Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: Uncovering the Secret to the Love You Want

By Dee Carroll

#1 International Bestseller on Amazon in TEN categories in the US and AU. Including Dating, Relationships & Spirituality, Family & Personal Growth, Personal Transformation & Spirituality, and Psychology of Personalities in the US. Christian Love & Marriage, Christian Relationships, Inner Child, Interpersonal Relationships, and Women's Health in AU.

 

Always picking the wrong guys?
Worried there's something wrong with you?
It's time to ditch the past and create the love you crave.

Today, you will begin separating the best relationship advice from the myths you've been told about love. Learn how to break out of toxic patterns, heal the heartbreak of failed relationships, and finally get the happily-ever-after you deserve.

You can undo the social conditioning that's pushed you into bad relationships and kept you from finding true love.

In Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places, you'll learn how to permanently change the game, moving beyond the patterns that keep you stuck and hurting. Dr. Dee will show you how to:

• Overcome your fears around dating
• Stop falling into the same traps
• Love your life even while waiting for true love
• Attract the right partner
• Discover the number-one secret to permanent love and personal happiness

Don't let the past write the future. And don't give up.

Simply open the pages of this book today and start writing a tomorrow with true love at the center!

• Language: English
• Publisher: AlCinde Publishing
• Release date: Feb 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798987709108

Book preview

Yes, you read that right.

This is a full disclaimer: you’re reading a how to find love book written by someone who has had four failed marriages. Why take advice from someone with four marriages that ended in divorce?

Because hindsight is twenty-twenty, and it’s absolutely priceless.

It’s hard to see patterns when you’re already stuck in them. It’s hard to see past the chemical cocktail we call love and spot red flags before it’s too late. It’s hard to know what you want if you’ve never defined it.

Just think about all those people who stay in a relationship even when they know in the pit of their stomachs that the relationship is not right. Somewhere in their hearts, they realize it’s doomed before it begins—yet they hang on and move ahead with it.

I did that. And I suffered the consequences—four times.

Of course, I’m not the only one who has made that kind of mistake. Every June, which is the most popular wedding month of the year, thousands of couples say I do, and they commit to a blissful, lifelong relationship filled with joy, passion, friendship, support, and, hopefully, everlasting love.

But sadly, it doesn’t always work out that way.

You may have heard that 50 percent of marriages end in divorce, but even that is a misleading number. It doesn’t mean that the half of marriages that last are healthy and happy. According to relationship experts, far too many of the ones that last become bitter and dysfunctional. And even though some recent studies show the divorce rate dropping, that doesn’t mean more people are living happily ever after.

As Harvard psychology researcher Daniel Gilbert has said, It’s not marriage that makes you happy, it’s happy marriage that makes you happy. People in unhappy marriages experience a spike in happiness once the marriage is dissolved. [1]

I became self-aware of the patterns I was stuck in only after the fact. It took some painful experiences to give me the insight I needed. Isn’t it ironic that we learn so much more from adversity than we do from an easy life? At least I did, and I’m sharing everything I learned so you don’t have to.

I was making my life choices based on a lot of social pressures, cultural stories, and downright foolish expectations of change. But even though all four of my marriages ended badly, I wouldn’t call them failures. They were powerful teachers.

Here’s how it happened for me.

I was born in Florida. My home was one in which my father abused me verbally, emotionally, and physically.

My mom did the very best she could with what she had to work with. Most parents aren’t equipped to help their kids through that kind of trauma, even though it’s rather ordinary. She took a position of patient resilience: God will get us through. We will pray, and we will get through this.

My mom believed that this was the hand we were dealt and we were just going to ride it out. Whenever she did try to intervene during one of my dad’s violent outbursts, he would take it out on her, right in front of us kids. No one was immune. When I married for the first time, I did it because I couldn’t wait to get out of that house. Marriage was supposed to be my way out.

I grew up in a poor and dysfunctional family yet yearned for the good life. By the time I became a young woman, I was clear on what I didn’t want in a man. But, like many others, I didn’t know what I did want. I constantly fantasized about men who represented everything my father wasn’t.

Fortunately, my mother always encouraged me to go after my life’s desires. Because she taught me to expect to achieve, I always knew I would have a dynamic career, a good education, and financial success.

Upon earning a BS degree in psychology and my PhD in business administration and management, I became a speaker, author, coach, and consultant. I appeared before the United States Senate Committee on Housing and Urban Affairs, was in a featured CNN segment on the success of minority-owned businesses, and also a featured ABC segment discussing my book, Emotional Emancipation. (That book is about reinvention and transformation after overwhelming and insurmountable trials, tribulations, and adversities.) Additionally, I managed a multimillion-dollar business for twenty-eight years.

Obviously, I was quite accomplished on the outside, but my personal (love) life hadn’t met my expectations. In business, I was (and still am) a fearless and driven woman. Can you believe that after all I’d accomplished, I was still looking for a man to complete me, validate me, and show me what love was?

I NEEDED LOVE. I was desperate for it.

Perhaps you also know how that feels.

Lessons may come gently and sweetly for some. But in my experience, most have roared in like a tornado that shakes up my life, forces me to my knees, and only then reveals itself.

I went from an abusive home to a string of marriages that were completely wrong for me. And each time, I learned a little more. I’m sharing these experiences in the hope that you can avoid painful lessons and find true, lasting love the right way, in the right place and time.

Marriage Number 1: Just Like Home

We met young and married quickly. I was just out of high school. I chose him based on what I saw my parents go through—and, quite frankly, because he was my ticket out of my abusive childhood home.

He started abusing me verbally right away. I should have gotten out then.

Within six months, he was smacking me around.

I had been through this before, and here I was, the girl who said it wouldn’t happen to her. History was repeating itself. Based on what I’d witnessed and experienced at home, I knew my marriage was headed in a bad direction. I also knew I wasn’t going to put up with what I had escaped