Engel, Beverly (2006) Healing Your Emotional Self : A Powerful Program to Help You Raise Your Self-Esteem, Quiet Your inner Critic, and Overcome Your Shame. In: Healing Your Emotional Self : A Powrful Program to Help You Raise Your Self-Esteem, Quiet Your Inner Critic, And Overcome Your Shame. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey, pp. 1-272. ISBN 13 978-0-471-72567-1
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THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE who were emotionally abused, neglected, or smothered by their parents or other significant caretakers when they were growing up. Many of these people do not realize they were abused or neglected, and they continue to suffer from myriad problems throughout their lives because they are not getting the help they need. People who internalize the abuse manifest selfdestructiveness, depression, suicidal thoughts, passivity, withdrawal (avoidance of social contacts), shyness, and a low degree of communication with others. They are likely to have low self-esteem and may suffer from feelings of guilt and remorse, depression, loneliness, rejection, and resignation. Perceiving themselves as unworthy and the world as a hostile place in which they are bound to fail, many are unwilling to try new tasks, develop new skills, or take risks. People who externalize the abuse may be unpredictable and violent, their behavior characterized by impulsive action rather than conformity to social norms. They frequently become anxious, aggressive, and hostile. They suffer from constant fear and are always on the alert and ready to hit back. Many end up mistreating others, often in the same ways they were mistreated. At the core of all these symptoms and behaviors is an inadequately developed sense of self and a distorted image of self based on parental negative messages and treatment. Unless adult survivors address these fundamental issues, their efforts toward recovery will be thwarted. If you were a victim of emotional abuse or neglect as a child, this book will show you exactly what you need to do in order to heal from the damage done to your self-image and self-esteem. Healing Your Emotional Self will guide you step by step through a program that is both innovative and psychologically sound—innovative because it uses the mirror as a metaphor and a tool for healing, and psychologically sound because it combines my many years of experience specializing in treating people who have been emotionally abused with various respected psychological concepts. Although the primary audience for this book is survivors of emotional abuse and neglect, this book is for anyone who suffers from low self-esteem or body-image issues. People who are preoccupied with their bodies, or who determine their self-worth by how their bodies look, will find the book particularly helpful. Many suffer from a distorted body image and from negative feelings concerning their bodies, but they do not understand that the cause may be negative parental messages, emotional abuse, or neglect. Many of you know me from my other books on emotional abuse, namely: The Emotionally Abusive Relationship, The Emotionally Abused Woman, and Encouragements for the Emotionally Abused Woman. In those books I wrote about the fact that people who are currently being emotionally abused (or are abusive) are doing so because they were emotionally abused as children. Now, in Healing Your Emotional Self, I will help readers take a giant step forward by offering a powerful program that will help them repair the damage caused by emotionally abusive parents. Childhood neglect and emotional abuse cause many of the most serious problems people suffer from today. This is not a revelation to most professionals or to many who suffer from its effects, but in spite of this knowledge, there is insufficient help for the survivors of these types of abuse. Relatively few books have offered readers a complete understanding of how this kind of child abuse affects people, ways to heal from the damage, and how to resolve relationships with parents. This is the first book to offer a comprehensive healing program specific to the kinds of messages (mirrors) that emotionally abusive and neglectful parents give their children and to how this kind of abuse affects a child’s self-image. Neglect and emotional abuse are the primary causes of both borderline personality disorder (BPD) and narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), which have turned out to be the disorders of our time. This is true for two major reasons: Children in the past two decades have grown up with absent, neglectful parents and parents who continued to pass on the emotional abuse they themselves sustained. In addition, both the borderline and narcissistic personality disorders have “come out of the closet” in terms of professionals telling their patients exactly what their diagnoses are. In the past they had kept these diagnoses from their clients for fear of traumatizing them. Those who were emotionally abused or neglected also tend to suffer from eating disorders. Many overeat as a way of soothing themselves, while others overeat out of self-loathing. On the other end of the spectrum, many become anorexic as a way of gaining a sense of control because they feel overly controlled by their parents. People recovering from alcohol or drug abuse will also find this book helpful because many addicts suffer from severe distortions to their sense of self. In Healing Your Emotional Self I offer my unique Mirror Therapy program for healing, which has proven to be highly effective with my clients and the clients of some of my colleagues. This program is highly innovative, combining what I have learned from many years of specializing with adults who were emotionally abused or neglected as children with concepts from developmental psychology, object relations, self psychology, body therapies, cognitive behavioral therapy, and art therapy. Many of the ideas in the book are uniquely my own, while others are variations on the concepts created by other people, and together they form a unique program designed specifically for the emotionally abused or neglected. For example, according Laurel Mellin M.A., R.D., author of The Pathway and creator of the Solutions Program, research on childhood obesity from San Francisco University shows that for the children studied, most of their extra weight was rooted in the most basic internal patterns of their functioning—the inner conversations they had with themselves. Teaching the kids some very basic skills— self-nurturing (which is like having a responsive internal mother) and setting effective limits (which is like having a safe, powerful father within)—brought their minds and bodies into balance and allowed their drive to overeat to fade. These skills can be taught to people of any age and are effective for other common excesses such as drinking, smoking, overspending, and working. The skills find their way into the thinking brain—our emotional core. I have adapted some of these skills to help adults who were emotionally abused or deprived to essentially “grow themselves up” and give themselves the skills their parents did not give them. This book will not simply cover old ground. While I will spend some time defining emotional abuse and describing its effects, I focus primarily on healing, especially in regard to helping readers to raise their self-esteem and improve their self-image. (Refer to my earlier books The Emotionally Abused Woman, Encouragements for the Emotionally Abused Woman, and The Emotionally Abusive Relationship for more information on emotional abuse and its effects.) I have organized this book around several themes, including “The Seven Types of Emotionally Abusive or Neglectful Parents” and “The Seven Most Common Parental Mirrors.” I provide specific advice and strategies for healing for each of the destructive parental mirrors and specific strategies for dealing with each of the seven types of emotionally abusive parents—all using my Mirror Therapy concepts and strategies. There are other unique aspects to Healing Your Emotional Self. Most of my books on emotional abuse have been focused on the issue of relationships—how adults who were abused or neglected as children can avoid losing themselves in their relationships, how they can avoid being reabused, and how they can avoid passing on the abuse to a partner or to their children. Healing Your Emotional Self focuses on the self—how readers can become reunited with the self, how they can create a positive self separate from their abusive parents’ distorted picture of them, and how they can raise their self-esteem. In addition, the book focuses on helping readers to overcome their tendency toward self-blame, self-hatred, and self-destructiveness. I also cover a subject that has not been focused on in self-help books: the effects on adults who experienced parental neglect in childhood. Many who were neglected will continually search for someone who will give to them what they missed out on in their childhood. This naturally sets them up to be used, victimized, or abused by their partners. Others suffer from a constant feeling of worthlessness,emptiness, deep loneliness, and confusion, and they are unable to sustain intimate relationships. I will also discuss another issue that is seldom if ever covered in most self-help books—the effects of parental smothering on a child— which can be just as damaging as neglect. Many people are preoccupied with their looks and even more are critical of them. While some depend on diets, exercise regimes, and cosmetic surgery to help them like what they see in the mirror, others recognize that they will never be happy with what they see unless they raise their self-esteem. This book takes raising your self-esteem to an entirely different level. It teaches a system that can actually help heal the damage caused by negative parental messages.
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine R Medicine > RB Pathology |
| Divisions: | Politeknik Penerbangan |
| Depositing User: | Mr Penerbangan Surabaya Politeknik |
| Date Deposited: | 18 Feb 2022 01:49 |
| Last Modified: | 21 Mar 2022 04:47 |
| URI: | http://repo.poltekbangsby.ac.id/id/eprint/662 |
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