****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
First of all, I had a pretty rough childhood which included losing my mother at the age of 8, only 5 months after immigrating to the U.S. from Asia, and not knowing a single word of English. That, combined with a dysfunctional family to start with, left me pretty scarred growing up.I read a ton of self-help books, and they all helped in some way. Went to a very expensive NLP therapist that charges $200/hour for about 1.5 years, and it helped me release a lot of old wounds.After 1.5 years, I felt considerably better, so I stopped going to therapy. But I knew there were things I still wanted to work on with regards to my feelings of safety, self-esteem, and how I relate to others.I bought this book in October 2015. In November 2015, I bought Dr. Burns's other book "Intimate Connections" and started doing the exercises in the books during my winter vacation.The processes that worked best for me were:- an abbreviated version of Daily Mood Log (I don't do it in exhaustive detail like the book instructed because you only work on 1 belief/thought at a time anyway. I just list the event, the anxiety level, circle the emotions and write in the amount of that emotion, then I pick one main triggering thought to that emotion/event to work on),-the Downward Arrow/What-If techniques to get to the root cause of why I had a certain unpleasant emotion/thought,- and Cognitive Flooding, Cost-Benefit Analysis, Feared Fantasy, and Externalization of Voices to transform my emotion and self defeating beliefs.What I noticed was that the processes worked just as effectively and fast as my expensive NLP therapy to help me transform negative emotions and thoughts, and immediately decreased my anxiety surrounding the particular situations I worked on!Around the same time during my winter break from work, I had read a couple of books to help me figure out my life purpose/career direction: Secret Language of Destiny and The Life You Were Born to Live. The insights these books helped me gain about myself helped me to clarify my life direction tremendously, which really helped to build confidence and self esteem.When I got back to work in January 2016, my colleagues all noticed the difference in the way I interacted with them. People pulled me aside to one on one meetings to ask me what I'd done differently for such a positive shift in the way I carry myself and the way I interact with them. They saw me as more of a leader and more confident in myself.This shift was made possible by releasing negative emotions and self defeating beliefs through Dr. Burns's methods and combined with a sense of clarity about my life that I never had up until that point.Another thing that really helped me was doing the 30 minute full body meditation from the mp3 of The Realization Process to help me feel calm and connected to my essential self.In summary, the three main things that helped me drastically improve my life were this book, The Realization Process, and the life purpose books: The Life You Were Born to Live and Secret Language of Destiny.What's most empowering is knowing I will have these practices for the rest of my life to continually work towards releasing my self defeating behaviors and emotions so I can achieve all my goals...all on my own time, using my own efforts, without having to pay expensive therapy fees!
