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Start your review of What Should I Believe? Apr 14, Ewen rated it really liked it. This is a really fascinating read.
I should probably give you a bit of context as to why I picked it up. I'm a humanist, I guess. I have a firm aversion to fundamentalist religious devotees who are hell bent on foisting their views on the rest of the world. Yet I am not a fundamentalist atheist who doesn't see the benefits of religion, either. It's just that religious zealots kind of scare me because I have never understood them or really cared enough to learn more about the myriad of religions This is a really fascinating read.
It's just that religious zealots kind of scare me because I have never understood them or really cared enough to learn more about the myriad of religions out there. Problem is, I recently had a traumatic experience where my belief system left me with nothing to grapple with.
I had no framework whatsoever to help me deal with the suffering. So in part-jest, I picked up this book as I thought it might help me on my philosophical journey.
In actuality, my biggest problem with this book turned out to be the title. Even though it's what made me pick it up, it's not a self-help book and it's not going to help you work out what to believe at all. What it does do, though, is give you some insights into different belief systems - religious or otherwise. You finish it feeling like you've learned a little bit more about where religious zealots have come from - without having to read the primary sources! From that point of view, it's great.
This gave me a greater appreciation of my situation and helped me arrive at a place of acceptance - from a humanist perspective. Generally speaking, it's well-written and well structured, but she does digress from time to time.
She sounds like an old aunt with wisdom to impart but who is known to get on a bit of a rant from time to time too : If you have the patience, and you're in the right frame of mind to hear it as I was , it's definitely well worth your time. Aug 11, Rhondda rated it really liked it. Dorothy Rowe thinks that depression and other anxiety disorders are mainly caused by our belief systems.
They are an internal conflict around wanting to be good, but knowing you are bad. This she feels stems from a religious training and expectations given to children at an early age. I've had many conversations with her over the years and she will hold on to large quantities of whatever it is you happen to have said.
Not everybody has the capacity to do that within a conversation. In the subsequent decade she published half a dozen books and adopted the more explicitly self-help approach that would make her well-known.
In books such as Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison and Beyond Fear , she offered advice to her readers in the second person "Thinking that you will be helping your family by killing yourself can seem to be very virtuous, but it is not" , rather than simply describing clinical work, and recast depression as a personal challenge that could be overcome without professional help.
Writer Tim Lott, who suffered a severe depressive episode in his 30s and was successfully treated with anti-depressants, is one of those who believes Rowe's books can help depressed people to get better. Having been told by doctors when he was ill to disregard his dark thoughts as symptoms of his low mood, he was amazed to find Rowe took the opposite view: his feelings were the product of his thought processes, so his thoughts were worthy of close attention.
He had been "quite hardcore on the idea that depression was a physical illness", he says, but became attracted by Rowe's framing of it as an existential problem. As he puts it: "Life can be shit, horrible things do happen at random to innocent people, and our mental defences can make things worse. But while titles such as The Successful Self , Wanting Everything and Dorothy's Rowe's Guide to Life placed Rowe in the vanguard of the expanding self-help industry, Lott believes "the way she's labelled a self-help guru does her a great disservice".
She remains a champion of the original self-help idea, "the notion that the experts are rubbish and we can do this ourselves", but in conversation and in print she is more thoughtful and more political than much of the faux-spiritual, money-seeking advice that saturates the "self-help" market.
Her previous book was a serious examination of sibling relationships, while Why We Lie is a wide ranging discussion of the uses of dishonesty in public and private life. Rowe describes herself as having embarked on a "long quest to educate journalists" in the s, and says that back then the reporters she spoke to would be amazed when she suggested childhood experiences could affect us later on.
She was part of a generation of professionals who proposed a revolution in parenting, arguing against old-fashioned techniques in favour of a much greater effort to see the world from a child's point of view. Alessandra Lemma, head of psychology at the Tavistock NHS Trust in London, believes Rowe's gift for communication has been her most lasting contribution. Being out there in the media is important.
Within psychology, Rowe identifies herself with a small band of fellow professionals, known as "personal construct psychologists", whose most important idea, based on the work of George Kelly, is that we construct our own meanings in the world, in our lives and families, a theory she believes sits well with recent discoveries in neuroscience.
While broadly in line with mainstream cognitive psychology, her approach is more open-ended and she has been critical of the government's preferred model of cognitive behavioural therapy CBT as a "quick fix". Her early writings show her chafing against the grids and charts used by clinicians to make their diagnoses, and she says what she learned as an undergraduate "had no relevance to human life whatsoever". Recently, she wrote that she could not be considered a "proper psychologist" as she was too aware of the "curious mystery" of life.
This insistence on the validity of subjective experience, as well as her conviction that a person's childhood and early relationships may hold crucial keys to their present distress, in some ways place Rowe closer to psychoanalytic thinkers, and she shares with psychoanalysts dating back to Freud a huge interest in literature.
She and psychologist friends love to sit around after dinner plotting a syllabus built entirely on literature. Edmund Gosse's Father and Son is her favourite book. But her view of emotional life and the function of psychotherapy stops well short of the idea essential to psychoanalysis that there is a dimension of the human mind that is hidden from conscious thought.
How We Acquire Our Beliefs. The Consequences of Our Beliefs. Review Text "Dorothy Rowe brings a refreshingly sane voice to the fraught, confusing but vital discussion of our beliefs about life, death and reality.
Looking past the content of beliefs, she asks why people believe as they do and describes with wonderful lucidity how deep-seated emotions shape our ideas about life and these, in turn, mold our experience of it. This book is a timely reminder that we choose what we believe and how we believe it, and a passionate, liberating argument for self-awareness.
An important and robust attack on the self-serving aspects of religion. At a time when belief in God has never been more controversial and debated, the sane, balanced and wise voice of Dorothy Rowe comes as manna from heaven. Review quote "Dorothy Rowe brings a refreshingly sane voice to the fraught, confusing but vital discussion of our beliefs about life, death and reality.
She is Australian and divides her time between London and Sydney. Rating details. Book ratings by Goodreads. Goodreads is the world's largest site for readers with over 50 million reviews.
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