Making Great Relationships

The Two Wolves

A Cherokee elder once told her granddaughter that there were two wolves in her heart, a wolf of love and a wolf of hate, and that everything in her life depended on which one she fed each day. Rick Hanson opens *Making Great Relationships* with that small story because it carries the whole argument of the book in one image. Relationships are not given to us by luck, chemistry, or family of origin. They are made, one fed wolf at a time, by what we say at the kitchen table, what we let ourselves feel in our chests when someone we love walks into the room, and what we keep saying to ourselves in the dark.

Hanson has been a clinical psychologist for more than forty years, and he is unusual among self-help writers in being willing to admit how late he came to most of this. He was shy and awkward as a kid. He entered adulthood, he says plainly, numb from the neck down. He has been married for four decades to the same woman, raised two children with her, watched himself fumble his way through the same arguments for years. The book is built on that humility. He is not writing as a guru. He is writing as someone who has had to learn relationships the hard way, by translating neuroscience, attachment theory, and twenty-five hundred years of contemplative tradition into things you can actually try on Tuesday.

There are roughly fifty practices in the book, organized into six movements: befriend yourself, warm the heart, be at peace with others, stand up for yourself, speak wisely, and love the world. The order matters. You cannot give what you do not have. The first eleven chapters are inner work, because Hanson is convinced that the most important relationship in your life is the one between you and the person carrying your name. Everything else is downstream.