Psychiatrist and Montel Williams show Director of Aftercare Salzer offers an instruction guide to overcoming the deleterious effects of emotionally wrenching experiences.
“How does a person live through a life-altering challenge yet emerge still self-possessed, still hopeful, still empowered,” asks the author at the beginning of this practical guide to beating the often crippling aftershock of trauma—be it uppercase Trauma, such as rape or death, or lowercase trauma, as in any situation that has robbed you of self-esteem and left you fearful and helpless (a health issue, job loss, betrayal, etc.). When trauma becomes “permatrauma”—maladaptive behavior in which the lessons of the worst day become the guideposts of the everyday—then, Salzer writes, it is time to recalibrate your mindset. In addition to affirmation and cheerleading, the author tenders some serious tools. She doesn’t simply ask readers to ad lib their way through various evaluative templates; she provides extensive lists of possible answers to either use or to jump-start your replies. When she suggests finding a greater meaning in the experience, she gives numerous examples, from the teachings of Viktor Frankl to tactics to reframe your boss’ daily insults. If you identify with the passive-victim mode, Salzer serves up specific exercises in awareness, assertiveness and harvesting positive associations. She provides a crash course in survivorship, abetted by a positive psychology that draws from resilience theory, cognitive therapy and learned optimism, with cues taken from people who display resilient talents like flexibility, accountability, the perception of success and developing some form of social network. A few of Salzer’s strategies may seem a stretch at this difficult juncture—reaching for the flow state, for example—but in her hands, something as simple as a worry stone can help find you “navigating a path through traumaville.” A sensible escort to identifying and deploying signature strengths buried by traumatic emotional paralysis.
Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-177106-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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