It's Not Your Fault: How Healing Relationships Change Your Brain & Can Help You Overcome a Painful Past

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Summary: Rewiring the brain
Review: I found this book fascinating. When I was a young mother, I knew it was important to relate to my child in a helpful, healing way. I read many books on childhood development and none gave me the information that this book does. In the early chapters, the book explains the mechanics of brain development and the importance of the bonding relationship between mother and child. Watching a close friend of mine with her infant son has given me the opportunity to be an educated observor of this (thirty years too late for my own child!). The second half of the book takes the reader through a case study of a woman whose upbringing did not provide any opportunity for healthy development and whose subsequent life reflected this. Through the parenting process of therapy the counselor actually restructured her brain, helping to close the pathways that caused pain and pathology in her life.
This book would be helpful for therapist's needing to understand more fully the transformative nature that therapy can provide. Also I think young mothers could also benefit by understanding the choices that mothers make and the consequences in raising their children.

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Summary: What about GETTING healing relationships?
Review: I need a book on that. I was in the mental health system for 20 + years and never had one. And they all missed the point of my real problems. Then when you try to get a doctor like her to have a healing relationship, she does everything under the sun to keep her distance from you, unless of course your history is similiar to others that she deals with. But, where is the honesty? How many therapists are the same way as people as they are as therapists. And that is a real problem for the whole mental health system.

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Summary: Page after Page of Revelations
Review: Never have I read such powerful insight into the human brain and how it functions, or indeed one that debunked so many of the false beliefs that are so rampant in the psychology field.

Self-help books talk about how you need to "think positive" to heal from a traumatic past; this book shows you how instead you need to restructure the way you "feel" to overcome trauma and that, by so doing, your thought processes will improve as well.

This book is also unique in its affirmation of God's role in the healing process with solid scientific proof to back up this assertion, falling nicely in step with the Bahá'í Faith's core principle of perfect and absolute harmony between science and religion.

Romano McGraw is not only well spoken and humorous but also has a talent for presenting complex subjects in ways almost anyone can understand.

If you or anyone you know has ever been traumatized, this book will help you understand that person and their behavior from a fresh new perspective that's backed up by solid science. Even if you haven't been traumatized and don't know anyone who has been, at the very least this milestone in the history of psychology will move you. Or, if you're like me, it may well change your very perception of human existence.

Rating:
Summary: It's Not Your Fault
Review: What a great book! Well written and very informative. Everyone should read this book. Perhaps people will learn some compassion and understanding for the person trying to heal from trauma. This book explains why someone can't "get over," or "let go" of a painful past. They need other people. What a concept! The story of Kim is so inspirational. I'd love to meet her. Thank you for this book.

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Summary: A powerful and vital contribution
Review: Written by a psychologist who has given individual and group psychotherapy to trauma and abuse victims for over twenty-five years, It's Not Your Fault is a spiritual self-help guide that denounces the commonly trumpted belief that one can simply think one's way to happiness. Warning that those who suffer from the devastating effects of trauma cannot simply think themselves happy, and offering down-to-earth wisdom for improving one's emotional health and well-being without setting unrealistic goals, It's Not Your Fault is a powerful and vital contribution to understanding the deepest parts of oneself and how to seek out the help one needs to improve the quality of one's life.