When a relationship comes to an end, you experience pain and distress. This book aims to help you overcome this distraught state, to open your eyes and change the situation. Once you've understood why you feel incapable of acting, you will be able to look toward the future serenely. Love is the very essence of life, and the loss of a loving and loved one produces an inconsolable feeling of absence. But there are many ways of reacting to love. If you've been hurt in a relationship you may regard love with suspicion. You may run away from love out of fear that you'll be abandoned, or because you didn't recognise it when you saw it, or out of awkwardness, or because of poor self-esteem. There is a way out of this emotional desert: through anamorphosis. This is the secret of love, which will allow you to moult and change, to come out of yourself by breaking out of a blocked inner state, and to change the way you look at life and at your past experiences. This new perspective will provide the energy to carry on, enabling you to acknowledge love when it is before you. This in-depth analysis of the obstacles that keep us imprisoned in our past histories and our lost loves also shows how to make use of pain to bounce back, how to create the inner conditions to improve the chances of meeting someone new, and how to make the most of the situations that are offered.

The authors show that if we stop harking back to the past and learn to overcome the fear of getting hurt, we will be able to rediscover the movement and energy that is life itself.

Sylvie Angel is a psychiatrist, systemicist and psychoanalyst. She is the author of Ah, quelle famille!, Décrochez!, Bien choisir le mode de garde, Des frères et des soeurs and Comment bien choisir son psy. She is the co-author, with Aldo Naouri and Philippe Gutton, of Les Mères Juives n'existent pas.