[PDF] The Battle For Normality eBook

Author : Gerard J. M. Van den Aardweg
Publisher : Ignatius Press
Page : 164 pages
File Size : 18,81 MB
Release : 2010-07-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1681494620

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This book is primarily meant for those homosexuality afflicted persons who seek practical advice in order to change, or, at least, to constructively and responsibly deal with it. It is written with their needs, anxieties, and weaknesses in mind, as Dr. Van den Aardweg has learned them during more than 30 years of therapy with homosexual persons. There is a need for such a practical ""guide"" because there are very few able therapists who want to help the well-intentioned homosexual to change, and because most existing works on homosexuality are about theory, not about every-day self-therapy. Theoretical subjects are discussed, too, in so far as they are necessary to be able to fight the homosexual inclination, and to refute certain myths. This is a Christian psychological approach and it offers the best opportunities for change. ""Rich and insightful. Highly recommended."" -Paul Vitz, Ph.D. ""Provides a useful, ""no-nonsense"" guide for self-help therapy. Many readers will be helped by this practical book."" - Joseph Nicolosi, Ph.D., Author, Healing Homosexuality , Gerard Van den Aardweg has had a private psychotherapeutic practice since 1963 in Holland, specializing in the treatment of homosexuality and marriage problems. He has written for many publications in these fields, and has authored several books on homosexuality.

Author : Steven James Bartlett
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 39,5 MB
Release : 2011-09-12
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 0313399328

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How do you define good mental health? This controversial, counterintuitive, and altogether fascinating book argues that "psychological normality" is neither a desirable nor an acceptable standard. Normality Does Not Equal Mental Health: The Need to Look Elsewhere for Standards of Good Psychological Health is a groundbreaking work, the first book-length study to question the equation of psychological normality and mental health. Its author, Dr. Steven James Bartlett, musters compelling evidence and careful analysis to challenge the paradigm accepted by mental health theorists and practitioners, a paradigm that is not only wrong, but can be damaging to those to whom it is applied—and to society as a whole. In this bold, multidisciplinary work, Bartlett critiques the presumed standard of normality that permeates contemporary consciousness. Showing that the current concept of mental illness is fundamentally unacceptable because it is scientifically unfounded and the result of flawed thinking, he argues that adherence to the gold standard of psychological normality leads to nothing less than cultural impoverishment.

Author : Dave Gibbons
Publisher : Zondervan
Page : 182 pages
File Size : 32,77 MB
Release : 2011-10-25
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0310558670

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We thirst for purpose, clarity, fulfillment and direction in our lives. How do we go about sorting through all the self-help books, talks and seminars? The common, normal solutions to navigating life are focused on strengths, gifts, and passion. The reality is quite contrarian to what seems to make sense. The revelations is found in the divine fingerprints of all that we are: our life story, what energized and de-energizes us, our rhythms, and even our pain and weaknesses. It’s a different way of approaching clarity of life.At the heart of this book is the understanding that a life filled with passion is radically different than what many of us have been taught. Often it’s not in the how do we find life but a commitment to a passionate pursuit. Neurologically, if we ask the question how our brains can’t tap the new domains, our brains resorts to typical default solutions that are often inadequate. The way to live life to its fullest is found in abnormal rhythms and principles, that have the tension of questions more than answers. It’s a place where strategy is important but an ethos where relationships trump vision. The way we are invited to live life to its fullest is found with a contrarian set of beliefs, values and questions. It’s not about quick fixes and simplistic “solutions.”. God works through our weaknesses and our failures. Real vision is found through relationships with God and with other people. Obedience is better than passion. These contrarian concepts have been presented and tested in many business and non-profit settings, including Willow Creek’s Leadership Summit where Dave gave a keynote address. The tone of this book was established as Dave thought about what he would want to share with his four third culture children and future leaders. It was Dave’s heart that they would walk a life where they experienced life to it’s fullest, exploring the new and old domains of world that is constantly changing.

Author : Roy Richard Grinker
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 448 pages
File Size : 37,85 MB
Release : 2021-01-26
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 0393531651

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A compassionate and captivating examination of evolving attitudes toward mental illness throughout history and the fight to end the stigma. For centuries, scientists and society cast moral judgments on anyone deemed mentally ill, confining many to asylums. In Nobody’s Normal, anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker chronicles the progress and setbacks in the struggle against mental-illness stigma—from the eighteenth century, through America’s major wars, and into today’s high-tech economy. Nobody’s Normal argues that stigma is a social process that can be explained through cultural history, a process that began the moment we defined mental illness, that we learn from within our communities, and that we ultimately have the power to change. Though the legacies of shame and secrecy are still with us today, Grinker writes that we are at the cusp of ending the marginalization of the mentally ill. In the twenty-first century, mental illnesses are fast becoming a more accepted and visible part of human diversity. Grinker infuses the book with the personal history of his family’s four generations of involvement in psychiatry, including his grandfather’s analysis with Sigmund Freud, his own daughter’s experience with autism, and culminating in his research on neurodiversity. Drawing on cutting-edge science, historical archives, and cross-cultural research in Africa and Asia, Grinker takes readers on an international journey to discover the origins of, and variances in, our cultural response to neurodiversity. Urgent, eye-opening, and ultimately hopeful, Nobody’s Normal explains how we are transforming mental illness and offers a path to end the shadow of stigma.

Author : Cornelius Ryan
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 749 pages
File Size : 28,49 MB
Release : 2010-02-16
Category : History
ISBN : 1439127018

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The classic account of the final offensive against Hitler’s Third Reich. The Battle for Berlin was the culminating struggle of World War II in the European theater, the last offensive against Hitler’s Third Reich, which devastated one of Europe’s historic capitals and marked the final defeat of Nazi Germany. It was also one of the war’s bloodiest and most pivotal battles, whose outcome would shape international politics for decades to come. The Last Battle is Cornelius Ryan’s compelling account of this final battle, a story of brutal extremes, of stunning military triumph alongside the stark conditions that the civilians of Berlin experienced in the face of the Allied assault. As always, Ryan delves beneath the military and political forces that were dictating events to explore the more immediate imperatives of survival, where, as the author describes it, “to eat had become more important than to love, to burrow more dignified than to fight, to exist more militarily correct than to win.” The Last Battle is the story of ordinary people, both soldiers and civilians, caught up in the despair, frustration, and terror of defeat. It is history at its best, a masterful illumination of the effects of war on the lives of individuals, and one of the enduring works on World War II.

Author : Robert Jay Lifton
Publisher : The New Press
Page : 142 pages
File Size : 44,69 MB
Release : 2019-10-15
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1620975122

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A definitive account of the psychology of zealotry, from a National Book Award winner and a leading authority on the nature of cults, political absolutism, and mind control In this unique and timely volume Robert Jay Lifton, the National Book Award–winning psychiatrist, historian, and public intellectual proposes a radical idea: that the psychological relationship between extremist political movements and fanatical religious cults may be much closer than anyone thought. Exploring the most extreme manifestations of human zealotry, Lifton highlights an array of leaders—from Mao to Hitler to the Japanese apocalyptic cult leader Shōkō Asahara to Donald Trump—who have sought the control of human minds and the ownership of reality. Lifton has spent decades exploring psychological extremism. His pioneering concept of the "Eight Deadly Sins" of ideological totalism—originally devised to identify "brainwashing" (or "thought reform") in political movements—has been widely quoted in writings about cults, and embraced by members and former members of religious cults seeking to understand their experiences. In Losing Reality Lifton makes clear that the apocalyptic impulse—that of destroying the world in order to remake it in purified form—is not limited to religious groups but is prominent in extremist political movements such as Nazism and Chinese Communism, and also in groups surrounding Donald Trump. Lifton applies his concept of "malignant normality" to Trump's efforts to render his destructive falsehoods a routine part of American life. But Lifton sees the human species as capable of "regaining reality" by means of our "protean" psychological capacities and our ethical and political commitments as "witnessing professionals." Lifton weaves together some of his finest work with extensive new commentary to provide vital understanding of our struggle with mental predators. Losing Reality is a book not only of stunning scholarship, but also of huge relevance for these troubled times.

Author : Margaret MacMillan
Publisher : Random House
Page : 332 pages
File Size : 30,75 MB
Release : 2020-10-06
Category : History
ISBN : 1984856146

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Is peace an aberration? The New York Times bestselling author of Paris 1919 offers a provocative view of war as an essential component of humanity. NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW “Margaret MacMillan has produced another seminal work. . . . She is right that we must, more than ever, think about war. And she has shown us how in this brilliant, elegantly written book.”—H.R. McMaster, author of Dereliction of Duty and Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World The instinct to fight may be innate in human nature, but war—organized violence—comes with organized society. War has shaped humanity’s history, its social and political institutions, its values and ideas. Our very language, our public spaces, our private memories, and some of our greatest cultural treasures reflect the glory and the misery of war. War is an uncomfortable and challenging subject not least because it brings out both the vilest and the noblest aspects of humanity. Margaret MacMillan looks at the ways in which war has influenced human society and how, in turn, changes in political organization, technology, or ideologies have affected how and why we fight. War: How Conflict Shaped Us explores such much-debated and controversial questions as: When did war first start? Does human nature doom us to fight one another? Why has war been described as the most organized of all human activities? Why are warriors almost always men? Is war ever within our control? Drawing on lessons from wars throughout the past, from classical history to the present day, MacMillan reveals the many faces of war—the way it has determined our past, our future, our views of the world, and our very conception of ourselves.

Author : Ian Buruma
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 417 pages
File Size : 38,73 MB
Release : 2014-09-30
Category : History
ISBN : 0143125974

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A marvelous global history of the pivotal year 1945 as a new world emerged from the ruins of World War II Year Zero is a landmark reckoning with the great drama that ensued after war came to an end in 1945. One world had ended and a new, uncertain one was beginning. Regime change had come on a global scale: across Asia (including China, Korea, Indochina, and the Philippines, and of course Japan) and all of continental Europe. Out of the often vicious power struggles that ensued emerged the modern world as we know it. In human terms, the scale of transformation is almost impossible to imagine. Great cities around the world lay in ruins, their populations decimated, displaced, starving. Harsh revenge was meted out on a wide scale, and the ground was laid for much horror to come. At the same time, in the wake of unspeakable loss, the euphoria of the liberated was extraordinary, and the revelry unprecedented. The postwar years gave rise to the European welfare state, the United Nations, decolonization, Japanese pacifism, and the European Union. Social, cultural, and political “reeducation” was imposed on vanquished by victors on a scale that also had no historical precedent. Much that was done was ill advised, but in hindsight, as Ian Buruma shows us, these efforts were in fact relatively enlightened, humane, and effective. A poignant grace note throughout this history is Buruma’s own father’s story. Seized by the Nazis during the occupation of Holland, he spent much of the war in Berlin as a laborer, and by war’s end was literally hiding in the rubble of a flattened city, having barely managed to survive starvation rations, Allied bombing, and Soviet shock troops when the end came. His journey home and attempted reentry into “normalcy” stand in many ways for his generation’s experience. A work of enormous range and stirring human drama, conjuring both the Asian and European theaters with equal fluency, Year Zero is a book that Ian Buruma is perhaps uniquely positioned to write. It is surely his masterpiece.

Author : Gary Greenberg
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 359 pages
File Size : 38,82 MB
Release : 2013-05-02
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 1101621109

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“Gary Greenberg has become the Dante of our psychiatric age, and the DSM-5 is his Inferno.” —Errol Morris Since its debut in 1952, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has set down the “official” view on what constitutes mental illness. Homosexuality, for instance, was a mental illness until 1973. Each revision has created controversy, but the DSM-5 has taken fire for encouraging doctors to diagnose more illnesses—and to prescribe sometimes unnecessary or harmful medications. Respected author and practicing psychotherapist Gary Greenberg embedded himself in the war that broke out over the fifth edition, and returned with an unsettling tale. Exposing the deeply flawed process behind the DSM-5’s compilation, The Book of Woe reveals how the manual turns suffering into a commodity—and made the APA its own biggest beneficiary.

Author : Jo Harper
Publisher : Central European University Press
Page : 294 pages
File Size : 26,86 MB
Release : 2018-10-20
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9637326553

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This volume of essays and interviews by Polish, British, and American academics and journalists provides an overview of current Polish politics for both informed and non-specialist readers. The essays consider why and how PiS, Law and Justice, the party of Jarosław Kaczynski, returned to power, and the why and how of its policies while in power. They help to make sense of how “history” plays a key role in Polish public life and politics. The descriptions of PiS in Western media tend to rework old stereotypes about Eastern Europe that had lain dormant for some time. The book addresses the underlying question whether PiS was simply successful in understanding its electorate, and just helped Poland to revert to its normal state. This new Normal seems quite similar to the old one: insular, conservative, xenophobic, and statist. The book looks at the current struggle between one ‘Poland’ and another; between a Western-looking Poland and an inward-looking Poland, the former more interested in opening to the world, competing in open markets, and working within the EU, and the latter more concerned with holding onto tradition. The question of illiberalism has gone from an ‘Eastern’ problem (Russia, Turkey, Hungary, etc.) to a global one (Brexit and the U.S. elections). This makes the very specific analysis of Poland’s illiberalism applicable on a broader scale.