What Do You See When You Look in the Mirror?: Helping Yourself

Noting the risks involved with poor body image, an eight-step program helps readers to devalue stereotypes, overcome self-consciousness, end self-defeating behavior, and establish healthy thinking patterns. Original.

Cash is an interesting writer whose main point here is that "negative body image has little to do with outward appearance: It's a state of mind." His goal is to help his readers develop "an understanding of the psychology of physical appearance?how our outer looks and our inner body image affect our lives." Simply put, "despite...our preoccupation with physical attractiveness, looks aren't everything they're cracked up to be." To prove this observation, Cash presents a rigorous eight-point program to help readers create in their minds a new body image?ranging from "Getting Comfortable with Your Body" to "Correcting Your Body Image Errors." Cash acknowledges that his book is rooted in basic cognitive therapy techniques, recognizing that "our emotions stem from how we talk to ourselves about ourselves." To this end, he provides helpful progressive relaxation and visualization techniques to help develop what he calls the readers' "New Inner Voice." The book also provides a wide range of graphs, worksheets and questionnaires that are designed to help readers explore and track their relationships to food and self-image, but ultimately these may overwhelm Cash's main concern: "successful control over your feelings is real control?control that matters."
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.