30 Scripts for Relaxation Imagery and Inner Healing, Vol. 1 Book

Although not a self-help book, I do think that reading this actually helped me to examine some of my automatic thoughts and question some assumptions... I think there were a few situations these last few weeks that might have made me angry but didn't because this book has succeeded in changing my thinking. I am only realizing now as I am writing this review that this book is from the year 2000, almost 20 years ago, and that in the meantime it seems like way more people are now "prisoners of hate" than when he wrote it.

There are some chapters in the middle that I felt were weaker. When Beck starts wandering into other disciplines, talking about genocide and war, the arguments are lacking the depth of knowledge and experience he brings to the more interpersonal stuff in the beginning and concluding chapters. As you can tell from some of the other reviews of this book, Beck is joining a handful of psychologists who posit utopias, if only everyone would just learn their techniques. Beck implies a kind of Walden II at times, after all, it is called Cognitive *Behavioral* Therapy... but instead of sticking the whole world in a Skinner box he just kind of suggests some new studies and hints that if morals were taught from a CBT perspective with lots of role playing, people would be less violent. He gets more into it in the final chapter, where he points at "General Systems Theory". I haven't read that book yet, but I know that in it the author also waxes utopian. Well, I'm all for utopias... I just get nervous when the headshrinkers start planning them.

There is a lot in here about domestic violence that can be a bit harrowing, but ultimately Beck is optimistic. He is saying that none of this stuff is human nature... OK, overreacting to perceived threats is human nature, he says, but so is empathy and being social creatures and all that, but he claims that war and what we now call toxic masculinity are not natural and can be overcome.

One of the things that can disturb me about CBT is when they start talking about your mind like it's a bunch of algorithms and they can help you "reprogram" yourself. But in this book I got to thinking that actually CBT is about not having algorithms at all. They are saying you get into these habits, jumping to the same conclusions or behaviors based on algorithms you have developed and that if you slow down and examine each thought in the process and think critically and look at the situation from other perspectives or as objectively as possible than you won't get into your own traps anymore. So really, it's like a "become human" thing, not a become a better computer thing. They talk or write a lot about information processing but their goal is to get the client or whoever to slow down and go beyond processing to true thinking.

So that's good.