Category: Adult, self-help.
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| Susan Jane Smith |
Reviewer: Susan Price.
Susan Jane Smith’s photo shows someone very like the
ideal grandmother: smiling, kind, wise, good humoured, ready to listen, and
understand.
Her book, Emotional Health for Emotional Wealth shows this to be an accurate
assessment. Life experience has taught
her wisdom. Twenty years of counselling
means that nothing surprises or shocks her.
Her advice may not be what you want to hear, but it’s probably what you
need to hear.
Susan Jane Smith herself says that this is ‘another
self-help book.’ What makes it different
is the fine anger underlying the compassion and advice, and the passion for
helping people to overcome the emotional pain she suffered herself.
Emotional pain means you cannot be healthy: you
cannot live at ease with yourself. Nor
can you be emotionally wealthy. You may have material wealth –you may be driven
to tirelessly acquire more and more ‘success’ – but emotional pain prevents you from relaxing, or
simply, wholeheartedly enjoying anything.
The pain forever chafes and nags.
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| Emotional Health for Emotional Wealth |
It can be so established that it seems normal, yet
it still hinders people, adversely influencing their choices in careers, in
partners, life.
Susan Jane Smith knows all too well that attaining
the peace of ‘emotional health’ isn’t easy.
Habits are hard to change, and trying often rouses old terrors: but many
live with such distress they are willing to work hard to be rid of it: to
endure the nightmares, the withdrawal, the loss of family and friends… Whatever
it takes.
Susan Smith went through this struggle herself, and
relates how, after years of counselling, she woke one day to a puzzling sensation:
an absence of the emotional pain that had chafed her for so long. The experience set her on a crusade: to
qualify as a counsellor so she could relieve others’ pain.
Her message is simple: If you don’t like your life,
change it. If you can’t understand what
is causing your pain, don’t know what to change, or how to begin – then find a
therapist to help you puzzle it out, and encourage you when it gets tough.
Her advice is excellent, but she doesn’t expect you
to simply accept it, recommending many other titles and organisations for consultation.
The book is a veritable self-therapy source-book.
She discusses the pain caused by the abuse of
children, domestic violence and rape – and also the addictions and compulsive
habits so often employed in a desperate attempt to control the resulting
emotional pain: alcoholism and other drug abuse, compulsive eating and
starving, over-work, self-harm and violence towards others.
The advice is always based on what Susan Smith
has found to be practical and effective.
It is admirably down-to-earth and realistic.
She has counselled abusers and rapists, and although
she has compassion for them, her attitude is refreshingly steely: ‘My understanding from the people I have
worked with who had perpetrated abuse is that they simply “wanted to” and could.
They have a callous disregard for the victim… One man said… it would be
a crime [only] if the victim told the
police. Distorted thinking!’
The book’s empowering anger is inspired by injustice,
cruelty and apathy. A Telegraph headline
– ‘Child Abuse Won’t Be Overcome Until We
Define What It Is’ – makes her demand: Do governments and social services still
not know what it is? She provides, from
her experience, a full definition for their assistance.
She has listened to the damaged adult victims of every
kind of child abuse: children hit with pokers, constantly ridiculed, left
hungry and cold for days, raped. Her
fervent wish, I think, is for us all to sort ourselves out and stop treating
each other so badly!
As the old Russian tale says, There would be no suffering on earth…if only we were kind to each other.
Sadly, that time will never come, but Susan Jane
Smith will battle on – an odd shining knight, but a brave one.
Almost everyone would gain some insight, some help from
reading this book – and if you are one of the many bruised and reeling from a
cruel childhood, or rape, or assault by a partner – to name only a few possible
traumas – I think this book would be a strong, supportive, wise friend.
Emotional Health for Emotional Wealth can be found here (UK)
And here (USA)
Susan Price is the Carnegie winning author of 'The Ghost Drum' and 'The Sterkarm Handshake'.
She blogs at Nennius and with the Authors Electric.
Her website is at www.susanpriceauthor.com
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