Your Road Map to Lifelong Happiness: A Guide to the Life You Want

I only bought this book because I was curious to find out what happened to Ken at the end of his life. I immediately notice on the back flip cover that he was married to Lydia, much younger than Penny. In his autobiography "Discovering the Secrets of Happiness" Ken wrote on p.167 that "I felt that Penny's refusal to share adult films with me" was already the seed for future divorce. In this book, as far as I can tell, he wrote only one paragraph about his 3rd ex-wife Penny on first page of ch.21 p.225: "Life still sends lots of 'hurricanes' to test me. My wife with whom I wanted to live the rest of my life decided she had another agenda. A training I had set up to teach the Living Love System fell apart. People I thought I could count on let me down. my personal curriculum at the University of Life is frequently enriched." In his first Appendix subtitled "Inventory of Childhood Survival Strategies" he almost got the same conclusion Werner Erhard of EST and that I redefined as 'fall from heaven story' (see 'all my review' for examples and please find your own -- to find what's clipping your own happiness wing) Although this is one of his fattest book, it's an easy read. He has some interesting & enlightened claims: p.66 (again part of my #)- "Sex is a crucial area that is often complicated by a parent's false-self adaptations... One out of every three women in the US have experienced some form of sexual abuse before age 18... For childhood survival, we had to perfect our performance of the strategic, false-selves required by our caregivers...every five-year-old deserves an Oscar. We had to learn the 'right' lines provided by our caretakers. We had to convince everyone (including ourselves) as we automatically responded to life situations using our false-selves." p.67 "Many of us, in varying degrees, have lost our aliveness and spontaneity. We have become depressed, unhappy, and desperate. We can become alive again and free from depression and anxiety when our self-esteem is based on the 'authenticity' and 'wholeness' of our true-self feelings-and not on the 'performance' of false-self adaptations that helped us survive childhood. When we reclaim the anaesthetized true-self parts we had to disown, WE FEEL WHOLE. We experience that we are ENOUGH. It is interesting to note that the enlightened state of consciousness is often described as transpersonal, timeless, and being aware of what's here and now." His definition of childhood abuses from the list on p. 87 include parent(s) that - physically leave you - is so busy that you get little quality time together - don't model their own emotions for you - don't affirm that it is okay for to have strong emotions... - use you to take care of their own unmet needs or desires - use you to take care of their failing marriage - hide and deny their shameful secrets to the outside world, and you have to protect these hidden issues in order to keep the family balance - do not give you their time, attent

This is the better mousetrap. In this last book by Ken Keyes, finished just before he died, Ken introduces EMDR, Harville Hendrix, Ron Kurtz's Hakomi, and other therapies as much faster ways of getting rid of addictions than using his classic methods (which themselves are efficacious at achieving positive results with zero side-effects)