Overwhelmed: Coping with Life's Ups and Downs / Edition 2

by Nancy K. Schlossbereg

Overview

Overwhelmed is a helpful, positive guide to dealing with the challenges-both expected and unexpected-that accompany change. More than a discussion of turning points and transitions, it offers real-life examples and specific guidelines for responding constructively to all kinds of changes, welcome and unwelcome. Nancy K. Schlossberg shows readers how to evaluate each change and determine its affects, how to assess personal strengths and the support systems brought to the change, and how to pinpoint the best coping strategies for the situation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780739100318
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	05/01/1999
Edition description:	Revised Edition
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.96(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Nancy K. Schlossberg, author of seven books, is president of TransitionWorks, a consulting firm; Professor Emerita at the University of Maryland, College Park; and served as president of the National Career Development Association. She has been honored for her work by the American Psychological Association.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Acknowledgments Chapter 2 Introduction Part 3 Part I: APPROACHING CHANGE Chapter 4 The Transition Process Chapter 5 Transitions: Their Infinite Variety Part 6 Part II: TAKING STOCK Chapter 7 TAKING STOCK of Your Situation Chapter 8 TAKING STOCK of Your Self and Supports Chapter 9 TAKING STOCK of Your Strategies Part 10 Part III: TAKING CHARGE Chapter 11 Your Action Plan for Mastering Change Chapter 12 TAKING CHARGE of Your Work Transitions Chapter 13 Profiting from Change

What People are Saying About This

Ann McLaughlin

"For the overwhelmed woman, time given to reading Overwhelmed will be well spent. The author has a rare gift: insight combined with clear, crisp writing. Her prescription for coping is mature, sympathetic, and-best of all-realistic."
— Ann McLaughlin

Carol Tavris

"Schlossberg's work represents an important and enormously helpful alternative to old-fashioned 'stage theories.' When you think you are having an 'age-thirty (or whatever) crisis,' there's nothing much you can do. When you realize that it isn't being thirty, or forty, or sixty that matters, but what is happening in your life, you can learn to cope with inevitable changes-and even thrive on them. This warm, wise book shows how."
— Carol Tavris

Gerard I. Nierenberg

"Schlossberg comes to the subject with great professional competence and experience and presents readers with much-needed solutions."
— Gerard I. Nierenberg

George G. Higgins

"For better or worse, Americans are among the most mobile people in recorded history. Almost willy-nilly, they change their places of residence, occupations, schools, life styles, etc., at a dizzying pace. For those of us-and our name is legion-who at times feel overwhelmed by these unexpected and, more often than not, extremely painful disruptions in our hectic lives, Schlossberg's study of people in transition is just what the doctor ordered. She is a scholar in the best sense of the word, but wears her scholarship lightly, and her study is suffused with an appealing note of personal warmth and empathy too often lacking in works of this kind. I found her book instructive and personally very helpful, and I am pleased to recommend it enthusiatically."
— Rev. Msgr. George G. Higgins

Editorial Reviews

For the overwhelmed woman, time given to reading Overwhelmed will be well spent. The author has a rare gift: insight combined with clear, crisp writing. Her prescription for coping is mature, sympathetic, and-best of all-realistic.

Ann McLaughlin

For better or worse, Americans are among the most mobile people in recorded history. Almost willy-nilly, they change their places of residence, occupations, schools, life styles, etc., at a dizzying pace. For those of us-and our name is legion-who at times feel overwhelmed by these unexpected and, more often than not, extremely painful disruptions in our hectic lives, Schlossberg's study of people in transition is just what the doctor ordered. She is a scholar in the best sense of the word, but wears her scholarship lightly, and her study is suffused with an appealing note of personal warmth and empathy too often lacking in works of this kind. I found her book instructive and personally very helpful, and I am pleased to recommend it enthusiatically.

Rev. Msgr. George G. Higgins

Schlossberg's work represents an important and enormously helpful alternative to old-fashioned 'stage theories.' When you think you are having an 'age-thirty (or whatever) crisis,' there's nothing much you can do. When you realize that it isn't being thirty, or forty, or sixty that matters, but what is happening in your life, you can learn to cope with inevitable changes-and even thrive on them. This warm, wise book shows how.

Carol Tavris

Schlossberg comes to the subject with great professional competence and experience and presents readers with much-needed solutions.

Gerard I. Nierenberg

Schlossberg's work represents an important and enormously helpful alternative to old-fashioned 'stage theories.' When you think you are having an 'age-thirty (or whatever) crisis, ' there's nothing much you can do. When you realize that it isn't being thirty, or forty, or sixty that matters, but what is happening in your life, you can learn to cope with inevitable changes-and even thrive on them. This warm, wise book shows how.--Carol Tavris, Ph.D., author of Anger: The Misunderstood Emotion

For the overwhelmed woman, time given to reading Overwhelmed will be well spent. The author has a rare gift: insight combined with clear, crisp writing. Her prescription for coping is mature, sympathetic, and-best of all-realistic.--Ann McLaughlin, former Secretary of Labor

For better or worse, Americans are among the most mobile people in recorded history. Almost willy-nilly, they change their places of residence, occupations, schools, life styles, etc., at a dizzying pace. For those of us-and our name is legion-who at times feel overwhelmed by these unexpected and, more often than not, extremely painful disruptions in our hectic lives, Schlossberg's study of people in transition is just what the doctor ordered. She is a scholar in the best sense of the word, but wears her scholarship lightly, and her study is suffused with an appealing note of personal warmth and empathy too often lacking in works of this kind. I found her book instructive and personally very helpful, and I am pleased to recommend it enthusiatically.--Rev. Msgr. George G. Higgins, adjunct lecturer, Department of Theology, Catholic University of America

From the Publisher

Author and entertainment reporter Schwarz (The Hillside Strangler) documents the life of Juanita Slusher (1935-2005), from her birth and troubled childhood in Edna, Tex. to her days as a 14-year-old runaway, enslaved in the South Dallas sex trade, before escaping and becoming the popular Las Vegas erotic dancer Candy Barr-celebrated for the beauty and body that lured, all her life, the worst kinds of men. Schwartz's research includes a hundred hours of exclusive interviews with Slusher, who would only allow her story to be told after her death. A local legend, her connections to Jack Ruby and Mickey Cohen have been overstated in the title, but her story is a compelling, brutal tragedy set against a country's loss of innocence; she's even brushed by the investigation into JFK's assassination. Additionally, there's no redemption after a lifetime of abuse; she lived to see 70 and, according to Schwarz, spent the last 30 years of her life bitter and isolated. There was once talk of a Candy Barr biopic starring Farrah Fawcett; this is definitely the stuff of edgier television movies (think HBO, not ABC), and clearly a story she wanted told. 16 pages of b&w photos.
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Publishers Weekly

Veteran true-crime/entertainment scribe Schwarz (Hollywood Confidential: How the Studios Beat the Mob at Their Own Game, 2007, etc.) charts the lurid life and times of a stripper. The burlesque star notorious for her association with Jack Ruby and mob boss Mickey Cohen was born Juanita Slusher to impoverished parents in a small Texas town. A precociously attractive child, she was regularly abused and molested by a string of neighbors and family members. (In a particularly horrific passage, Schwarz describes eight-year-old Juanita being put up as the jackpot in a pedophile poker game.) She ran away from home in her early teens, settling in Dallas. There she immediately fell prey to "the Capture," a tradition in which, Schwarz informs us, young girls were kidnapped, systematically raped and forced into prostitution, catering to the hypocritical Dallas establishment. After suffering in this role for a period, Juanita somehow managed to carve out a career as "Candy Barr," a burlesque dancer whose act was so transporting that she became the toast of Las Vegas and attracted Cohen's attention. Schwarz clearly presents this sensational material, but the book is one-dimensional. The endless litany of kidnappings, murder attempts, conspiracies, drug arrests, prison and rape after rape is hard to stomach and, after a while, hard to completely believe. Readers may raise eyebrows over the author's unquestioning acceptance of Barr's muddled, often half-remembered saga; they surely will wonder about his characterization of her as a brilliant artist. Quoted at length, she comes across as a rough-edged survivor and a self-mythologizer. Schwarz has written a compelling, upsetting screed against society'sdepraved exploitation of an innocent, but it lacks the rigor necessary for full-scale biography and social history. A punishing read, filled with righteous anger and fuzzy on details.

Kirkus Reviews

Nancy Schlossberg's Overwhelmed: Coping with Life's Ups and Downs is a combination self-help book and personal improvement tool-kit. Professor Schlossberg tells great stories—stories that teach and guide us to move from "overwhelmed" to "in control" as we face life's vicissitudes. What more could one ask for?

Bernard S. Arons