Product Description

Re-issued with a new cover, this book explains the art of accepting yourself, warts and all. Accepting your strengths and weaknesses, rather than striving towards change and improvement lie at the heart of happiness. Windy Dryden shows the readers that until you accept the person you are, you cannot be truly content. This is a practical book offering realistic self-help exercises, case-study stories and examples of how to put the advice into practice.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #159000 in Books
• Published on: 1999-09-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

About the Author
Windy Dryden is a Professor of Psychotherapeutic Studies and author of many self-help books including the popular Overcoming Jealousy (Sheldon Press, 1998) and Letting Go of Anxiety and Depression (Sheldon Press, 2003).

Customer Reviews

Self acceptance, not self esteem
An excellent, plain-language introduction to a simple but often life-changing idea: self-acceptance. This is basically a modern term for the ancient idea: "Judge the sin, not the sinner."

What is the solution to low self-esteem? Surely it must be to increase your self-esteem, right? No.
Far better to do away with the whole idea of self-esteem and replace it with something much more satisfactory.

Self-esteem is based on the idea that you can judge ('esteem') EVERYTHING about you (your 'self') in a single word or phrase. Eg, I am "good" or a "success" or "useless" or "a failure".

In reality, your SELF is far too complicated to be judged like that, and it is potentially very harmful to do so. This is because your feelings of self worth will depend on how you perform. And as we are all fallible and no-one performs perfectly all the time, relying on self esteem will inevitably leave you feeling bad about your self when life's let-downs occur.

Your self consists of all your thoughts (good, bad, in-between), your behaviours, your habits, your body, your hopes, your skills, everything. This constitutes thousands of different things that make up YOU. That can't be accurately judged in one word or phrase.

To BE a "failure" you would have to fail ALL THE TIME at EVERYTHING. In reality, you fail at some things, you succeed at others, and you don't even bother to judge success or failure in most of the things you do. So why beat yourself up with the label "failure"? The only result is that you feel bad and are less likely to actually sort out the problem.

As this book shows, self acceptance is a far better solution.

Instead of judging your WHOLE SELF, you only judge your actions.

So instead of saying, "I failed my driving test therefore I AM a failure," you can learn to simply say "I failed my driving test. Next time I'll practice more." No self-judgment. You're going to feel disappointed enough about failing the test without giving yourself a hard time about what you ARE.

So you ACCEPT your SELF as a fallible human being. You remember that the whole YOU is too complicated to being judged in a word or phrase. And slowly you realise that you don't need to feel bad about your SELF no matter how anyone judges you (including yourself).

This DOESN'T mean that you judge yourself as "good" no matter what you do. You don't judge your self as "good" or "bad" or anything else. You simply judge what you DO.

If you do something you regret, you simply concentrate on doing what you can to make up for it.

It's a remarkably freeing notion, but one that actually makes it MORE likely you will take responsibility for the things you do.

And of course, this extends to not judging other people, only their ACTIONS.

This idea has most elegantly been described by Windy Dryden, Albert Ellis, Paul Hauck and others, and has helped many people overcome their emotional problems.

Dryden's book does this comprehensively, but without being too technical or full of jargon. Highly recommended.

This is a very helpful book.
This is one of the best books on self-esteem and happiness I've read. It's very accessible and most importantly, it works. I bought it along with "Why Can't I Just Be Happy" by Rolf Nabb and I think I am much farther along than I was previously.

Nice content - badly written.
This book just didn't speak to me in the right way at all. I agree that the main points it makes and the general research is on the money but speaking as someone endevoring to develop more as a person through such research I felt this book at times to be over-simplified, excessively repetative and in places condescending. The task sections - where you answer questions and do little experiments as if you were back in primary school - will be unhelful to those like me who find them childish and break the flow of information coming from the book. The entire sentiment of the book rather washed over me as if I was a child asking an adult a probing question and being told 'Pull your socks up and get on with it dear!' - Unhelpful.