The Emotional Hostage: Rescuing Your Emotional Life

This book by Leslie Cameron-Bandler (now Leslie Lebeau) and Michael Lebeau is in my opinion the best book so far on emotional management. I read this book over 16 years ago and my copy is well-worn (I even bought another copy for when my original will finally have to be retired). The book is easy to understand and the principles and techniques are easy to understand and apply: with praactice you will learn how to get your emotions to work for you rather than against you. In this book you will learn: The Strucutre of emotions: this section will give you a model of the eight components that comprise an emotion (Criteria, chunk size, comparison, involvement,intensity,modality,time frame and tempo) and how understanding and changing those components will allow you to transform emotional states or create the ones you deisre. The Functional Attributes of emotions: here you will learn how to respond to emotions (especially unpleasant ones) as signals to take better more useful actions. The book provides a list of possible meanings of different emotions and how you can use those meanings to serve you. Example: Anxiety: the signal or functional attribute of anxiety is to let you know thatthat there is something in your future for which you need to better prepare (page 36). You will also be given insight and strategies for dealing with difficult emotions before you experience them, while you are experiencing them, and after you are experiencing them. You will also learn various ways to gain access to the emotions you want, when you want them. At the end of the book you are given a summary of all the major principles and strategies offered in the book for quick reference. I refer to this book often and have used it as the basis for seminars and trainings I have conducted on emotional mastery. You will benefit tremendously from the book. By applying what you read you will quickly gain practical tools and skills that will give you greater emotional choice and freedom. Buy and read it!

About 18 years ago I had the pleasure of working one on one with Leslie as she was researching her model of Imperative Self Therapy. In just over 2 hours, I experienced first person Leslie in action employing all the processes from this book, Emotional Hostage, along with Emprinting and Futurepacing. You may not know these terms but I assure you, everything in Emotional Hostage is in lay terms. All that is required is that you accept Leslie's invitation to try on some of the ideas and methods offered in the book. Keep what works, return what does not. I have given away over 100 copies of this book to my co-workers, fellow seekers, students, teachers, even strangers. I would have this book required teaching in all health and education related fields. I strongly suggest you read all works of Leslie Cameron Bandler Lebeau if you are a student of NLP, a therapist, a personal coach or an educator. For everyone else, it's an open invitation. Please take the chance, show up for life. This book will show you how.

Seen in retroperspective I should have dedicated my book "7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence" to Leslie-Cameron, given that reading her book helped me to write a reply to Goleman's book. Out of respect for her work, I keep refering people to this book. The biggest "mistake" of this book is that it appeared 10 years too early, long before Goleman made the term "emotional intelligence" popular. Yet it does a far better job than Goleman when it comes to helping people to increase their EQ.Leslie Cameron is one of the co-founders of NLP, even if she now has moved on and seems to be "lost" to the NLP community. I keep wondering where the field of emotional intelligence would have stood if Leslie would have kept up her work in this area.Conclusion: even now this remains one of the best books on the topic of emotional intelligence. I hope that readers of my book will feel that it's complementary.Patrick E.C. Merlevede, MSc -- co-author of "7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence"

I actually tried this method for several months, keeping an emotional journal. I had little success, nothing like what the book promised, but I didn't have a thorough understanding of the basics of the book's methods.My emotions are responses to conditions that are important to me, and when they are not, then I decide that there's something wrong with the way my emotions are working. But whether my emotions work or not, I have to discover what they are a response to, and the book "The Emotional Hostage" tells a person how to do that. I didn't really consider that part of it when I starting using the models, I just assumed that I could decide what my emotions were made up of, and then control them. When that didn't work, I gave up on the book.If you do what I mistakenly did the first time I read through the book and tried out it's methods, you'll find that it's easier to say to yourself "I'm not changing my emotional tempo correctly" than it is to say "I'm not really appreciating what my emotion is signaling" or "I don't know what my emotion is signaling". The book describes a "generative" method of responding to one's own emotions. If there's one thing worth taking away from the book, that method is it.You need to learn how to respond to your emotions before you consider the details of your emotional elements, because you'll find that emotional elements are conceptually slippery. What the authors mean by them are actually obvious behaviors you notice are a part of your emotions. For me they were conceptual ??? whenever I thought of them, but I still told myself that I felt an emotional element ("I'm feeling an emotional element!") when I didn't even know how to identify them. So read the book thoroughly, and then decide for yourself what evidence of your emotions are ones you associate with a particular emotional element. Learning to change that element may then have an effect that you need to change your emotions, just like the book promises. Or you can fritter your time away like I did, wondering if what you're feeling is an "emotional element".

The best book I've ever read on emotions. I refer back to it often. Worth studying and incorporating into your own life.