Product Description

"Sensible advice on how to give up childhood, accept yourself and your own maturity and deal with life on your own two feet."
DALLAS TIMES HERALD
In this unique, bestselling question-and- answer guide to self-love and acceptance, two practicing psychologists (who are also married to one another) reveal the secret of pursuing happiness, by revealing to ourselves what we think we are striving for, and what it is that keeps us from achieving our goals.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #195051 in Books
• Published on: 1986-12-12
• Released on: 1986-12-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 96 pages

Customer Reviews

How to be your own best friend
This book was very enlightening. I owned a copy which I read 3 times and then I gave it away to a person who badly needed it. I told her to read it and then, to pass it on to the next person who needs it.
I purchased three more copies so that I could give them to my friends who should read them in order to live a better life and also create a better life for their families as a result of learning to love oneself first in order to be able to love anybody else.

A Great Book to Wreck Your Life With ...
This namby pamby slop is just like all the rest of the junk pop psychology from Wayne Dyer, et al., that I used to wreck my life with, starting in the 1970s.

While some of it is not that tragically worthless, it does what all the other poisonous pop-psych. books do: leads you to belive you are a wonderful, warm, cuddly light in the universe, while offering you little or no perspective on how to protect a light like yours, in a world like this one!

Read and enjoy, if you feel you must. Yet, FACE it: if you don't cultivate your community image and gather some social power to yourself, none of this fancy-pants commercialized 'insight' is going to do you a tinkers' damn, and can even lead you to serious misery by virtue of instilling a false or misleading concept about your ACTUAL self in the world.

Being sensitive, wonderful, vulnerable, smiley, friendly, and bouyant all the time shouldn't make you a victim at the whims of bullies and power mongers and all their manipulative little games.

Cultivate some public image and social power for yourself, or your 'new self' found as a result of reading books like this. And find yourself a solid social circle to 'ground' yourself in.

All newly discovered and ready to take a new-found joy and pleasure in life, you may just become a pathetic target for bullies and the envious, who may elect to find some overt, or even very sneaky ways to screw your fragile, new-age life up. Such eventuations can be truly harmful and deeply devastating and depressing, depending on the turns they take. And don't imagine you are resilient and 'enlightened' enough to automatically resist any and all negative impact on yourself. Sorry, but a few scraps of psychological insight and being humane, charming, and 'well-meaning' just aren't enough.

"But I'm a good person!" ...yeah, right! And you'll make a great target, too, for some, I'm sure...

Real strength, power, and positive image projection of the right type, can take some doing. Some real sacrifice.

Some people just naturally smell sensitivity, kindness/friendliness, and happiness on people, and just can't wait, by some animal instinct or inspiration, to wreck it for you. And they'll do it laughing all the way, or by finding a way to be self-righteous about it.

Your 'happy,' positive, enlightened self exists within a context. This is the context of the community that accepts the image you project, the image you have cultivated up to this point. This includes the experiences, positive or negative, that said community has been suitably encouraged to allow you to have, in the way it allows you to have them. This takes some doing, for most, for a positive overall result.

Perhaps I am being to vague and general for some tastes. But I believe I am speaking in the right general direction.

To put it briefly, if you think you and your experiences aren't a product of you, your image, your social power, your environment/community as a whole and how it reacts on you and to you, guess again.

It isn't all in your childhood memories and in how you love yourself, believe me. There's a bit more to all this business, than romanticized, contrived-to-sell-well pamphlets like this one will tell you.

...by the way: that eerie couple on the back cover, really ought to go outside and get some fresh air ... might even clear their heads a bit . . .

Short and sweet
This is a wonderful little book. If you're a person frustrated with all the so-called self help books out there then this little gem might be the one you've been looking for. There are some complaints here that it's outdated because the authors don't bow down to the present DSMV standards. So the heck what? If the DSMV says that bestiality is okay does that make it so? God forbid someone disagree with the almighty DSMV (or is it MTV now? It's hard to tell the difference anymore)
The fact that we encourage certain behaviors today only makes books like this, where homosexuality is acknowledged as a mental disease, that much more refreshing.
How to be your Own Best Friend is one of those books that helps to remind us to put things into perspective while at the same time not encouraging us to deceive ourselves with New Age pop psychology.
I thank Mildred Newman and Bernard Berkowitz for writing it.