"For most women, love and creative energy feel like the split ends of our psychic and emotional lives. When we focus on relationship, we feel uncomfortable about not accomplishing more. When we focus on our more self-expressive impulses, we feel guilty that we're not relating more. We end up seeing ourselves as divided, frantically trying to balance obligation with need, responsibility with satisfaction." "In Singing at the Top of Our Lungs, Claudia Bepko and Jo-Ann Krestan, internationally renowned family therapists and authors of Too Good for Her Own Good, reveal how real women can, and do, resolve this split. Based on original research with more than three hundred women, Bepko and Krestan identify and describe four dominant life patterns that women create in order to overcome the struggle between love and creativity: lovers - whose compelling and driving passion is for intimate, nurturing love, and relationship with others; artists - who are highly creative women capable of being completely single-minded about their work; leaders - who may be highly creative in their careers, but for whom relational contact is both the focus of their work and the context for it; and innovators - who find that creative self-expression is as much a necessity as relatedness, and are most inventive in blending their relational and mental lives." "In this important, wise, and encouraging book, the authors help women determine if the life pattern they have chosen for themselves is truly fulfilling - a woman may be highly relational, or highly creative, or both, but the key is that she, not others, has defined the form of her life. She pursues a passion of her own; she sings at the top of her lungs." "Ultimately, Singing at the Top of Our Lungs can help all women open up new worlds of possibility for themselves, with new appreciation for their own powerful potential."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved… (more)