The First Argument is a book illustrating that within a couple's first argument lies the core conflict of a relationship. In one form or another, this conflict presents itself again and again. This repetition can lead to a wall of resignation and despair or, as Sharon M. Rivkin's book points out, become the key that unlocks an opening for healing, leading to an increased freedom to love.
The First Argument provides couples with a powerful technique for releasing themselves from their most tenacious pattern of negativity. As a key to healing, the technique uses the pattern already present, like a genetic code, in a couple's first argument. It is an approach that has a preventive, predictive, and a retroactive healing power. It can be used at any point in a relationship.
Though The First Argument focuses on couples, the book can be used in the context of other relationships: parents and children, friends, and co-workers. The book appeals to men and women equally because it moves away from differences and emphasizes similarities: we are all vulnerable to the particular kind of re-wounding that happens, via a recurrent conflict, in those relationships that elicit our deepest feelings.
The First Argument offers a practical, step-by-step method that will enable readers to break through the layers of frustration and resentment that cloud their most important relationships and find the genuine intimacy that lies below.