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Summary: Creating Optimism
Review: This is a great book , it gives excellent insight into the base causes of depression and practical and easy to follow steps on how to go about overcoming depression . I can't recommend it highly enough for those who have found depression a reoccuring pattern in there lives. You can work through this with the help of this seven step program and you'll never look back. And it's on going with a website that you can visit to keep up with any new information , fantastic effort to Bob and Alicia you have given the world a great gift,
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Summary: I Can Now Move On
Review: A while ago I bought the book "Creating Optimism" on Amazon. I bought it because I was desperate and my depression had brought me to near suicide (I have seriously tried to kill myself on a number of occasions).I have survived not just physical and sexual abuse in my childhood, but also well-intentioned but fruitless therapy and a wide variety of antidepressants. None helped. I didn't understand why my parents had mistreated me and what motivated the uncle who molested whom and who everyone thought was so kind. I always though that it was somehow my fault. However, after reading Bob Murray and Alicia Fortinberry's book I can now understand what drove them. I can see that they were victims of a society gone mad. However the most valuable thing, for me, was the final understanding that it was not my fault-none of it: not the beatings, not the sexual molesting, not the enduring criticism. I now see their actions in the light of their family history. It was so liberating to be able to put the pieces together with the help of the book's clearly laid out exercises. For the first time in my life I feel truly innocent. Everyone who has suffered abuse of whatever kind should get the book and be so liberated. I can now move on. I have already ditched a boyfriend who was critical and who verbally abused me. I have found the strength to actively search for a better job and I have laid down boundaries with my parents and my fiends that I never could have done before. To the authors of "Creating Optimism" I say: Thank you, thank you!
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Summary: A Doctor's Prescription
Review: As a doctor I would like to recommend this book to everyone. Research has shown 80% of all the patients physicians see are clinically depressed. This book will help them overcome their illness and by doing so it will do much to lower the rapidly rising healthcare costs in this country. Fortinberry and Murray understand healing. Their knowledge of the whole person is more than profound. The chapter on how depression affects the body and how it somatizes (ie mimics physical illness) is so clear that I have copied it and am giving it as a hand-out to my patients. As a scientist I appreciate the wealth of research that has gone into the writing of theis volume. As a holder of deep spiritual values I applaud their inclusion of a chapter on spirituality as a healing mechanism. This is a clear, articulate book and I welcome it.
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Summary: Simple Steps That Work
Review: Because depression runs in my family (as well as myself), I've read just about every self-help book on the topic. "Creating Optimism: A Proven, Seven-Step Program for Overcoming Depression" helped me to see this insidious illness in a totally new light and gave me real hope that I--and other family members--can indeed overcome it. The seven steps make sense to me: 1. Identify and defeat the inner saboteur (I discovered aspects of my childhood "programming" that years of therapy hadn't uncovered)2. Reconnect to your body (Because the co-author, Alicia Fortinberry, is a trained Feldenkrais practitioner, she has a very practical approach to freeing the body from the trauma of the past) 3. Create healing relationships (This is the meat of the book, and offers a step-by-step program that is already working for me) 4. Elevate your self-esteem (What a surprise for me to discover that it's OK to get your self-esteem from others,we all do, and to learn exactly how to do that) 5. Uncover your competence (I found out how to identify what I am best at and enjoy most, and then how to enlist others in the process of making me shine at it)6. Access the power of shared purpose (This includes the three criteria for a successful life purpose and you'll never guess them) and 7. Deepen your relationship to the Divine (I always knew insinctively that part of the solution to depression had to be spiritual, but I didn't understand how to find the right way for me to use my own spiritualty to heal until I read this book.) As you can tell from this brief run-down, the book is packed with unique information and really practical, "doable" (one of the authors' favorite words) actions you can take. They make sense to me. I suggest you check them out.
Rating:
Summary: Simple Steps That Work
Review: Because depression runs in my family (as well as myself), I've read just about every self-help book on the topic. "Creating Optimism: A Proven, Seven-Step Program for Overcoming Depression" helped me to see this insidious illness in a totally new light and gave me real hope that I--and other family members--can indeed overcome it. The seven steps make sense to me: 1. Identify and defeat the inner saboteur (I discovered aspects of my childhood "programming" that years of therapy hadn't uncovered)2. Reconnect to your body (Because the co-author, Alicia Fortinberry, is a trained Feldenkrais practitioner, she has a very practical approach to freeing the body from the trauma of the past) 3. Create healing relationships (This is the meat of the book, and offers a step-by-step program that is already working for me) 4. Elevate your self-esteem (What a surprise for me to discover that it's OK to get your self-esteem from others,we all do, and to learn exactly how to do that) 5. Uncover your competence (I found out how to identify what I am best at and enjoy most, and then how to enlist others in the process of making me shine at it)6. Access the power of shared purpose (This includes the three criteria for a successful life purpose and you'll never guess them) and 7. Deepen your relationship to the Divine (I always knew insinctively that part of the solution to depression had to be spiritual, but I didn't understand how to find the right way for me to use my own spiritualty to heal until I read this book.) As you can tell from this brief run-down, the book is packed with unique information and really practical, "doable" (one of the authors' favorite words) actions you can take. They make sense to me. I suggest you check them out.
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Summary: Back to Freud, huh?
Review: Creating Optimism is written in language that is easy for the average reader to understand with practical tips for reducing and /or eliminating depression and anxiety.The step-by-step method shows how to break long term patterns that have prevented you from getting what you really want from life - happy, healthy, loving relationships and the JOY that results from them. I have used this method in my Private Practice as a Licenced Clinical Social Worker and also in my personal life. In 20 years in this field, I have been to many types of training and read many books on depression and anxiety and I must say that this is the most powerful and effective method I have found for creating real and lasting change.
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Summary: a happy customer
Review: I had the pleasure of reading a truly wonderful book, and meeting the authors yesterday. I recommend that everyone who has or has had depression in some way,read the book. There were tons of new ideas that I have not received in ay type of therapy before. The book is truly revolutionary. By the way, my e mail address is pkh117@earthlink.net. My old address was not put onto this new computer. I also as I stated to the authors yesterday, am helping to care for a terminally ill father. the authors were more than kind and supportive about my family situation,and shined a new light on how to make a cumbersome situation more tolerable. Kudos for the authors and all of their works!!!!! With love and appreciation, George M. Hoffmeyer
Rating:
Summary: a happy customer
Review: I had the pleasure of reading a truly wonderful book, and meeting the authors yesterday. I recommend that everyone who has or has had depression in some way,read the book. There were tons of new ideas that I have not received in ay type of therapy before. The book is truly revolutionary. By the way, my e mail address is pkh117@earthlink.net. My old address was not put onto this new computer. I also as I stated to the authors yesterday, am helping to care for a terminally ill father. the authors were more than kind and supportive about my family situation,and shined a new light on how to make a cumbersome situation more tolerable. Kudos for the authors and all of their works!!!!! With love and appreciation, George M. Hoffmeyer
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Summary: The Book Helped Me
Review: It's rare that you come across a self-help book that has something genuinely new to say. This is such a book. What's new is a basic assumption that human beings are essentially relationship-forming animals, that we are mentally and physically well to the extent that our relationships are supportive and lasting and vice versa when they are not. Lasting depression essentially represents a relationship failure, especially in nearly youth and that its cure lies in forming relationships in adulthood that will erase the scars of early trauma. The authors' mission in this book is to show readers how they can escape from pessimism and depression by changing the basis of their relationships. They claim that we have lost the art of living together the way we were meant to and that this is the root cause of our present appalling rise in social dysfunction, divorce, pessimism and individual disempowerment (a prime factor in our very high levels of child and spousal abuse). Fortinberry and Murray set out to show that healing, like physical and emotional trauma, comes from the outside in-contrary to what much of the pop-psychology industry would have us believe. The curative outside factor comes from being in supportive relationships. Much of the book is taken up with the how-to of forming these connections. The exercises that they suggest are illuminating, clear and easy to follow. Unlike many self-help books this one is really thoroughly researched and is grounded in the most recent findings in neurology and anthropology as well as psychology and psychiatry. "Creating Optimism" is quickly becoming a controversial must-read among my fellow academic psychologists and may well completely change the way psychotherapy is taught
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Summary: Finally an End to Depression!
Review: The opening of this book explains how the changes to our society are responsible for causing a depression epidemic in Western Society. The change from 'Hunter Gatherer Band' to dysfunctional nuclear families. Fascinating reading. It then goes on to provide exercises, which are easy to implement and provide a clear way out of depression. They actually work! I have found Alicia & Bob's techniques an invaluable help with my depression. After many years of trying to deal with my depression with therapy, personal development courses and medication, I was at frustrated and thought that there was no way out. Creating Optimism gave me the techniques that helped empower me, and find out what it was I needed from myself and others to be happy, and the resolution to go after it. I can't thank Alicia and Bob enough.
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