Starting Over: How to Find Love when You've lost Hope.

In a couple of weeks, my sixteenth book will be hitting the bookstores. The title in Spanish: Volver a empezar: cómo encontrar el amor si has perdido la esperanza (Starting Over: How to find love if you’ve lost hope), published by ediciones Obelisco.

Every one of my books is filled with experience and learning, a lot of work and plenty of enthusiasm.


Following, is the text of the back cover and although it will soon be available in any bookstore it can be reserved at Jardín del Libro. If you read Spanish and would like to receive updates, click here. 

Thank you from the bottom of my heart to the readers of my blog and my books, since having readers is what enables me to continue to publish.

Back Cover:

Would you like to start a new relationship but find you’ve lost hope, think it’s too late or that the wounds of negative past experiences will never heal?

Life is too short to stop taking risks in any aspect of life, including love. When a writer’s manuscript is rejected, he cannot consider that his career is over. Likewise, when a marriage is over, that does not mean that the next relationship is also doomed.

The first step towards being in a stable and happy relationship is to keep an open and fresh attitude towards love and friendship. What applies to love also goes for the professional field: those who learn to reinvent themselves during a setback are more likely to find a better job or follow their calling and succeed than the blamers and complainers who are not proactive.

No matter what your age, whether you are separated or divorced, have children or not, this book will help you understand that attitude is everything and that it is possible to be happy in a new relationship.

Bio:

Lorraine C. Ladish is the author of two novels and fourteen non-fiction titles. Bilingual in English and Spanish, she is a professional translator and interpreter, based in Florida. To know more about the author: www.lorrainecladish.com

Blog in Spanish: www.diariodelexito.com and in the Spanish Magazine HOLA.com 

Codependent no More!

Almost 17 years ago, a friend introduced me to the book Codependent No More, by Melody Beattie. Her books had been around for a while, but they say that when the student is ready the teacher appears, and not a moment before. I devoured that book, Beyond Codependency , the Codependent´s Guide to the 12 Steps, and a few others, in order to move past the feeling that if only others did this or that I would feel better, my life would make more sense, and I would be happier.

Throughout the years, I´ve had to dust off these books and reread them at different times, because codependency is not something that simply goes away. It may resurface under challenging circumstances. So, here I am, revisiting this bestselling author and all of her books.

I recommend them to anybody who can say yes to at least a couple of these statements:

You:

-       Believe your happiness depends on somebody else´s behavior

-       Think you can change people, places and things, and you try hard to!

-       Deal with someone with an addiction on a daily basis

-       Have to deal with someone with a mental or physical disorder

-       Feel bad for other people and absorb their problems

-       Are extra sensitive and suffer because of it

-       Feel bad about someone else´s pain and absorb it as your own

-       Want everyone to like you

-       Want to please everyone

-       Feel that you are responsible for someone else´s happiness

-       Go out of your way to please everyone, except yourself

-       Engage in fatal attractions and stay in toxic relationships

-       Have unresolved anger

-       Have feelings of guilt

-       Feel you are always right, and everyone else is wrong

The list could go on and on, but most of us can probably relate to at least one of the above.

The bottom line is that really, we cannot put our happiness in anybody else´s hands. We also cannot think we hold the key to someone else´s happiness. Each one of us may not always be to blame for what is going on in our lives, but we are definitely responsible for making it better.

And we cannot make everyone happy. So, let´s make ourselves happy, detach, and live in the present.

Melody Beattie continues to write books, also about grief, after her son was killed in a skiing accident.

One of my resolutions this year: to continue to take responsibility of my own happiness and let go of the woulda, shoulda, coulda´s …

To know more about my books: www.lorrainecladish.com

Yes I Can, and so Can You!

When I was eighteen I had a crash that totaled the car I drove (my father’s). The vehicle ended up overturned on the sharp curve of a highway, with me in the driver’s seat and two other passengers. One of them was my sister. The jeep had no seatbelts, it was raining, and the cars coming out of the curve swerved to avoid us. Thankfully, they all did.

Right after what could have been a fatal accident, my sister and I were at the ER, nervously laughing and cracking jokes, numbed by the adrenaline rush, I imagine. 

As the days passed, however, I realized that it was short of a miracle that we had survived the event unscathed physically. Emotionally, not so much. The realization of what could have happened weighed down on my soul and I felt exhausted and down for a while.

That happened 29 years ago.

For the past few weeks I’ve been feeling under the weather physically and emotionally exhausted. And this was despite a great visit to my sister in San Francisco, having just finished the first rough draft of a novel, my publisher in Spain announcing that my sixteenth book will hit the stores for Valentine’s Day, being back on the saddle freelancing, my kids being healthy and my personal life fulfilling.

I felt something similar to the down after that accident 29 years ago. Most of 2009 was a symbolic wreck in my life. As I’m no longer numbed by the survival mode required in the face of extreme circumstances, I’m free to grieve and that´s what my body and soul are doing.

Had I let myself realize the scope of my hardship while I was struggling to get through the tunnel of personal, financial and professional darkness, I probably wouldn’t have made it.

Realizing that I managed to pull through during dire straits without coming apart, albeit with more grey hairs that I care to count, has given me “permission” to feel now what I couldn’t back then, when I needed all my strength, faith and health to make it through another 24 hours, one day at a time.

Now I know I can, because I did.

And no matter what you are going through now, so can you!

www.lorrainecladish.com 

The Power of Intention

Yesterday I was running at the beach, something I have been doing regularly since I was 12-years old. Running is my form of meditation. I was overcome by thoughts of the different times in my life when clarity of intention, visualization and then (most important), action propelled me towards my goals:
- When I was 26 and wanted to lose weight and wrote daily affirmations about it, and have been the same size ever since with the exception of my two pregnancies.
- When I wanted to write and publish my first book when I was 29, and made a mock cover and pasted it on the wall in front of my stationary bicycle. I wrote the book in less than a three weeks and it was published a few months later. Still my best-selling title, by the way.
- When I wanted to have kids and at 36 was having a hard time conceiving. I meditated and visualized and also took care of myself. When doctors were about to start hormonal treatments, I became pregnant with my first child. My second one, at 40, came a lot faster!
- When I became clear, at 46, as to what qualities I wanted in a life-time partner. A few weeks later, I met the person who embodies every single one of those qualities and I am not questioning how or why this happened. Eerie, though!
Seeing this has worked in the past, I am headed towards clarity of purpose in my profession as an author and speaker, and things are already starting to happen. What a wonderful feeling.
Intention + mechanism = results

http://www.lorrainecladish.com/