Customer Reviews

Here Be Dragons: The Psychological Problem, Cause & Cure

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Manuel J. Smith has come out with a new and much needed book on assertiveness. Assertiveness means nothing more than making desions based on your own understanding of the facts. Doing this, as Smith explains involves using higher brain functions.

When we are made to feel guilty or shameful or angry in someway, a reflex gets triggered and we adopt a flight/fright response involving the more primitive brain. So, says Smith, if we are assertive we need to find a way to employ higher brain functions. As Smith explains it, the answer to assertiveness come in the form of another reflex which, when triggered, automatically sets higher brain functions
into motion.

In earlier works, Smith provided his readers with practical "assertive responses" which are easily memorized and serve to trigger the reflex which employs higher brain functions. The problem, however, was getting people to use these responses. In his new book, Smith addresses the idea of "self-talk". Here Smith teaches you how to apply "assertive responses" to negative or crooked self-talk, to trigger the higher brain reflex, and enable more assertive living.

Fans of CBT will say that Smith is just "training" the subconscious. However, Smith makes the case that his approach to self-talk works much quicker than CBT ever could.

There a weakness with this book. The book is partly self-help and partly a professional address to fellow psychologist about Smith own brand of behaviorism.
Thus, the narrative voice seems to amble from an informal address to a professional one. Also, since I am not a professional, I could have done without the latter part.
(Since he dealt with professional matters, I wish he would have examined the idea of the "freeze" response as being something other than flight/fright and having to do with the engagement of the "social instinct" or "smart vagus")

In terms of the self-help, the book is WONDERFUL and SHOULD BE READ BY EVERYONE. It has all the virtues of a Smith book: it is deeply practical, funny, and it makes perfect sense.

Dr. Smith builds on his classic WHEN I SAY NO I FEEL GUILTY, using the assertive techniques with special emphasis on FOGGING (agreeing with the truth, odds or principle of what your critics say) and NEGATIVE INQUIRY -- inquiring about the criticism to either get to the point of what is really the problem, or exhausting the critic.

He gives an extremely helpful look at the phenomenon called "psychological problem," and shows how it develops. He then gives a system that anyone can use to work through problems.

It has helped me to face up to my nagging "inner critic" -- that nasty little voice in my imagination that loves to tell me about what a loser I am and how I'll never succeed. In fact, I've found it helpful to actually write down the inner critic's accusation and write my assertive responses to them!

It might help to read WHEN I SAY NO I FEEL GUILTY first, but the book can also stand on its own.

Do you get defensive often and wish you didn't?

Are you afraid of being criticized?

Are you scared to death of people thinking less than perfect about you?

Do you hate it when you make a mistake?

Would you rather die than make a fool out of yourself in front of people?

Are you suffering from the loss of your loved ones? A painful breakup? A divorce?

This book will teach you how to effectively solve all these problems and more using a scientifically proven technique called Orienting Reflex Methodology. Basically it puts you through a very uncomfortable barrage of personal negatives about you (or what's called "flooding") and you're given a very simple task of calmly agreeing to their truth or probability. For example:

Someone else: You're so stupid that you'll never succeed in your life.
Me: You might be right, I think that myself, too.
Someone else: I bet you have a problem in bed, too.
Me: How did you know? I have so many problems in bed!
Someone else: No one's gonna read your crappy reviews!
Me: I wouldn't read it myself, either.

The reason behind this somewhat idiotic procedure is simple and yet mind-blowing. Listen carefully: when we get emotional, defensive, nervous, or anxious about anything, we resort to the defensive reflex that activates our sympathetic nervous system. When we process information or focus on a task, we resort to the orienting reflex that activates our parasympathetic nervous system. The crucial fact is that these reflexes are mutually antagonistic, meaning that when we start to, for example, process information, we can effectively reduce our emotional response.

And by practice and flooding, we can reliably desensitize ourselves to any personal negatives that have been bothering the hell out of you for your entire life in as short as TWENTY minutes.

This helps you to become a psychological adult, someone who can 1) rise above any conflict, 2) cope with pretty much any personal negatives without being painfully affected or influenced by them, and 3) be your own judge of what you do and what reality is.

Having sung the praise of this excellent book, however, I must point out a few flaws. The author speaks in a mix of jargon and layman's terms in first three chapters, making them pretty tough to get through. He is clearly not an expert at punctuation, glaringly evinced by his consistent failure to properly place hyphens. Finally, I thought the last chapter on beliefs and critical thinking to be completely useless, uninformative, and utterly boring. That may have to do with my background as a philosophy major.

I recommend reading Chapter 4 and the subsequent chapters that are relevant to your problems, and going back to the first 3 chapters to fill in the theoretical gaps that may surface in reading those invaluable chapters.

EVERYONE should read it.
Can't recommend it highly enough.