Customer Reviews

A Different Kind of Health: Finding Well-Being Despite Illness

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Living daily with chronic illness, with the loss of everything familiar, with pain, with the unpredictability of the future, one can become despairing and hopeless. This outstanding book directs one's attention towards a way of living with illness that brings meaning and joy back into one's life. The message of the book has greater meaning because the author speaks from his own pain, and with grace and honesty, shares his own journey back to a life he can embrace. I hope to use the material in this brilliant book in working with groups of people living with chronic illness. Anyone living with illness needs the messages of hope and transformation in this book.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Justice, a colleague of true distinction, at a psychology conference in 2007. Dr. Justice presented a workshop on a subject with which he was intimately familiar-- stroke survival. As a stroke survivor himself, he discovered there were many, many other people like him, who were sick but not sickly, even disabled but not down for the count. According to Dr. Justice, "many persons with chronic disease or disability gain a sense of well-being in the very presence of their disorder." These are people who are happy, hopeful, and enthusiastic about life. They stay connected to other people and become active participants in life. These individuals have discovered that "inner health" and a "sense of well-being" don't depend on your outer circumstances, including even the condition of your body or the state of your health. They don't let infirmity keep them from deriving full meaning and purpose in life. On the contrary, such individuals have found that the disease itself motivates them to change, and that "because of illness or disability they reach deep inside themselves to find ways to be whole."

Dr. Justice clearly practices what he preaches. I call people like him `spunky eldsters," aging individuals who remain full of vitality, stay creative and innovative throughout their entire lives and make the best of diminishing resources. They do not use age or disability as an excuse for living life.

Richard Kownacki, Ph.D. Author of Do Not Go Gentle: Successful Aging for Baby Boomers and All Generations