Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book helps you identify, understand and work on your "life traps", self-depeating behaviour that is often unconsious, deeply ingrained, and self-defeating. It offers scorecards that are very useful in identifying which life traps apply to you, what caused the life trap in your early years, how it manifests itself in you as an adult, and how you can defeat it.

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.

This book provided me with great insight about myself and everyone I know. I don't believe you can fix your problems until you know why you have them and where they came from, this book answers those questions.

Nice book and one you will not just put on the shelf. Helps to see how others as well deal with adversity.

This book helped me to define myself . There are many conceptual models here which will help everyone who reads it to find themselves . If you can see yourself , you can change yourself . We all adapt to our early infant and adolescent environment , but we do so unconsciously , as we do not yet have critical thinking at those stages of life. Some of the ways we have chosen to adapt do not serve us well in adulthood . This book is very helpful to show you how you may have adapted , and also you can change those patterns of thought and behaviour . It's a very helpful book .!

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!

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 first purchased this book years ago and I found it very helpful in working out precisely which 'life traps' I had fallen into. I was able to systematically fix those points of my life strategies which had caused me so much trouble. I subsequently bought copies of this book repeatedly to give as gifts to people who were experiencing a crisis in their lives, and they too found it hugely beneficial. The book employs a breakdown of Schema-based therapies, which form the basis of Cognitive Therapy. Very useful and an essential in anyone's library if you want to figure out what makes you or someone else tick.Reinventing Your Life

Was recommended by a psychiatric nurse friend for a husband who was lying and hiding things. Very eye-opening for both him and me, was a big turning point for his decision to seek counseling for entitlement issues.

There are very few moments, tools and people in my life which have changed me: this book and this approach is one of them. Though it may be a bit simple at least in this paperback self-help edition, I think the simplicity of reasoning as written here, and the book's frameworks (we have a deep-set pattern we repeat in life; our reaction to our deepest feelings comes out in surrender, something else I forget :)), and / or overcompensation) explain something brilliantly fundamental about ourselves and our relations. Much as M. Scott Peck's _the Road Less Travelled_ worked, the simplicity and the structure here really worked for me. This apporach in a sense saved me, as I had gone through two years of therapy before including for suicidal depression and had never understood many of my issues or made real progress before.

My only negative on the book is that it is in the end a bit too short for me. I'd like a bit more discussion in the book about schema / lifetraps that get started or developed later in life, by siblings and by friendship or in-law patterns, and also on how to continue talking yourself through difficult moments, later in life. My feeling is that and enthusiastic editor changed the title of this book to make it stupid, and that the authors are academic psychologists who are packing a tonne of information in to a short readable volume. This is in any case the only self-help book I've read over more than once, and used again and again.

This book was recommended to me as well by my therapist, who uses this approach and helped turn the exercises and reflections in to something more personally meaningful. As an indicator, I'm no longer in therapy and it has been helpful for me. I also look forward to a second, expanded edition.

So, while I do recommend the book, I went through the exercises with a professional on hand for all my exercises and discussion and thoughts; without a notebook, my diligent work, and a professional to talk with about my results, I wonder how effective the book alone would be.