, they don’t know all the positives that they truly deserve to have within a relationship.

If someone grew up watching their parents or other family members act out chronically toxic patterns, then that person may very well come to define those patterns as normal and have difficulty understanding the baseline of what a good relationship looks like.

From many of her years of clinical experience working with people, Barbara Berger discovered that the value of Healthy Models is that when we have a clear Model for how healthy behavior looks, people can then compare their own life situations and relationships to these Models and then identify what is off in their own experience.

As for those aforementioned Healthy Models, well, I won’t give them all away, as you will obviously have to buy and read this deliciously enticing (for the brain) book yourself, but there are 16 Models; starting with Basic Democratic Principles in Families and Other Close Relationships, The 3 Levels of Conversation, The 4 Main Aspects of Good Couple Relationships, through to You Have Inherent Worth, You Have an Inner Compass, culminating in Life is a Learning Curve and We Are All Evolving and Moderation.

The second section contains 12 Basic Observations about this thing called life, and begins with There is Reality and Then There Is Your Thinking About Reality, Your Thinking Determines Your Experience of What Is Going On - Not What Is Going On, through to You Can’t Fix or Control or Change Another Person, culminating in Other People Are Not Responsible For Your Existence and It’s Not Personal!

The third and final section brings us 8 Healing Processes, where Berger talks about dealing with stress, dealing with anxiety, using the power of mind wisely for healing and recovery, culminating with The Great Universal Intelligence - the greatest healing power of all.

About the Author - American-born Barbara Berger is the bestselling author of fifteen self-empowerment books. After Barbara left the USA to protest against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, she settled in Scandinavia and continued her quest to learn more about the science of the mind, spirituality and psychology.

Today, she gives workshops and coaching to help her clients harness the power of their own minds. She lives in Copenhagen, Denmark.

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