Making Peace With Your Past: The Six Essential Steps to Enjoying a Great Future - Hardcover

Goldberg, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060195282 ISBN 13: 9780060195281

Publisher: Harper, 2000

Synopsis

Do You ...

• Harbor guilt, gripes, or grudges from past relationships?
• Feel plagued by thoughts like "If only I had or "I wish I didn't..."?
• Think "Oh, no, not again!" when personal problems arise?
• Feel ashamed of things you've done?
• Wish you could apologize to someone you've wronged and be forgiven?
• Feel victimized by past experiences?
• Wish you could set the record straight-and finally be vindicated?
• Wonder why life hasn't turned out the way you wanted?
• Feel anxious or depressed about your future?
• Seem to be less happy as time goes by?

If you answered yes to even one of these questions, you've come to the right place. It's time to make peace with your past.

The past lives on in everything you think, feel, say, and do. Medical studies show that adults who've had adverse childhood experiences are much more vulnerable to life-threatening illnesses such as cancer and heart disease. But you can heal the pain of the past and create a vibrant, joyful future.

With the practical, scientifically proven techniques in this book, eminent psychiatrist Harold Bloomfield, M.D., will help you:

• Break the shackles of shame-and feel your true worth.
• Stop the slow acid drip of regret-and feel truly grateful.
• Resolve the grief that will not end.
• Heal the not-so-obvious wounds of love and sex.
• Forgive and be forgiven.
• Reawaken to the magic and fun of being alive.
• Rediscover the passion to live your highest destiny.

Through Dr. Bloomfield's dynamic, psychospiritual approach, confusion is replaced by wisdom, bitterness by gratitude, heavy burdens by a lightness of being. You will finally be able to put the past to blessed rest and create the future you always dreamed of-and deserve.

About this title

About the Author

Harold H. Bloomfield, M.D. is a Yale-trained psychiatrist and a respected leader in alternative medicine and integrative psychiatry. He is the best-selling author of Making Peace with your Parents, Making Peace withn Yourself, Hypericum (St. John's Wort) & Depression, How to Heal Depression, How to Survive the Loss of a Love, and TM Transcendental Meditation. His books have sold more than seven million copies and have been translated into twenty-six languages. His work has been featured in every major media outlet, including 20/20, Oprah, Larry King, Good Morning America and in Time, Newsweek, the New York Times, Forbes and People. He lives in Del Mar, California.

Reviews

With this intelligent, sensitive work, Bloomfield (Making Peace with Your Parents; Making Peace with Yourself) adds another surefire success to the lengthy list of well-regarded psychology books that he's authored or coauthored. Embracing the view that unprocessed experience causes human suffering, he offers readers a program for examining their pasts that's been successful in his practice with individuals and in his seminars. While some case studies are included, Bloomfield's warmth and wide-ranging advice would be enough to fill this book, unlike many self-help books that rely on anecdotes to enliven them. While Bloomfield offers no quick fixes for emotional pain, he advocates a thorough and kindly, if unflinching, analysis of its causes. He firmly believes that finding inner peace gives one the mooring and strength to explore issues of shame, regret, grief, love and sex, and to view past history in a new light. His techniques for self-exploration include using imagery and meditation (an early proponent of Transcendental Meditation, Bloomfield also wrote the classic TM: Discovering Your Inner Energy and Overcoming Stress), and writing one's life story (he supplies helpful questions to get readers started). He also encourages spiritual pursuits, joining 12-step and other groups, if needed, as well as herbal remedies and other alternative measures. For the conscientious reader, Bloomfield's advice will help in dealing with psychological pain. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Bloomfield has become a renowned psychospiritual educator and champion of emotional literacy over the course of his 30-year career. His best sellers include Making Peace with Your Parents, Making Peace with Yourself, How To Heal Depression, and TM: Discovering Inner Energy and Overcoming Stress. Although he uses New Age vocabulary and makes references to Transcendental Meditation, overall Bloomfield clearly addresses the syndrome Freud called "repetition compulsion"Dhumans' tendency to re-create what they have not worked through. This is one of the few times in self-help literature that an author has tackled the underlying issues (e.g., shame, blame, guilt, regret, grief, and the past) that can prevent healing. With revealing exercises, Bloomfield shows readers how to rediscover "the passion to live [their] highest destiny." Recommended for all public libraries.DSusan E. Burdick, Lower Merion Sch. Dist., Ardmore, P.-- highest destiny." Recommended for all public libraries.DSusan E. Burdick, Lower Merion Sch. Dist., Ardmore, PA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Healing a Painful PastHurt Was Inevitable, Suffering Is OptionalThose who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.--George Santayana

The three most profound questions in every person's life are: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? This book will help you explore and answer all three. As you unravel the tangled web of your past, you will be able to extract from it the golden thread that is your essence and weave your future into a bold, brilliant tapestry.

Scientific research, depth psychology, and the great wisdom traditions of every culture all strongly concur that the root cause of human suffering is the accumulation of unprocessed experience from the past. In my 30 years as a psychotherapist and seminar leader, I have learned that no one can experience true love, or a joyful presence, or create an optimal future until he or she makes peace with the past. People come to therapy to deal with an immediate crisis or persistent problem. They are often depressed about the present or anxious about the future. But without exception, they soon discover that the pain and chaos of the present have origins in the past. To understand themselves and move forward with confidence and freedom, they must reflect on what brought them to this moment. Aspects of their personal history that are holding them back must be confronted and resolved; aspects that can rejuvenate their creativity and strength-the fun and wonder of childhood, for instance, or the visionary enthusiasm of adolescence- need to be rediscovered and resurrected.

Without a doubt, many of the here-and-now conflicts people have with their spouses, lovers, bosses, or children are, in part, reenactments of incidents that happened earlier in their lives.

Here are some examples from the people I'm currently seeing in my practice:

Mary feels resentful and ashamed because her husband ran off with her best friend three years earlier. Beautiful, rich, and a well-known dermatologist, deep down she still can't get over the shock of having her charmed life torn apart. She is so mistrustful that she can't allow herself to get really close to any man or woman.James torments himself for squandering his inheritance in day trading and high-risk investments. Seeing his business school classmates build their fortunes and start their families fills him with self-contempt, regret, and jealousy.Now 38 and unable to conceive, Carol is plagued by feelings of guilt and regret for two abortions she had in her teens.A model in her thirties, Helen feels insecure around other women and is sure that any man she loves will leave her for someone prettier and smarter. She needs to see the connection to her childhood, when she was taunted, and sometimes tortured, by her older sister, who never let Helen play with her and her friends.An underachieving supermarket manager, Mark is a loner who complains of being bored with his life. Ever since he was twelve and saw his father die suddenly, he has been a self-declared hypochondriac and can't let anyone or anything become important to him.Deeply in love for the first time in her life, Janice is troubled because sex with her fiancé: has become boring. Her basis of comparison is the wild, forbidden sex she had with "bad boys" when she was younger-and with her boyfriend when they first met and he was still married. She needs to find acceptable ways to bring the excitement of her sexual past into the peaceful, long-term intimacy she also desires. At age 50, Peter is torn by competing desires: to stay with his wife of 20 years or start a new life with another woman with whom he is having an affair. He is repeating the same pattern he witnessed when his dad ran off with a young woman at the age of 50. At the time, Peter hated his father for leaving his mother, but also admired that he had "the guts to go for it" despite intense social disapproval.

As the great novelist William Faulkner once said, the past is not dead, it is not even past. Indeed, the past lives on in everything we think, feel, say, and do. The cells in our bodies may die and replace themselves every seven years; we may change jobs, spouses, addresses, even our names; but the imprint of every experience-large and small, pleasant and unpleas ant- remains with us, each one adding to the sum of who we are, like the bricks and mortar in a house or the words on a page.

The past does not just sit there like an obedient child, waiting to be called upon when we want to remember things. It is a full participant in our lives. A painful past can haunt us, stirring up rage, regret, sorrow, shame, and other bitter feelings. The emotional residue of that pain--a background buzz of self-punishment, fear, and anger--can quite literally control us, turning us into victims of memory and drowning the more delicate emotions of love, joy, and compassion. Positive memories haunt us, too, making us long for the freedom and excitement of days gone by. But it's not just the past we remember that influences the present. To a large extent, the unremembered past shapes the feeling tone of our lives, sometimes calling forth confidence, generosity, and exuberance, and at other times unexplained anxiety, despair, and physical illness.

What echoes of the past are disturbing your peace in the present? To assess the extent to which you can benefit from this book, please answer yes or no to the following questions:

Do you harbor guilt, gripes, or grudges from a past relationship?Are you plagued by thoughts like "If only I had . . . " or "I wish I didn't . . .?"

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060195282
• ISBN 13: 9780060195281
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288