Growing Yourself Up

How to bring your best to all of life’s relationships

Jenny Brown MSW

Relationships are part of life...

Growing Yourself Up looks at all of the relationships we may experience in our life time. From being a single young adult to marriage to having children to divorces to midlife crisis and old age.

To be human is to be in relationships. We can’t survive without them but at the same time it’s in our relationships that we so easily come unravelled. There are certain relationships that seem to just do us in. Either we feel like we lose ourselves or we feel burnt out from unsuccessful efforts to make things right for another. In our relationships we can experience the very best of ourselves and the very worst.

Most psychological approaches to building resilience focus on the individual — the individual mind, emotions and experiences. The message of Growing Yourself Up, however, is that you can’t separate understanding the individual from understanding relationships; they go hand in hand. All of life’s relationships are integral to increasing self-awareness and growing maturity — and it’s not necessarily the comfortable relationships that promote personal growth.

Drawing from Bowen family systems theory, this book takes you on a journey through each stage of life to see the predictable patterns of relationships and to show how to use this knowledge to make purposeful adjustments in yourself. The result, though certainly not a quick fix, is a sturdier self, sturdier relationships and a refreshing new way of viewing life’s challenges and opportunities.

SPECIFICATIONS:  234 x 153mm (9¼ x 6 inches) | Paperback (eBook available) | 248 pages

About the author

Jenny Brown is the founder and director of the Family Systems Institute in Sydney, Australia, where she has a counselling practice and trains mental health professionals and organisations. She has trained and earned academic awards at the University of Sydney and Columbia University New York. Additionally, Jenny has completed many years of post-graduate education in systems approaches to counselling at Relationships Australia, Sydney; the Family Institute of Westchester, New York; and the Tavistock and Portman in London. She is currently undertaking PhD research at the University of New South Wales into parents’ experiences of their adolescents’ mental health treatment.