Customer Rating: 
Summary: Restructuring Your Life
Comment: This book is about writing the story of your life to gain insight into the maladaptive patterns of your life, and to restructure your life in the light of the self-knowledge you gained from this process. Most people don't need apsychiatric set up to gein deeper understanding of their lives. What they need is a guide, like abook of this kind, to help review and come to terms with their lives, and to move forward and live an authentic life. Ms. Aftel's book will certainly meet those needs, and it is an exceptionallygod self-help book of its kind. It is a structured, profound, and skillful guide for those who are serious about exploring their own lives.Working on the superb exercises given in this book is not a substitute therapy for major psychiatric problems. Such interrventions are not within the scope of this book, abd the author does not make such claims either. But I find this book valuable in facilitating therapy for those who are in therapy with a competent therapist. I have taught and practiced psychology for nearly forty years, of which 25 years were spent in the Psychiatric Departments of the University of Chicago and the Northwestern University. I lead a Psycho-oncology program in a suburb of Chicago where I include Aftel's writing the Story of Your Life as part of the therapy protocol. I strongly recommend a five star rating for this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Exploration of Creativity and Self-Reliance
Comment: As a writer and reviewer of mental health literature for more than 35 years, I found Ms. Aftel's approach fresh and innovative. All I can say about the critics of such invitations to creative expression is-----LIGHTEN UP PEOPLE. Clearly, this book is for people who are willing to consider different ways of resolving their personal issues and moving toward increasing creativity and freedom in much the same manner as Julia Cameron's books. I found each of the exercises in the book unique and a force for powerful insight into one's life. The book reinforces individual responsibility and creativity. To suggest, as one of the review postings here does, that the book is pseudotherapy and analogous to boundary confusion and sex with a patient is outrageous. It also suggests that the critic's agenda has addled his (or her) rational faculties. Such logic condemns every form of self-enpowerment as somehow preventing needed treatment and requires complete adherence to a concept of therapuetic dependency, rather than indvidual expression. This is a book about enpowerment through creativity. Read the book. Better yet, practice its exercises.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Positive Authorship
Comment: Wonderfully well written and thoroughly thought out. If ever you've wondered how some people can describe their lives as the same dilemmas, year after year, you'll understand after reading this insightful book. Using the metaphor of "Stories", Ms. Aftel illustrates how our lives are dramas lived out each day by us as actors and written each day by us as self-authors. While this is not the first written work to depict life as a story, it is one of the most thorough in illustrating how we consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly, pre-define our lives with the story-like reality-perceptions we choose to adopt.
Where one might opt to use their "story" as a tool for understanding their history, the most significant opportunities are for "self-authoring" our present and future. Understanding our stories is a first step--a powerful first step. Using our understanding of our own and others people's stories for designing our future empowers us to live fuller, happier, healthier lives.
This book is also beautifully written. While there are well grounded ideas within every page, the book reads like an interactive fireside conversation. The author skillfully weaves her own experiences into the powerful examples and scenarios. While Ms. Aftel never quite admits that any of the painful experiences are hers, we can all hear her pain in some of the written words. Not to be dismayed, the book shines a very positive and optimistic picture...we are each able to author our own lives, recognize our own plots and craft our own stories.
This book deserves its five stars.
