LETTING GO: Uncomplicating Your Life

According to this most recent jargon-trap for the distraught and overwrought, intense self-analysis will reduce our worldly cares to manageable morsels. Unfortunately, the therapist-authors never explain how one is to relax under the onslaught of ""Total Pressure Drawings"" or beseechings to ""write down your excess baggage in the column at the right."" Though supposedly pressures can strike anytime--at home, work, or during ""extracurricular"" moments--the preponderance of the pressures considered are of the personal sort. Thus we are confronted with five different ways to end a tired relationship (""time as terminator"" is the most common) or with sketchy guidelines for breaking with the past (""security blankets,"" though treated as a separate issue, would seem to fall into this category). Among the more questionable techniques advanced are those for discarding outworn personal habits via negative reinforcement--as in the case of the woman who gagged herself as punishment for a sloppy room. If there's one group that really does not need this book, it's those who already feel pressured.