Customer Reviews

Beyond Fear

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

 

 

This is the book for anyone who wants to seriously understand why we operate the way we do in our culture and for anyone battling through any kind of depression or life-angst. It helped me to understand my relationships with everyone in my life, most importantly myself and that unmentionable fear that makes life all too hard to live sometimes. It really is a gift to the world.

After all the psycho babble and clap trap of therapists and experts over the last 15 years, I now finally understand my own behaviour and can use my own knowledge to continue to learn and grow. Dorothy Rowe cuts to the chase and allows us to develop our own thinking as she gives us invaluable insights on the human condition. The depth of this woman's knowledge is extraordinary. This 75 year Aussie got voted one of the sixth wisest people in the UK, so the secret is out.
Run and get this book

After 15 years in the therapy business, and several hundred books on psychology later, (most of them unforgettable except for one or two points) I can state with some authority, that Dorothy Rowe's wisdom is indisputable. She guides you into understanding your deepest fears and deepest secrets and learning to truly love yourself. Not in the 10 easy steps false positive way that is so popular in current psychology, but in ironically both the most simplest way - in appreciating how important understanding whether we feel good or bad as humans is, and in also the most complex as she builds on our belief systems inherited from childhood to the desperate defences we use in order to survive.
Every American should read how she explains "so-called" mental illnesses and truly changes lives by helping others to remember how much they know or how to take control of their lives out of the hands of 'experts', and back into the person who really knows best if only they get support and trust in their own thinking.
Power to you
Maryanne Campbell

This is an important and thorough exposition of the affects of fear (and other factors) in early childhood in the development of the self. It is hard to fault much of the theory of the book (679 pages) but it is still a book of its time. Rowe apparently dislikes psychiatrists and seems to feel they are basically superficial and too ready to classify diagnoses using the DSM and then prescribing harmful drugs. She probably takes the fear concept too far when she talks about schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in light of the recent discoveries of brain research. She also seems to believe ADHD is more a new fashionable diagnosis than a very useful concept of the way some brains function.
There is much more to this book to do it justice here. Thoroughly recommended.

Dorothy Rowe has a great level of respect and known as one of the wisest people to exist in the UK. I'm sure she knows much more than I do about Psychology but with this point in mind, I was particularly disappointed in chapter one's subtitle: Fight or Flight. Seriously? What about 'freeze'? Now granted, I haven't read her whole book and will create an update when I finish, but knowing that she overlooked something so fundamental to our responses makes me doubt how rigorously she assesses even some of the basics. Nevertheless, since I haven't read her whole book, I'll still give her 4 stars on good faith.

I'd been suffering from depression, severe anxiety attacks, an eating disorder and self harm on and off for 14 years when I first picked up one of Dorothy's books after a referral from a friend.
The way Dorothy explains how and why you've construed your desperate defences, is like turning on the light in a dark room. She explained how I'd built my defences in order to protect myself from my fears, defences I didn't even know were there.
She KNEW the lies I'd told myself in order to keep myself safe, she KNEW that I felt as though these matters were life and death and she KNEW how to make it clear so that I could work my way out of the darkness.
I had tried countless times over the years to have someone really understand what I was trying to say, to really understand what I meant when I described how I felt and for someone to really understand how helpless I felt. Dorothy knew it all, all my lies, all my fears, even how I justified my routine purging day after day.
Her book showed me why I was afraid and how that filtered down into all my beliefs and ideals.
On one occasion I remember throwing the book at the wall, not because it was wrong but because she had hit a nerve that I'd never wanted to admit was true. How could she know this if she didn't know me? She made me confront why I was who I was and how'd I'd gotten there. She shows you that by being truly honest you give yourself the choice to heal and to free yourself from the feelings of powerlessness.
Her book conveys astonishing insight.

I think this book is a great asset to the people living day to day with Schizophrenia. I live with it every day and it is very hard to cope with it and having a brother with it.