Taking Charge When You're Not in Control
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Control is a myth. Sooner or later, all of us run into people and situations we have absolutely no control over. That's precisely when we need to step in and take charge. As nationally renowned psychotherapist and author Patricia Wiklund, Ph.D., shows in this persuasive new book, taking charge means valuing yourself for who you are and using your strengths to achieve what's important. Warm, practical, and appealing down-to-earth, Taking Charge When You're Not in Control offers real solutions to difficult everyday issues.
Dr. Wiklund argues that being a victim is fundamentally a state of mind. Once we clarify how we feel about what life has dealt us, we gain the power to emerge from the victim mentality and embrace our best options truthfully and capably. Even if we can't change outside events, we can change the way we react. That's charge now, we become freer, stronger, and more fully ourselves. This complete program of self-understanding includes how to
• Confront—and defuse—the "out of control" people in our lives
• Stop the labeling, blaming, shaming, and feeling guilty game
• Achieve real change without relying on conventional self-help programs
• Release yourself from the victim mentality once and for all
• Let go, forgive, and feel your absolute strongest emotionally
• Free yourself of anxiety, self-doubt, anger, and frustration
And much more
Taking Charge When You're Not in Control is not a recovery book but rather a book about being—and feeling—recovered. Here you'll find exercises, anecdotes, and great advice to help you start taking charge—right now. You can live a rewarding,successful, deeply satisfying life. Let this uplifting book be your guide.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Championing a philosophy that may be summed up with her statement, "It's not dysfunction. It's life," Wiklund, a psychotherapist and memoirist (Sleeping with a Stranger), reminds us that we don't have ultimate control of our own lives. Illustrating her point with stories of lives dislocated by circumstance, nature, bad luck or malice, she offers an antidote to the current victim mentality: self-empowerment through changes in behavior and attitude. Deploring what she sees as a tendency to emphasize emotion over reason, Wiklund advocates hard thinking to determine the truth of a situation, to decide what to let go of and what actions to take. Yet her framework for action isn't really fleshed out in the chapters on thinking through issues and finding one's purpose; more intriguing is her discussion of the distinctions between forgiveness, pardon, letting go and forgetting. Unfortunately, Wiklund's voice is alternately simplistic ("Lots of people aren't smart enough to think for themselves") and academic (as in her discussions of epistemology and moral development). Her self-assessment exercises at the end of each chapter only highlight her peculiar tone. Even readers who share her philosophy and cold appraisal of 12-step programs, (she labels the concept of co-dependency "noxious") may not be drawn to a work that expresses it in such a downbeat, oddly impersonal style.