Customer Reviews

Anxious to Please: 7 Revolutionary Practices for the Chronically Nice

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have the same problem with this book that I do with other self-help/spirituality books that are based on Western Buddhism: They all have the same basic framework, and they all simply cause me to be _more_ neurotic, and to beat myself up even more.

The biggest thing I have a problem with is this book's self-professed foundation: "Awareness." All of these Western Buddhism-inspired books tell you to pay attention to every thought and feeling. You're not supposed to do anything with it; you're just supposed to neurotically obsess about every process that goes on in your mind. This is a problem first and foremost because a lot of what happens in your mind is meant to be automatic, without you thinking about it. It's true that any self-help books tries to help you change these automatic, hurtful negative behaviors, but that's the second big problem with this constant vigilance: You aren't given in-depth instructions in this book on what to do with these observations.

And, really, to tell a Nice Person or a codependent person to increase their vigilance is just cruel: We're all hypervigilant to begin with, so if one of our habits is to judge what we do - and it is - then this is only going to make things worse, especially in the short term. This book even issues you a warning that this practice will increase your anxiety in the short term.

Comparing this book to No More Mr. Nice Guy!, the latter is clearly superior. When I read No More Mr. Nice Guy!, I feel empowered, good -- better. I feel like my life is getting better the more I read that book. That's not the case with this book. And No More Mr. Nice Guy is _filled_ with activities, and that's where the true progress is made.

If you like the approach of being aware of your patterns you want to change, I suggest the book When Panic Attacks: The New, Drug-Free Anxiety Therapy That Can Change Your Life. In that book, you're given concrete, pen-and-paper tools that help you observe and work through negative emotions. You're also given hundreds of pages of tools to help you figure out how to heal from these patterns.

This book, at one point, quotes the book A General Theory of Love. That book explores the theory of neural networks, and this book makes a lot out of "ruts"/patterns/neural pathways that form our negative patterns and what makes them so stubborn. It's true that you have to do something different in order to establish more helpful, positive, "happy" pathways, but while this book offers scattered, inconcrete, almost breathlessly "spiritual" descriptions and reasons to change, it fails to give us many tools.

Some of the information in the introductory chapters are useful purely from an intellectual/historical perspective, but I got little practical use/exercises out of this book.

Anxious to Please is a great book for anyone who has problems being too nice (if you find yourself always trying to please other people, or apologizing a lot, or worrying what other people think). Just read the nice list in the first chapter and you'll know if it's you. This book explains the psychological source of the problem (anxious attachment), where it came from and how it works. More importantly, the main portion of the book is devoted to 7 practices which are solid advice about how to change things - become more self-loving, strong and confident, without losing the ability to be kind. I highly recommend this book!

After reading Anxious to Please I had insight into some of my mother's behavior. My memories include her obsessive baking of desserts and giving them away to coworkers, neighbors, doctors, anyone she had contact with. She often couldn't pay her bills but always had money to buy the ingredients for her gifts. It is obvious now that she was one of the original "chronically nice" people. She wanted to be liked by everyone (except perhaps family members who were locked into a relationship by blood). None of these people became real friends.

My husband also identified his father as one of the chronically nice, though he treated his wife very poorly. He gave big parties for extended family and acquaintances paying for literally truck loads of liquor. His dad also bought people (would be friends) gas for their cars. Generous to a fault? The family was not well to do, and his mother worked in a factory.

This book will, no doubt, give others insight into themselves and into friends and family. I suspect many people will recognize relatives, who might not have always been nice to them, but who gave away time and things to strangers in a quest to be liked.

Dana Paulinski MSW

Reading Anxious to Please was like having a light turned on in my life. "Wow, that's my stuff. I do those things. THAT'S ME!" The good news is, Anxious to Please helps you clean it all up with simple, practical steps anyone can follow. The book itself is easy to read and navigate through and return to again and again. What I especially liked (and found useful as illustrations) were the real-life case studies/examples that were always dead-on hitting the mark. The practices take you out of the darkness where you can see, identify, and then correct habitual behavior. And in the process, forge better and stronger relationships, both old and new. Thanks Rapson and English.

Being "nice" in every situation--especially in love relationships--often will not get you the positive strokes you crave. The authors of this book, both Recovering Nice Guys, tell how some of us fall into the pattern of being Chronically Nice--and how these behaviors work against our happiness and success. This book presents an intelligent, engaging, inspirational and genuinely useful plan for recognizing and overcoming these destructive behaviors. In these pages, you'll likely recognize yourself or someone you love. In fact, a male friend saw the book on my shelf and he went over to it immediately and he took it off the shelf and flipped through it and he said, "Can I read this?" He took it with him when he left. Now I'll have to get myself another copy!

Anxious to Please is a thoughtful, well-organized discussion of the reasons that some people have difficulties with relationships because they feel compelled to always be nice. They deal with situations by not making waves rather than honestly responding to the situation. It's a book about behaviors that are all too common in our society and that lead to many of the difficulties in our relationships. It presents a clear, consistent approach to improving communication by being more honest and open with oneself and others. I heartily recommend the book to anyone who feels too anxious to please. Sema Labovitz

Added in May, 2009:

I had only skimmed the book for operational concepts in my previous review for the purpose of determining books to use for bibliotherapeutic purposes in a group setting.

Had I had the time to read the book word-for-word, I would have given it a five-star rating despite my various minor upsets. The authors have done one of the best jobs I have ever seen of reducing the formal operational concepts of attachment-scheme-driven codependence to the concrete operational level. For that alone, A2P deserves five stars.

This is possibly the best book on the topic I have yet run across, and that includes everything Evans, Mellody and Beattie have written, as well as Cermak, Weinhold & Weinhold and Lissette & Kraus. Mellody's =Facing Love Addiction= may be the only thing out there in this book's league at this time.

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I have to admit that I often grit my teeth when someone hands me a self-help book to look over because they want me to put a stamp of approval on their excitement about it. In many cases, it's because I can see that the person who's handed me the book has had a few major discoveries, but clearly has yet to make others.

In a few, however, I can see that the person has moved from some pretty wretched state of depression, anxiety or even psychosis to a far more functional place... and I am very curious as to why. Such was the case when I was told about =Anxious to Please=, so I willingly took the book and looked through it. What I found helped me to understand a little more about why this particular person has come so far in their recovery from severe child abuse, as well as the typical course of case mismanagement that so often takes a bad situation and makes it a lot worse.

Rapson and English cover a lot of ground in the general pigeonholes of "codependence," "approval-seeking," "dominance and submission," and "sadomasochism." And they do so without giving much credit to those who developed the ideas they have distilled into more accessible language (e.g.: Pia Mellody, Patricia Evans, Claudia Black, Janet Woititz, Timmen Cermak, John Bowlby, Diana Baumrind, Erik Erikson, Pierre Janet, Alfred Adler, many others). This bothers me only because lay readers tend to think the ideas they read in such books have sprung entirely from the minds of the authors, and they are cheated from finding the earlier material from which they may gain great value.

And as so many authors do nowadays, perhaps because they're not as ancient as I am and did not get it from any instruction in "games theory" (a terrifically useful nosology all but ignored in most current MFC and LCSW programs), the authors ignore the Karpman Drama Triangle, the single most useful graphic explanation of approval-seeking and dominance-submission dynamics I know of.

Nevertheless, =Anxious to Please= is a very worthwhile read for those who were overwhelmed by narcissistic, invalidating, verbally abusive parents (more or less in the mode of the stories I hear from those who attend Adult Children of Alcoholics 12 Step meetings, for example). The trait descriptions remind me of those from ACA and Co-Dependents Anonymous (CoDA). Cognitive-behaviorist that I am, I would have preferred it if Rapson and English had gone a step further and separated their trait descriptions into thought, emotion / sensation (affect), and behavioral categories for the sake of seeing the causal chains described by Beck, Ellis, Seligman, Wessler, Young and all the rest. Most patients derive tremendous self-empowerment and ego-decontamination from identifying such linkage.

That said, the material on attachment schemes (straight out of Bowlby and Ainsworth, albeit without citation) is very good for a mass-market book, as is the progression of trait data leading from denial through contemplation on to acceptance of such traits in oneself (or self-identification; see Prochaska and DiClemente on the stages of recovery).

"Anxious attachment is the condition that all Nice People have in common" and "Anxiously attached children are hypersensitive to rejection and desperate for morsels of kindness" are typical of the large-type "call-outs" intended to foster self-recognition (identification / acceptance).

The brief discussion of the cultural / environmental influences of family, religion, business organizations, the media, "commercialized sexuality," idealized role modeling and external sources of approval is also excellent for a mass-market readership.

There's first-rate material here on transferences from early life relationships into the adolescent and adult social realm including idealization, pedastalizing, icon worship, romantic delusions and the hugely distorted concept of "unconditional love." (The authors lean toward the notion that there is no such thing, and I agree. The concept has been twisted into a fantasy, and worse, a manipulation. I expect Carl Rogers would be pretty upset about the corruption of his original concept of "unconditional positive regard" if he were still around.)

Rapson and English offer "7 Practices" to offset the corruptive socializations of Western culture. I may not care for some of the verbiage (the "warrior practice" strikes me as New Age babble), but the ideas back of them are pretty solid: Every one provides building blocks for effective boundary-setting so long as the reader does not go too far with them.

Therapists looking to help patients move through denial and contemplation into identification and commitment may do well to turn those patients onto this book, albeit with consideration that patients who have not learned to tolerate ambiguity or see "some good and some bad" (vs. "all good and all bad") may run too far with some of the material here.

Finally, those who have self-identified as "codependents," can be expected to gain further insight into, as well as useful tools for their recovery from, the dominance-and-submission games typical in their interpersonal experience.

This "anxious attachment" concept is new to me, but I have to say that it describes me well. Not only has this book helped me to understand myself, but it also gave me some new insights and ideas about how to more effectively communicate and relate to people.

Sure, it's good to be nice, but you may be "too nice." If you are clingy, care too much what others think of you and minimize the bad personalities of the people around you, then your niceness may be hurting you. Authors James Rapson and Craig English recommend seven practices that will put you on the road to a more balanced emotional life - many of these approaches will be familiar to readers who have engaged in any sort of meditation or self-awareness exercises. Lists, sidebars and quotes make the book's ideas easily accessible - although integrating these practices into your daily life will require some work. We recommend this book to self-help beginners who are tired of having sand kicked in their faces and wish to develop their tranquility and strength of character.

One of the things the authors talk about in this really useful book is taking the time to examine your core beliefs. This is an essential pre-req to what they call "warrior practice." Makes sense, it is a lot easier to fight for something you believe in.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the GS risks a lot, not only in helping the half-dead stranger in the ditch, but he deliberately does NOT do it anonymously.

It takes guts to write a book like this. It takes guts to read it, examine yourself, and start making a change.

To all of you nice guys (and gals)- read the book. Practice. Band together.

Remember the motto of a famous English warrior band: "Honi soit qui mal y pense."