Becoming Real: Defeating the Stories We Tell Ourselves That Hold Us Back - Hardcover

Gail Saltz, M.D., is a mental health contributor to the Today show and is a contributing editor for Glamour magazine. She has appeared on Dateline, on CBS News and the Early Show, and on Fox News and Health News, among other television shows, and has been featured in the Associated Press, the New York Times, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, New York magazine, Newsweek, Harper's Bazaar, Redbook, Woman's World, Town & Country, and WebMD.

Saltz, an assistant professor of psychiatry at New York Presbyterian Hospital appears who weekly on the Today show, provides a guide to a kind of narrative unconscious as it affects decision making. The author says that most people live according to stories about care and need that were created in childhood to help them stay attached to and feel safe with adults who often failed to give what was needed emotionally. Saltz finds five major groups of stories about oneself and others, and names them by their distinguishing traits: dependent, super achiever, self-defeater, competitor, perfectionist. Such descriptors, she finds, lodge in the unconscious and result in self-destructive or nonproductive behavior in relationships and at work, as each type (or a combination of several) is used as a shield to fend off emotional stress. To move beyond these early stories to a more satisfying life, Saltz recommends that one clearly articulate the "old story" and its cost to one now, and then "rewrite" it and act accordingly. Although the author's instructions for undergoing this process are specific and clear, this is not a quick fix self-help book, but is based on psychoanalytic technique that will take time and commitment.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.