COPING WITH THE CRISES IN YOUR LIFE

The author, a minister and sometime counselor (Telling a Child About Death, 1965) in fact talks very little about ""crises management"" if by a crisis we mean an unforeseen and catastrophic upheaval. Instead he deals with those normal turbulences which are a part of the growth process, more or less following Erik Erikson's schemata of developmental stages from early to middle childhood, adolescence, youth, marriage, the middle years, aging and retirement. At each, obstacles and frustrations are encountered which may potentially become crises if the need to ""work through"" feelings of anger, insecurity, jealousy, et al. is not met. Freud, Otto Rank, Maslow, Rollo May, Darwin and Kropotnik are all thrown into the hopper and emulsified. Rituals and ceremonies are recommended to deal with birth, marriage, graduation and death, and when things get out of hand, or preferably before, ""let yourself be helped"" by Alcoholics Anonymous or a marriage counselor or a child therapist. . . . What it comes down to is that mature people grow stronger in times of trouble while those previously scarred by parents or society tend to collapse. So try to have had a happy childhood.