Making Sense of Suffering: The Healing Confrontation with Your Own Past [Paperback]

J. Konrad Stettbacher (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 9, 1994

Swiss therapist Stettbacher provides a four-step program that enables adults to reconstruct their histories, find and heal their primal childhood traumas. Famed psychotherapist Alice Miller says, "I have undergone this therapy myself and felt its astonishing holistic effect on the body, mind, and emotions."

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Stettbacher, a Swiss psychotherapist, undertakes a thoughtful inquiry into the psychological causes of "primal wounds." These psychological traumas, endured during birth or early childhood, result in the repression of painful memories in the unconscious mind and can cause emotional distress and difficulty many years later. Stettbacher contends that healing these deep unconscious memories requires bringing them into conscious awareness. In order to facilitate this process, he suggests a four-step program of primal therapy, which he employs in his psychotherapy practice. Stettbacher provides a thorough but nontechnical explanation of his therapy, and his four steps are simple enough for anyone to learn. Recommended for self-help collections.
- Elizabeth Salt, Otterbein Coll. Lib., Westerville, Ohio
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Language Notes

Text: English
Original Language: German --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Plume (December 9, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0452011590
• ISBN-13: 978-0452011595
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #261,403 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Valuable for both individuals and professionals, November 18, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Making Sense of Suffering: The Healing Confrontation with Your Own Past (Paperback)

This book suggests a very interesting approach to undoing the damage of psychological trauma. Briefly, the approach is to start with any experience of intense or inappropriate anger and to try to "work backwards," like a detective, to discover if there are repressed emotions, from a prior traumatic event, that are being expressed transferentially in the current situation; and then (if repressed emitions are at the root) to shift attention to the past event. The method suggested for this progression is very efficient and direct. There is more to it than that, including a specific dialogue technique that is used once the transferential connection is uncovered, but that will give you the idea.

Aside from the method, the book has some wonderfully perceptive ideas, and great one-liners. In my view, the following line, which discusses what happens when a child has intense needs that remain unfulfilled, is worth the price of the book: "Eventually the child comes to fear its own needs."

I think this book can be of real benefit both to individuals who are trying to sort out their past, and to therapists who are open to better understanding trauma and approaches to working with trauma patients/clients (with "trauma" broadly defined and including verbal, physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, as well as physical or emotional abandonment, including that produced by parental narcisism). This book is written simply, and the writing style/structure is a bit uneven, but it would be a mistake to be disuaded by that.

Other books that I consider excellent for both individuals and therapists are: anything by Alice Miller (especially Prisoners of Childhood/Drama of the Gifted Child, the first half of For Your Own Good, and Banished Knowledge), Toxic Parents by Susan Forward, Betrayal Trauma by Jennifer Freyd, and the out-of-print Soul Murder by Morton Schatzman (books of the same title, but by different authors, are currently in print; but I recommend the one by Schatzman; try a library or interlibrary loan). These books all penetrate to the core issues.

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A healing book, December 24, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Making Sense of Suffering: 2The Healing Confrontation with Your Own Past (Hardcover)

I discovered this book many years ago while I was undergoing psychotherapy for depression and anorexia nervosa. Contrary to another reviewer, this book does not propose a therapy that is merely talking into a tape recorder.

With the aid of J Konrad Stettbacher's book you can learn how to help yourself become your own advocate and by doing so help your inner child recover from it's past injuries. It is not a cathartic method which simply represses those injuries all again. It is serious and hard work and ongoing.

Alice Miller distanced herself from this book because Stettbacher did not have certain qualifications which she felt he should have. I believe this to have been a mistake on her part. She has also made a mistake in asserting that autism is caused by bad parenting when it is, in fact, a neurological disorder ! Despite these mistakes, Alice Miller's books are invaluable, as is Stettbacher's 'Making Sense of Suffering', and I can neither discount nor forget the glowing foreword and afterword Miller gives his book. Nor can I forget the help I got and continue to get from this book.

51 of 58 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Tread these strange waters with your brain intact, January 20, 2000

By 

Jan Wessman - See all my reviews

This review is from: Making Sense of Suffering: The Healing Confrontation with Your Own Past (Paperback)

Thanks to the customer reviewer who recommended this and several other books on relationships with parents. Regarding this title, I'm always suspicious when a theorist is very outspoken in his or her views but lists no research and no bibliography. I want to know how the views are supported, also how they fit into the history of ideas. Stettbacher lists no research of any kind and acknowledges no one in the evolution of his ideas. The book is supported fore and aft (foreward and afterward) by the famed Alice Miller. In turn Stettbacher titles his "Further Reading" section "Books by Alice Miller" and only lists titles by her.

Yes, Stettbacher has interesting ideas. No, he (and/or the translator) doesn't present these ideas very clearly, completely, or well. Be forewarned. They are very extreme and somewhat dogmatic ideas, in spite of Alice Miller's statement in the book's foreward, "Stettbacher is incorruptible in his judgments... [Stettbacher], unlike myself, dispenses with all polemic."

I believe that one must experience and grieve the pain of the past in order to heal and embrace life. However, Stettbacher's four-step method doesn't go far enough. You get to the pain, sure, but how do you get beyond it? He mentions that healing is a natural process. But he doesn't give enough ways to relax into that process and let it happen. Nor does he give enough ways to encourage it to happen. Say that you were born in a difficult medical situation and/or that your parents intentionally or unintentionally hurt you. What do you do now? It may be necessary to scream things like: "Life hurt me, and it's not fair. I need this. I don't need that." However, screaming like this isn't enough. If your birth and your parents let you down, how are you going to nurture yourself now as you grieve and on throughout life?

If you are well-read in recovery and therapy topics, including research about which types of therapy have been shown to be effective, by all means read this book. If you want to find introductory, balanced and sane support on a healing journey, look elsewhere.

Incidentally, John Bradshaw, who recommends Alice Miller highly, allowed his two-day seminar on healing your relationship with your mother to be taped and sold. Ditto for his similar seminar on healing your relationship with your father. If you want a great weekend retreat (make sure you check it out with your therapist first and/or arrange for backup support from a friend in case things get too heavy) choose one of these taped seminars and go for it.

Supplement your retreat with a copy of Bradshaw's book Homecoming. You'll get into the pain that Stettbacher is so adament about, but you'll also be a lot more likely to find a way beyond it. As imperfect a writer and speaker as Bradshaw is, he is more up front than Stettbacher about where his ideas come from. He is also more clear about what is backed by research and what is more in the line of "interesting, but anybody's guess".