Arriving at our answers means going on a journey and facing some tough stuff about ourselves. There’s no way around it. If we want to heal and grow, we have to go straight through the thick of it.
In Therapize Yourself, practicing psychotherapist Carrie Leaf won’t tell you what your deal is or exactly how to “fix” it, but if you commit to this journey you’re on, and you put in the time, effort, and energy, this book can help guide you to the answers within you. The best part? Once you’ve found your answers, you’ll realize you already knew your answers—and that what you needed was the journey. Boom.
We have to go through it. We can’t go around it. We have to face it head on and deal with it. We have to learn how to tap into our intuition about what our mind, body, and soul need in order to heal and move forward in life.
With an easy to follow step-by-step process, Carrie will lead you on building a healthy foundation for good mental health and identifying and bringing subconscious negative beliefs and patterns to the conscious so that we can begin healing.
Whatever your “it” is, it has most likely been there for a long time. It doesn’t matter if it’s relationships, career, family, addiction, weight loss issues, anxiety, depression, etc. So, just as it took time to become a problem, it will take time to resolve the problem. The time spent healing, however, does not have to be equivalent to the time it took for your pain to hit the saturation point.
The time it will take to heal will depend on your level of commitment, your willingness to be uncomfortable and push through, and your approach to doing so.
Ready to dig in?
This guide provides a detailed but concise exploration of the kinds of questions and concerns therapists initially use with their patients. Leaf writes in an inviting, non-judgemental tone and eschews jargon and diagnosis terminology; the steps that she lays out prove applicable to problems of differing severity. She makes it clear that the therapist’s goal is “helping you identify and eliminate [your] negative belief” and points out that the answers to problems need to be excavated from inside the patient. She closes with encouragement for readers to continue the work that she has coached them through with a qualified therapist.
Leaf offers isolated anecdotes and examples from her experience, driving home the value of therapy and the issues it can address, thought more of these would be welcome. Additionally, she praises EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), including its positive impact on her own life, and hints at how it works, but readers not already convinced of its efficacy may wish for more details. These minor issues, though, don’t diminish her welcoming, straightforward, easy-to-follow demystification of therapy—and the work it demands—for anyone hesitant or anxious to seek it out.
Takeaway: Readers curious about therapy will appreciate this self-paced, introspective handbook.
Great for fans of: Faith Freed’s Starting Therapy, Irvin Yalom’s The Gift of Therapy.
Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: B+
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A-
