Reinventing Your Life - Jeffrey E. Young PhD

[BPDFamily]

Reinventing Your Life Author: Jeffrey E. Young PhD, Janet S. Klosko, PhD Publisher: Plume (May 1, 1994) Paperback: 384 pages ISBN-10: 0452272041 ISBN-13: 978-0452272040

Book Description
Schema therapy is an innovative psychotherapy developed by Dr. Jeffrey Young for personality disorders, chronic depression,  and other difficult individual and couples problems.Schema therapy integrates elements of cognitive therapy, behavior therapy, object relations, and gestalt therapy into one unified, systematic approach to treatment.

Do you find it difficult or impossible to form healthy relationships? Do you repeatedly get involved with people who abuse you?  :)o you feel that you are essentially flawed, worthless, or incompetent? Do you become extremely upset when someone close to you disagrees with you? These and many other patterns are covered in this book, along with a technology for identifying yours and how to heal them.

Even though this book was originally published in 1993 and Schema Therapy has evolved further (which is what this book covers), the information is just as valuable today. This is an easy-to-read book that helps you identify limiting patterns or life traps (schemas) that originated in childhood and adolescence.


About the Author
Jeffrey E. Young, PhD, serves on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. He is director of the Cognitive Therapy Center of New York as well as the Schema Therapy Institute. Young founded schema therapy, and is a founding fellow of the Academy of Cognitive Therapy. He has published two books, Schema Therapy: A Practitioner's Guide, for mental health professionals, and Reinventing Your Life, a best-selling self-help book.

Dr. Young is coauthor of a psychotherapy outcome study evaluating the effectiveness of cognitive therapy in comparison to antidepressant medication. He also served as a consultant on cognitive and schema therapy research grants, including the NIMH Collaborative Study of Depression, and on the editorial boards of journals including Cognitive Therapy and Research and Cognitive & Behavioral Practice. Young was awarded the NEEI Mental Health Educator of the Year award in 2003.

[gh444]

Hi,

Bought this book only today, so can't yet give an extensive review but so far it strikes me as a very helpful resource, worth mentioning, especially on the "taking personal inventory" board.

More info available at: www.schematherapy.com/id202.htm

I came across the name of Jeffrey Young due to researching appropriate therapy approaches for people with BPD. He's the "Schema" guy and this is a "Schema" book written for the general public. A BPD could use it, and so could a NON... .have a look and let me know what you think... .

Cheers,

gh444

[Tilery]

My therapist has mentioned this book. I have found it really helpful looking at my schemas, it makes soo much sense.

[PrettyPlease]

I recently read this, and it gave me several  moments. I believe the things it taught me about my own life were important and will continue to be useful.

Pros:

--It's structured using Young's unique way of categorizing the effects of our early child experiences -- what some call schemas; in this book they're called Lifetraps.

--I found that I matched three (of the dozen or so) Lifetraps, and the chapters describing them made sense to me.

--I'll speculate that the other Lifetraps are probably equally valuable for the people who match them, and that they cover most situations.

--It should be possible, therefore, for anyone to do a sort of 'poor person's overview' of their own worst psychological tangles, and get some understanding of how they may begin to untangle them.

Cons:

--I found the examples of how their clients improved to be less relevant to me. Everybody is different, and just knowing what the problem structure is doesn't mean it's possible to solve it easily (although knowing it is a good start).

--The style is a bit too 'rah rah' pop-psych for me. Young is a serious researcher (and his later work is directed at therapists), so I think this does the book a disservice. It has a lot of good content in it.

Ranking it beside the five books about BPD/NPD I ordered and read recently,

and basing my ranking on the usefulness to me personally, I'd say, ranking out of 10:

8 - Understanding The Borderline Mother (Lawson)

8 - Reinventing Your Life (Young and Klosko)

8 - The Narcissistic Family (Pressman and Donaldson-Pressman)

5 - Walking On Eggshells 2nd Edition (Mason and Kreger)

3 - disarming the narcissist (Behary)

The top three all seemed to have unique things to say to me that I hadn't yet figured out even after many years of searching on my own and several months of reading on the BPD site. The last two, in contrast, seemed to have little that I didn't already know. They also had some irritating formatting and stylistic habits, the last one moreso.

PP

[Blimblam]

I really liked this book, it led me to reading one of his more clinical books which I liked even more.  Ultimately though to better understand some of the concepts it led me to psychoanalysis. I now see the schema therapy model as kind of like psychoanalysis filtered through The psychologist Piaget, who I have only read secondary materials about but I found fascinating.