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A review by cici_christianson
Now What?: How to Move Forward When We're Divided by Sarah Stewart Holland, Beth Silvers
2.0
I love listening to the pantsuit politics podcast, and you can tell this book doesn’t fail to come from the heart of Sarah and Beth. I love hearing their unique voices. The book does an excellent job of talking about how to navigate complex relationships that are normal and healthy and where each party has an underlying mutual respect for the other. However the problem is that most relationships that have conflict are not coming from a healthy background. This is only addressed in an afterword with very limited information and acknowledgement of this fact. Given how well researched these two normally are I was very disappointed on how little research appeared to go into this book.
Don’t get me wrong it was still a good book, however I was hoping for more of a hard-hitting, research-based guide on challenging relationships than the feel good beach read this came across as. It just didn’t have a lot of information in it that I didn’t already know, or a lot of information at all.
There needed to be more acknowledgement of underlying conflict (both good and bad) that already exists in normal relationships. The relationship you have with your parents is completely different if you are living with them or if you are financially independent, if they are co-signers on your mortgage and your primary source of babysitting, or if you are their primary source of medical support in their old age. The relationship you have with your coworkers changes if you are both up for a promotion, or are dependent on them to finish an important part of a project, or if you are having to be in a supervisory role over them. These are not necessarily bad dynamics, but they change the nature of the relationship completely and this says nothing of the truly bad dynamics that could exist in a toxic or unsafe family, work environment, etc. They could have talked about how to identify healthy dynamics in relationships, they could have talked about how the conversations change during the different seasons of life they kept referencing over and over again. They could have thrown in some statistics about how the polarization of America has changed over time. This was what I was hoping for and didn’t get.
Don’t get me wrong it was still a good book, however I was hoping for more of a hard-hitting, research-based guide on challenging relationships than the feel good beach read this came across as. It just didn’t have a lot of information in it that I didn’t already know, or a lot of information at all.
There needed to be more acknowledgement of underlying conflict (both good and bad) that already exists in normal relationships. The relationship you have with your parents is completely different if you are living with them or if you are financially independent, if they are co-signers on your mortgage and your primary source of babysitting, or if you are their primary source of medical support in their old age. The relationship you have with your coworkers changes if you are both up for a promotion, or are dependent on them to finish an important part of a project, or if you are having to be in a supervisory role over them. These are not necessarily bad dynamics, but they change the nature of the relationship completely and this says nothing of the truly bad dynamics that could exist in a toxic or unsafe family, work environment, etc. They could have talked about how to identify healthy dynamics in relationships, they could have talked about how the conversations change during the different seasons of life they kept referencing over and over again. They could have thrown in some statistics about how the polarization of America has changed over time. This was what I was hoping for and didn’t get.