PT Bookshelf

One of the oldest ideas in cognitive psychology is that people use
a set ofexpectations, called a schema, to interpret their experiences. We
have, for example, a schema for restaurants: When we dine out, we expect
to be seated at a table and offered a menu. Some psychotherapists now
apply the schema concept to destructive patterns of behavior. According
to psychotherapist Tara Bennett-Goleman, M. A., author of Emotional
Alchemy: How the Mind Can Heal the Heart (Harmony, $24), most of these
schemas involve fear--of abandonment, betrayal, rejection, and so on.
Unrealistic expectations distort our perceptions of ourselves and our
environments so that we deal with illusion rather than reality, leading
to unhappiness. One of Bennett-Goleman's clients, for example, had such
unrealistically high standards that she saw only her failures and
consistently overlooked any successes she had. Bennett-Goleman discusses
how such inappropriate schemas work against people, and how adopting a
more realistic schema is helpful. She also argues that destructive
schemas can be brought "into the light" through mindfulness, cognitive
therapy and Buddhist teachings. While her unique brand of New Age therapy
is as yet unproven, she provides entertaining anecdotes from her personal
and clinical experience to illustrate her point.

If your fears are more like spider phobias or generalized anxiety,
you might want to try more traditional, well-documented psychological
remedies. In Facing Fears: The Sourcebook for Phobias, Fears, and
Anxieties (Checkmark, $16.95), psychologists Ada Kahn, Ph.D., and Ronald
Doctor, Ph.D., offer general information on fears and their treatment as
well as an alphabetically arranged compendium that tells you everything
you want to know about specific phobias, and then some.

By all accounts, schizophrenia is a horror worse than anything
Steven King's imagination could conjure up. Now, writer Greg Bottoms has
provided a biographical novel about his brother, Michael, a paranoid
schizophrenic, that may be as close as most of us will ever get to
knowing what it is to be truly mad. Angelhead: My Brother's Descent into
Madness (Crown, $22) is a story nearly as terrifying as the disease it
describes.

Research shows that slow-witted people generally have more children
than those with better brains. If this is true, why isn't the world's IQ
falling like the fellow who tipped a vending machine toward himself to
get a free treat? Wendy Northcutt, author of The Darwin Awards: Evolution
in Action (Dutton, $16.95) implies that it's because stupid people remove
their genes from the pool sooner. Northcutt, an Internet consultant,
gives the awards to those who show a remarkable talent for shortening
their lives in creative ways. There is, for instance, the couple who made
love in their garaged car and left the motor running to stay warm--sure
proof that evolution is still at work.

In A Quiet Worm (Yale, $18.50), David Myers, Ph.D., a psychology
professor at Michigan's Hope College, wittily discusses the trials of a
person sinking into deafness. He tells us, for example, of the hearing
impaired woman who writes to an advice columnist: She thinks her
boyfriend proposed marriage, but she's not sure she heard him correctly.
What should she do? Myers uses humor deftly, much of it self-directed.
Still, he recognizes that hearing loss is a serious problem, and helps
his reader appreciate how the inability to hear becomes the inability to
connect.

Adapted by Ph.D.