Emotional Bullshit: The Hidden Plague That Is Threatening to Destroy Your Relationships—And How to Stop It

admin — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 10:42:00 +0000

Emotional bullshit, however far flung, rarely consists of strategies for conflict aversion. Carl Alasko’s Emotional Bullshit: The Hidden Plague that Is Threatening to Destroy Your Relationships—And How to Stop It consists of strategies for identifying and replacing those habits. Denial, delusion, and blame sneak into our repertoire, to make us look or feel better about our job, our part in a relationship, or role in our family, how far we’ve digressed from our goals and integrity, or keeping promises, to ourselves and others. In some it is tastelessly obvious, in others it is virtually undetected, at least for a while.

Alasko describes three common habits: denial, delusion and blame as a self-camouflaging sequence, in addition to that pesky, prickly good feeling we get from serotonin when we’re in love can help us get hooked on delusions about a relationship, even when we at first see bad signs. Like any good self-help book, it makes a lot of sense, and yet it is original and interesting.

My eager endorsement of the book may be self-incriminating; allow me to follow a genre approach to elucidate: Do you often spend time, energy or other resources avoiding conflict? Do you rationalize your own or others behavior? Following a confrontation do you have thoughts about how right or how much better you are? Are you often lonely or are you usually in relationships that are parasitic or filled with strife? In short, anyone who has strife in a relationship of any kind could theoretically benefit.

There are a couple strategies on how to deal immediately with conflict, even if you are in a position where you cannot respond, or are incapacitated to respond well. And there are more complex strategies for engaging in ongoing discussion with someone you have an intimate relationship with and are committed to. These are "fool proof if you follow all the steps/rules." Realistically, I can imagine very many alternate "out of bounds" responses and outcomes for every case study that went well.

To the author's credit, attempts one, two and three to getting it right are often described. Some of the couples' true stories are very moving. I can't help but think that they benefited particularly by having the author as their therapist, and that undertaking the strategy, however simple, as "amateurs" and without a neutral, and professional, mediator, could take a lot more tries. Still, better self-awareness, at least, can be achieved by reading Emotional Bullshit: The Hidden Plague that Is Threatening to Destroy Your Relationships—And How to Stop It.

Written by: Heather Irvine, March 29th 2009

Floor Sample: A Creative Memoir

admin — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 13:53:00 +0000

By Julia Cameron

Tarcher

Bestselling author and teacher Julia Cameron, known worldwide for her book The Artist’s Way, finally comes clean and tells all in her new memoir: Floor Sample. And when I say tells all, it’s not a cliché. I must admit when I first picked up this book, I feared I’d somehow lose my champion of creativity. How could she really live up to all she taught? How could she really walk the walk? I feared my mentor’s lessons would lose their impact within the story, behind the story.

Floor Sample will not disappoint. Cameron surpasses all of her previous work. The reader is allowed into her private past of alcohol and drug addiction, her fight to become sober and her battle with mental instability. We watch her struggle to be taken seriously as writer and then again as a composer of musicals in a male dominated art form. Her relationships, including her marriages to Martin Scorsese and Mark Bryan, are painfully revealed with an honesty that will break through the thickest of skeptics.

Her art unfolds as she describes the beautiful country side of her beloved Taos and the stimulating muse that exists in New York City. Within these pages, one can see Cameron apply her beliefs. No, it’s not a sweet, little story, but it is a story of success even when it seemed no success existed. Though deaths, divorces, loss of home and madness threaten her creativity, Julia applies her own brand of guts not to be matched by most.

This book will be satisfying to artists of all mediums and the general public. You don’t have to be well read in Cameron’s work to walk away with a lesson learned from this effort. It is a book that will remain on my shelf for years to come.

Written by: Ann Hite, January 31st 2007