Customer Reviews

Hiding from Love

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have read almost everything I can get my hands on to help me understand myself, my ex, and why it all went wrong. I finally feel like I understand why we have the defenses we do, and why it's so hard to snap out of it. The author combines years of solid experience working with people in real clinical situations with inspirational insight into issues of the heart in light of the Biblical understanding God gives us about how He created us. This book was rare for me, because it is solid and specific about why we are afraid to reach out and grasp what we most need to truly heal. I found it especially different because it addresses the problem of well-meaning Christians who come across as judgemental when they are really trying to be loving and helpful, as well as the tendency sometimes in counseling to provide acceptance and safety without the truth and responsiblity we need to grasp the power to actually change. It is refreshing because it is solid, specific, and treats us as complex, wonderful but fallable children of God who are hurting and so to protect ourselves from further injury we hide, afraid to reach out and try again. But it is not a how-to formula book so much as a scriptural guidebook to see how God made us and how he heals us. This book is not just the same old same old. For me, this book was tremendously important for unlocking hurts and helping me understand. It's not as easily readable as some of his other books like Changes that Heal, Boundaries, or Safe People, but I think it builds on the others and goes deeper. It's about exactly what it says it is, why we hide from love and how to safely come out of our fears and become who we were created to be.

Hiding From Love provided me with the insight I needed to understand all the why's I had dealt with my entire life. At the age of 45 I was finally able to understand why I had felt so "unlovable", "insecure" and "stupid" as a child, that there were very valid reasons for my thinking that way about myself that were NOT MY FAULT. I began to see myself with confidence, and worthy of being loved, for the first time in my life! I would recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone struggling with childhood abandonment issues.

Every person has a desire for intimacy. Sometimes this desire is overriden by fear. The disabling behavior I learned as a child and continued through my adult life has been identified and replaced with constructive behavior. "Hiding from Love" was key in this transformation. My fear has been replaced with empathy and a real capacity for giving and receiving love. I admire every book that comes from the "Minerith-Meier Clinics", or as they are now called, "New Life Live".

Great book. This book changed my life and it will truly change yours as well. It teaches why we withdrawal within ourselves. It helps us to understand why we do and what we can do about it. Outside influences, home life growing up, our self esteem; these are all factors that contribute to why we do the things we do. This book will help you get in touch with yourself much more than you ever thought possible. You will never be the same again after reading this book. I recommend it as well as buy it for others. Enjoy!

In this book the author (who is the co-author with Henry Cloud of the Boundaries series) uses an extended allegory to explain the problem that many people have in their relationships. In the allegory, a girl has to hide from enemy forces that have taken over her town. She learns not to trust anyone especially soldiers in uniform. Eventually when friendly, liberating forces arrive she responds to them in the same way i.e. with fear, mistrust and hatred. This allegory is presented as a picture of the tendency of people who have suffered emotional hurt or abuse to take these experiences forward into their subsequent relationships.

The author argues that typically these experiences manifest themselves in four destructive ways:

* The inability to recognise both good and bad in people / situations
* Attachment deficits - the inability to open up to people emotionally or to allow them to get close to you
* Separation deficits - the inability to say "No" to certain people, to establish boundaries with people, always feeling the need to do what people say, to agree with people regardless of one's true feelings
* Authority and adulthood deficits

The author discusses in detail many things that may help to repair the deficits in these areas. I strongly recommend that people read the book for themselves. However here is a list of principles which I personally have found helpful:

Recognising Good and Bad
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Give up the need for perfection both in ourselves and in the world around us. Stop striving for the ideal. Accept that "good enough" is good enough.

Accept that both we ourselves and the people around us are not 100% good or bad but a mixture of good and bad.

Think of the people that we admire and respect. Are we in danger of putting them on a pedestal? Dwell for a moment on their bad points. Notice how they are a mixture. Try not to idealise people; it will just make it more difficult when they do let us down. At the same time notice how despite their bad points, we can still appreciate the good in them.

Recognise where we have been in denial about our own personal failings and errors. Accept responsibility for our mistakes. Confess our mistakes to other people and give them the opportunity to accept and forgive us; this could be the start of healing for them as well as for us.

Think of some people that we have come to dislike - perhaps people that we try to avoid. What is it about them that made us start to dislike them? Can we think of any good points about them? Have we been fair in our judgement of them?

Recognise that most days are a mixture of good and bad. Sometimes we say that a day (eg a day out or a holiday) has been "completely ruined" by one thing going wrong. Try to see that that is not true - one small problem should not cancel out a whole period of time when everything has been more or less OK.

Make sadness our ally rather than our enemy. Most people recognise that grieving the death of a loved one is a normal part of the healing process and that suppressing one's emotions in such circumstances is not a healthy way of dealing with it. However this principle is also true in less traumatic situations; the grieving process can be a vital way to bring about recovery from any kind of disappointment. Sadness and grieving can be God's way of resolving past hurts.

Attachment Deficits
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Don't allow the bad experiences with people in the past to drive us into a state of isolation. If we are prone to doing this, we need to find safe, warm relationships in which emotional needs will be accepted and not subjected to criticism and judgement. Healing comes from openness to people. Clearly this does require that we take risks with our needs, a great deal of patience and perseverance, and a determination not to retreat into hiding when people do let us down. We need always to bear in mind the principles above i.e. that everyone is a mixture of good and bad.

Separation Deficits
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If we have difficulty saying "No" to people, or feel a pressure always to agree with everyone, we may need consciously to "practice disagreement" i.e. go out of our way to disagree with people and to emphasise our own opinions.

Ask God to help us to become truth tellers even of negative truth

Find people who celebrate our separateness i.e. people who respect and accept our "No" as well as our "Yes"

Learn to respect other people's separateness i.e. respect other people's 'no' as much as their 'yes'

Authority and Adulthood
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Recognise if a particular person or people have an excessive or unhealthy degree of control over us. Do we relate to that person almost like a child towards a parent rather than as two adults? (This can include relationships between parents and their grown up children. "Good parenting should culminate in a relationship based on friendship and equality, not continued control").

See authority as a positional not a personal issue - eg we should give a manager the respect and submission that his position demands, but that doesn't mean being blind to his faults. Also we need to remember that authority has limits and parameters. We need to recognise what these are.

Take an inventory of our values and convictions. Ask ourselves, "what do I believe?", then find out "why do I believe it?"

Develop your talents. Adulthood involves finding out what our passion is, what we really want to accomplish in our lives and what gifts we have to do it. This may be different from our family's expectations.

I was gripped by anxiety and panic attacks since my early teens, but didn't realize it until my mid-40s. Once I hit bottom in my relationships, and had to face the facts, I turned to Dr. Townsend's book and found the answer. My early childhood trauma had imprisoned me in a childish emotion that I had to overcome.

He not only helps you recognize where and how this can grow from early childhood, but describes specific steps to healing, including the spiritual aspects as well as how to recognize old habits that built up as a defense against the pain.

I highly recommend this to anyone that had a wrenching early childhood experience (i.e. alcoholic parents, abandonment or abuse)and wants to begin to live life in close relationships rather than loneliness, shame and guilt.

I think many readers may find this book useful.

Whether you find it useful may depend on whether you are a beginner, that is, on your past exposure to self-development or spiritual growth reading. If you already have strong habits of introspection, you may find the approach of the book too simple for you. (The book is more about "withdrawal" than about fear of or struggle with intimacy.)

However, if you have not had much chance analyze your past, and want an approach that relies on a traditional foundation, then it book may be very useful to you.

Book Review: This book is a wonderful tool to use for those who have deep hurts and maybe have already sought some counseling but still need more resolution. As someone who has survived deep hurts, I believe it is important to continue seeking to heal and learn, in order to love and be loved. I was dealing with a nasty bit of depression and using this book helped me to work through it. It is not difficult to read and works really well with the workbook.

Workbook Review: Hiding from Love attracted my attention because, as a single, I was struggling with depression and old wounds that just seemed to frustrated me. I needed some guidance to walk through "stuff" and yet I didn't want to go through formal therapy (I couldn't afford it anyway.) So I picked up the book and workbook and started making my way though it, 2 or 3 sections at a time. The questions are thought provoking and helpful tools in identifying where change not only needs to happen, but (AND THIS WAS SO IMPORTANT) it helped me feel like I wasn't crazy and that I COULD change. I don't think reading the book alone could have helped me to deal with issues as thoroughly. I used the workbook alone but I'm sure in a small, very intimate group it could work well, perhaps even better.

One of the best things about this book is that he backs up what he is saying by scripture. So you know the book is really based on the Bible. He also tells a lot of stories about other people which makes you feel as if it is not just a bunch of information being shoveled on you. I am only on chapter 4 but I have already learned so much about myself and the things that I have hidden in my life and why I have hidden them. I cannot wait to get further into the book and to start to learn how to change it!

I bought this book for a friend on what I thought at the time was some urging of the Spirit of God. The message is absolute spiritual dynamite of the best sort. Before giving it to my friend, however, I read the first paragraph or so of a few chapters to test the book out. As a result, I have decided not to give it to him.

In my admittedly limited exposure to this book, I found many illustrations of people, all female, all speaking to female concerns with "security," the very thing that can cause women to build up walls that keep out the good as well as the bad. The most excellent advice seems to be, "Start taking down those walls for the right people." However, this is spelled out in a way that did not speak to me at all as a man. Indeed, men with superiority/insecurity complexes might be easily misled by pride after cracking this book, simply because of the feminine bent to it all. Their response might be something like "Oh, this is ridiculous. I am not concerned for myself like these women are. These examples are alien to me, and do not speak to me." The denial of insecurity would be false, but the latter statement about the book's examples would be completely true if you ask me.

I admit I have limited exposure to the book, but I don't think I'd recommend it for males.