Here’s How to Order My Books:
Why We Suffer brings into clear focus a largely unrecognized compulsion in human nature, which is to indulge in emotional suffering and even to seek it out. This flaw in our emotional operating system is a grave danger to each of us personally and to all of us collectively. Through our defense system, we cover up awareness of our unconscious tendency to replay and recycle unresolved negative emotions. This flaw in human nature gets the best of us only if we fail to become conscious of it. When we expose this inner condition, we are beginning to overcome and resolve it. When it no longer contaminates our inner life, we feel, just for starters, our goodness and our value more acutely, and we are now free to fulfill our aspirations and live in inner harmony.
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The Phantom of the Psyche uncovers inner passivity, which is a common characteristic of the human psyche. This passivity distorts our sense of self and binds us to a second-hand experience of ourselves. This psychological condition, which affects men and women equally, is much more than just our difficulty in standing up for our rights. It is a complex and mysterious aspect of our psyche, concealed beneath our feelings of being helpless, doubtful, overwhelmed, and indecisive. Inner passivity also contributes to feelings of being defective or unworthy, and it is a factor in hundreds of symptoms, including anxiety, fear, anger, addictions, compulsions, procrastination, panic attacks, and depression. Our growing awareness of this aspect of our psyche produces inner freedom, enhanced self-confidence and peace of mind.
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Here’s another way—through poetry—to assimilate the psychological knowledge that is so important to our wellbeing. This poetry offers a way to awaken in us a more objective sense of who we are and who we might become. This collection consists of 50 poems that add up to almost 14,000 words. Two prose essays are included in the Appendix. The book deals with such topics as inner conflict, psychological resistance to self-development, and knowing truth from falsehood. Many of the poems are instilled with humor, and all flow with rhythm and rhyme. Excellent reading for teenagers as well as adults. This collection, published in 2024, is the author’s first book of poetry.
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Freedom from Self-Sabotage is a powerful book that exposes the invisible inner saboteur that lurks behind our defeat and failure. This book shows how we resist and reject the positive, how we collude in creating our problems, and how we cover up awareness of these hidden dynamics through our defense system. Core questions are addressed: Why is the negative there in the first place? Why do we find it so difficult to do what’s in our best interest? Why don’t we exercise more, eat better, stay focused, worry less, remain positive, keep friends, save money, hold on to love, and achieve more with our creativity and skills? This book identifies in detail the unresolved negative emotions that block and hinder us, and it provides scores of examples of the hidden ways we sabotage ourselves through our entanglement in feelings of being deprived, refused, controlled, criticized, and rejected.
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Secret Attachments delivers the keys to recovery from addictions through a powerful new awareness of the nature of negative emotions. We now can see clearly how unresolved negative emotions are directly related to out-of-control behaviors with food, drugs, alcohol, sex, and gambling.
Addictive personalities are unconsciously determined to go on experiencing negative emotions that are unresolved from their past. These emotions constitute unconscious or secret attachments, meaning they are like emotional addictions. Secret attachments produce passivity, helplessness, bitterness, cynicism, self-rejection, apathy, and even self-hatred. These attachments weaken us and undermine our capacity for self-regulation.
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See Your Way to Self-Esteem uncovers the surprisingly strong tendency we have to see other people and the world from a negative perspective. More than we realize, our emotions determine how we see things, what we see, and what we do not see.
If we’re bored, we see with eyes that are listless and dull; if we’re angry, we see things to be angry about; if we’re envious, we see what fuels feelings of envy. We’re unconsciously interested in “seeing” how we are allegedly being deprived, refused, belittled, or opposed in some manner. We can be especially willing to see ourselves in a negative light. This book offers a therapeutic approach that attacks the root causes of negative and self-defeating beliefs.
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Psyched Up is a work of artful communication that takes profound and vital self-knowledge from depth psychology and makes it comprehensible and easy to assimilate.
Though we might be smart and well-educated, often all we encounter when we look inward is a fuzzy obscure uncertainty. This book explains the deeper dynamics at the heart of emotional and behavioral difficulties.
We learn, for instance, why we can quickly become angry, depressed, or discouraged when facing life’s challenges. Why do we fail to be at our best when a stellar effort is needed? Why do we experience so much of life in a negative rather than in a positive way? These topics and many others are addressed in detail as they apply to specific emotional and behavioral problems, including anger, depression, anxiety, loneliness, addictions, guilt and shame, stress and worry, and feelings of helplessness.
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Who’s Afraid of Inner Truth? comprises 74 articles that uncover inner truth as it applies to the dynamics of our emotional life. These articles are dispatches in the journalistic tradition, reports from our psyche’s underworld. Our psyche is a war zone where primitive forces and instincts involving aggression, passivity, egotism, resistance, defenses, and irrationality clash with conflicting agendas. Just about everyone is a casualty, to some degree, of this inner conflict. We can establish inner peace when we assimilate this knowledge. New material has been added to this book that hasn’t appeared on this website, and the writing has been crafted to communicate the ideas and knowledge as effectively as possible.
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Books by psychotherapist Sandra Michaelson (1944-1999):
LoveSmart: Transforming the Emotional Patterns that Sabotage Relationships demonstrates through theory, examples, and exercises how our unconscious interpretations and beliefs can adversely affect our relationships. We see how we unwittingly avoid recognition of our participation in relationship failure, while making our partner, loved ones, and friends largely responsible for our feelings and behaviors. More specific topics include: why we choose our partner; the meaning of the begging-bowl syndrome; the origins of control issues and what we can do about them; the clear difference between genuine love and addictive attachments; how sexual issues reflect our emotional conflicts; the tendency to compulsively repeat self-sabotaging patterns of behavior; and the illusion of reforming our partner.
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The Emotional Catering Service is a metaphor for what is commonly known as codependency. This book takes a totally new approach to codependency. It uncovers the roots of the problem, which are unresolved emotional attachments to self-denial, rejection, unworthiness, and feeling helpless and controlled. Deep knowledge from within our psyche is uncovered, and this new self-awareness provides readers with the best insight for change and growth.
This book examines the six major features of emotional catering. These features represent everyday attitudes and behavioral problems that plague many “normal” people to some degree, sabotaging prospects for health and happiness. The six features are: self-denial, fear and avoidance of intimacy, obsessive investment in the welfare of others, compulsive seeking of approval, taking responsibility for others and doing it all, and a passive stance toward life. Each of these features is examined in depth throughout the book.
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Is Anyone Listening? reveals rules and insights that guide you in communicating more successfully with your partner, as well as with friends, family members, and even strangers. The essence of this book’s communication program involves learning how to feel genuine interest, as well as compassion, without being judgmental or reactive.
Discover the dozens of ways we block communication and what we can do to change these unconscious ineffective patterns. This book is designed to help readers see and understand communication patterns. It gives you tools that help you overcome the fear of expressing yourself honestly and directly. Discover insight into our instinctive readiness to act defensively and inappropriately with our partner. Learn why defensive reactions are so common, and what they reveal about our issues on a deeper level. Resolve once and for all the fear that arises when it’s time to be honest with ourselves and our partner.
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