Bestselling author Melody Beattie returns with a message of hope for difficult times, offering a blueprint for navigating the path of choice, from our everyday concerns to our moments of deepest despair.
This unique collection of profoundly moving personal stories and inspirational prose demonstrates the capacity of the human spirit to overcome suffering through the cultivation of awareness and acceptance, heart and vulnerability, service and surrender. Our ability to determine our most authentic choices and live a life of greater freedom is closer than we think.
Beattie (Codependent No More, The Language of Letting Go) has a gift for mixing traditional 12-step thinking with subtle wisdom from her own life to inspire readers to think beyond mainstream consciousness. Here she relays brief, uplifting tales of people (including herself and Elisabeth K bler-Ross, the late expert on death and dying) who overcame great inner resistance to make major life-affirming decisions. The author's stock meditation passages appear at the end of each story, helping readers absorb the lesson to be learned. Fleetingly covered in prior publications, the theme of making positive life choices is better explored here, although a few trite expressions weaken the book. Beattie does a fine job of discussing the spiritual milieu that we often find ourselves in when faced with a dilemma. Grounded in practical spirituality, she shares what really matters: staying attentive to what is happening after making a hard choice, which helps us to grow as individuals and brings us the peace we have been seeking all of our lives. Recommended for psychology/self-help collections in public libraries. Lisa Liquori, MLS, Syracuse, NY Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Review
“Beattie shares what helps us grow and brings us the peace we have been seeking all our lives.” (Library Journal )
Melody Beattie is one of America's most beloved self-help authors and a household name in addiction and recovery circles. Her international bestselling book, Codependent No More, introduced the world to the term "codependency" in 1986. Millions of readers have trusted Melody's words of wisdom and guidance because she knows firsthand what they're going through. In her lifetime, she has survived abandonment, kidnapping, sexual abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, divorce, and the death of a child. "Beattie understands being overboard, which helps her throw bestselling lifelines to those still adrift," said Time Magazine.
Melody was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1948. Her father left home when she was a toddler, and she was raised by her mother. She was abducted by a stranger at age four. Although she was rescued the same day, the incident set the tone for a childhood of abuse, and she was sexually abused by a neighbor throughout her youth. Her mother turned a blind eye, just as she had denied the occurrence of abuse in her own past.
"My mother was a classic codependent," Melody recalls. "If she had a migraine, she wouldn't take an aspirin because she didn't do drugs. She believed in suffering." Unlike her mother, Melody was determined to self-medicate her emotional pain. Beattie began drinking at age 12, was a full-blown alcoholic by age 13, and a junkie by 18, even as she graduated from high school with honors. She ran with a crowd called "The Minnesota Mafia" who robbed pharmacies to get drugs. After several arrests, a judge mandated that she had to "go to treatment for as long as it takes or go to jail."
Melody continued to score drugs in treatment until a spiritual epiphany transformed her. "I was on the lawn smoking dope when the world turned this purplish color. Everything looked connected--like a Monet painting. It wasn't a hallucination; it was what the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous calls 'a spiritual awakening.' Until then, I'd felt entitled to use drugs. I finally realized that if I put half as much energy into doing the right thing as I had into doing wrong, I could do anything," Beattie said.
After eight months of treatment, Melody left the hospital clean and sober, ready to take on new goals: helping others get sober, and getting married and having a family of her own. She married a former alcoholic who was also a prominent and respected counselor and had two children with him. Although she had stopped drinking and using drugs, she found herself sinking in despair. She discovered that her husband wasn't sober; he'd been drinking and lying about it since before their marriage.
During her work with the spouses of addicts at a treatment center, she realized the problems that had led to her alcoholism were still there. Her pain wasn't about her husband or his drinking; it was about her. There wasn't a word for codependency yet. While Melody didn't coin the term codependency, she became passionate about the subject. What was this thing we were doing to ourselves?
Driven into the ground financially by her husband's alcoholism, Melody turned a life-long passion for writing into a career in journalism, writing about the issues that had consumed her for years. Her 24-year writing career has produced fifteen books published in twenty languages and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles. She has been a frequent guest on many national television shows, including Oprah. She and her books continue to be featured regularly in national publications including Time, People, and most major periodicals around the world.
Although it almost destroyed her when her twelve-year-old son Shane died in a ski accident in 1991, eventually Melody picked up the pieces of her life again. "I wanted to die, but I kept waking up alive," she says. She began skydiving, mountain-climbing, and teaching others what she'd learned about grief.
Choices is a series of short essays, each two or three pages long, each illustrating a point the author wants to make. Some are New Age-y: A woman closing her business is surprised when someone says, "I feel that I should speak to you..." Others are more straightforward and down-to-earth.
I couldn't relate to all -- even most -- of the stories here. If you haven't had the experience, the story is meaningless. Several involve getting tough about relationships.
Two essays were especially powerful: "She saw a monster in her bedroom" is about a woman who realizes she must leave to escape a "monster" husband -- at age seventy-one. Beattie concludes, "It's hard to be a newcomer at anything."
"He had to backtrack" is the story of a young delinquent who turns his life around after a gifted counselor roots out long-buried feelings.
I see each episode as a turning point rather than a choice: each time the protagonist hit bottom, his or her life changed. It's not always about choices: the delinquent doesn't face a crossroads.
I'd probably recommend this book to clients whose lives felt out of control, who wanted role models and examples of taking charge, or who wanted to understand the concept of change.
One negative: Each chapter ends with a small lesson that could be omitted. It's overkill. The book's power comes from the stories and the way Beattie tells them. The lessons themselves are not particularly new or original. Leave them out.
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Like Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, Melody Beattie has come unstuck in time. When Billy Pilgrim ceases to experience his life in chronological order, he learns from the invisible inhabitants of the planet Trafalmadore that life is a collection of moments, and that our job is to concentrate on the good ones and try to ignore the bad.
Melody Beattie is wiser than a Trafalmadorian. With Choices, she takes us on a journey, skipping from one moment to the next, in her own life and the lives of many others. And whether the moment is about celebrating a victory, dealing with a child's death, jumping out of an airplane, taking a horseback riding lesson, or simply being indecisive, Melody will convince you that every moment is important, and that every moment holds the potential for choice.
As a psychotherapist and author (Embracing Fear, HarperSanFrancisco 2002) I frequently emphasize to clients and readers that there is an important difference between being "in control," and being "in charge." Melody's new book is a wonderful collection of lessons about how to be in charge even when we seemingly control nothing.
These lessons are not really unstuck in time; they transend time. They are timeless, and well worth reading.
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This review is from: Choices: Taking Control of Your Life and Making It Matter (Paperback)
I'm a big fan of Melody Beattie's "thought for the day" type books, so this was disappointing. It was a quick read and fundamentally great words for better "choices". It repeated itself ALOT. But, of course some of us need to be reminded over and over....
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