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Title: The Forgiving Self: The Road from Resentment to Connection by Robert Karen ISBN: 0-385-48874-2 Publisher: Anchor Books/Doubleday Pub. Date: 08 July, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.45 (11 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: The Forgiving Self
Comment: My husband and I read this book aloud to each other. As we read, it became the vehicle for lengthy and intense discussions about our own relationship and our relationship with others. The book goes way beyond forgiving; it provides insight into how we approach intimacy with the important people in our lives. The most important message is that we each have emotions from our childhood that we carry into our adult relationships, and once we are able to recognize them, we have the power to make profound changes in our lives with others. Dr. Karen uses not only his knowledge of psychoanalytic theory but real life examples from his clinical counseling along with tangible examples from literature and films. We highly recommend reading this book aloud with a significant other; it provides the foundations for a journey worth taking together.
Rating: 5
Summary: Forgiveness Brings Peace
Comment: I didn't expect to carry old wounds and hurts from childhood into adulthood. Foolish on my part, but I hoped experience would bring peace and perhaps some understanding.
Reading THE FORGIVING SELF helped me realize I not only carry the pain, but it influences the way I feel about myself today.
What Robert Karen has achieved in his book is so important. In beautifully written prose, funny, charming and insightful, he helps us understand how to LET GO! To send the pain and hurt away for good. Or at least to come to terms with it. To accept that we had and have every right to be angry and hurt. But not to let it go on spoiling our life in the present.
Karen helps us understand that to forgive those who have hurt us, to forgive ourselves for the pain we've caused others, and to accept our humanity, warts and all, is the road to true freedom of the heart and mind. PEACE, it's wonderful!
GO FOR IT!
Rating: 2
Summary: Responding to a critic
Comment: Though the rules of Amazon.com's review boards explicitly state that reviews are not supposed to be interchanges between reviewers, someone chose to ignore that rule and "correct" my "flagrant misunderstandings" of this book.
I'm reasonably sure I did not misunderstand this book; I am a reasonably well respected scholar on the history and ethics of mental health care, a very experienced psychotherapist, and an expert in health care policy who consults with and writes for some major players in health care reform.
Why does it matter that Dr. Karen has brought moral issues into the therapy room? The issue is really quite obvious and fairly simple:
Historically mental health professionals have insisted that moral improvement is beside the point of mental health--that disease, not lack of moral strength or the practice of any virtue, is the cause of the problems they address. Removing the stigma of mental illness has always been understood to depend on denying any connection between illness and virtue. If it is true, as Karen insists, that sometimes health requires that we acquire a specific virtue, several things follow.
First, if Karen is right, much of the ideology of the mental health professions must simply be false. It cannot be the case that mental problems do not reflect moral deficiencies, if it is the case that at least sometimes they reflect failures of attaining appropriate virtue--in this case, the ablity to forgive. That is a tautology, hence cannot possibly be false.
Second, mental health professionals practice on licenses that depend on the idea that they have mastered a specific science. Neither their training nor any licensure exams require that they have training in helping their patients toward moral improvement. Thus, when mental health professionals urge their patients to cultivate and practice a certain virtue--in this case, forgiveness--they are using their professional licenses to urge on patients beliefs that their training and licensure do not warrant, in the most literal sense of "warrant."
Third, if at least some mental problems reflect deficiencies of character, i.e., the inability to forgive when it is needful to do so, then there is indeed good reason for attaching stigma to mental health patients. Since at least some patients' problems reflect their moral failings, and since (for reasons of patient confidentiality) we cannot know which patients those are, we are justified in wondering of any patient whether his are the sorts of problems caused by failing to attain some virtue.
Finally, if one admits moral counsel into mental health care, one puts the entire edifice into question. From the first licensing laws to recent gaurantees of parity with physical illness, mental health care has trested its case for legal protections on the model of illness, not moral immaturity. Does anyone really believe that such protections, essential to the functioning of the mental health system,would continue if lawmakers saw therapists setting themselves up as moralists?
Why does it matter if a mental helth professional breaks the rules? The entire point of licensing mental health workers is to insure that they practice within the bounds of "the rules."
While patients rarely sue over the issue--since, after all, they don't even known when it's happening--professionals can be (and often are) censured by professional examination boards for such things.
Fortunately, the sort of loosy-goosy reasoning contained in this book, along with tolerance of psychiatrists sitting around making up stuff without scientific basis or public accountability, is coming to an end. One upshot of mental health parity is that insurers are beginning to offer well-validated treatments and to exclude others. Insurerers do not care to pay for flaky, speculative moral counsel, and--note this carefully--the laws that created the professions do not require them to. The legal rights of mental health professionals rest entirely on their claim to science, not morals.
People who don't like science, or who don't want their care based on the anti-moralistic traditions that created the mental health disciplines, may of course continue to pay out of pocket for whatever snake oil they enjoy. Practitioners purveying notions inconsistent with the legal protections and responsibilities of the professions will depend on such people for their survival--because the professions are rapidly extruding them.
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Title: Becoming Attached: First Relationships and How They Shape Our Capacity to Love by Robert Karen Ph.D. ISBN: 0195115015 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 1998 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Our Need for Others and Its Roots in Infancy by Josephine Klein ISBN: 0415058791 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: 01 December, 1987 List Price(USD): $38.95 |
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Title: The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are by Daniel J. Siegel ISBN: 1572307404 Publisher: Guilford Publications Pub. Date: 01 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $26.50 |
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Title: Forgiveness Is a Choice: A Step-By-Step Process for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope (Apa Lifetools) by Robert D. Enright ISBN: 1557987572 Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA) Pub. Date: 01 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Parenting from the Inside-Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive by Daniel J. Siegel, Mary Hartzell ISBN: 1585422096 Publisher: Jeremy P. Tarcher Pub. Date: 10 March, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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