Customer Reviews

The Comfort Trap (or, What If You're Riding a Dead Horse?)

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Ignore the editorial reviews of this book, which offer only glowing generalities. Comfort Trap offers the first solid guidance for a challenge faced by many.

Safety, says Sills, "limits the amount of satisfaction any experience can deliver." Yet inevitably, we cling to what feels safe and comfortable. There's nothing wrong with making do and staying put, Sills hastens to add. But if your job or relationship aren't going anywhere, you'd better face facts. Avoid reality and your subconscious may take over: you'll make mistakes that catapult you off the horse, ready or not.

Facing facts calls for creating a vision and studying your past to see if you have a habit of riding dead horses (or, she might have added, killing anything that starts out half-alive).
To her enormous credit, Sills reminds us that delving into the past can create yet another comfort trap. It is only by taking action, making decisions and facing fear that we can actually find a new horse.

To remove yourself, Sills says, calls for discipline, i.e., "the will to get over the wall." It is necessary to follow one's mind rather than one's short-term emotions. And, she recommends, create structures to help you reach your goal.

Most important, you must have a vision -- you thinking of moving to something rather than leaving the horse behind The vision must be under your control, which leaves out visions like "Make Harry a more sensitive person." And the vision must be motivational -- you must be excited enough to get moving.

Sills is a psychotherapist who has, she says, worked long enough to know when to question her training. Yet as a therapist, inevitably she sees clients with relationship rather than career or busines challenges. Not surprisingly, nearly all of Sills's examples focus on love rather than work.

As a career coach, I was drawn to the example of the client who hates the family business but can't earn the same income elsewhere. Rather than question her client's values ("Do you really need this much money?") Sills wisely helps the client develop a vision of working constructively for this business. She creates simple interventions that seem as much like coaching as therapy, e.g., "Start work with that pile of paper. Set an alarm to remind yourself to begin a difficult task."

I would have liked to see more about the way people decide if their horses are really dead. Sills admits that, at some point, you have to "place your bet" with incomplete information. In the self-help world, authors need courage (and a good editor) to say saying, "There is no checklist." However, there are times when people have to weigh tradeoffs, especially if they walk away from a career or marriage with tangible benefits that cannot be replaced. And Sills drops a tantalizing hint when she says, "Sometimes what's dead is you." I'd have liked some clarification.

Overall, this book offers a new way to think about being stuck and I will be recommending Comfort Trap to everyone who visits my own website. It's timely and upbeat, but refreshingly honest. You have to admire a book that, in the 21st century, dares to replace "dream and do it" with "discipline."

We all get stuck. It's human nature to steer towards comfort, and when we find it, to stay. If I once thought--in my youthful verve and idealism--that we are driven first and foremost by the pursuit of happiness, with maturity has come the understanding and accumulated observation that it is often not happiness that drives us, but instead a sense of maintaining our security and safety (real or imagined). Of course, degrees vary with the individual. But it can often be astounding to see to what people cling in order to preserve what Judith Sills, Ph.D., in this book describes as "the comfort trap."

Change is crucial to life. Change is, after all, necessary to growth. While not all change is good, it must happen if we are to indeed find meaning (happiness) in our lives. Yet with change comes risk, and that's the place where we, sooner or later, become stuck. Change and the risk it entails by its very nature can feel like facing a very scary beast. To avoid doing battle with this "beast" (and make no mistake, it is a battle), some of us would do most anything... or do nothing at all, stagnating in place, dead weight floating on the river of life, pushed and pulled this way and that by default, rather than face it. But life does not tolerate stagnation. And so even when we choose not to do anything (and that, too, is a choice), life will make choices for us, force often painful change upon us.

How to deal with change in a more healthy manner? How to avoid getting stuck in a rut? Sills deals with this dilemma in her easily read book, lining out simple (not to be confused with simplistic) strategies. Magic formulas? Not at all. There will probably be nothing here to surprise the reader, but even if one needs nothing more than to bring what is already known to the forefront of awareness, this can be an inspiring and encouraging read. Sills discusses how to recognize when we are stuck in a comfort trap, how to deal with fear that keeps us there, how to begin actively making healthy decisions that will bring about positive changes, how to stop fence sitting, how to start living again. With sample situations from therapy sessions in her own practice involving comfort traps of toxic relationships, career dissatisfaction, family issues, and more, Sills gives a soothing, rational approach that, if one can reach down inside for that elusive courage, can work.

Do not be afraid to get unstuck. Do not be afraid to take risk. Do not be afraid to make major changes in your life. Certainly, these points are easier said than done. The author provides 7 steps to help the reader get unstuck.

According to Judith Sills:

1. Face What Hurts - Stop distracting yourself from the pain.

2. Create A Vision - Visualize a new comfort zone.

3. Make A Decision - Is the horse really dead?

4. Identify Your Pattern - Have you done this before?

5. Let Go

6. Face Your Fear - Name, face and overcome the electric fence of anxiety.

7. Take Action - Change requires action.

Dr Judith Sills is a psychologist with decades of experience of men or women who want to leave a stale relationship but can't get themselves to take that first step, for various reasons - fear of the unknown, not knowing where to go, how to manage, etc. It also covers people being stuck in other situations such as a dead end job, having the boss from hell, being bullied.
The comfort trap is when a situation is bad, but familiar, so it feels safe, even though you are miserable. Sills gets you on the road to breaking through that barrier of fear and taking that next step which will bring you out the other side and change your life.
A great book to give you some life tools and help you muster up the courage to do something.
This book arrived in fantastic condition. I would recommend buying a used book. It saves you money and you see a detailed description of the condition of the book before you buy, so you know what you'll get.

I've got a library of psychobable books and this is the first one that actually moved me from my mind into action. It is the best. I'm giving a copy to my brother for Easter with a note "may you, too, be reborn".

This author gives you the tools to make a break-through. She uses many examples from patients she has seen in private practice. At times the many examples get in the way of the basic advice. Dr. Sills does describe well how easy it is to stay in a comfort zone and not break out. As she says we are on a platform and the way to leave is only by a high-wire; which in turn causes anxiety. She slips in brief advice advocating visiting a professional and for prescription drugs. This book was helpful but brief. It could be a useful advocate for change if read an additional three times for re-enforcement of its principles.

Great Book! The delivery was quick and I am very satified with the quality of serivie I got with Amazon and the seller of the book.

This book was a bit too predictable, and I did not get anything out of it.

On one hand, this book does a fine job of making the reader think : Why not leave a lousy job? Why not leave a unsatisfying relationship? On the other hand it fails to understand today's economic reality. There are a lot of folks out of work today and after begging their landlords to accept a partial payment or telling the bank that the mortgage check is NOT in the mail or having to go to the community food bank so their kids could have dinner these folks would love to have a "safe" but boring job. What the author calls a comfort trap millions of others would call peace of mind.