Getting Past Your Past: Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy

THE Self-help book to read. Highly recommended.

Life is cumulative. Past experience builds upon more experience and we
become who we are whether we’re conscious of it or not. Memories of these
experiences are stored physically in the brain. Dr. Shapiro’s book helps
people think about their lives and provides specific techniques to find the
links to make sense of who we are. She provides real life examples to which
one can relate, then suggests hands-on strategies and exercises that enable
the reader to connect the dots, make new decisions, take different actions,
and achieve the means to effect change and growth. However, nowhere in this
book does she recommend or mention moving one’s eyes, nor does she suggest
self-administered EMDR, because that would be clearly unethical and
irresponsible. Rather, when an emotional problem is described, she offers a
variety of self-help techniques that can be safely used. In addition, she
offers guidelines for readers to decide if it would be useful to get
professional help with an experienced EMDR clinician.

Getting Past Your Past is full of accessible, empowering self-help
resources. It’s a delight to read, difficult to put down, and has something
beneficial and fruitful for everyone.

Dr. Patti Levin
Boston

5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Highly recommend it!

Dr. Francine Shapiro in this inspiring book, not only shows us how we can begin to find and understand the core of our suffering, but how to help ourselves find freedom from past experiences of hardship, adversity and trauma. This is an excellent book that brings hope and empowers the reader to seek healing as an attainable goal. So many of us have felt at times hopeless and helpless and it is nice to find a book that remind us that there are healing forces within us that we can tap into as we begin our journey towards healing and a better future. Dr. Shapiro has done and excellent job providing self-help strategies grounded in the principles and core of EMDR therapy while making it clear that it is not intended to replace the therapeutic work done with an EMDR trained practitioner. This is definitely a book to have, and a book to give to anyone we care about! Ana M Gomez, MC, LPC

5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Highly Recommended - Tell your colleagues, tell your family, tell your firends

In her latest book, Getting Past Your Past, Take Control of Your Life with Self-Help Techniques from EMDR Therapy, Francine Shapiro, PhD, brings the miracles of EMDR to clinicians and laypeople alike. These miracles refer to the many individuals who have been transformed since Dr. Shapiro’s historic walk in the park in Los Gatos, CA in the late 1980s. With compassion, caring, insight, and integrity, she presents some of their stories before and after EMDR. She generously shares self-healing techniques to assist readers in beginning their own healing journeys. This book can enlighten and strengthen individuals by encouraging them to explore past experiences in the present so they can be freer and more empowered in the future.

4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

"Connect the dots" for self help insights and exercises

As a psychotherapist, I often hear folks ask, "I know how I WANT to act (or feel or think,) but I find myself responding in ways that just don't work. Why?" Dr. Shapiro's book, "Getting Past Your Past", provides the insights gleaned from the EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) psychotherapy approach in a digestible, engaging format that will help individuals learn how to answer this question for themselves. By describing the experiences of actual clinical cases, she helps the reader understand how our problematic behaviors, feelings, thoughts, and reactions are simply a manifestation of past experiences that are physically stored in the brain in an unprocessed form. When these memories are not processed completely, we respond in ways that might have made sense in the past, but are no longer helpful. These unprocessed past experiences form memory networks that are triggered by current experiences. Dr Shapiro guides people to trace their current difficulties back to the past unprocessed memories that are the basis for their current responses. She also offers some simple ways to "de-activate" the intensity of current reactions in order to be more present in the "here and now" rather than responding from the "there and then."

I highly recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand their own responses and how they are impacted by past experiences - or anyone wanting to understand "what makes people tick." While this book is written for the general public, EMDR therapists and therapists curious about EMDR will benefit from the range and breadth of examples of the application of EMDR, and will gain a more thorough understanding of the Adaptive Information Processing model that is the foundation of EMDR practice.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

BN download stinks

I would love to have read this book but guess what! I paid for it and never got it. Still cant dl it just get the "Technical difficulty" Message when I try to DL it

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

Yes--A self help book that actually helps!

Seeing GPYP on a table in my office, several clients decided to buy the book. I believed it would be interesting to them but I have to admit they surprised me. They talked about themselves and their experiences prior to trying EMDR treatment in a new way. One man said (I believe, in jest) that you must have thought I read the book before I started treatment. He said, “She described me so well— the high functioning, successful male, undone by anxiety that he couldn’t comprehend. This client said I now really see how the childhood experiences which were built upon by the adolescent experiences kept escalating and so I couldn’t understand why I could do so well and feel so terrified, so angry and so inadequate. This clearly wasn’t the first conversation we had about this, but reading the book allowed him to “get it” in a way that he hadn’t before. He also started using the safe place and other self soothing techniques more regularly and seemed to appreciate their benefits with new insight.

Presented in an articulate compassionate manner, Dr. Shapiro has given the reader a book that minimally will help them feel less undone by their own symptoms and more appreciative of the experiences they have had along the way. They have the opportunity to recognize that it is not “their fault” that they struggle with shame, anxiety, eating disorders; they are not crazy—there isn’t something intrinsically wrong with them—they are simply products of their experiences. AND, there are ways that allow those experiences to be healed giving them the potential of a much greater quality of life.

Thank you, Dr. Shapiro—this is not a self-help book that will simply sit on people’s shelves,--- it will be read, reread and utilized. I highly recommend this book for clinicians, for clients, for all who want to make greater sense of their own story.

Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

IT IS A BLESSING.

This is a great book I would recommend it to anyone at any point and time in their life.
I give it 5 stars

0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.