Reviews for Under His Wings: And Other Places of Refuge

The average rating for Under His Wings: And Other Places of Refuge based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-02-13 00:00:00 Allan Dumas If you have the omnibus edition with "God Uses Cracked Pots," "Normal Is Just a Setting on Your Dryer," and "Under His Wings" bound together, and you like the first two volumes, you probably won't like this one. "Another comedian runs out of funny material and gets earnest on us"? Not exactly. Though Clairmont's audiences enjoyed her stand-up comedy, as collected in her books of funny stories, they also knew she'd been a psychiatric case of severe agoraphobia and wanted to know what helped her. "Under His Wings" is where she explains what helped her. I give it two stars because she didn't write it as a specific case history of how her "sweet tooth," lack of exercise, shallow extrovert brain, and other factors interacted to produce her agoraphobia. Real psychiatric problems are, as even Freud recognized, real medical problems. "But I wasn't writing a case history for specialists. I wanted to make it applicable to everybody," Clairmont might have argued, and I say, "That's what's wrong with 'Under His Wings': much harm has been done by trying to make the ideas that help psychiatric patients *seem* 'applicable to everybody'." People go to psychiatrists because their emotional feelings don't seem connected to their reality. "Everything's going well, but I feel sad, sick, and tired," says a depressive patient. "I know there's nothing to be afraid of, but I have disabling panic attacks," says an agoraphobic patient. So it makes sense for them to try to change their feelings. People who don't go to psychiatrists, but vent their feelings about reality problems to friends, are not helped by the kind of lectures psychiatric patients use to change their feelings. If anything their reality problems are aggravated by the deterioration of their friendships. Clairmont certainly knows how to talk herself through panic attacks by retelling Bible stories with her trademark witty wordplay. That information is useful to readers who have panic attacks...but not to "everybody." And while a (blog-type) record of what she ate and drank, what medications she took, and how much panic she felt, wouldn't be as much fun to read as Clairmont's versions of Bible stories, it *would* probably be useful to other agoraphobics. So although this book is amusing, it falls short of the mark as either comedy or psychology, and gets only two stars. (Fair disclosure: I bought the omnibus book, the individual books, and some of Clairmont's other books, at a discount for resale. I wrote the reviews of the individual books separately, but over the same week, while reading the omnibus.)

Review # 2 was written on 2018-08-19 00:00:00 Brina Mathis This is a nice little book. Patsy is a good writer, tells it like it is, uses humor, and is very encouraging. This book talks about the struggles we have in our lives, and while she has good advice, I wish she had given more Scripture so that we would know HOW to get to the coping place.