Customer Reviews

Escaping Toxic Guilt: Five Proven Steps to Free Yourself from Guilt for Good!

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I found myself in this book in ways that surprised me. But when I did find myself, I just felt relieved and unburdened myself of some stuff I was carrying around. This is a easy read - but deceptively insightful, and it covers just about everything....holiday guilt... does that ever ring a bell! I recommend this for anyone that wants to look at their stuff and understand it better - maybe some good changes will follow.

Susan Carrell's Escaping Toxic Guilt has helped me to make sense of tense confrontations and instances of feeling trapped in my own life and in what others have told me about theirs. It has only been about a week since I finished reading it. Nevertheless, I have referred to it in a e-mail to a friend (for the description of Forgiveness on pages 227-229) and have ordered a second copy to send to a friend. There is overlap between the steps for escaping guilt's toxicity given here and the steps for finding ones direction in any situation that make this book universally helpful.

The organization is easy to follow. The stories illustrate the points being made. The personal note is struck just often enough, and does add weight and authenticity.

"Toxic Guilt" is a clear, practical approach to understanding ourselves whether you are in some situation or just want to do some "housekeeping". Dealing with a variety of scenarios, it is written in a straight forward, step by step, logical approach making concepts clear and understandable. There is no "foo foo"ness in the text which allows the concepts and ideas to "ring a bell". I highly recommend it

I feel this book is very applicable to many many of us who struggle with this codependent issue of blaming ourselves too frequently for other people's actions. It is a to-the-point approach which covers so many areas of our lives with a reader friendly format. I will keep this book out to revisit regularly. I bought 2 extra copies to give to friends.

The author has clearly written this book towards a particular niche audience. In my opinion the target audience is someone with no college who considers themselves to be very religious. The writing level is probably around 10th grade and the authors style is to assert, and not argue for, a point and then tell a cute story that illustrates the assertion perfectly.

After I asserted that the writing level was around 10th grade I decided to see what the actual writing level was. I Googled "writing sample analyzer" and typed up about four pages of text from the section titled "Diana: Guilt Ignored" and I found out that I was off; by a lot. The average grade level is in fact 3.24-third grade. The ease of reading was off the chart; in a good way. A score of below 30 is college level; the four pages I typed up had a score of 88.

Overall this would be a cute way to teach my child not to feel guilty all the time. If you are an adult and want something more than a "feel good about yourself book that doesn't teach you anything relevant about guilt (it just provides examples of things that make you feel guilty)" I recommend you read "Guilt: The Bite of Conscience" by Herant Katchadourian.