May help sufferers gain insight and move along with life, if they're not put off by the cloying tone and conventional wisdom.
Psychological exercises to help individuals recover from abusive relationships.
Stosny (Love Without Hurt, 2008, etc.) is a consultant on anger management and family violence who conducts workshops worldwide. In this manual, he offers a pathway to recovery based on maxims similar to those found in books such as Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking. Stosny cautions that being angry has “potent analgesic and amphetamine components that temporarily numb pain and provide a surge of energy to overcome perceived threat,” which can be addictive. Instead of being reactive, the author counsels allowing “ourselves to be guided by deeper values more than temporary feelings.” All of the exercises are to be done in writing. The first counterpoises a negative, self-critical attitude, such as “I'm gullible, a fool, too trusting,” with the affirmation, “I'm resilient, resourceful, human, sensitive.” A follow-up, five-step exercise elaborates core values and concludes with a spiritual testament. Another exercise includes comparing specifics: “What my partner did: My partner was mean to our pets. What I do: Today I was kind to our pets,” and so on. The second section of the book takes readers beyond verbal affirmations to taking actions that provide a meaningful basis for moving ahead with the healing process, such as treating a family member to dinner, bringing a pet to the vet or visiting an art gallery. Stosny also offers tips on how to use the lists to evaluate a potential lover (e.g., how that person discusses former relationships that didn't work out). In a valuable final section about the possibility of repairing a relationship after betrayal, the author gives a hypothetical example of a couple that profited from his anger management boot camp.
May help sufferers gain insight and move along with life, if they're not put off by the cloying tone and conventional wisdom.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60882-752-7
Page Count: 232
Publisher: New Harbinger
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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