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Name: It's Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self: Jacobs Hendel, Hilary, Fosha, Diana: 9780399588143: Amazon.com: Books
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It's Not Always Depression: Working the Change Triangle to Listen to the Body, Discover Core Emotions, and Connect to Your Authentic Self Hardcover – February 6, 2018

by Hilary Jacobs Hendel (Author), Diana Fosha (Foreword)

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Fascinating patient stories and dynamic exercises help you connect to healing emotions, ease anxiety and depression, and discover your authentic self.

Sara suffered a debilitating fear of asserting herself. Spencer experienced crippling social anxiety. Bonnie was shut down, disconnected from her feelings. These patients all came to psychotherapist Hilary Jacobs Hendel seeking treatment for depression, but in fact none of them were chemically depressed. Rather, Jacobs Hendel found that they’d all experienced traumas in their youth that caused them to put up emotional defenses that masqueraded as symptoms of depression. Jacobs Hendel led these patients and others toward lives newly capable of joy and fulfillment through an empathic and effective therapeutic approach that draws on the latest science about the healing power of our emotions.

Whereas conventional therapy encourages patients to talk through past events that may trigger anxiety and depression, accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP), the method practiced by Jacobs Hendel and pioneered by Diana Fosha, PhD, teaches us to identify the defenses and inhibitory emotions (shame, guilt, and anxiety) that block core emotions (anger, sadness, fear, disgust, joy, excitement, and sexual excitement). Fully experiencing core emotions allows us to enter an openhearted state where we are calm, curious, connected, compassionate, confident, courageous, and clear.

In It’s Not Always Depression, Jacobs Hendel shares a unique and pragmatic tool called the Change Triangle—a guide to carry you from a place of disconnection back to your true self. In these pages, she teaches lay readers and helping professionals alike

• why all emotions—even the most painful—have value.
• how to identify emotions and the defenses we put up against them.
• how to get to the root of anxiety—the most common mental illness of our time.
• how to have compassion for the child you were and the adult you are.

Jacobs Hendel provides navigational tools, body and thought exercises, candid personal anecdotes, and profound insights gleaned from her patients’ remarkable breakthroughs. She shows us how to work the Change Triangle in our everyday lives and chart a deeply personal, powerful, and hopeful course to psychological well-being and emotional engagement.

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Popular Highlights in this book

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Inhibitory emotions preserve connection by overriding core emotional expression.
Highlighted by 1,157 Kindle readers
Defenses cause us to feel trapped, inhibited, limited, and unable to reach our potential. Defenses force us to live in extremes of black and white, good or bad, where life lacks nuance. Too many defenses make it hard to wholeheartedly engage in life.
Highlighted by 929 Kindle readers
Wellness is a by-product of our ability to tolerate our internal experiences.
Highlighted by 919 Kindle readers

Editorial Reviews

Review

Hilary Jacobs Hendel is a highly accomplished therapist who practices a form of psychotherapy that is based on processing our core emotions. This type of psychotherapy uses a modern approach that has moved beyond more conventional psychodynamic psychotherapies. This new form of psychotherapy is known as "Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy." It stands in stark contrast to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy which places predominant emphasis on the impact of thoughts on behavior. Hendel is a practitioner of an accelerated form of experiential dynamic psychotherapy, AEDP, that was developed by Diana Fosha in New York.
What is unique in this book is Hendel's mission to take these psychotherapeutic tools and to present and rework them in a way that can be used by individuals on their own. This is a little bit like Penn and Teller showing us how a magic trick is really done! But she has a more important goal to bring these methods to a wide audience that may have little access to, or may not require formal psychotherapy.
Hendel reveals herself to be a passionate and effective healer by relevant clear case examples that give a most enlightening portrait of this therapeutic method. Equally disarmingly she is able to translate the method in ways that individuals can use for themselves. This is achieved by the case examples and exercises that readers can practice using the Change Triangle. The Change Triangle embodies many complex psychotherapeutic ideas that Hendel has distilled into an easily understood self-help approach. This is the genius of this book, converting formal psychotherapeutic strategies into a self-help toolbox.

I learned a lot from this book. It deepened my appreciation for AEDP and I enjoyed and learned from Hendel's canny grasp of this method. I also found the book therapeutic by working through some of the exercises.
In particular, I found the section dealing with the inhibitory emotions of shame and guilt outstanding. Shame is very common and often very toxic inhibitory emotion and can be really difficult to deal with and overcome. Hendel's discussion and demonstration of the method are powerful and healing.
This book is not only an excellent self-help resource for anyone dealing with powerful emotions such as grief, sadness, fear, anger, guilt, shame and anxiety it is of great value in educating new and experienced therapists in the application of emotion-focused experiential therapies. -Alan Eppel Professor of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Supervisor in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioural Neurosciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.

"One of the best new Depression audiobooks" - BookAuthoritybookauthority.org/books/new-depression-audiobooks

About the Author

Hilary Jacobs Hendel, LCSW, received her BA in biochemistry from Wesleyan University and an MSW from Fordham University. She is a certified psychoanalyst and AEDP psychotherapist and supervisor. She has published articles in The New York Times and professional journals. Jacobs Hendel also consulted on the psychological development of characters on AMC’s Mad Men. She lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

Getting to Know the Change Triangle

What This Book Will Do for You

i first encountered the Change Triangle in 2004 at an academic conference on the science of emotions and attachment in New York City. There I was staring at a giant upside-down triangle projected on the auditorium screen. It was a representation of how emotions work and can lead, if mismanaged, to psychological symptoms like depression. Defenses, anxiety, and these very important things called core emotions were mapped out in such a way that something suddenly clicked. The elements of psychological experience, which had seemed random and chaotic, fell into place, like the final turn of a Rubik’s Cube. I felt understood. I felt relief. I was excited. With all of my science and psychological education—Bronx High School of Science, a biochemistry degree from Wesleyan University, a doctor of dental surgery (DDS) from Columbia University, a master’s degree in social work, and since then a certification in psychoanalysis—why had I not seen this simple map before? I had the thought then, This should be basic education. Every one of us can benefit from understanding how our emotions work and how to work with them to feel better.

When I saw videotapes of emotion-informed psychotherapy, I saw radical transformations that occurred in one session. For these patients, work that would have taken a traditional psychotherapist years to accomplish was achieved in an hour. I couldn’t help wondering if it was too good to be true. Was this a method with scientific basis that could be taught and duplicated? My last decade of practice has proved that the answer is yes.

Having meticulously studied the last hundred years of psychological thought and the science and anatomy of the brain, and having practiced psychotherapy for more than a decade, I believe that the Change Triangle can help anyone, not just those in psychotherapy. My mission is to translate the theory behind the Change Triangle into a tool that everyone has access to, not just people training to practice psychotherapy. I’ve adapted the clinical literature and science to make the Change Triangle easy to understand and nimble enough to be used anytime, anywhere. I will explain how to use this important tool to help you feel better.

Life is tough. We all suffer. Modern humans experience more stress, burden, emptiness, anxiety, self-judgment, and depression than ever. Most of us don’t know how to deal with emotions effectively. Instead we work hard to manage them through avoidance. That coping strategy is the very thing that leads to symptoms of mental distress such as depression and anxiety. Avoiding emotions just does not work in the long run. The Change Triangle is a map to moving past our distress so we can spend more of our time in calmer, more vital states of being. The Change Triangle is grounded in the latest scientific research on emotions and the brain. Despite its complicated scientific roots, it feels intuitively right and is a resource for managing emotions that none of us should be without.

Emotions are powerful forces that in an instant overtake us and make us feel things, do things, and react in ways that are often hurtful. In response, we use other parts of our mind to bury emotions, believing that won’t affect us. But emotions are biological forces that move in accordance with physics. They cannot be ignored without consequences—hence the rising rates of anxiety and depression in the world. Our cultural and educational systems fail to equip us with the education, resources, and skills to understand and work with emotions, and our society lacks a basic understanding of how they function biologically. What our culture does teach us, quite well, is how to dismiss and avoid emotions. The Change Triangle is a challenge to this cultural norm.

Avoiding emotions has a multitude of costs. Emotions tell us what we want and need and what is bad for us. When we don’t use our emotions it’s like navigating a boat across tumultuous ocean waters without sonar or even a compass. Emotions also connect us to our authentic Self and allow us to feel intimately connected to other people. When we are out of touch with emotions, we suffer loneliness, because the connections to both ourselves and the people we care about are enriched through empathy, the emotional connector. A deeper connection to our most authentic Self comes through experiencing the seven universal, inborn, prewired core emotions: sadness, joy, anger, fear, disgust, excitement, and sexual excitement. These core emotions help us to navigate life effectively, starting the day we are born and continuing until the day we die.

Emotions are survival programs deeply embedded in the brain and not subject to conscious control. In the face of a physical threat, fear is triggered. Let’s say a wild dog was chasing you; fear makes you instantly move. Anger protects us by compelling us to fight in self-defense. Sadness is the core emotion we feel when we suffer losses, like losing one’s hair, losing a cherished possession, and losing loved ones. When we succeed and connect with others in enriching ways, emotions such as joy and excitement propel us to engage further, so humans grow, expand, and evolve. Emotions are immediate responses to the present environment. Emotions stand in stark contrast to intellect. Our thinking brain allows us time to consider how we want to respond. Our emotional brain just responds.

Despite the fact that we truly need emotions to live effectively, they also cause us problems. What a fundamental conflict! From a biological perspective, we need emotions, but they also hurt us. The human mind has evolved in such a way that we have an incredible ability to ignore emotions to push through life. In fact, this ability helps us get things done. We need to work, feed our families, secure shelter, and take care of other basic needs. We use defenses so that we can carry on. But researchers now know that blocking emotions is detrimental to mental and physical health. Blocked emotions lead to depression, anxiety, and a wide variety of other psychological symptoms caused by chronic stress. Additionally, chronic emotional stress causes changes to our physical health by increasing the amount of stress hormones, called corticosteroids, coursing through our body. Emotional stress has been linked to heart disease, stomach pain, headaches, insomnia, autoimmune disorders, and more.

Furthermore, the challenges of modern life—such as the pressure to succeed, the pressure to fit in, the desire to “keep up,” the “fear of missing out” (FOMO), and the desire for good relationships and work satisfaction—evoke combinations of emotions that are often in conflict with one another. For example, Frank could not afford the kind of car he really wanted. Something as simple as Frank’s thwarted car desire could cause a mixture of sadness, anger, humiliation, and anxiety. Needless to say, all those feelings together are hard to manage or bear without defenses. Life’s challenges and conflicts create complex emotional cocktails.

Based on our genetics, natural disposition, and childhood experiences, we each navigate emotions differently. The type and amount of adversity we faced in youth directly affects how we feel today even if we cannot consciously perceive the connection. Furthermore, how our parents and caregivers responded to our individual emotions directly affects how we feel about and deal with our own emotions and the emotions of others in the present, now.

Some of us disconnect from our emotions to cope with the challenges we face. That has ramifications. We turn off. We shut down. We become numb. Eventually, we live in our heads with only our thoughts and intellect to guide us. We have lost our emotional compass. Alternatively, some of us cannot disconnect and instead become easily overwhelmed by emotions. That has ramifications as well. People who become easily overwhelmed expend a tremendous amount of energy managing their feelings, and that is exhausting. You might recognize yourself as someone who is quick to anger or who cries at the drop of a hat. Or maybe you recognize that you often feel scared even though intellectually you know there’s actually nothing to fear. Some of us are easily hurt or insulted by others, taking even the smallest misunderstandings so personally that being around people becomes strenuous. When our emotions are so intense and easily set off, we sometimes react in ways we later regret, making our lives even harder.

Ideally, we create a balance between our emotions and thoughts. We need to feel our feelings, but not so much that they overtake us, impair our functioning and ability to be productive. We need to think, but not so much that we ignore our deep and rich emotional lives, sacrificing vitality.

The Change Triangle is a map to move us out of our defenses and put us back in touch with our core emotions. When we contact our core emotions, feel them, and come out the other side, we experience relief. Our anxiety and depression diminish. When we are in touch with core emotions, our vitality, confidence, and peace of mind increase. Biologically, our nervous system resets for the better.

Working the Change Triangle makes the brain more flexible so we have much more control and power over how we feel, think, and behave. When people learn about the Change Triangle and understand how emotions work, they are transformed.

Although I first learned about the Change Triangle at a conference for professionals, it is a map that all of us can easily learn and begin to apply immediately. By the end of this book you will understand yourself, your loved ones, friends, and co-workers in a new way and be able to put that understanding to use. Because all of us are the same when it comes to how emotions work, the Change Triangle makes sense for everyone. You will be more informed about how to improve your relationships with both yourself and others. You will feel better and your life will be easier.

The Story of Me

i was born into a family of Freudians and a culture where mind over matter was the mantra. My mother had been a guidance counselor and my father was a psychiatrist. They believed that I could and should control my feelings with intellectual insight. Emotions were rarely discussed at home and, if they were, it was the goal to master them or “fix” them.

My clear memories begin around the fourth grade, when I started to feel self-conscious. My mother always told me I was beautiful and smart, but I didn’t feel it. I felt stupid and ugly. When I looked in the mirror I felt that I came up short. I wasn’t bullied and was friendly with the cool kids, but I always felt separate and insecure. As an adult, I realized that what I was feeling was anxiety and shame.

In middle school, I excelled academically. With each good grade and honor society mention my confidence grew. I developed the belief that if I worked hard, I would succeed and be recognized. With each success and recognition, I felt relief from insecurity.

Around that time, my seventh-grade English teacher had us read Freud and I became obsessed with psychoanalysis. In retrospect, it must have helped me understand myself in a way that made me feel in control. My passion for psychoanalysis continued to grow through high school to the point that my friends begged me to stop analyzing everyone. So I curbed my hobby of providing free—albeit unwanted—psychoanalysis and, instead, read voraciously on the topic.

By that time, I had decided I wanted to be a doctor like my father. I loved and was good at science, and I received a tremendous amount of positive attention for that decision. Up until my junior year in college, I never questioned my path, but I had never really considered what the day-to-day life of a doctor looked like.

In college I signed up for a course called Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Much to my chagrin, I realized that in fact it was an anti-Freudian course in feminism. For the first half of the semester, I sat righteously in the small seminar, me against ten radical feminists. Confident in my position, I argued fervently about why Freud was brilliant and his theories valid. After about five classes, I realized that my arguments were falling on deaf ears. In fact, my classmates had brought up some solid counterarguments and research that I found incredibly persuasive. The thought occurred to me that maybe I could learn something if I wasn’t so busy arguing.

By the end of the course, I had started to question everything, including the values and beliefs of my parents, my society, and my culture. I started to consider why I had decided to be a doctor. As embarrassing as it was for me to admit at the time, I realized that my fantasy of being a doctor had everything to do with achieving a certain lifestyle and nothing to do with wanting to treat physical illness. When I imagined myself dealing with very sick people and having to deliver a dire diagnosis to their loved ones, I found the prospect too difficult—too anxiety provoking. I bristled at the responsibility. I didn’t want to deal with such heavy issues of loss and death—topics we had always avoided in my family—on a daily basis.

I was too scared to abandon the medical track and I needed an immediate plan or I would be lost, out of control. Starting from childhood and up until this point I had been driven by the desire to minimize my anxiety. I was making decisions, big and small, with the goal of having a long-term plan for my life to ensure I would be happy. I had many fears festering under the surface that I believed I could avoid if I just stayed on course to achieving a good career and finding a good husband. So . . . I decided to become a dentist.

In dental school, I met my first husband and I thought everything was working out perfectly. I had an amazing partner, I was ready to start a family, and my lucrative career was on track. Then step-by-step everything fell apart. I became a dentist but hated it and left the field a year after graduation. My decision to leave dentistry upset my husband, my in-laws, and my father terribly—I lost their approval and esteem. After six years of marriage, my husband and I were unable to manage the conflicts that had arisen between us. I was lost, alone, and afraid. Couples therapy didn’t help. We had no way to solve our problems; our marriage ended.

I was single again, with two little children and no career. Everything I thought I knew and was confident about proved wrong for me. I loved my daughters, but I felt lost and without a compass. For the first time in my life I was off track and without a plan.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Random House; First Edition (February 6, 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0399588140
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0399588143
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.15 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.43 x 1.12 x 9.52 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #27,525 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #40 in Depression (Books)
- #56 in Popular Psychology Psychotherapy
- #78 in Emotional Mental Health

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Hilary Jacobs Hendel

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To relieve her patients’ suffering, psychotherapist Hilary Jacobs Hendel switched from practicing traditional talk psychotherapy to Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP). Traditional therapy focuses on people’s thoughts and stories while AEDP is a healing methodology that helps people connect with their core emotions. Hendel teaches us that core emotions like joy, anger, sadness, fear, and excitement, are automatic and universal physical experiences; this is firmly grounded in neuroscience. Lack of access to these core emotions is at the root of anxiety, depression, and many other problems people suffer from today. We can all be taught to rediscover our core emotions with The Change Triangle, an easy to learn tool that Hendel uses to help people move through emotions to a place of calm and which is an important part of healing anxiety and depression. After years of using this tool in her private practice, Hendel was convinced that it could be a life-changing resource for anyone.

HILARY JACOBS HENDEL received her BA in Biochemistry from Wesleyan University, and an MSW from Fordham University. She is a certified psychoanalyst and AEDP psychotherapist and supervisor. She has published articles in The New York Times and professional journals. Hilary was the Mental Health Consultant for the Emmy Award winning television show Mad Men on AMC. She lives in New York City.

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David M.

This book is a brave and risky gift of deep compassion for which I'm very grateful

Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2018

Verified Purchase

For many years I'd been seeing doctors who had diagnosed me with major depression and social anxiety. I tried the "gold standard" approach of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and the newer mindfulness-based Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), as well as medication, meditation, exercise, and countless other things everyone always recommends. They all helped somewhat, but I couldn't help feel that they never touched the heart of my emotional pain. One day, I happened to read Hilary Jacobs Hendel's op-ed in The New York Times titled "It's Not Always Depression, Sometimes It's Shame." The story of "Brian", whose parents had provided for him materially but neglected him emotionally, spoke to me, and something crucial clicked when Hendel called his experience "a form of trauma." When I saw that Hendel was publishing a new book with the same title as her article, I jumped at the chance to buy it.

Trauma was a word I had always associated with experiences like warfare, car accidents, rape, or natural disaster. But reading her article sent me on a path of searching, which eventually led me to the work of Bessel van der Kolk, Pete Walker, Beverly Engel, and others who recognized that things like abuse, neglect, bullying, or other more workaday adverse experiences can result in similar symptoms as those more obvious traumas. In this book, Hendel calls these "small t traumas" (as opposed to "Big T Traumas"), and makes the point that "we are all a little traumatized." Such "small t traumas" are often easy to overlook, but can deeply wound our ability to feel what we really feel and (by extension) be who we really are. In this book, Hendel teaches you how to reconnect with your emotions and with your true self, what she calls "the openhearted state", characterized by calm, compassion, clarity, connectedness, confidence, and courage.

It's taken me several months to get through the book. Hendel really wanted to get as much of the healing potential of therapy (particularly the style of therapy she practices, Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy) into the book as possible and make it as accessible as possible, using plain language. The result is admittedly more pragmatic than immediately inspiring. It makes for a slow read, especially if (like me) you want to contemplate the information and apply it to your life. It's not easy work, and may require working through it with a therapist. But this is vital information in a world which seems to revolve around running from our emotions, and each page is brimming with empathy and compassion for her clients and for her readers. Hendel was doing a brave and risky thing in making this information, heretofore available only to mental health professionals, widely available in a book for the general public. Diana Fosha, the founder of AEDP, expresses in the Foreword to this book a veiled apprehension about having her life's work loosed upon the world, out of her careful guardianship, though I don't think she need worry. This book is thus a gift of deep compassion, and I'm extremely grateful she put in the work and dedication to get this information out to as many people as possible. I especially appreciated the inclusion of specific techniques for working with emotions like anger, anxiety, and shame; in addition, Hendel goes into considerable depth about the nature of trauma, the factors that can contribute to our anxiety or shame, and offers moving, relatable stories from her own therapy practice.

It's not a perfect book. The Change Triangle she uses is a helpful shorthand for our uneasy relationship with our emotions, but I'm not convinced that this framework (developed for clinicians) will be successful as self-help tool for a general audience, due to the level of self-awareness required. (I note that, to date, many of the positive reviews are by therapists and not laypeople.) What's more, I don't feel Hendel emphasized the potential pitfalls of trying to do this work on your own. AEDP is a deeply interpersonal form of therapy, and this comes across in both Fosha's Foreword, and Hendel's moving clinical vignettes. Especially when we're dealing with trauma, the presence of a compassionate other is vital. I previously read Tina Gilbertson's delightful Constructive Wallowing: How to Beat Bad Feelings by Letting Yourself Have Them , which covers much the same ground as Hendel, and I find myself using her T-R-U-T-H technique more than the Change Triangle, though they accomplish essentially the same thing. But Hendel's book adds a wealth of information from neuroscience, attachment theory, emotion research, and clinical practice that will be valuable to anyone interested in going deeper.

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K. Alford

everyone should read this book

Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2023

Verified Purchase

clearly written.
Intended audience is therapists, but it's perfect & extremely helpful for non-therapists, too.
borrow it from the library if you want to give it a test run, but I've marked mine up & am planning on reading it again.

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Larry Drell,MD

HELPING YOU PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT MATTERS

Reviewed in the United States on February 6, 2018

Verified Purchase

As a psychiatrist and therapist for over 40 years I have always encouraged my patients to pay attention to how they are feeling and thinking. To deny or avoid one's true feelings and emotions leads to a multitude of problems and symptoms from states of depression to anxiety and everything in between.

This practical and clearly written self-help book written by a gifted therapist helps the reader learn the incredible importance of understanding and accepting our core emotions and the variety of ways we use defenses and other emotions (anxiety, guilt, and shame) to protect us (even though they cause us pain as well).

It is filled with examples from her personal life and her work with patients to help you understand the importance of discovering and accepting your emotional responses and how to use that knowledge to better navigate your life.

She introduces you to The Change Triangle, a conceptual tool, a map, to understand our emotions and discover what we are doing with them that limit our awareness and growth.

Without jargon or overly technical explanations, she presents the latest theories and discoveries in cognitive psychology, neuroscience and mindfulness meditation. She distills this knowledge into a multitude of useful tools and skills to better understand, acknowledge and use our emotions to enhance our lives.

She describes clearly and compassionately the various ways we have of avoiding emotions with the layers of defenses, protective feelings, and automatic emotional reactions.

Her approach reminds us and focuses on our innate health and teaches how to use that more effectively.

The book is filled practical techniques of observation and mindful awareness skills to help one become more in touch and accepting of our core emotions. The book offers hope and direction.

The author is a trained and obviously skilled therapist and writes openly about her own struggles and discoveries. She writes with openness, compassion and humor that offers the reader the opportunity to understand what she is feeling and how she thinks and how she guides her patients to help them discover their true power.

This gives us a window into how our minds work and how important it is to pay attention to our bodies and our emotions whenever interacting with others (and ourselves).

And most important this book offers hope for gaining understanding, acceptance and healthy ways to manage our deepest feelings.

Larry Drell, MD
Anxiety And Depression Therapy Services
Washington, DC

113 people found this helpful

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Sheryn N.

Emotions rule!

Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2020

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This book really put me in tune with my emotions. After years of addiction, I was numb to what I felt. The Change Triangle and the seven Cs of the authentic self were instrumental in changing my mindset about embracing my emotions.

5 people found this helpful

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Farrann

This book is a game changer in therapy!

Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2023

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I cannot recommend this book highly enough! I am new to learning about AEDP and the author writes this book in a way that is easy to read with stories to help you understand. I am not a fast reader and I read this book in a week and a half. That’s how good and an easy read it was!

One person found this helpful

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Julianna

excellent and fun to read!

Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2023

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The approach to therapy is very personal centered and that is key.
The practical change triangle is very understandable for most to apply.

Reviewed in the United States on October 9, 2023

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Love the details in this book. I immediately started using the interventions with clients.

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Top reviews from other countries

Sue R

okay

Reviewed in Canada on January 12, 2024

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like

l e morris

Highly recommended

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 3, 2023

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A very useful framework for how to process your emotions

Angelo

Informative, compassionate, scientific

Reviewed in Italy on September 22, 2021

Verified Purchase

This book is packed with every sort of useful information about dealing with one's feelings. The author's stance is very compassionate toward human suffering, and scientifically informed at the same time. I have learnt a great deal of things about how to practicallly heal myself and my emotions. By practicing the suggestions inside the book, I have become a stronger man. I cannot thank the author enough for her work.

Kapil Sakhuja

Beautiful book with so much important information

Reviewed in India on January 19, 2019

Verified Purchase

I have read some books in last one year on the topics of depression, emotional issues, trauma etc for my own healing. This book has brought together most of that information in a very relevant way. The author has been able to put together so much important and relevant information and present it in such a beautiful way. The author is both compassionate and wise in her words.

4 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Finally!

Reviewed in France on January 17, 2019

Verified Purchase

I loved the book, I've been struggling with depression, anxiety and low self confidence for as long as I can remember, and it feels good to find out about a different perspective on the subject other than the supposedly cure all therapy aka CBT. This shines a new light on our personal issues, and confirms what I knew intuitively for a while, that most of them come from repressed emotions that we haven't released yet. It will definitely help me to get in the right direction. For this, thank you so much Hilary!

One person found this helpful

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