Su Naseby Executive Therapist

24/04/2024

When a baby is born only the more primitive parts the nervous system (CNS) is well developed, so there’s not a lot of difference between a modern baby and a primitive one. The primitive CNS is in control, and that’s fine for a baby, but it takes another 25 plus years for our brain to bring us up to date with the world we are born into.

Why is this a problem?

The problem isn’t so much that we are dependent helpless babies; it’s that we are a primitive dependent helpless babies.

It’s as if every mother’s womb is a time-machine delivering prehistoric babies into an increasingly new and evolving era of human society and development. I believe this could be part of the reason why mental health issues are on the rise.

To make things worse our baby brains are thrown into hyperdrive in its Herculine effort to catch up and overtake the CNS. In our first year the brain is flooded with huge doses of neuroplastic chemicals to develop all the basics, but then it’s a downhill run to do all the major pruning and tuning for everything we will need for our future adult life, all by around the age of eight.

I think you can see why this could be a problem.

We now know that attachment is a central part of this story. These early social interactions profoundly influence a child’s emotional, cognitive, relational, and neurological development. In essence attachment is an elegant dance between safety (feeling secure) and danger (feeling insecure) that helps us to recognise the music of an uncertain world, and to survive.

As we strive to control safety (because we often can’t control danger), the child’s brain creates an internal sense of safety when safety isn’t readily available externally. A child’s vulnerability can have them feeling unsafe in an infinite array of situations, from a parent being on the phone to a potentially life-threatening experience.

Dissociation is one of the brain’s primary ways to create a felt sense of safety. Research shows that this defensive shutdown is enabled by neurochemicals such as endogenous opioids and cannabinoids, which create a numb feeling of being disconnected from emotions, the body, environment, and other people. It’s our brain’s way of managing fear and pain, but you’ll probably recognise these in a range of adult situations too, from being blinded by anger to being blind drunk.

These natural attempts to control safety become interpersonal styles thatimpacts us later in adult life. Adult attachment styles are usually categorised into four main types: Secure, Avoidant-Dismissive, Anxious-Preoccupied, and Disorganized-Unresolved (sometimes called Fearful Avoidant). However, these patterns are more fluid than these suggest because styles overlap depending on situations. Nobody is 100% secure in their attachment, and everyone has attachment ‘issues’.

Attachment work is a wabi-sabi affair.

Unresolved attachment styles can cause havoc until we recognise that as adults, we have a lot more options to be safe in this world than we had when we were small. By acknowledging these options, and then witnessing these interpersonal patterns as essentially old ‘primitive ‘rescuers from our childhood, we can begin the process of forming secure relationships. The most important secure relationship we need is with ourselves, and this is where therapy and good psychoeducational books can step in.

05/08/2023

Understanding Toxic Emotions.

Firstly, we need to have a less personal understanding of emotions. Most of us believe that everyone basically feels the same kinds of emotions (unless the person has a mental health disorder) but in fact emotions are neither hardwired into our brains nor universally felt. Emotions are a complex system of internal and external sensory input created by our brain, our nervous system and messenger chemicals, such as hormones, to essentially keep us safe.

What is fascinating is we are taught the meaning of all those sensory goings-on by our early childhood care givers and experiences, so we can’t really be sure that what we call sadness or anger feels the same for everyone. In fact, we know that emotions aren’t even universal across all cultures!

We can see my old friend The BioPsychoSocial Model is at play here. Emotions have biological causes with psychological meaning and are triggered in relationship to people, things, and environment.

So, how do emotions become toxic?

Let’s use salt as an example to understand toxicity. Salt in small amounts is not only healthy but necessary for life but in large amounts it can become toxic, just think about the Dead Sea.

There are healthy levels of all emotions, but they become toxic when we are swamped by one particular emotion to the point it feels like who we are. Take shame for example.

It’s perfectly natural and even helpful to feel the blush of shame if we make a social faux pas by saying something hurtful or stepping on someone’s toe. In this case we have made a mistake and will be forgiven. But when a child associates the blush of shame over and over again whenever they make understandable and unintentional mistakes, they begin to feel as if they are the mistake, and they are a shameful person.

In my practice my clients struggle with toxic shame more than any other painful experience. When we understand how we have been conditioned to interpret the blush of shame as a core aspect of who we are as a person then we can re-educate ourselves about the actual meaning of that feeling. It is only a message from our primitive brain and nervous system doing it’s best to keep us alive.

With understanding, kindness and gratitude we can free ourselves from toxic emotions.

Can you look at someone's face and know what they're feeling? Does everyone experience happiness, sadness and anxiety the same way? What are emotions anyway? For the past 25 years, psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett has mapped facial expressions, scanned brains and analyzed hundreds of physio...

06/03/2023

Wow! Who would have thought science could ratify that being too nice can lead to chronic illness?!

Maybe I need to back track a bit.

I’m currently reading Dr Gabor Maté’s book The Myth of Normal: trauma, illness & healing in a toxic culture. This book examines the close relationship between mental health and physical ill-health and well-being.

A 2004 oncological study on “Stress, Depression, the Immune System, and Cancer” found the stress of bereavement can be linked with an increase in lymphatic and haematological malignancy “among parents who have lost an adult son to an accident or military conflict.”

When I read this, I immediately contacted a dear friend who lost his adult son in a car accident a couple of years ago and who is now about to start leukaemia treatment. I suggested he do some more grief work on the loss of his son. He said he hadn’t done any!

But back to being too nice.

I have been taken back by all the data supporting this niceness phenomenon. Surely being nice is a virtue, and nasty, well it’s just not nice.

In his practice Maté details how “time after time it was the ‘nice’ people, the ones who compulsively put other’s expectations and needs ahead of their own and who repressed their so-called negative emotions, who showed up with chronic illness …”.

Dr Lydia Temoshok coined the term ‘type C personality’ to describe people who were too “cooperative and appeasing, unassertive, patient, (and) unexpressive of negative emotions” such as anger. It’s shocking to learn the ‘C’ stands for cancer because these types of people show up more often with melanomas.

Maté examples compelling Harvard research that shows "emotional stress and trauma as inseparable from physical illness and health" and cites many medical and scientific studies linking personality types to chronic illnesses, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), multiple sclerosis (MS), rheumatoid arthritis, and Alzheimer's disease, to name a few.

The problem isn’t with being nice (or nasty). The problem is with being too anything if done as a way to repress (unconsciously) or suppress (consciously) supposedly unacceptable feeling states, emotional responses or behaviours.

Repressiveness is now considered a mind-body issue, rather than just a psychological one. Stress can create a relentless flood of the stress hormone cortisol that can impair our immune system and disable its capacity to control and eliminate our normal potential for malignant cells.

What we generally understand to be personality traits are created both from “inborn temperaments” and a child’s attempt to “accommodate their emotional environment”. In essence, being too nice is a coping skill.

I'm sure the question of what do do about this is in the front of your mind. Maté suggests we need to go further than healing, we need to move toward the wholeness of our authentic Self.

Consider Santa's naught or nice list (not far removed from St Peter's book at heaven's pearly gates). Have you ever questioned why 'nice' is the opposite to 'naughty'? After all, aren't all children naughty sometime, and to err is human. Right? (See your name on the list??)

Child behaviour modification is a primary task of caregivers, but parents are not to be blamed just because they want nice children, not nasty ones. In fact blaming anyone isn't helpful nor justified.

All children really want is to feel loved and secure, so children are willing to play the naughty or nice 'game' if it means getting these needs met. As adults, when we acknowledge our fears surrounding being loved and secure, we can begin to see how niceness (or self-scarifying or people-pleasing or unbounded striving) does not require us to repress our authentic self, as it did when we were children. As adults we have the capacity to make free choices about how much and why we put the needs of others before our own … and we have the resources to take time out to balance the scales of self-care/others-care.

This newsletter is a postcard from my journeys so far with The Myth of Normal. As I continue on this journey, I may share more postcards.

16/01/2023

I’ve been enjoying slowing life’s pace down. I’m driving less and walking more, writing poetry and going to the beach, and spending more time with family and friends. I guess this is a kind of resolution but a Life Resolution, not a new year’s one.

There was a time when slowing down did not compute!

I often joke, “I’m Suzanne and I’m a recovering perfectionist” but it’s really true. The perfectionist in me had a strong critical voice that demanded I not only needed to do more, I also needed to be more. It’s fair to say I suffered a lot of pain around believing I wasn’t enough. My perfectionist is still here but now I’m in the driver’s seat of this once unconscious habit.

At my father’s life celebration, I gave a tribute and talked about how my father wasn’t very demonstrative while I was growing up but in later years this changed. I know for sure my self-critical perfectionist feelings of not-enoughness were directly linked to not feeling I could ever please my father. I always had to do more, be more.

The shift in our relationship happened after I started studying psychotherapy. I was introduced to a lot of theories, but Family Systems Theory really stood out. I began applying what I was learning to my own family of origin issues. It was a slow and sometimes painful process but eventually I was fortunate to receive many years of my father’s love and respect. In the big picture this work helped me to update my inner picture of who I thought I was. Slowly I began to inhabit my true adult self.

But what to do if we don’t have this same good fortune?

I used to give myself a hard time when I didn’t feel self-loved, but self-love is a tricky concept. To love oneself infers a kind of dual inner relationship, a part that gives love and a part that receives love, but love given can also be withheld.

We learn this pattern of giving, receiving and withholding love in childhood. All parents give and withhold love to adjust children’s behaviour, a pattern that is the source of most self-limiting beliefs. If we get too focused on self-love, we are in danger of repeating the parent-child pattern of giving and withholding love dependent on our behaviour.

Self-love is part of a bigger process of inner transformation often called involution.

There are many many paths to free ourselves from the ‘inner picture’ of who we’ve been conditioned to believe we are in this world - the Perfectionist, the People Pleaser, the Risk-taker, the Outsider – whatever label was put on you, you can peel off, but only if you become aware of it.

Obviously, psychotherapy is a great path to take and there’s always good self-help books, but we can also dance, sing, write, meditate, make art, travel, or walk our way to self-awareness. It doesn’t matter much which path or how many paths we take, as long as we integrate our experience with willingness, acceptance and understanding. It’s our choice!

17/03/2022

Do you have meditation on your 'should list'?
The key to bringing the clarity and calm that comes with a regular meditation practice is to make it achievable and attractive ... your practice needs to be YOUR practice. If seated practice isn't for you then try walking meditation. If 20 minutes is too long then try 10 or 5 minutes. You might listen to an app or use meditation beads. You might do it as soon as you get up in the morning or last thing at night. There aren't rules to meditation, only guidelines. Here is the first of a beautiful series of videos featuring Thich Nhat Hanh ... I recommend you watch all 8 videos, because I feel they really embody the art of making meditation your own 🙏

Thich Nhat Hanh offers this mindful meditation to show how practicing breathing meditations is very important as a foundation of meditation and a way to find...

01/03/2022

I hope you got to enjoy a bit of holiday time recently. I had a wonderfully rejuvenating get-away and, even though it was short, it was long enough to help me replace some old habits with new conscious living choices. Personal experience tells me if I want to love my life I am the only one who is response-able to change it. My holiday helped me do this and that is why I’m calling this the Holiday Effect.

I had an old habit of sitting in front of the television with my dinner, and staying there until bedtime. This habit went back to childhood. I have fond memories of dinner with my brothers watching Six Million Dollar Man and Bewitched, and even older memories of my grandmother sitting me in front of the TV to watch Romper Room with my snacks arranged neatly on my Romper Room placemat. These days I’d watch whatever was trending on Netflix.

Our functionality in day-to-day life is very habitual. Our adult cognitive behavioural habits are built on neural ‘short cuts’ tuned and pruned in our brain when we were very young. The pleasure or pain associated with these experiences is part of the habit programming, but my habit bothered me. I wanted to do something more meaningful with that time of day, and I value living less habitually and more consciously.

Habits sit mostly in our subconscious mind. Approximately 90% of our neural activity is going on in our subconscious. But, even with awareness, these habits can be stubborn to shift.

“We tend to think of our behaviour as largely conscious and willed. To imagine that we are not always in control of what we do is a frightening thought, but in fact it is the reality. We are subject to forces from deep within us that drive our behaviour and that operate below the level of our awareness.” Robert Greene, author of The Laws of Human Nature

I’ve had many clients report they find it relatively easy to not drink during the week but on the weekend or holidays their drinking can get out of hand. It’s curious how we can value having a clear head for work but, when it comes to our unpaid personal time, that value goes out the window. There’s definitely something wrong with that picture, yet it takes a deeper enquiry to see the old underlying habits these behaviours are built on.

My grandmother eventually developed dementia, and I remember her becoming more confused and anxious when she was in unfamiliar spatial and social environments but, once back in the familiar, her functioning improved. This memory made me think of my mealtime habit of TV watching.

When dinnertime arrived my brain slipped into the old neural habit of anticipating a good TV show, like it was slipping into a comfy pair of slippers (and that’s pretty much how it felt). Our brain ‘remembers’ important childhood experiences as pathways to regulate the adult brain and body. A regulated body is a comfortable relaxed body.

I’m not saying we can prevent dementia by breaking old habits (though it’s possible there’s a link). I’m suggesting we need to exercise our neural muscle by making conscious adult life choices based on meaningful values, even if it feels uncomfortable. As the old saying goes; Use it or lose it!

While holidays are the perfect time to do this work, we don’t need to actually go on holiday to gain this change effect. We need to create a holiday mindset.

When on holiday, we are usually prepared to try new things and break out of old habits. It’s almost the definition of a holiday. So, rather than taking the same route to work or buying the same brand of toothpaste, go for a fresh ‘holiday’ experience. Challenge yourself to choose five small new experiences each day and add a bigger life changing habit into the mix. The key is managing the unhelpful thoughts and uncomfortable feelings that arise in the moment. We need less fearful thinking and more loving action.

Ultimately this is your life and, if you aren’t loving it, there is no one else response-able to change it but you.

Did you know that changing your mood can change your life? See what Tony has to say about changing your state of mind to improve your life.

24/11/2021

Recently I was out for a run, and it began to rain. I wondered if I should stop to take shelter or just keep running. I decided to keep running and was surprised I hardly got wet. It felt like I was running between raindrops!

You probably know how much I love a good metaphor, and this felt like a great metaphor for recognising the times in our life when we need to either take shelter or keep moving. But how to make that choice?

This is an interesting question, because the decision the ‘take shelter’ or to ‘keep running’ will largely depend on our mood. When I say mood, I am not talking about emotions like happy, sad, or even scared, I’m talking about the feeling state in our body which is called physiological affect. How our physiological affect feels will depend on some very basic stuff like whether we have eaten recently or if we are well rested. Affect can also depend on whether we spend the day completely alone or at a social gathering with family and friends or a training day with a bunch of strangers.

It’s not like we consciously say to ourselves “gee my body feels pleasant so I’m going to talk to that stranger”, no we either stay staring at our phone, or we make a friendly comment to the person next to us. We are usually unaware of the affect motivating this behaviour.

Making the safe decision to ‘take shelter’ or the risker one to ‘keep running’ will depend on our mood (affect).

A controversial study of eight judges presiding over 1,112 parole hearings found, with a very consistent empirical regularity, that as judges tire and get hungry they slip towards making safe decisions to deny parole. There may be several considerations explaining this shift from parole approval to denial, but the study speculates rest and food breaks rebalance the 'body budget' and thus improves the ‘mood’.

Next time you are feeling hungry take notice of how your body feels. We will usually feel lethargic, but we will also have a gnawing feeling in our gut, maybe a tight feeling in our chest, dryness in our mouth and we will find it hard to concentrate. But this affect is almost exactly the same as feeling nervous about giving speech or excited about a first date. The body actually has a relatively limited affect repertoire.

We all know the perils of going supermarket shopping on an empty stomach but feeling hungry can impact all kinds of impulsive decisions. It goes without saying that repressing hunger (or any other physiological affect for that matter) is a recipe for disaster because it invariably creates an affect ‘reality’ incongruent with what’s really happening outside the body!

Remember those hungry and tired judges?

Psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett shares in this TED talk about this groundbreaking work on 'body budget' and the way we experience the world through affect-coloured glasses.

One of our brain’s most important jobs is keeping checks and balances on our internal resources such as oxygen, glucose, hormones, and neurochemicals like dopamine, this is in effect our ‘body budget’.

Do you believe that what you see influences how you feel? Actually, the opposite is true: What you feel — your "affect" — influences what you see, hear, smel...

20/09/2021

We are undoubtedly living in challenging times. Many of my clients are feeling hopeless, powerless, frustrated, and frightened. One client recently disclosed wishing she could go to sleep and wake up when it’s all over! I know how she feels.

I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by saying we may not return to pre-covid ‘normality’, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Humanity has gone through many ‘slam-dunk’ times of change, and we have adapted. In fact, I believe our most important quality is our ability to adapt to change, and it’s largely because our brain is neuroplastic.

Neuroplasticity is the ability of neurons in the brain to change their structure in response to environmental, behavioural, and relational change, in other words, to adapt. Humans are especially good at this because we have such a long infancy that necessitates a lengthier period of elevated learning.

During lockdown many of my clients have set goals to learn something new like an instrument, a language or skateboarding. But they have felt disappointed in their lack of motivation, often contributing to a sense of hopelessness (which we really don't need). Our adult brain doesn’t have the same capacity to change as it did when we were children.

You’ve heard Practice Makes Perfect but from a neuroplastic perspective it’s Errors that makes perfect.

Andrew Huberman is an American neuroscientist who suggests Using Failures, Movement & Balance to Learn Faster, can be achieved by means of short bouts of extreme focused practice with error making, followed by rest, then ‘rinse and repeat’. This is referred to as Incremental Learning.

The process of reaching (trying) to learn and making errors sends messages to the brain ‘something’s not working’ and this creates a neurological feedback prompting the brain to release the neurochemicals needed to encourage neuroplastic changes (learning). We need to tolerate the frustration of errors rather than walking away from them. When we walk away feeling the frustration of failure, we are creating neuroplastic reinforcement to not learn the new skill. Incremental learning as an adult is essential!

Smaller bouts of learning are key to this approach. Whatever you are wanting to learn, bouts of between 7-30 minutes, with plenty of room for errors, is what’s needed. Focus on one component that needs to change and repeat (with errors). Do not add new components. We also need to have a serious incentive for the plasticity to improve otherwise we will hit a limit to learning.

Huberman encourages us to fix a strong motive for learning the new skill. How important the skill is personally influences how fast you learn, as well as the plasticity of your brain. You want to access and encourage plasticity with a specific achievable meaningful goal in mind.

The top 4 points of Incremental Learning

•Pick the time of day when you have highest mental ability to focus (usually the morning)

•Practice to the point of making errors then keep going for 7 to 30 minutes, then rest
•Let go of frustration and stimulate a ‘good’ feeling (release dopamine) about the errors because errors are helping your brain to learn!
•Find a deeply personal incentive for learning

In this episode, I discuss how we can use specific types of behavior to change our brain, both for sake of learning the movements themselves and for allowing...

12/07/2021

I’m getting a lot more enquiries from people asking if I offer trauma-informed counselling therapy. Yes, is the short answer.

In my practice I work with psychological and emotional trauma. A trauma-informed approach realises that trauma is widespread, recognises the signs and symptoms, responds by integrating knowledge about trauma and seeks not to re-traumatise.

Recently my father stayed at my place because my mother had time in hospital. One night after dinner he reminisced about growing up in the UK. This was the first time he’d spoken to me about his horrific memories of WWII. I knew he was a child living in London during the bombings because I have a locket my grandmother said he’d found in the remains of a bombed house, but that night he told me he’d found the locket in what was left of his best friend’s house who lived across the road. He spoke very softly about this loss and how that bomb could have easily landed on his house.

Trauma is often defined as either big ‘T’ or small ‘t’ trauma. Big ‘T’ trauma are acute events such as war or a bad accident while small ‘t’ trauma are more common life events such as moving to a new house or school or getting lost or losing a job or even making a mistake. There’s also cultural and multigenerational trauma, as well as vicarious or secondary trauma.

These categories are all objective descriptions of highly subjective experiences. In every case fear is the common factor, which is sometimes why we minimise our traumatic experience, especially with small ‘t’ trauma where fear can take the form of shame. What child hasn’t pretended they aren’t scared? When we do this, we lose our authentic connection to self, other and the present moment.

Shame turns external traumatic experiences into internal trauma states of being.

I’ve been working on healing my relationship with my father for a long time. He has always tended to have explosive outbursts of anger but learning more about his war experiences has helped me to understand him and his reactive states from a trauma-informed perspective. I can literally hear the fear in his anger now. This understanding has opened a path of compassion in our relationship that helps me to resource a calmer response to what’s really going on between us.

Trauma is like a time machine. When we experience something strongly threatening it is imprinted onto a part of our brain that makes it always feel real and present. This process effectively makes the past disappear by making it feel NOW. A person doesn’t remember a traumatic event they relive it. We can’t stop this process from happening because it is an automatic protective brain function separate from the process of making ordinary recall memory, which is why we often can’t even remember the triggering event.

Recently I watched a film called The Wisdom of Trauma featuring the work of Dr. Gabor Maté. The film asks the question “Can our deepest pain be a doorway to healing?” This film reinforced for me my belief that trauma deeply impacts our ability to experience the feeling of authentic self, often felt as a perpetual emptiness or loneliness. Maté goes as far as to say, “trauma is suppressed authenticity [and] underneath the traumatised person is a healthy person not knowing how to express their authenticity.” I strongly agree.

Healing trauma helps us connect to and express our true sense of authenticity by giving us access to our free adult self in the reality of the present moment.

Trauma is the invisible force that shapes our lives. It shapes the way we live, the way we love and the way we make sense of the world. It is the root of our deepest wounds. Dr. Maté gives us a new vision: a trauma-informed society in which parents, teachers, physicians, policy-makers and legal per...

12/04/2021

Today I watched my daughter’s old childhood bed get crunched up by the council clean-up truck. Wow! It was only a piece of furniture but she grew up in that bed. All those years of loving moments. Of bedtime stories, lullabies, tooth fairy visits, sickness remedies and sweet cuddles. It really hit home for me that everything my daughter knows of love essentially came from these kinds of childhood experiences. I have consciously tried to teach her about being loved and hopefully how to love others, but I wonder what she has learned about self-love.

In childhood we learn about love in pretty much the same way we learn about everything; through our early relationships, environment and conditioning. These childhood experiences write a kind of script for how we express and respond to love as adults (including self-love), and this script becomes the unconscious love stories we tell our self as we grow up and begin looking for love.

This unconscious 'love script' has been named Imago by Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt in their Imago Relationship Therapy (IRT). It's somewhat poetic that they developed imago theory after they were divorced. I'm trained in IRT (with Harville himself!). It's a form of couples therapy that focuses on the unresolved familiar love patterns from childhood that later shape our love life choices.

In my own life and those of my clients I have come to see these patterns influence more than our romantic relationships, they impact many other relationships, such as friends and colleagues, as well as with self.

The key factor is the unresolved aspect of these patterns. The lost, wounded and denied parts of our self. In an effort to help, our brave subconscious leads us into relationships with an intention for us to resolve these parts, but of course since we aren't consciously aware of them it usually doesn't work.

We need to become aware.

Self-criticism is often one of these imago love stories turned inwards. We've all experienced some kind of criticism or bullying as a child, and while a bit of criticism is normal and can even be useful, being told we are a disappointment is very different from simply disappointing others or self. Now we enter the Self-contempt Spiral.

There’s a huge difference between self-criticism and self-contempt. If we believe we are a disappointment there’s no escaping, it follows us around wherever we go. This can lead to seeking escape in addictive substances and behaviours.

When we identify with being a failure rather than simply failing at something, we can’t move on because there’s nowhere to move on to. This kind of self-criticism creates a spiral of despair leading to self-loathing, low self-worth and a lack of confidence or motivation. We try to deal with the problem with rigid hyper self-control coping mechanisms like perfectionism, but this only takes us deeper into the spiral. If left unchecked this behaviour can create difficulties with relationships and adapting to change, as well as loneliness, anxiety and depression.

The solution is to first become aware of the habit of self-criticism and self-contempt (because it is a habit), see the difference and acknowledge the old stories that support the habit. We need to speak differently to and about our self. We need to shift from ‘I am’ to ‘I did or didn't’ because it’s much easier to change our actions than it is to change who we think we are. Then we need to put this awareness shift into practice, in small ways at first but slowly building up to bigger situations. If all goes well this process leads us to happier and healthier relationships with self and others.

The book Getting The Love You Want Revised Edition: A Guide for Couples is where it all began for me. It was the first book I read after my ex-husband and I separated. It started me on the path to healing and then on the path to being a psychotherapist. Win win! The follow up books Keeping the Love You Find: Guide for Singles and Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved are worth reading too if you are motivated to keep going with the work.

Andrew Bauman writes about the pervasive power of self-contempt and the ways that it functions as an addiction in our lives.