Healing Your Family History: 5 Steps to Break Free of Destructive Patterns (Paperback)

by Rebecca Linder Hintze (Author), Stephen R. Covey (Foreword)
Key Phrases: Groundhog Day, Miss Jones

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

This fascinating book by Rebecca Linder Hintze powerfully and effectively communicates a key, and sometimes overlooked, piece of the puzzle relating to family dynamics. For example, have you ever wondered why some families reach a ceiling on their earning potential, struggle to have happy marriages, or have such difficult interactions with their siblings and parents? Perhaps your family has a history of sabotaging careers or thwarting their love relationships? Healing Your Family History explains that most of our individual issues originate from family blocks.

As you read this book, you’ll come to understand how family belief systems store inside you and prevent individual growth by locking you into thought processes that hold you back. All families have these nonverbal belief systems, and unless you understand and heal your inherent blocks, it may be difficult to love others, move forward, and get what you want in life.

Most people have a family . . . and we all have a reason to heal our related challenges—after all, tribal issues sit at the core of world turmoil. Those who are truly ready to heal their family dysfunction will benefit immensely from this book!

About the Author

Rebecca Linder Hintze is a life-skills coach and emotional-wellness counselor. A former broadcast journalist, she frequently lectures and leads workshops in cities throughout the United States on topics such as “Healing Your Family History,” “Strengthening Relationships,” and “Resolving Marital Conflict.” Rebecca is the author of a successful weekly newsletter called Weekly Wisdom, published as a public service online, and in print around the world. She’s also the co-founder of Pretty Sisters, a society for girls of all ages.

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: Hay House; 1 edition (October 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1401907970
• ISBN-13: 978-1401907976
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #544,012 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #69 in

  Books > Health, Mind & Body > Authors, A-Z > Covey, Stephen R.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Ambitious but not well supported, September 29, 2007

By	Sean Burke (Ketchikan, Alaska, United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is based on a bold new perspective on mental health phenomena that are often loosely grouped into the category of "codependency".

Where the author excels is in elaborating this idea: that severely maladjusted views about expectations about life, and ways to cope with life, are often neuroses that are self-perpetuating throughout families, from generation to generation.

The book is in five chapters, where each chapter is a step toward identifying, escaping, and recovering from these destructive patterns. Chapter 1 ("Step 1: Awareness is more than half the battle") and chapter 2 ("Step 2: Overcoming judgments and fears") lay the conceptual groundwork, with dozens, yes dozens, of examples of these multigenerational neuroses, such as: low self-esteem leading to self-defeating career behavior, which a particular family might actually encourage in all of its members, because of its shared belief that "that's just the way the world works".

Chapter 2 also begins the work of the rest of the book: providing you, the reader, with strategies for untangling yourself from these deeply ingrained neurotic patterns; and Chapter/Step 3: "Getting Past /Groundhog Day/" resumes this topic, with a focus on managing the conflicts (in yourself or with others) that this process will produce.

Chapter/Step 4: "Finding The Treasure" is about both maintaining and restoring your own self esteem by reconsidering what in you, your past, and your environment are /actually/ harming or helping you, instead of relying on past neurosis-tinted appraisals of these things.

But Chapter/Step 5: "Making a Spiritual Connection" is where the book begins to come apart. It's a very mixed bag, with some amount of anecdotes and affirmations of the powers of intuition; but simply put, this is where the author says that, in order to be sanely recovered from your destructive past, you must be, or become, religious.

She expresses this in terms that are sometimes unclear (as a nod toward the possibilities of vague spirituality), but which are still basically about requiring you to believe in some brand of Judeo-Christian religion and thus adopting an affirmative but entirely superficial theology-- for example, that "prayer" is a merely matter of asking God for something, and at times getting messages back from God through "our intuitive connection" [p138]. Page 137 stresses the absolute importance of "Connecting Your Sprit with God's". Page 146 tells us that "Our spirit knows what's best for us, which way to go, and how to get there", and that [back on page 133] "unless we allow our spirit selves to guide us-- and we're committed to change-- we typically struggle to alter our behavior patterns." (And rewinding back to page 35, the author lists disbelief in God as a destructive neurosis!)

I can understand that the author, a Mormon, very earnestly believes that belief in a personal God is the best way to live your life; but therapeutically, it is at least unprofessional, and at worst psychologically dangerous to insist on this. Notably:

Firstly, this final chapter/step's constant emphasis on the kind of intuition that is as far from reason as possible, is an open invitation to poor impulse control, essentially undoing the work of much of the rest of the book, namely being levelheaded in situations of conflict arising from ingrained destructive patterns. For psychologically vulnerable people, the line can be very thin between trusting their intuitions and falling back into their past ingrained neurotic beliefs and behaviors.

And secondly: On the one hand, this insistence on religion could put the psychologically vulnerable person into a friendly church community that will support them in hard times. But on the other hand, that church community could /also/ turn out to be a cult (The Peoples Temple was celebrated for being friendly, supportive, and charitable-- until it moved to Jonestown, Guyana...); or it could turn out to have radical fundamentalist views, such as have been fighting social progress, worldwide, for the better part of a century now.

To judge from the current state of the world (and its politics and history), you clearly need a healthy and intelligent skepticism and discernment to tell what, if any, kind of religion or religious community you should go trusting. An eagerness to simply make "a spiritual connection" is not enough to keep you out of trouble for yourself or others.

Behind this unprofessionalism, there is a question: is all this mental-health advice coming from someone with an actual psych degree?

She seems to hint that she is-- on p166 she says "a teacher in the field of psychology". But her "About the author" page says she is "a graduate of Brigham Young University". If she graduated with (for example) a Master's in Family Counseling, that's exactly where it would be mentioned. But from the fact that the sentence says no more than "a graduate", with no mention of level or field, we have to conclude that while she may consider herself qualified in many respects, she has no actual /credentials/.

I do not believe rigidly in the value of all credentials-- if someone building me bookshelves has experience, but no contractor's license, I don't care. But for critical life-changing mental health advice, I have to insist that it come from people with the credentialed education to benefit from the past century-plus of psychiatric and psychological experience with patients suffering from neurosis in all its forms. Lacking those credentials means just winging it, as Ms Hintze is doing more and more the further you get into her book.

Besides the insistence on religion in Chapter 5, the author occasionally drops in the occasional howler that also leads you to question not just her professionalism but her ability to cohere. On page 134, she says "75 to 90 percent of our emotional blocks- including our inborn (genetic) tendencies- originate from our experiences inside the womb". Her asserting this statement (leaving aside the conflation of "inborn" with "genetic") so far into the book leads us to wonder: is she actually saying that the familial neuroses that the whole book is about, are /genetic/!? First off, if true, then this is a fundamental point and should have been mentioned in Chapter 1, to say the least. But secondly, the idea that the /majority/ of the whole spectrum of neurotic behavior that she covers in the book is genetic, is the beyond even the wildest speculation you'll get out of any geneticist. It's well knows that there are genetic predispositions toward some mental illnesses (notably schizophrenia)-- but trying to claim you can have a 75-90% ability to track a neurosis like "I must hold on to all my money or it will go away" (page 33) to an actual gene, is ludicrous.

The author, and her writing and work, would benefit from getting an actual degree in the field that she's already involving herself in and generally shows a genuine and earnest talent for. But the lack of actual credentials undermines the effectiveness of her ideas and how well they can work for people trying to recover from personal or familial neuroses.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book!, July 14, 2007

By	K. Hansen "Clinical Psychologist" (Provo, UT) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I love Rebecca Linder Hintze's book, "Healing Your Family History." Her book is filled with psychological and spiritual wisdom. With her wonderful title and well-written content, she cleverly summarizes and merges insights from analytical and developmental psychologists with modern therapies focused on both changing beliefs and emotional regulation. I frequently recommend her book to my clients. The content and exercises help clients in their own space and time consider the value of introspection not only on their own psychology but on their immediate family's and beyond. Especially for those afraid to say anything less than positive about their families, Rebecca's book helps me explain to clients why looking into family patterns is essential to psychological and spiritual growth without having to resort to complicated language that often leaves clients more weary than excited. Thank you for this helpful book!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Book Works!, March 1, 2007

By	Lynda Lane (Belmont, MA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is a great book! It skillfully walks you through 5 steps that can heal the soul, bring about personal change, and help you achieve your goals. As I am implementing the principles taught in this book, it is having a profound positive impact on both me and my family. I highly recommend it to anyone!