Do-It-Yourself Therapy
   Lynn Lott, Riki Intner, Barbara Mendenhall
  1999 Career Press, Inc. New Jersey USA
   ISBN: 1564144097

You can order this book from the author at 1-800-456-7770

A RebeccasReads author featured in Authors & Books

How To Think, Feel, and Act like a New Person In Just 8 Weeks. Would you like to increase your self-awareness? Transform your relationships? Stop repeating self-defeating patterns? Now, for a change, you can help yourself change.

When I got this little book from Lynn Lott, whose earlier book Chores Without Wars I had relished & reviewed, I was flabbergasted! How could the APA allow it to exist? Do-It-Yourself Therapy? Images of Woody Allen's marathon sessions with his therapists flitted across my mind. You mean there really are people out there who not only know how to, they also teach us to fix the behaviors which are causing our lives not to work? Amazing!

In the Prologue the three authors even pose one of my many questions: Do-It-Yourself Therapy - Is It Possible? The Introduction makes the simple statement to be Your Own Therapist - after all there's no better expert on yourself than yourself! Right?

Well, this Baby Boomer has had a couple of engagements with community mental health counsellors & knows what it's like to sit on the “wrong” side of the desk & ask for homework, something to be thinking about, sort through until the next session. Until I took the training to be a battered children's advocate in a small town's domestic violence prevention agency, I could not find a counsellor or therapist who had a plan for or who thought homework of any value.

Do-It-Yourself Therapy is all about homework. All about discovering how change happens; finding out how we resist change & how we can improve our relationships with our families, our work colleagues as well as with our own selves!

I found the section on how I got to be me as rivetting as any thriller & when I began to put my childhood memories to work, jeez louise - talk about coming clean! When I learnt why I do what I do & that I could do the work to transform myself into thinking, feeling & acting like a new person & I read on! Don't get me wrong, this is real work, real hard work; stuff comes up, memories surface & sometimes I didn't want to focus, didn't want to know, wanted to stay in the sulk of my ignorant misery rather than scribble my way into knowing happiness!

I took the course & did the exercises. I read the stories & played the cards & I made the lists. Because I did the work I feel much more connected, more in tune with my reality & much, much safer. If you're not a list maker, the exercises will challenge you; if you're a list whiz then you'll have a ball with this jewel of a book & it really works!

Big things come in small wrappers & this book is a biggie! Lynn Lott, Riki Intner & Barbara Mendenhall have composed a concise, everyday language, well-formatted exercise book, with interesting stories, sound resolution work & lots of useful information clearly explained - this is definitely a life changing book.

Read & work it alone; read & work it with your group; read & work it in your bath; in the park; at the gymn; read & work it with your counselor - just read it & do the work! Very well done, you three wise women!

More from Lynn Lott:
Chores Without Wars with Riki Intner
Empowering Teenagers and Yourself in the Process with Jane Nelsen
Teaching Parenting the Positive Discipline Way Facilitators Manual with Jane Nelsen
Positive Discipline A-Z with Jane Nelsen & H. Stephen Glenn
Positive Discipline in the Classroom with Jane Nelsen & H. Stephen Glenn
Positive Discipline for Parenting in Recovery with Jane Nelsen & Riki Intner
Positive Discipline for Teenagers with Jane Nelsen
Positive Discipline in the Classroom: Facilitator's Manual

The following books are out of print
To Know Me Is To Love Me - Together and Liking It
Empowering Teens and Yourself in the Process

Do check out my Interview with Lynn Lott, Riki Intner & Barbara Mendenhall!
(09/17/00)

Rebecca