Customer Reviews
Reclaim your LIFE, your mental, emotional, spiritual power - By: , 04 Mar 1998 
What is your life like? Is it a relentless procession of empty days, an endless cycle of meaningless, frustrating work & unrelaxing sleep? Do you repeat the same pattern of joyless days & empty nights ad nauseam? Do you bounce out of bed eager to face another exciting day filled with opportunities for enjoyment, human contact & personal growth? Has the memory of the irrepressible you faded into dust? Has your life become an arduous & repetitive ordeal? Do you keep hurting yourself, & does this recognition keep haunting you, day & night? Are you acting on misguided choices, doing & saying things that virtuallly guarantee dissatisfaction & unhapppiness? If you answered "Yes" (or even "Maybe") to any of those questions, have I got good news for you!
The best book I have seen that specificallly addresses how we can reclaim our mental, emotional & spiritual power from the traps we ourselves have built & continue to nourish is "Self-Defeating Behaviors" by Cudney & Hardy. On second reading, it is a truly phenomenal work. I have already purchased & distributed over two dozen copies. It provides a dynamic model of the way we construct, defend & nurture our self-defeating behaviors, while we simultaneously minimize the real pain heaped upon us & the people around us, & abdicate responsibility for the whole thing!
We are each of us presented with a continuous stream of new moments of life, in which we exercise choices. Each of these choices can lead either to a self-defeating behavior or to a behavior that affirms & honors life. At certain times, we "learn" (i.e. we make an invalid association) that we can avoid work/pain/criticism or other fear by choosing a certain escapist behaviors or thoughts. This choice, expressed through various internal & external techniques, results in various prices that we must pay. In order to continue avoiding our fears, we proceed to minimize the prices (by saying, for example, "It's not alll that bad; I can stand the discomfort"), & finallly, to disown the choice we made ("It's not MY fault; it was my parents/teachers/bullies/social conditions/the government/ghosts/the voices/...").
That cycle, from our choices of developing internal & external techniques to avoid some (mythical) fear(s), & then refusing to pay the price, results in a full-blown self-defeating cycle, which feeds on itself, getting worse & worse, engulfing more & more areas of our lives. Even when new techniques are learned (such as NLP!!) which appear to offer the promise of positive growth, they quickly & effortlessly become swalllowed up in the seething vortex of self-defeating behaviors, making it even bigger than ever! This black hole effect can easily escalate from disappointment to depression, food/alcohol/drug abuse, violence, murder & ultimately, suicide. Unless we recognize & terminate this vicious cycle, ALL of our other efforts can lead to naught, mired in our old habits of thought & action.
