Customer Reviews

Reinventing Your Life: The Breakthough Program to End Negative Behavior...and Feel Great Again

5 star:		(43)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

For those of us who have read endless books on Cognitive / Bahaviour approaches to depression, anxiety and personality disorders, this one is most welcome: First of all, it is not simplistic, naive and patronising, like it often is with self help books. Second, the authors can empathise and demonstrate knowledge of 'what it feels like'. Third, the book is not solely based on the main principle of cognitive therapy that changing your thinking is the first step to changing your emotions. The authors describe how learning patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving in childhood can affect adult life; these patterns, often hidden under totally different circumstances, appear again and again. The authors make this pattern abstraction and repetition very clear, and suggest ways that this can be broken. This is the popular book version of the authors' research on schema theory; it is a very balanced book, addressing emotions and thoughts in a way that the dry cognitive therapy approach cannot achieve. It has been the most helpful book to me to date, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who has had enough of naive readings and is seriously looking for explanations, answers and suggestions.

Even though this book was originally published in 1993 and Schema Therapy has evolved further (which is what this book covers), the information is just as valuable today. This is an easy-to-read book that helps you identify limiting patterns or life traps (schemas) that originated in childhood and adolescence. Are you extremely anxious in social settings? Do you worry unrealistically about your health? Do you feel that you are essentially flawed, worthless, or incompetent? Do you become extremely upset when someone close to you disagrees with you? Do you find it difficult or impossible to form healthy relationships? Do you repeatedly get involved with people who abuse you? Do you avoid relationships? These and many other patterns are covered in this book, along with a technology for identifying yours and how to heal them. The first step is to recognize your life traps, which this book assists you in doing through detailed questionaires. You also learn about your misguided attempts to cope, which actually maintain the life traps. Then the author assists you in challenging these limiting patterns via various cognitive, behavioral, and experiential strategies. Highly recommended!!! --Fred P. Gallo, PhD, author of Energy Psychology: Explorations at the Interface of Energy, Cognition, Behavior, and Health, Second Edition (Innovations in Psychology), Energy Tapping, and Energy Tapping for Trauma: Rapid Relief from Post-Traumatic Stress Using Energy Psychology

I love this book. I have read many books in my efforts to heal from anxiety/fear/paranoia, depression, and a poor self-image. There are many books that have helped me, and this one is in the Top 10. I am happy to say that I no longer suffer from those problems! I credit the books I've read, changing my thought patterns, my voyage of personal inner growth/soul-searching/discovery, making changes in my lifestyle, and getting away from people in my life who were toxic/negative/abusive. This book made me realize that some "old wounds" I thought I had recovered from ... had not fully healed yet. It also illuminated some wounds I hadn't thought about before, and provided ways to try to heal from them. I found this book to be very touching. The authors' insight and empathy is commendable.

If you belong to the target audience of this book, that is, people that have had to face some serious childhood problems (feeling abondoned, abused, overprotected, having an addicted parent, ...), this book may help you onto the track to recovery, and do what it promises: ending the negative behavior you may have developped as result of your childhood problems. It contains questionnaires to diagnose which lifetraps may apply to you and to what degree (ranging from "does not apply" to "a core lifetrap").

If you have to face such a lifetrap, I adhere to the idea of working out a multidisciplinary approach to treat the lifetrap. The idea is to both deal with the problem source as it comes from childhood, as well as to teach behavioral skills (related to emotional intelligence). Yet, I agree with the authors that self-help books may make change seem easier than it actually is, especially if you have to deal with problems as the ones they describe.

To get a fifth star, the book would have to be expanded with examples of less serious childhood problems, or to include people that only have to cope occasionally with the lifetrap symptoms. Also, I would like to see some more positive examples, or what one has to do if one had the luck to live a "normal" childhood. Finally, this book is more focussed on the therapeutical part, than on the behavioral part (emotional intelligence skills) needed to have the full multidisciplinary solutions the authors adhere.

Patrick E.C. Merlevede -- co-author of "7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence"

I found this book very informative with behavioral and cognitive approaches along with psychoanalytical and experiential techniques that makes this book so very different and unique. I have been in therapy for years, and although from time to time I may of received helpful feedback, most of the time I just talked and talked and the therapist (supposedly)listened (I did try about 7 different therapists). I never felt there were any action steps to help break-through the repetitive cycles many people repeat throughout their lives. This book gives the reader the opportunity to determine if they fall into any of the lifetraps and to what degree. If there is a lifetrap that is holding a person back, then there are several examples of how it may relate to the readers life, and other examples that may exemplify someone the reader may know. However, there are suggestions to break the cycle, to break free! To build trust, to reframe thoughts, to change behavior in order to improve life and to eliminate the baggage load often carried around by people stuck in a lifetrap. Time to get out and lose that baggage!

This book, along with "Emotional Alchemy" by Tara Goldman, has been a life changing experience! Years of therapy and $$ down the drain never helped me as much as these two books. By understanding and challenging your schemas, you will free yourself to create the life you want. You will also come to understand your friends and family members and what drives them. As a side benefit, you will be able to let go of anger and experience compassion. While continuing work on my schemas, I feel freer. I can finally exhale and get off the roller coaster of an unexamined life. And, over time, I have been able see a more direct relationship between my emotions and the quality of my health. Thank you so much!

I've read many self-help books. This one is the most comprehensive by far. It very clearly reveals and explains the origins, consequences, and strategies for changing self-defeating behavior. To be used properly, it needs to be read and reread. It's easy to use this book to diagnose your problems. But the hard part is changing them. To make changes, read the sections on change repeatedly, following through on the authors' recommendations. It's not easy, but you will know that you're doing the right thing. I haven't made all the changes that I want to (and the authors know that change is difficult). But I'm confident that if I don't put this book down, I'll be able to become the person I want to be.

This book is a true winner! I read the entire 300 some odd pages in a day and a half because, once you get started, every sentence in the book makes you say to yourself, "So THAT is what's going on!" Now if the authors of this book would write separate books on each of the LifeTraps and go into more detail, I'd be FIXED MAN! FIXED I TELL YOU! Folks, this is one HECK of a starting point! I give it "Two Cheeks Up!" (Well, and the five stars too, but that isn't as fun.)

This book really made me think and that's what I think it would be used best as--a point to start thinking deeply about your childhood. I fit damn near every "lifetrap" in the book and I didn't know if that was really accurate or if I really am a basketcase!

The case studies they had as examples were dry & boring. Felt very white-bread. But I'm all for any approach that uses active exercises to make change, rather than just RECOGNIZING that you have problems and that's automatically gonna revamp your life. You've gotta WORK at it.

Furthermore, I felt they tried to cram too much advice into each chapter--some of the "lifetraps" can be a whole separate book! But as the authors instruct, you can follow similar exercises to get over all your "lifetraps".

Worth adding to your self-help library and esp. if you can get it at a good price!

This book was recommended to me by a cognitive therapist and has been the key to innerpeace, joy and happiness in my life. I found that this book is best used in conjunction with any of Margaret Paul's books on the Inner Bonding technique. These books explain how we develop schemas (or false beliefs) as children that we carry into our adult relationships thus causing us pain. These books further provide detailed step-by-step guidelines for breaking these self-defeating patterns. I have read many, many self-help books but these are the most helpful books I have ever encountered.