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THE REBT SUPER-ACTIVITY GUIDE

Name: THE REBT SUPER-ACTIVITY GUIDE
Author: Pamela D. Garcy
ISBN: 978-1449568566

52 WEEKS OF REBT FOR CLIENTS, GROUPS, STUDENTS, AND YOU!

by Pamela D. Garcy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 19, 2009

An instructive, practical self-help book, full of “aha!” moments.

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Psychologist Garcy offers a guide for living a healthier and happier life using REBT (rational emotive behavior therapy) methods.

This neatly organized, 52-chapter activity book incorporates the REBT techniques developed in the 1950s by psychologist Albert Ellis. Garcy explains that part of the REBT philosophy is the idea that unhappiness is often caused by one’s emotional perception of events and situations. Garcy details a simple, thoughtful strategy for analyzing and categorizing beliefs as rational or irrational; for example, she urges readers to change statements so that they start with “I would like to have” instead of “I need.” She emphasizes the importance of becoming aware of what causes healthy or unhealthy emotions: “Awareness precedes thoughtfulness, and thoughtfulness precedes decision.” Part of successfully combating depression and encouraging positive action, she explains, is separating “things you do from who you are.” An overwhelming belief that one can always do better, she writes, can cause “an enduring sense of depression.” The book’s format as a series of exercises permits a personal and practical approach, allowing readers to relate the REBT principles to their own lives. It include strategies for defeating procrastination, creating positive reinforcement, maintaining a sense of humor and increasing tolerance in order to achieve personal goals. The author also discusses how to cope with feeling out of control—a useful skill to have in increasingly complicated times. In addition to the many practical—and even humorous—exercises throughout the book, there are sections which prompt journal entries and require more thoughtful reflection. Garcy’s enthusiasm is infectious, and her logical, pointed questions may prompt helpful, healing introspection. An appendix includes a list of additional suggested readings.

An instructive, practical self-help book, full of “aha!” moments.

Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2009

ISBN: 978-1449568566

Page Count: 180

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2013

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY

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INTIMATE RELATIONS

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DESIRE

by Liam Hudson & Bernadine Jacot ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1995

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Hudson and Jacot (The Way Men Think, 1992) make a perplexing and incoherent effort to analogize intimacy and art. The authors declare ``that psychological differences between the sexes are both deeply engrained and imaginatively galvanising'' and ``that there exists a parallel between art and intimate relations.'' Unfortunately, very little that follows has anything to do with these potentially engaging assertions. For example, they devote two chapters to a ``thought experiment'' in which they describe several historically important women, including Margaret Mead and Kate Millett. The experiment requires imagining these figures as men, with the assumption that, as such, their stories would not make sense. The experiment fails thoroughly, however, for well-read readers of gender and sexuality literature, possibly because the authors dismiss these fields as postmodern and liberal to the point of irrelevance. Basically, they see men and women as fundamentally different because of early relationships with parents. Based in Freudian thought, they believe that men and women grow up with different complexes, and ``wounds,'' which color future interactions. The authors are exclusively concerned with ``the mutual fascination of individuals who are categorically dissimilar'' in terms of biological sex, so although they bill this as a history of desire and intimacy, only heterosexual love is addressed. And many of their characterizations of patterns of loving are rooted in stereotypes and structural inequities, criticisms of which they discard as extremist rhetoric of feminists and other radical groups. In their final analysis, intimacy and art are comparable because they both spring from the imagination, what Hudson and Jacot see as the ``mind's central function.'' But there never emerges a natural history of intimacy at all. What could have been a compelling discussion about the imagination is cluttered with conservative biases and false interpretations of social scientific data. (illustrations, not seen)

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-300-06293-1

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Yale Univ.

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1995

Categories:

PSYCHOLOGY

- BOOK REVIEW
THE WAY MEN THINK
by Liam Hudson & Bernadine Jacot

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AN UNQUIET MIND

A MEMOIR OF MOODS AND MADNESS

by Kay Redfield Jamison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 18, 1995

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Mood-disorder specialist Jamison (Psychiatry/Johns Hopkins) comes clean about her own mood disorder: manic-depression. Less bitter and defensive than Kate Millett (The Loony-Bin Trip, 1990) in writing of this illness, Jamison has one thing in common with her: the reluctance to take lithium, despite her knowledge as a professional that it would control her extremes of mood. Why the refusal? Because, Jamison says, the periods of mild mania, or hypomania, are ``absolutely intoxicating states that gave rise to great personal pleasure, an incomparable flow of thoughts, and a ceaseless energy.'' Jamison now takes her lithium dutifully, however, after being hobbled for years by cycles of extreme mania (sleepless nights, mental chaos, shopping sprees with bills totaling over $30,000) and suicidal depression. The illness began to manifest itself after the delicate balance of her family life was disrupted. In a highly fluid, readable memoir, Jamison wonderfully describes her childhood as an Air Force brat, capturing both the ``romance and discipline'' of military life. But in 1961, when she was 15, Jamison's father retired from the Air Force and the family moved to California. Her father, an imaginative, playful, charismatic man, began displaying signs of manic- depression, and a few years later, so did Jamison. Always passionate, curious, independent-minded, she was now subject to crippling mood switches as she began a successful academic career and passed through a failed marriage, love affairs, and a new marriage. Jamison is convincing on the seductiveness of hypomania. But the author of Touched with Fire (1993), which claimed a link between the artistic temperament and manic-depression, goes too far here in claiming a superiority of experience for herself: that she has lived more truly and intensely than folks whose moods are better calibrated (``I have run faster, thought faster, loved faster than most''). But overall, a well-written, vivid depiction of a devastating mental illness. (First printing of 75,000; Literary Guild alternate selection; author tour)