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What You Can Change and What You Can't:…
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What You Can Change and What You Can't: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement (edizione 2007)

di Martin E. Seligman

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True or false? * Dieting down to your "ideal" weight will prolong your life. * Reliving childhood trauma can undo adult personality problems. * Alcoholics have addictive personalities. * Psychoanalysis helps cure anxiety. If you think any of these statements are true, get rready for a shock. In the climate of self-improvement that has reigned for the last twenty years, misinformation about treatments for everything from alcohol abuse to sexual dysfunction has flourished. Those of us trying to change these conditions often experience the frustration of failure, mixed success, or success followed by a relapse. But have you ever asked yourself: can my condition really be changed? And if so, am I going about it in the most effective way? In this meticulously researched book, Martin Seligman, distinguished psychologist and bestselling author of LEARNED OPTIMISM, helps us realize clearly and realistically exactly what we can change and what we can't. Grounding his conclusions in the most recent and most authoritative scientific studies, Seligman pinpoints the techniques and therapies that work best for each condition, explains why they work, and discusses how you can use them to change your life. Inside, you'll discover: * The four natural healing factors for recovering from alcoholism * The vital difference between overeating and being overweight, and why dieters always gain back the pounds they "lost" * The four therapies that work for depression, and how you can "dispute" your way to optimistic thinking * The pros and cons of anger, and the steps to take to understand it * And much more!… (altro)
Utente:dogra
Titolo:What You Can Change and What You Can't: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement
Autori:Martin E. Seligman
Info:Vintage (2007), Paperback, 336 pages
Collezioni:La tua biblioteca
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What You Can Change and What You Can't: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement di Martin E. Seligman

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This is an abridged version of Seligman’s larger book, read by the author himself. The author looks at a range of issues we find difficult to change—addiction, diet, anger, depression, anxiety and phobias, sexuality—and shares what the latest research (now dated) reveals regarding whether we can change or not. I assume the full version would be deeper with richer insights. I found the abridgment lacking depth and substance. I enjoyed his recognition of the limits of psychotherapeutic drugs. ( )
  toby.neal | Nov 13, 2021 |
This was a hot self improvement-pop psychological mess. It is a shame because I agree wholeheartedly that any therapy should be forward thinking and allows a person to assume personal responsibility, but having distinctions in degrees of emotional difficulty in child abuse cases--mild fondling by strangers to forceful rapes by close relatives--is downright crazy, and expecting people to "turn down the volume" on such matters is fucking problematic. All this from a guy who wrote [b:Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life|26123|Learned Optimism How to Change Your Mind and Your Life|Martin E.P. Seligman|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1167783580s/26123.jpg|26823].

I just wanted to read something to tie up any loose emotional ends on the cusp of my 28th birthday so I guess I'll stick to old standbys [b:Emotional Resilience: Simple Truths for Dealing with the Unfinished Business of Your Past|834160|Emotional Resilience Simple Truths for Dealing with the Unfinished Business of Your Past|David Viscott|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178760159s/834160.jpg|819780] and [b:Six Pillars of Self-Esteem|79352|Six Pillars of Self-Esteem|Nathaniel Branden|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170965790s/79352.jpg|76620] to see if I missed anything or hold beliefs that no longer serve me. ( )
  nfulks32 | Jul 17, 2020 |
This is one of those "I'm gonna read this if it kills me" books. Those who read a great many of these books and actually try to use the solutions these books purvey often die of what society calls "suicide".
  NathanielPoe | Feb 18, 2019 |
I love the content of Seligman's books, though his writing style leaves me a little bored sometimes. This is the kind of book I'd keep on my shelf permanently and read a chapter every so often for inspiration. ( )
  austinbarnes | Mar 24, 2009 |
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The attempt to define free will is the granddaddy of these pointless quests. We understand what it is to be coerced. It is to be a prisoner frog-marched down a hill. Coercion is something tangible. Freedom is the absence of coercion, nothing more.

Events from childhood do not coerce our personalities in adulthood. We are not frog-marched by parental spankings at age six into being guilt-ridden thirty-year-olds. Our genes do not coerce our adulthood. Unlike spankings, they have a substantial statistical effect on our personality, but we are not frog-marched into being alcoholics even if our biological parents are alcoholics. Even having the genetic predisposition, there are tactics we can adopt to avoid alcoholism. We can, for example, shun drinking altogether. There are many more teetotal people with alcoholic parents than you would expect there to be by chance alone.

Absent coercion, we are free. Freedom of the will, choice, the possibility of change, mean nothing more-absolutely nothing more than the absence of coercion. This means simply that we are free to change many things about ourselves. Indeed, the main facts of this book—that depressives often become nondepressives, that lifelong panickers become panic free, that impotent men become potent again, that adults reject the sex role they were raised with, that alcoholics become abstainers—demonstrate this. None of this means that therapists, parents, genes, good advice, and even dyspepsia do not influence what we do. None of this denies that there are limits on how much we can change. It only means that we are not prisoners.
I want to end here with the most common and least understood sexual problem. So ordinary is this problem, so likely are you to suffer from it, that it usually goes unnoticed. It doesn't even have a name. The writer Robertson Davies dubs it acedia. “Acedia” used to be reckoned a sin, one of the seven deadly sins, in fact. Medieval theologians translated it as “sloth,” but it is not physical torpor that makes acedia so deadly. It is the torpor of the soul, the indifference that creeps up on us as we age and grow accustomed to those we love, that poisons so much of adult life.

As we fight our way out of the problems of adolescence and early adulthood, we often notice that the defeats and setbacks that troubled us in our youth are no longer as agonizing. This comes as welcome relief, but it has a cost. Whatever buffers us from the turmoil and pain of loss also buffers us from feeling joy. It is easy to mistake the indifference that creeps over us with age and experience for the growth of wisdom. Indifference is not wisdom. It is acedia.

The symptom of this condition that concerns me is the waning of sexual attraction that so commonly comes between lovers once they settle down with each other. The sad fact is that the passionate attraction that so consumed them when they first courted dies down as they get to know each other well. In time, it becomes an ember; often, an ash. Within a few years, the sexual passion goes out of most marriages, and many partners start to look elsewhere to rekindle this joyous side of life. This is easy to do with a new lover, but acedia will not be denied, and the whole cycle happens again. This is the stuff of much of modern divorce, and this is the sexual disorder you are most likely to experience call it a disorder because it meets the defining criterion of a disorder: like transsexuality or S-M or impotence, it grossly impairs sexual, affectionate relations between two people who used to have them.

Researchers and therapists have not seen fit to mount an attack on acedia. You will find it in no one’s nosology, on no foundation's priority list of problems to solve, in no government mental health budget. It is consigned to the innards of women's magazines and to trashy “how to keep your man” paperbacks. Acedia is looked upon with acceptance and indifference by those who might actually discover how it works and how to cure it.

It is acedia I wish to single out as the most painful, the most costly, the most mysterious, and the least understood of the sexual disorders. And therefore the most urgent.
There is a third premise of the recovery movement that I do endorse enthusiastically: The patterns of problems in childhood that recur into adulthood are significant. They can be found by exploring your past, by looking into the corners of your childhood. Coming to grips with your childhood will not yield insight into how you became the adult you are: The causal links between childhood events and what you have now become are simply too weak. Coming to grips with your childhood will not make your adult problems go away: Working through the past does not seem to be any sort of cure for troubles. Coming to grips with your childhood will not make you feel any better for long, nor will it raise your self-esteem.

Coming to grips with childhood is a different and special voyage. The sages urged us to know ourselves, and Plato warned us that the unexamined life is not worth living. Knowledge acquired on this voyage is about patterns, about the tapestry that we have woven. It is not knowledge about causes. Are there consistent mistakes we have made and still make? In the flush of victory, do I forget my friends—in the Little League and when I got that last big raise? (People have always told me I'm a good loser but a bad winner.) Do I usually succeed in one domain but fail in another? (I wish I could get along with the people I really love as well as I do with my employers.) Does a surprising emotion arise again and again? (I always pick fights with people I love right before they have to go away.) Does my body often betray me? (I get a lot of colds when big projects are due.)

You probably want to know why you are a bad winner, why you get colds when others expect a lot of you, and why you react to abandonment with anger. You will not find out. As important and magnetic as the “why” questions are, they are questions that psychology cannot now answer. One of the two clearest findings of one hundred years of therapy is that satisfactory answers to the great “why” questions are not easily found; maybe in fifty years things will be different; maybe never. When purveyors of the evils of “toxic shame” tell you that they know it comes from parental abuse, don't believe them. No one knows any such thing. Be skeptical even of your own “Aha!” experiences: When you unearth the fury you felt that first kindergarten day, do not assume that you have found the source of your lifelong terror of abandonment. The causal links may be illusions, and humility is in order here. The other clearest finding of the whole therapeutic endeavor, however, is that change is within our grasp, almost routine, throughout adult life. So even if why we are what we are is a mystery, how to change ourselves is not.

Mind the pattern. A pattern of mistakes is a call to change your life. The rest of the tapestry is not determined by what has been woven before. The weaver herself, blessed with knowledge and with freedom, can change—if not the material she must work with—the design of what comes next.
Freud considered that after age 45, psychoanalysis could do nothing for a neurotic: Jung was convinced that 45 was roughly the period of life when its immensely important second development began, and that this second period was concerned with matters which were, in the broadest sense, religious.

Many people are put off by this attitude. They want nothing to do with religion and are too lazy or too frightened to accept the notion that religion may mean something very different from orthodoxy. They attach themselves to the notion that Man is the center of all things, the highest development of life, and that when the individual consciousness is closed by death, that is, as far as they are concerned, the end of the matter. Man, as the instrument of some vastly greater Will, does not interest them, and they do not see their refusal as a limitation on their understanding.

         Robertson Davies, “The Essential Jung
John Bradshaw, in his best-seller Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child, details several of his imaginative techniques: asking forgiveness of your inner child, divorcing your parent and finding a new one, like Jesus, stroking your inner child, writing your childhood history. These techniques go by the name catharsis, that is, emotional engagement in past trauma-laden events. Catharsis is magnificent to experience and impressive to behold. Weeping, raging at parents long dead, hugging the wounded little boy who was once you, are all stirring. You have to be made of stone not to be moved to tears. For hours afterward, you may feel cleansed and at peace—perhaps for the first time in years. Awakening, beginning again, and new departures all beckon.

Catharsis, as a therapeutic technique, has been around for more than a hundred years. It used to be a mainstay of psychoanalytic treatment, but no longer. Its main appeal is its afterglow. Its main drawback is that there is no evidence that it works. When you measure how much people like doing it, you hear high praise. When you measure whether anything changes, catharsis fares badly. Done well, it brings about short-term relief—like the afterglow of vigorous exercise. But once the glow dissipates, as it does in a few days, the real problems are still there: an alcoholic spouse, a hateful job, early-morning blues, panic attacks, a cocaine habit. There is no documentation that the catharsis techniques of the recovery movement help in any lasting way with chronic emotional problems. There is no evidence that they alter adult personality. And, strangely, catharsis about fictitious memories does about as well as catharsis about real memories. The inner-child advocates, having treated tens of thousands of suffering adults for years, have not seen fit to do any follow-ups. Because catharsis techniques are so superficially appealing, because they are so dependent on the charisma of the therapist, and because they have no known lasting value, my advice is “Let the buyer beware”.
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True or false? * Dieting down to your "ideal" weight will prolong your life. * Reliving childhood trauma can undo adult personality problems. * Alcoholics have addictive personalities. * Psychoanalysis helps cure anxiety. If you think any of these statements are true, get rready for a shock. In the climate of self-improvement that has reigned for the last twenty years, misinformation about treatments for everything from alcohol abuse to sexual dysfunction has flourished. Those of us trying to change these conditions often experience the frustration of failure, mixed success, or success followed by a relapse. But have you ever asked yourself: can my condition really be changed? And if so, am I going about it in the most effective way? In this meticulously researched book, Martin Seligman, distinguished psychologist and bestselling author of LEARNED OPTIMISM, helps us realize clearly and realistically exactly what we can change and what we can't. Grounding his conclusions in the most recent and most authoritative scientific studies, Seligman pinpoints the techniques and therapies that work best for each condition, explains why they work, and discusses how you can use them to change your life. Inside, you'll discover: * The four natural healing factors for recovering from alcoholism * The vital difference between overeating and being overweight, and why dieters always gain back the pounds they "lost" * The four therapies that work for depression, and how you can "dispute" your way to optimistic thinking * The pros and cons of anger, and the steps to take to understand it * And much more!

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