| Description |
317 pages ; 23 cm |
|
text rdacontent |
|
unmediated rdamedia |
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volume rdacarrier |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| Contents |
Understanding negative legacy emotions. The most violent and most loving creature on Earth ; Our human legacy of Stone Age emotions ; Our brains are made up of people ; The social carnivore emerges from Africa ; Instincts for language, morality, and spirituality ; We are born helpless and dependent ; Why none of us escape emotionally free from childhood ; Nature's anger management ; When abuse overwhelms the child ; Bullying, domestic violence, and posttraumatic stress ; Don't people need some guilt and shame? -- Achieving emotional freedom. Taking the three steps to emotional freedom ; Identifying feelings of guilt, shame, and anxiety ; Recognizing feelings of anger and emotional numbness ; Negative things we tell ourselves ; How our bodies tell us about guilt, shame, and anxiety ; Rejecting guilt and self-destructive feelings ; Overcoming shame and defensive feelings ; Conquering anxiety and helpless feelings ; Mastering anger ; Breaking out of numbness ; How to run our minds and lives ; Facing real-live challenges -- Freedom to love. Love is joyful awareness ; Let's talk about sex ; Love is not the same as relationship ; What to do when love is lost ; Guidelines for maintaining a loving partnership ; Empathic self-transformation ; Where to turn when all seems lost ; Last resorts that seldom work out ; Love is our highest purpose -- Appendix A. About psychiatry and psychiatric drugs -- Appendix B. Darwin was no Darwinist. |
| Summary |
With the first unified theory of guilt, shame, and anxiety, this pioneering psychiatrist and critic of psychiatric diagnoses and drugs examines the causes and effects of psychological and emotional suffering from the perspective of biological evolution, child development, and mature adult decision-making. Drawing on evolution, neuroscience, and decades of clinical experience, Dr. Breggin analyzes what he calls our negative legacy emotions - the painful emotional heritage that encumbers all human beings. The author marshals evidence that we evolved as the most violent and yet most empathic creatures on Earth. Evolution dealt with this species-threatening conflict between our violence and our close-knit social life by building guilt, shame, and anxiety into our genes. These inhibiting emotions were needed prehistorically to control our self-assertiveness and aggression within intimate family and clan relationships. Dr. Breggin shows how guilt, shame, and anxiety eventually became self-defeating and demoralizing legacies from our primitive past that no longer play any useful or positive role in mature adult life. He then guides the reader through the Three Steps to Emotional Freedom, starting with how to identify negative legacy emotions and then how to reject their control over us. Finally, he describes how to triumph over and transcend guilt, shame, and anxiety on the way to greater emotional freedom and a more rational, loving, and productive life. |
| Subject |
Emotions.
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Guilt.
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Shame.
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Anxiety.
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Anxiety. (OCoLC)fst00810950
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Emotions. (OCoLC)fst00908819
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Guilt. (OCoLC)fst00949079
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Shame. (OCoLC)fst01115183
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| ISBN |
9781616141493 (paperback) |
|
1616141492 (paperback) |
|
9781616147211 (ebook) |
|
