Reinventing Your Life: 2how to Break Free from Negative Life Patterns

Several of the most painful petards upon which people become hoisted during an unhappy childhood are neatly dispatched here by two cognitive therapists, who attack 11 common ``lifetraps''--destructive patterns that underlie a variety of emotional problems. Young, director of New York City's Cognitive Therapy Center and a faculty member of the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry, and Klosko, co-director of the Cognitive Therapy Center of Long Island, ably demonstrate how to deal with issues of abandonment, dependence, trust, social rejection, emotional deprivation, failure and vulnerability. They provide meaningful case histories, perceptive descriptions, diagnostic tests and a variety of nugget-sized, easily understood lists detailing the causes, danger signs and effects of negative impulses and actions, as well as ways to short-circuit them. (May)