Several years ago, when I nearly died from the dangerous stupidity of AA, I was fortunate enough to find a wonderful Alternative Treatment clinic in St. Paul. And in that clinic, I read as much as I could and learned as much as I could. I, to this day, believe that ADDICTION, CHANGE, and CHOICE was the book that made the most impact upon me during the early stages of getting better. Several years later I still refer to it.
Vince Fox writes in a way that is easy to read, yet provokes a great deal of thought. For anyone trying to make a change in their chemical health life and is struggling, for those trying to learn more about chemical health truth in general, and for those who wish to break the bonds and bondage of 12Step terror, I highly recommend this book. It can add much to your life if you wish to change and to know the Alternatives that are available to all of us.

By far, one of the best books I have read regarding alcoholism, and more specifically where we are and where need to go in upscaling our current treatment efforts of this insidious problem. I have read quite a few books on alcoholism and 90% endorse only one mode of treatment-AA. That is not only unfortunate, it is a sad state of affairs when we cling on to only one mode of treatment that is not necessarily the right one for everyone.

Mr. Fox had some of the deepest knowledge in regards to alcoholism and more importantly where we need to move forward to in achieving a better success rate in treating this problem.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who openly and objectively would like to know more about alcoholism and what other options are available to those who truly want to deal with their or a loved one's substance abuse problem and receive the appropriate treatment that they need.

Vince Fox, in plain and fair language evaluates the major players on the recovery scene. There are many choices out there, even if there may only be one in your town. Before following "the others" on the "Broad Highway" leading "you know where", it would be wise to educate oneself on the principles of the lesser knonw recovery programs. What do they represent, what ideas to they promote, why did they come to be? I love the part where significant word clusters found in the Big Book are itemized for the reader. Over 200 instances of God and related words??? hmmmmmm... Spiritual, not religous... hmmmm.....

In this book, Al Ellis tells you everything you need to achieve long-term freedom from emotional upset. He explains why certain modes of therapy are ineffective and counter-productive. Even if they do no harm, they do not deliver the help you need, as opposed to more efficacious modes of therapy, such as REBT (Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy) and Cognitive Therapy. He distinguishes between merely palliative techniques, like Yoga and Meditation, which help you feel better, but do not lead to lasting improvement, and those which help you get better and stay better.

Ellis makes no bones about the fact that it is often difficult to achieve the changes you want to make - but that's no reason for not doing so!

Having tried other therapeutic methods, until I discovered Dr. Ellis at one of his legendary Friday night workshops, I can tell you that if you stick to the principles laid out in this book, you will be the better for it.

In this book, Ellis shows the interested reader how Rational Emotive Therapy works, what the underlying philosphy is, and - most importantly - what you can do to get yourself out of emotional difficulties.
He emphasizes not only the aspect of feeling better, which many clients can more or less easily do (e.g. by exercising, meditating or distracting oneself from difficult feelings and situations). It is much more important to actually get better and permanently stay better. Ellis shows how you can achieve the kind of deep restructruring of your basic philosphies of life. He specifically recommends the use of the following techniques:
- Logical Disputing, e.g.: does it really follow that I am a worm if I am acting wormily?
- Realistic Disputing: Where is the evicence for my absolutist belief?
- Pragmatic Disputing: making cost-benefit ratios of short and long term benefits of my behavior and thinking patterns

To effectively dispute your irrational beliefs, you better dispute them cognitively, emotionally and behaviorally.
What I as a psychologist especially liked about this new book, are Ellis' exemplary disputations of low frustration tolerance, self-downing and other downing. This can help clients considerably to apply the ideas to their real life problems.
A good book to use for bibliotherapy!

Feeling Better, Getting Better, Staying Better: Profound Self-Help Therapy For Your Emotions is a psychological self-help book with a wealth of advice on how to improve one's physical health by harnessing the power of one's emotional state. Chapters discuss such practical methods for improving one's attitude and therefore health such as thinking, philosophizing, emoting, and engaging in positive activities. A highly recommended addition to any personal self-help reading list, Feeling Better, Getting Better, Staying Better is not a substitute for seeing a therapist or counselor, but rather a recommended supplement to a professional care in order to help the reader respond more effectively to treatment.

I recently picked up a copy of this book because of my interest in the work of Ellis. Apparently Abrams and Dengelegi are terrific researchers. They have added alot of clearly presented biological research to the work. Excellent.

Although not a "diet" book per se this is the best in that category. Rather than provide the right way to eat, it demonstrates through extensive research that body weight is the result of a complex interplay of biological and behavioral factors. The authors first seek to teach self-acceptance, then the rational-emotive/cognitive behavioral methods to maximize self-regulation. The case vignettes presented throughout the book both add to its entertainment value and its applicability

The author does not assume that the reader will choose to live with someone seriously neurotic. That's the reader's choice. After making the choice to live with such a person, however, the reader will find strategies in this book to make that living situation as workable as possible. Nothing will make it easy; the book does provide effective tools that require discipline and practice.

These strategies, by the way, work well with non-family neurotics, such as co-workers and supervisors. The book focuses on how to live with behavior in others that we do not have the power to change. Sometimes, we can find no better option.

THIS IS A BOOK YOU CAN REFER TO TIME AND TIME AGAIN - THE INFORMATION IS EXTREMELY VALUABLE IN SAVING YOUR SANITY AND RELATIONSHIPS.

Sixteen-year-old Jenny Fowler has just moved to Rimrock with her parents, but she's soon on her own when her parents leave town for a couple weeks on business. In the meantime, Jenny has no problem making new friends and is invited on a scavenger hunt with a few other high school students. However, the event turns near-fatal when one of the teens falls off a cliff and ends up in a coma. Jenny can't believe it was accident, although everyone claims it was; she clearly remembers hearing an argument followed by a scream. Yet when she admits to hearing something, her friends are either skeptical or suspicious. She doesn't know which is worse: not having anyone believe her, or having everyone believe she pushed the girl off the ledge?

The incident is then complicated when Jenny starts receiving anonymous phone calls from a secret admirer, while at the same time, being harassed by someone else who wants her dead. Will she ever discover who either stranger is before the threats escalate to murder?

If you're a fan of Point thrillers, then you should definitely read this one. Recommended for ages 12 and up.

This is truly an outstanding book. I never read, and once I picked it up, I couldn't put it down. It is about a new girl in town, that has a secret admirer, but she also has just the opposite. Someone who is after her trying to scare her off. She is alone in her house for the weekend. Will she make it?

In page after page I find myself gasping as William Knaus explains the different ways I have developed to procrastinate my life away. Knaus describes procrastination as a complex mixture of discomfort, self-doubts, perfectionism, fear of failure, anxiety, rebellion and depression developed over a lifetime. He explains how heaping blame on yourself only drives you to procrastinate more and he has created thought questions to help you develop the skills you need to pause, resist, reflect and respond.

A life changing weapon against the graveyard of missed opportunities, I highly recommend it!

I was gonna buy this book...maybe next week...

Can help one gain self-help skills one can use for a lifetime, using that most efficient of personal change methods: Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy. It is amazing how the author covers so much ground in so little space and with such clarity.

The revolution I refer to is the one that followed in the wake of the original publication of this book in 1961. Ellis formally introduced his REBT therapeutic model in 1955, but at the time, few knew and fewer cared. However, this book would change that forever. No longer would we have to settle for self-help pablum like "The Power of Positive Thinking", because now we had a piercing book for the masses that explained both clearly and thoroughly three things that no popular work had ever told us before. First, we don't just "get" upset, we "do" upset. Or, in other words, we make ourselves emotionally disturbed. Second, the authors plainly explain how we make ourselves upset. We create our own emotional disturbances mainly through our irrational (aka, unhealthy, self-defeating) thinking. And third, Ellis and Harper give us many effective techniques to combat these thinking patterns. The techniques suggested are divided into cognitive, emotive and behavioral categories, although in fact there is significant overlap for the simple reason, as the authors point out, that we don't just think or feel or behave in a vacuum. Rather, we are thinking/feeling/behaving beings, and this interplay, luckily enough, offers us many ways to a "profound philosophic change" in our outlook, which is the goal of this work. Easily, the most influential self-help book ever written and rightfully so!

I have in my short life have read maybe 200 or 300 self-help books. Thse books vary from "The Power of Positive Thinking" to "How to Win and Influence People." Throught all these books, I have never seen a real good method to be happy. TO be really happy.

This book is the excpetion. This book can help almost any person to be happy.

The basic idea of the book is this: People have certain beliefs about things. For example you might have the belief that you must be liked by everybody. Beliefs like this cause you to become very upset when you realized that this belief is being broken and twisted by the world in which you are living. For example, if you believe that the world should be fair, then anytime the world treats you unfairly, you will very depressed. Or if you believe that you must be liked by people, then anytime somebody insluts you, you might become depressed.

So point A= Our beliefs cause our distresses and emotional problems. Eg. if I want everybody to like me, I will feel depressed when someone doesn't

To stop these "irrational beliefs" you have to put in place of them "rational beliefs" such as "I want people to like but if they don't it's ok and I should rather accept myself as I am." When you have rational beliefs than you will not feel depressed at all.

The book talks about ways to refute your irrational beliefs and uses examples from case histories on how this can be done.

The point of the author is to make you understand these irrational beliefs and dispute them using various methods. Once you do that, then you'll be happy.

The authors, want you to be rational in your living.

I also recommend that you read; Feeling Good, books by John Sarno, and books by Aaron T. Beck and other Cognitive Therapists.

Albert Ellis is the grand-daddy of modern psychology, and this book is the classic. While many psychologists and authors focus on one or several "pet techniques," Ellis and this book show you how to adapt an integrated set of rational (cognitive), emotive, and behavioral tools to your personal situations. And Ellis writes this and many of his other books for us non-psychologists...not just for "professionals."

The book starts by briefly summarizing the results of Ellis' ground-breaking work on what we do that causes us to feel and behave differently than we want. The author then teaches his general cognitive system...which includes very specific instructions...on how to change these feelings, behaviors, and thoughts. Ellis terms this system the "A, B, C, D" method of "disputing" irrational thoughts that are "irrational" because they (i) are not true and (ii) produce results that we don't want. The book then moves beyond this general system and shows you how to easily use cognitive, emotive, and behavioral tools to effectively stop your unwanted patterns. While the methods are extremely user-friendly, they do require work...beyond the reading.

Because this book shows how to effectively tackle a wide variety of patterns...the following is a partial list of chapters:
1. Overcoming the influences of your past
2. Refusing to be desperately unhappy
3. Tackling dire needs for approval
4. Eradicating dire fears of failure
5. How to feel undepressed though frustrated
6. Conquering anxiety
7. Acquiring self-discipline
...and others.

While many other psychologists/authors, such as David Burns in his "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy," use cognitive methods, Ellis shows how to use many of them far more effectively than most others. And he also includes emotive and behavioral tools, many of which he created years ago and that his non-for-profit institute has used successfully for decades. While Burns' book has some excellent additional tools, I strongly suggest that you start with "A Guide for Rational Living" and then move on to Burns' book if you want.

I've gone back to this and a few others of Ellis' books several times during the last 10 years or so. After working through a new situation, I keep realizing how much this one volume still does for me.

In my opinion, the book's only weakness is its stlye of writing. It's older style is less interesting than that in some of Ellis' newer books. I strongly recommend it not for its literary value, however, but for what it can do for you.

...
To readers familiar with Ellis's R.E.T.(Rational Emotive Therapy)theory(also called REBT), this is already a familiar book, a variation on themes Ellis expounds upon elsewhere, most notably in "A Guide to Rational Living", written back in the 60's, where he lays out the basics of his theory. Readers unfamiliar with Ellis and R.E.T. might see his approach as similiar to television's "Dr Phil"(McGraw), and if you see the latter as something of a scold, you're likely to experience Ellis the same way.
Ellis's approach emphasizes "self-talk", and asking you to question your motives in avoiding anxiety-provoking tasks. He prefers behavior-oriented and pragmatic thinking over "what-happened-way-back-when" depth psychology. If such an approach strikes you as what you're looking for in a book about this topic, then I'd recommend Ellis. He's very straightforward and easy to comprehend.

In this little book, Dr. Albert Ellis gives us tools in order
to deal with procrasination. He instructs us in his A-B-C
system of mental health. We have the Activating event (A),
the Beliefs that we hold (B), and the Consequences of those
beliefs (C). (A) for me is writing this review. (B) is my Belief that it must be a perfect review. (C) is the Consequence
which I experience from that belief. Which is anxiety. When
we procrastinate, according to Ellis, we are holding irrational

(B)eliefs. The more we (D)ispute these beliefs, the more healthy
(E)ffects of mental health we will experience. Ellis also gives
us behavioral tools to help us eliminate our procrastination.
Such as a reward system. Nevertheless, his system depends
on disputing the irrational beliefs. There are two things that you might want to remember before you buy this wonderful book.
First, you have to use REBT (Rational-Emotive-Behavioral-Therapy) all the time. It has to become a powerful philosophy in and of itself. If you counter your procrastination ten minutes daily,
but then whip yourself with irrational thoughts and ideas the rest of the time, it won't work. For this, you might want to go to the REBT website (...) for more information. The second thing is that you might want to employ a Tibetan Buddhist technique to really dispute your irrational beliefs and to burn
in rational ones. To do this, you sit in a chair. Count to ten. And after you have counted to ten without losing your count, you THEN dispute your irrational beliefs. This is how
they burn in rational thoughts in the Gelugpa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. Regardless, I hope that you enjoy this little
book. And I wish you all the happiness in the world.

This book is effective because it both (i) identifies the major cause of procrastination and (ii) shows you how to combat it. Since the cause of procrastination lies principally in our thinking, the "rational" techniques work especially well. I also found a number of behavioral tools that worked well for me. Among these are the profit-penalty system, reminders, bits and pieces (which NLP authors term "chunking down"), and the five-minute plan. I've used this book several times over the past few years when I've found myself procrastinating.

If you're procrastinating, I suggest that you buy this book and start using it...now. As you're working with it, you might also augment your procrastination-fighting skills by using David Burns' "The Feeling Good Handbook." (I have found it more useful than its predecessor, "Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy," and you can easily use it without reading the latter.) And then, until you realize that you've made the progress you wanted, stop looking elsewhere for more books and more tools. That's just another procrastination pattern!