Review of Pursuing the Good Life, by Christopher Peterson

Pursuing the Good Life

100 Reflections on Positive Psychology

by Christopher Peterson

Oxford University Press, 2013. 341 pages.
Starred Review

I’m rather fascinated by Positive Psychology. I’ve read books like How We Choose to Be Happy, You Can Be Happy No Matter What, and What Happy Women Know: How New Findings in Positive Psychology Can Change Women’s Lives for the Better, and enjoyed all of them.

Christopher Peterson was one of the founders of the field of Positive Psychology. This book is a set of 100 short pieces taken from his Psychology Today blog called “The Good Life“. I approached the book by reading one piece per day for the last few months. (I had to turn the book back in a few times, too!) The pieces were fascinating, or at least amusing, and often helpful.

Here’s a paragraph from Dr. Peterson’s first chapter:

My goals for the reflections that follow are several. First, I will discuss research findings about the psychological good life. Second, I will explore the most promising practical applications based on these findings. And third, I will use positive psychology as a vantage to make sense of the world in which we live. I hope you find what I say interesting.

Indeed, you might not expect to find a book written by an academic to be entertaining and practical at the same time, but this one is both of those things.

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Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Surviving Survival, by Laurence Gonzales

Surviving Survival

The Art and Science of Resilience

by Laurence Gonzales

W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2012. 257 pages.

Surviving Survival looks at people who have survived traumatic experiences — and looks at how they live the rest of their lives afterward.

Your experience of life in the aftermath may be even more dramatic, sometimes more painful, than the experience of survival itself. But it can be beautiful and fulfilling, too, and a more lasting achievement than the survival that began it all. What comes after survival is, after all, the rest of your life.

Many of the people whose stories he tells survived horrific experiences. They range from shark attacks and bear attacks to loss of a child or maiming in war. He tells many, many stories, and they don’t all end happily. I found myself getting depressed when he said he needed to balance it out by showing people who did not overcome!

The author doesn’t sugarcoat what these people lived through and now face every day. He explains why the aftermath is so difficult, and looks at many different strategies that work for these people as they live out the rest of their lives.

This book is mostly fascinating. And though I sincerely hope I will never face trauma at the level of the author’s examples, everybody faces smaller traumas throughout their lives. And the author shows techniques that can help you recover from those traumas and live a fruitful life.

One insight that struck me early on involved my vestibular migraines. I had a stroke a year and a half ago. It was in my cerebellum, the center of balance, and was manifested by the room suddenly spinning. After the stroke, I started getting, for the first time in my life, vestibular migraines. They aren’t headaches, but the mechanism is similar to migraine headaches. But instead of head pain, I get a vague dizziness. And it reminds me of nothing so much as my stroke. And that scares me.

This book explained to me why that’s so, why it’s going to take a long time before that’s not a perfectly normal reaction. Here he’s talking about someone who was shipwrecked and witnessed the deaths of her friends.

Much of what the brain does is unconscious. It works behind the scenes to forge memories of what is dangerous and what is beneficial so that in the future we can respond correctly and automatically. During her crisis, Debbie’s brain was working overtime to map out those memories in preparation for the next assault. In the brain, the cardinal rule is: future equals past; what has happened before will happen again. In response to trauma, the brain encodes protective memories that force you to behave in the future the way you behaved in the past. Any sight, sound, or smell, any fragment of the scene in which you were threatened, can set off that automatic behavior. The trouble was that in all likelihood, Debbie would never again face a similar hazard. It is rare to be shipwrecked…. In other words, Debbie’s natural and normally useful systems for forming important memories were working on a job that had no practical value. Indeed, those systems were working to make her miserable.

And that’s not the only effect of trauma. Laurence Gonzales examines many, many cases, and looks at people with varying degrees of coping. At the end of the book, he summarizes what he’s learned about rising above survival and living well after trauma.

This book is fascinating like a train wreck, but it throws in good insights for living along the way.

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Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of “I Love You But I Don’t Trust You,” by Mira Kirshenbaum

“I Love You But I Don’t Trust You”

The Complete Guide to Restoring Trust in Your Relationship

by Mira Kirshenbaum

Berkley Books, New York, 2012. 294 pages.

I hesitated before reviewing this book. After all, I am not in a relationship any more. But I’ve posted reviews of so many books to help when a marriage falls apart, I wanted to mention this one, that looks like it would be great help at putting a marriage back together. And if I ever get in a relationship again, I want to remember that it exists!

I began writing Sonderbooks in 2001. At the time, I described myself as very happily married. And I honestly thought I was. Now I’m divorced and I’ve come to the place where I’m enjoying my life now. But I don’t want to cut myself off from people because I don’t want to get hurt again. However, a major betrayal leaves scars, and this book shows how to work with them.

There are other books out there that take you through a breach in trust. For example, NOT “Just Friends” takes you through the trauma of an affair. One thing I like about “I Love You But I Don’t Trust You” is that the focus is on rebuilding trust. This book gives you hope that trusting again is possible.

Here are some sections from the author’s words in the first chapter:

Can love survive betrayal? I believe it can. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. Hell, if betrayal necessarily kills love, then love is too fragile to exist in the real world. Because the world is made up of imperfect people who make mistakes. Imperfect people — people we love — will too often hurt us and disappoint us and betray us, which will set up a chain reaction that too often destroys a relationship.

Well, if we can’t stop ourselves from hurting the people we love and being hurt by them, then we have only one choice: We have to find a way to repair the damage that’s done when there’s been a betrayal.

We need to restore the trust because I firmly believe that while you can’t have people without betrayals, if only little ones, you can’t have love without trust.

Having trust makes love come alive. Trust isn’t just the basis for a relationship; it’s the lifeblood that keeps a relationship healthy.

The biggest difference trust makes in any relationship — and not just an intimate one — is that you can relax, be open, be yourself. Just think about it: If you can’t be yourself because you’re not feeling safe, then even if the other person “loves you,” he’s really just loving a stranger, the person you’re projecting who’s not really you. And so how can you feel loved if it’s not the real you who’s being loved? And how can you keep on giving love if you’re not feeling loved?

But when you trust each other so that you can be yourself and be open, the roots of love grow very strong. They grow into your very being.

This book will help you evaluate whether to stick with the relationship where you were hurt, it will help you calm your natural crazy-person reactions to betrayal, and it will help you learn to trust again, whether the new trust is with the original person or someone else.

One thing I like about nonfiction books is that without guilt I can quote the end of the book:

The good news is that we can learn from experience.

For some of us, that learning is all about how we can be hurt. And that’s too bad. But we can also learn that these hurts can heal. We can learn that there are people out there who are far less likely to hurt us. We can learn about how resilient we are. We can learn that trust makes sense. We can learn how to create the solidly based trust we’re so hungry for.

MiraKirshenbaum.com
penguin.com

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Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Beautiful Outlaw, by John Eldredge

Beautiful Outlaw

Experiencing the Playful, Disruptive, Extravagant Personality of Jesus

by John Eldredge

Faith Words, New York, 2011. 219 pages.
Starred Review

In Beautiful Outlaw, John Eldredge looks at the personality of Jesus. He points out that Jesus was not the sort of person who didn’t make waves. He does an amazing job of causing the reader to take a fresh look.

What is missing in our Gospel reading — and in our attempts to “read” what Jesus is saying and doing in our own lives right now, this week — is his personality, undraped by religion. Let’s see if we can find it.

Now, I’m well-versed in the Gospel story. I’ve read about Jesus over and over again. But John Eldredge was able to make even me see Jesus in a fresh light. I felt like he was saying, Remember? This is what Jesus is like. Here’s his take on the Gospel story:

Any way you look at it, it is a beautiful story. Playful, funny, so human, so hopeful, so unreligious. And it is that particular quality that gives the passage its true character and gives us an essential for knowing Jesus as he really is. The man is not religious. If he were, the story would have taken place in a religious setting — the temple, perhaps, or at least a synagogue — and Jesus would have gathered them for a Bible study or prayer meeting. Jesus doesn’t even show up at the temple after his resurrection. He’s at the beach, catching his boys fishing, filling their empty nets and then having them to breakfast.

The subtitle talks about the aspects of Jesus’ personality the author focuses on: He’s playful, disruptive, and extravagant. But all of this talk about Jesus’ personality is to tell us it’s worth it to let Jesus’ life fill our lives. He’s talking about Christ living in us.

As we love him, experience him, allow his life to fill ours, the personality of Jesus transforms our personalities. The timid become bold and the bold become patient and the patient become fierce and the uptight become free and the religious become scandalously good. “They looked to Him and were radiant” (Psalm 34:5 NASB). They looked to Jesus and became like him. Loving Jesus helps us to become what human beings were meant to be. As Athanasius said, “He became what we are that we might become what he is.”

In short, this book is about looking hard at who Jesus really is, and then letting Him change who we really are.

beautifuloutlaw.net
ransomedheart.com
faithwords.com

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Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Should I Stay Or Should I Go?, by Lundy Bancroft and Jac Patrissi

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

A Guide to Knowing if Your Relationship Can — and Should — Be Saved

by Lundy Bancroft and JAC Patrissi

Berkley Books, New York, 2011. 417 pages.

Here’s another valuable resource for women struggling in their relationships. Although I’m already divorced, I read it to gain some perspective; to figure out what went wrong; to process that the divorce has truly happened.

So often, when a marriage breaks down, there are some lies and untruths going on. This book helps you look at your experiences and your feelings and figure out the root issues and what’s really going on for you.

The introduction tells you if this book will be helpful for you:

You are holding a book that has been written for women who are going through repeated conflicts, frustrations, and dissatisfactions in their relationships, and are beginning to wonder what the root of the problem might be. You may be asking yourself whether your partner and you are just not a good match, and perhaps considering whether all this struggle is worth it. . . .

This book can help you find out what has gone wrong, and what steps you need to take to get your relationship back on track. We will also guide you in figuring out if your relationship can’t be saved — or shouldn’t be — and how you can move yourself decisively toward a happier life whether you and your partner succeed in staying together or not. . . .

You are going to be okay, whatever happens. In this book, we will guide you in how to give the best possible chance to your relationship while also making sure to take equally good care of yourself. Some days you may feel that your life depends on fixing your current relationship; but it doesn’t; if you go through the steps and exercises that we lay out in the pages ahead, you will find yourself able to handle the challenges that lie ahead for you. . . .

The issue we address right away in Chapter 1 — because we think it will be at the forefront of your mind — is whether the difficulties you are having are just the typical ones that all relationships go through, or whether they are symptoms of something deeper. We’ll ask you to examine your expectations, to answer the question “Do I just expect too much from a relationship?” (We’re already guessing that you don’t; we meet more women who expect too little than too much.) . . .

Welcome, then, to a process of healing and clarification. We believe you will gain insights that will build your strength, increase your faith in your own thinking, and help you to love yourself. Along the way, you will learn how to give your partner a great gift: the opportunity to experience tremendous growth, and to make his relationship with you a vibrant and satisfying one. If he chooses not to do the work, he will be punishing himself. And whether he does or not, your growth will leap forward, and you will come out feeling in charge of your life and relationships.

That should give you a good idea of whether or not this book will be useful to you. I was not in the target audience, since my marriage was already legally over. But the book still gave me good things to think about and reinforced the healing process. It reminded me of what I deserve in a relationship and made me feel much less of a failure about my ended marriage.

ShouldIStayOrShouldIGo.net
LundyBancroft.com
GrowingANewHeart.com
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Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Each Day a New Beginning, by Karen Casey

Each Day a New Beginning

Daily Thoughts for Women

by Karen Casey

Hazelden, 1991 (2nd edition. 1st edition, 1982).
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #7 Other Nonfiction

Karen Casey has so much wisdom. I first was introduced to her writings by her book Change Your Mind and Your Life Will Follow. I found this book of daily meditations I think in May 2011. I picked up the book in the middle, on the day I was on, and when 2012 came around, I started at January first and kept reading from it all year.

The thoughts in this book seem to be mainly geared toward people in 12-step programs, but even if you aren’t in one (as I am not), the wise words are a great way to start your day. The daily pages are short. Each day’s meditation begins with a quotation from a woman and ends with a summing up thought for the day.

I found an example to quote that happens to show where the title came from. Here is the meditation for April 7:

It is only when people begin to shake loose from their preconceptions, from the ideas that have dominated them, that we begin to receive a sense of opening, a sense of vision.

— Barbara Ward

A sense of vision, seeing who we can dare to be and what we can dare to accomplish, is possible if we focus intently on the present and always the present. We are all we need to be, right now. We can trust that. And we will be shown the way to become who we need to become, step by step, from one present moment to the next present moment. We can trust that, too.

The past that we hang onto stands in our way. Many of us needlessly spend much of our lives fighting a poor self-image. But we can overcome that. We can choose to believe we are capable and competent. We can be spontaneous, and our vision of all that life can offer will change — will excite us, will cultivate our confidence.

We can respond to life wholly. We can trust our instincts. And we will become all that we dare to become.

Each day is a new beginning. Each moment is a new opportunity to let go of all that has trapped me in the past. I am free. In the present, I am free.

That gives you the idea of the format and content. Encouragements and wise thoughts to get you going on your day. I found another Karen Casey book to start in 2013, but I will keep this one around for some time in the future.

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Source: This review is based on my own personal copy.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of The Brain That Changes Itself, by Norman Doidge

The Brain That Changes Itself

Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

by Norman Doidge, M.D.

Viking, 2007. 427 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #6 Other Nonfiction

Big thanks to my friend and co-worker Ivelisse Figueroa-Gonzalez for recommending this book to me after I had my stroke.

This is a book about neuroplasticity. We have learned, fairly recently, that the brain can heal from injury; the brain can change its wiring. How we use our brains is important.

Some words from the Preface explain what you’ll find in this book:

This book is about the revolutionary discovery that the human brain can change itself, as told through the stories of the scientists, doctors, and patients who have together brought about these astonishing transformations. Without operations or medications, they have made use of the brain’s hitherto unknown ability to change. Some were patients who had what were thought to be incurable brain problems; others were people without specific problems who simply wanted to improve the functioning of their brains or preserve them as they aged. For four hundred years this venture would have been inconceivable because mainstream medicine and science believed that brain anatomy was fixed. The common wisdom was that after childhood the brain changed only when it began the long process of decline; that when brain cells failed to develop properly, or were injured, or died, they could not be replaced. Nor could the brain ever alter its structure and find a new way to function if part of it was damaged. The theory of the unchanging brain decreed that people who were born with brain or mental limitations, or who sustained brain damage, would be limited or damaged for life. Scientists who wondered if the healthy brain might be improved or preserved through activity or mental exercise were told not to waste their time. . . .

I began a series of travels, and in the process I met a band of brilliant scientists, at the frontiers of brain science, who had, in the late 1960s or early 1970s, made a series of unexpected discoveries. They showed that the brain changed its very structure with each different activity it performed, perfecting its circuits so it was better suited to the task at hand. If certain “parts” failed, then other parts could sometimes take over. The machine metaphor, of the brain as an organ with specialized parts, could not fully account for changes the scientists were seeing. They began to call this fundamental brain property “neuroplasticity.”

Neuro is for “neuron,” the nerve cells in our brains and nervous systems. Plastic is for “changeable, malleable, modifiable.” At first many of the scientists didn’t dare use the word “neuroplasticity” in their publications, and their peers belittled them for promoting a fanciful notion. Yet they persisted, slowly overturning the doctrine of the unchanging brain. They showed that children are not always stuck with the mental abilities they are born with; that the damaged brain can often reorganize itself so that when one part fails, another can often substitute; that if brain cells die, they can at times be replaced; that many “circuits” and even basic reflexes that we think are hardwired are not. One of these scientists even showed that thinking, learning, and acting can turn our genes on or off, thus shaping our brain anatomy and our behavior — surely one of the most extraordinary discoveries of the twentieth century.

In the course of my travels I met a scientist who enabled people who had been blind since birth to begin to see, another who enabled the deaf to hear; I spoke with people who had had strokes decades before and had been declared incurable, who were helped to recover with neuroplastic treatments; I met people whose learning disorders were cured and whose IQs were raised; I saw evidence that it is possible for eighty-year-olds to sharpen their memories to function the way they did when they were fifty-five. I saw people rewire their brains with their thoughts, to cure previously incurable obsessions and traumas. I spoke with Nobel laureates who were hotly debating how we must rethink our model of the brain now that we know it is ever changing.

The chapters of the book look at different aspects of neuroplasticity. He covers many different things, including stroke recovery; sharpening perception and memory; healing learning problems; stopping worries, obsessions, and bad habits; counteracting aging; psychoanalysis; and even sexual attraction and love.

I can’t emphasize enough how fascinating this book is. I’m not sure if it has direct application to my own stroke, since it hit my balance center, not my higher thinking. (Though I did purchase a balance board after reading this book.) I’ve already recommended the book to parents of children with OCD, and I’ve decided that my guilty pleasure of doing Killer Sudoku at bedtime is actually therapy so I won’t lose my ability to think logically as I age.

And so much of the book, whether practical or not, is simply interesting. Here’s an example:

When it came to allocating brain-processing power, brain maps were governed by competition for precious resources and the principle of use it or lose it.

The competitive nature of plasticity affects us all. There is an endless war of nerves going on inside each of our brains. If we stop exercising our mental skills, we do not just forget them: the brain map space for those skills is turned over to the skills we practice instead. If you ever ask yourself, “How often must I practice French, or guitar, or math to keep on top of it?” you are asking a question about competitive plasticity. You are asking how frequently you must practice an activity to make sure its brain map space is not lost to another.

Competitive plasticity in adults even explains some of our limitations. Think of the difficulty most adults have in learning a second language. The conventional view now is that the difficulty arises because the critical period for language learning has ended, leaving us with a brain too rigid to change its structure on a large scale. But the discovery of competitive plasticity suggests there is more to it. As we age, the more we use our native language, the more it comes to dominate our linguistic map space. Thus it is because our brain is plastic — and because plasticity is competitive — that it is so hard to learn a new language and end the tyranny of the mother tongue.

But why, if this is true, is it easier to learn a second language when we are young? Is there not competition then too? Not really. If two languages are learned at the same time, during the critical period, both get a foothold. Brain scans, says Merzenich, show that in a bilingual child all the sounds of its two languages share a single large map, a library of sounds from both languages.

Another fascinating section speculating about cognitive problems as we age:

Mezenich says, . . . “We have an intense period of learning in childhood. Every day is a day of new stuff. And then, in our early employment, we are intensely engaged in learning and acquiring new skills and abilities. And more and more as we progress in life we are operating as users of mastered skills and abilities.”

Psychologically, middle age is often an appealing time because, all else being equal, it can be a relatively placid period compared with what has come before. Our bodies aren’t changing as they did in adolescence; we’re more likely to have a solid sense of who we are and be skilled at a career. We still regard ourselves as active, but we have a tendency to deceive ourselves into thinking that we are learning as we were before. We rarely engage in tasks in which we must focus our attention as closely as we did when we were younger, trying to learn a new vocabulary or master new skills. Such activities as reading the newspaper, practicing a profession of many years, and speaking our own language are mostly the replay of mastered skills, not learning. By the time we hit our seventies, we may not have systematically engaged the systems in the brain that regulate plasticity for fifty years.

That’s why learning a new language in old age is so good for improving and maintaining the memory generally. Because it requires intense focus, studying a language turns on the control system for plasticity and keeps it in good shape for laying down sharp memories of all kinds. . . . Anything that requires highly focused attention will help that system — learning new physical activities that require concentration, solving challenging puzzles, or making a career change that requires that you master new skills and material. Merzenich himself is an advocate of learning a new language in old age. “You will gradually sharpen everything up again, and that will be very highly beneficial to you.”

The same applies to mobility. Just doing the dances you learned years ago won’t help your brain’s motor cortex to stay in shape. To keep the mind alive requires learning something truly new with intense focus. That is what will allow you to both lay down new memories and have a system that can easily access and preserve the older ones.

Another whole chapter deals with progress in healing stroke patients. I’m not yet sure how it applies to me, because the effects of my stroke were not immediately obvious. Now they are manifesting as vestibular migraines. Is it possible that working with the balance centers of my brain would begin to rewire my brain? This book raises intriguing questions in my mind as well as revealing lots of answers to questions I had never before asked.

Fascinating reading for anyone at all interested in the brain and how it works.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of Love Isn’t Supposed to Hurt, by Christi Paul

Love Isn’t Supposed to Hurt

A Memoir

by Christi Paul

Tyndale House Publishers, 2012. 280 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #7 Nonfiction: Personal Stories

This powerful story had me transfixed until I finished it. Christi Paul tells about her four years of marriage to a man who abused her emotionally and the repercussions of that in her life. She deeply wanted to stay. She’d made a vow. She tried hard to be able to take it. But ultimately, her faith in God helped her see that she needed to leave and helped her recover.

This book is good on many levels. In the first place, it’s a mesmerizing story. Christi Paul tells about how she fell in love with Justin and decided to marry him. Looking back, she can see she made a bad decision, but reading the book, it’s easy to understand how it happened, and why it was hard for her to leave.

Second, this book provides a window into emotional abuse. It can help people understand how women get into a hurtful situation, and why it’s so hard to get out. It can help you see one form emotional abuse takes and give you compassion for women in that situation. Christi Paul doesn’t write to make you feel sorry for her, but she does help you understand her. She also tells the hard questions she asked herself that helped her to heal.

Third, this book is all the more compelling for women who’ve been in some kind of abusive relationship. I appreciated that she took her vows before God seriously, and was in no hurry to divorce. I think the parts that most resonated probably say a lot about the reader. (Perhaps I still need to work through feeling guilty about my own divorce?) It’s so easy to see in someone else’s life that it does not glorify God to live in such a hurtful relationship.

Now, Christi’s ex-husband was more overtly abusive than many. And she also was able to see that she’d made a mistake marrying him in the first place. It’s perhaps harder when the emotional abuse is more covert than name-calling, taking forms like blaming or defining your reality. In those cases, it’s all the harder to see clearly that this is emotional abuse and this is wrong. So I still strongly recommend Dr. Patricia Evans’ books on verbal abuse, because they are so crucial to understanding the many different forms abuse can take.

It’s also perhaps harder when the abuse starts in a mid-life crisis situation, rather than at the start of the marriage. You can’t tell yourself that you simply shouldn’t have married him. But that still doesn’t mean it glorifies God to stay in that situation.

Still, as she said:

People often think holding on is what makes you strong, but sometimes it’s letting go. I was committed to releasing all that haunted me from this relationship. I wanted to learn from it, yes, but I was no longer willing to be chained to the memories that made me feel inadequate, insecure, and fearful.

Or in another place:

Each of us has a different story. Not everyone needs to leave her partner. We don’t want to abandon people who need help. Your answer might not be to get out — only you know what’s right in your situation. And my purpose isn’t to demonize people who are abusive. They’re wounded and hurting in their own way. But please hear this: until someone is healthy enough to treat you with civility, dignity, and respect, that person isn’t healthy enough to be in your life.

The part on healing during and after abuse is especially powerful. I strongly believe that one part of healing is coming to a place of forgiveness, and that is much much easier when you can begin to see the many ways good has come into your life through the abuse. Not that abuse is good, but that as you come through it, you grow. Christi Paul shows much of her process of thinking this through, and it’s helpful and healing and thought-provoking.

I loved the way she showed that living through the abuse helped her become a stronger person in many, many different ways. I feel the same way. I like the person I am after coming through the end of my marriage, and it resonated to see Christi Paul write the same thing.

This book is strongly rooted in the author’s Christian beliefs, as you can see in this paragraph:

Hear this loud and clear, my friends: you weren’t put here to be abused. God’s will isn’t for us to wake up each day mired in fear, self-doubt, and condemnation. He wants us to see ourselves the way he sees us — wounded but worthy. To view ourselves and each other with forgiveness and grace. To trust and believe in Him despite where we’ve been, what we’ve done, or what someone told us we are.

This book is a beautiful story of hope and God’s grace, and it gives the reader plenty to think about. I know I’ll be thinking about Christi Paul’s words for a long time to come.

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Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of Victory Over Verbal Abuse, by Patricia Evans

Victory Over Verbal Abuse

A Healing Guide to Renewing Your Spirit and Reclaiming Your Life

by Patricia Evans

Adams Media, Avon, Massachusetts, 2012. 221 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #5 Other Nonfiction

Here’s a wonderfully uplifting addition to Patricia Evans’ wise and insightful books on verbal abuse. In this latest book, she doesn’t focus on the abuser. She focuses on the person recovering from verbal abuse, reminding them what a valuable person they are.

The beginning part of the book goes over the information about verbal abuse from Patricia Evans’ other books in a clear and succinct form. Then she talks about healing your spirit. That’s the wonderful addition in this book. The majority of the book is building you up as a self-defining, valuable person. The second part includes 52 affirmations, one for each week of the year.

In a way, it’s a shame these healing affirmations are in a book called Victory Over Verbal Abuse, because, as the author says:

You need not have experienced verbal abuse in a relationship to benefit from the affirmations. Anyone can use this book to enhance his or her growth. I doubt that there is anyone who has not been defined in some way, if not at home or at school, then by some segment of the culture, such as through gender or racial discrimination. . . . Mutuality between people does not exist where people negatively define other people — not between significant others in couple relationships, not between family members, not between groups, not between countries, and not between dictators and their “subjects.”

The affirmations include about a page about the affirmation, and then a page for Notes about it in your own life. I’d usually revise the affirmation slightly to something I knew I believed and could say whole-heartedly, something I thought was a good reminder. It’s been so long since I read the beginning, I will probably go through and read it all again.

The focus on healing in this book is so good. Verbal abuse tears down your soul. Here Patricia Evans explains what can help you heal:

While time heals physical wounds, an antibiotic or bandage may facilitate the healing process. Likewise, when it comes to emotional pain, the healing that time affords reaps more benefits if we apply the antibiotic and bandage of affirmation and positive action. But positive action and affirmation best take place in the context of a positive perspective.

A new perspective on your recovery may help relieve some of your pain. One might be: he was not capable of seeing me and hearing me; I did nothing to justify his behavior.

A positive perspective is a lens, so to speak, through which you see yourself as the unique person that you are. No one in the world has your unique combination of gifts and talents. It is imperative that you appreciate and value yourself no matter how anyone has defined you.

I think this sums things up nicely:

Healing is possible. Ultimately, it is victory over the influence of verbal abuse. Victory over verbal abuse can be both a personal goal and a goal for humanity. Kindness and verbal abuse cannot exist in the same place, the same relationship, or the same world. Your personal victory over verbal abuse does, therefore, contribute to the healing of our planet.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

Review of A Praying Life, by Paul E. Miller

A Praying Life

Connecting with God in a Distracting World

by Paul E. Miller

NavPress, 2009. 279 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #3 Other Nonfiction

My small group began this book more than a year ago, and I continued slowly through it on my own. I think it’s the best book I’ve ever read on prayer, full of practical ideas for really getting personal with God and listening for His voice.

I like the first section: “Learning to Pray Like a Child.” He thinks of prayer in a very personal way with God, and gives examples of how that has worked in his life. He prays like someone really talking with his Father, and helps me want to do that, too.

And Paul E. Miller doesn’t simply talk about prayer. He talks about a praying life. Here’s a section from the Introduction:

Because prayer is all about relationship, we can’t work on prayer as an isolated part of life. That would be like going to the gym and working out just your left arm. You’d get a strong left arm, but it would look odd. Many people’s frustrations with prayer come from working on prayer as a discipline in the abstract.

We don’t learn to pray in isolation from the rest of our lives. For example, the more I love our youngest daughter, Emily, the more I pray for her. The reverse is true as well; the more I learn how to pray for her, the more I love her. Nor is faith isolated from prayer. The more my faith grows, the bolder my prayers get for Jill. Then, the more my prayers for her are answered, the more my faith grows. Likewise, if I suffer, I learn how to pray. As I learn how to pray, I learn how to endure suffering. This intertwining applies to every aspect of the Christian life.

Since a praying life is interconnected with every part of our lives, learning to pray is almost identical to maturing over a lifetime. What does it feel like to grow up? It is a thousand feelings on a thousand different days. That is what learning to pray feels like.

He goes on to explore many different facets of prayer. How much do we really know our Father? How comfortable are we talking with him? The ideas in this book can help.

There were many, many sections of this book I especially like, and I’ve posted them on Sonderquotes. I am sure I’m going to come back to this book again and again for encouragement from a fellow-traveler.

When it comes to prayer, we, too, just need to get the words out. Feel free to stop and pray now. It’s okay if your mind wanders or your prayers get interrupted. Don’t be embarrassed by how needy your heart is and how much it needs to cry out for grace. Just start praying. Remember the point of Christianity isn’t to learn a lot of truths so you don’t need God anymore. We don’t learn God in the abstract. We are drawn into his life.

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on my own copy of the book.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I write the posts for my website and blogs entirely on my own time. The views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.