Reinventing Your Life: How to Break Free from Negative Life Patterns and Feel Good Again

I've been going to therapy for a long time so I was skeptical when my therapist recommended this book, but the insights were incredible! I would highly recommend if you're open and able to dig deeper into your thought patterns and actions.

I love this book. I have read many books in my efforts to heal from anxiety/fear/paranoia, depression, and a poor self-image. There are many books that have helped me, and this one is in the Top 10. I am happy to say that I no longer suffer from those problems! I credit the books I've read, changing my thought patterns, my voyage of personal inner growth/soul-searching/discovery, making changes in my lifestyle, and getting away from people in my life who were toxic/negative/abusive. This book made me realize that some "old wounds" I thought I had recovered from ... had not fully healed yet. It also illuminated some wounds I hadn't thought about before, and provided ways to try to heal from them. I found this book to be very touching. The authors' insight and empathy is commendable.

Even though this book was originally published in 1993 and Schema Therapy has evolved further (which is what this book covers), the information is just as valuable today. This is an easy-to-read book that helps you identify limiting patterns or life traps (schemas) that originated in childhood and adolescence. Are you extremely anxious in social settings? Do you worry unrealistically about your health? Do you feel that you are essentially flawed, worthless, or incompetent? Do you become extremely upset when someone close to you disagrees with you? Do you find it difficult or impossible to form healthy relationships? Do you repeatedly get involved with people who abuse you? Do you avoid relationships? These and many other patterns are covered in this book, along with a technology for identifying yours and how to heal them. The first step is to recognize your life traps, which this book assists you in doing through detailed questionaires. You also learn about your misguided attempts to cope, which actually maintain the life traps. Then the author assists you in challenging these limiting patterns via various cognitive, behavioral, and experiential strategies. Highly recommended!!! --Fred P. Gallo, PhD, author of Energy Psychology: Explorations at the Interface of Energy, Cognition, Behavior, and Health, Second Edition (Innovations in Psychology), Energy Tapping, and Energy Tapping for Trauma: Rapid Relief from Post-Traumatic Stress Using Energy Psychology

I found this book very informative with behavioral and cognitive approaches along with psychoanalytical and experiential techniques that makes this book so very different and unique. I have been in therapy for years, and although from time to time I may of received helpful feedback, most of the time I just talked and talked and the therapist (supposedly)listened (I did try about 7 different therapists). I never felt there were any action steps to help break-through the repetitive cycles many people repeat throughout their lives. This book gives the reader the opportunity to determine if they fall into any of the lifetraps and to what degree. If there is a lifetrap that is holding a person back, then there are several examples of how it may relate to the readers life, and other examples that may exemplify someone the reader may know. However, there are suggestions to break the cycle, to break free! To build trust, to reframe thoughts, to change behavior in order to improve life and to eliminate the baggage load often carried around by people stuck in a lifetrap. Time to get out and lose that baggage!

For those of us who have read endless books on Cognitive / Bahaviour approaches to depression, anxiety and personality disorders, this one is most welcome: First of all, it is not simplistic, naive and patronising, like it often is with self help books. Second, the authors can empathise and demonstrate knowledge of 'what it feels like'. Third, the book is not solely based on the main principle of cognitive therapy that changing your thinking is the first step to changing your emotions. The authors describe how learning patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving in childhood can affect adult life; these patterns, often hidden under totally different circumstances, appear again and again. The authors make this pattern abstraction and repetition very clear, and suggest ways that this can be broken. This is the popular book version of the authors' research on schema theory; it is a very balanced book, addressing emotions and thoughts in a way that the dry cognitive therapy approach cannot achieve. It has been the most helpful book to me to date, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who has had enough of naive readings and is seriously looking for explanations, answers and suggestions.

I've read many self-help books. This one is the most comprehensive by far. It very clearly reveals and explains the origins, consequences, and strategies for changing self-defeating behavior. To be used properly, it needs to be read and reread. It's easy to use this book to diagnose your problems. But the hard part is changing them. To make changes, read the sections on change repeatedly, following through on the authors' recommendations. It's not easy, but you will know that you're doing the right thing. I haven't made all the changes that I want to (and the authors know that change is difficult). But I'm confident that if I don't put this book down, I'll be able to become the person I want to be.