DOWNLOAD THE INTRODUCTION TO FREEDOM FROM SELF-SABOTAGE (2nd Edition) HERE (available Aug. 1, 2011)

5.02.2011

My New Book’s Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble

My new book, a two-year project, is finally done. It’s titled, Why We Suffer: A Western Way to Understand and Let Go of Unhappiness. It’s available as an e-book at Amazon and at Barnes & Noble for only $4.99. Here’s the book description as it appears at those websites:

Psychotherapist’s Revolutionary New Book Says
We’re All Addicted to Pain and Suffering

How is it possible to be addicted to our suffering? The notion seems preposterous. How could we be so foolish as to suffer for nothing?

Fortunately, we’re not foolish at all. We just haven’t penetrated our psyche deeply enough. We haven’t understood the dynamics in our psyche that cause our suffering.

This book by experienced psychotherapist Peter Michaelson shows how we unwittingly produce our own suffering. The author tells us how to free ourselves from it. Most readers will immediately realize they have not previously encountered this knowledge.

Whatever form your unhappiness takes, the knowledge in Why We Suffer can save you from failure, self-defeat, and misery. Are you depressed? Do you feel confused, overwhelmed, disappointed, angry, and dispirited? Perhaps you’re failing at some of your endeavors and feel you can’t get your intelligence into high gear. Are you lacking in self-regulation? Some of us just feel like we’re stranded on the wrong planet.

Bestselling author Eckhart Tolle agrees that we unwittingly facilitate our own suffering. “Whenever you are in a negative state,” he writes, “there is something in you that wants the negativity, that perceives it as pleasurable, and that believes it will get you what you want.”

It’s vital to understand exactly how we produce this suffering. Readers of Why We Suffer can bring their psyche into sharp focus as they discover the precise psychological mechanisms at the heart of human dysfunction.

This book is a radical break from the psychological establishment’s contention that suffering is caused by such factors as cultural clashes, human malice, genetic anomalies, and brain biochemistry. The knowledge in Why We Suffer empowers individuals to resolve their suffering through their intelligence and their growing awareness of how the psyche operates.

The book is practical, specific, and scientific, and it popularizes the most powerful knowledge from psychology. The writing is polished and the ideas simplified. The text can be read and understood by a high-school student, even as the material remains intellectually stimulating. The book shows exactly how most adults, in varying degrees, continue unwittingly and compulsively to experience and recycle painful, unresolved emotions.

The knowledge in this book is based mainly on the work of Edmund Bergler M.D. (1899-1962), a psychoanalytic psychiatrist who wrote 25 books and almost 300 articles published in professional journals. He is largely unknown because this knowledge he produced is so humbling to our ego.

Bergler’s writing, which is laden with clinical terminology, does put difficult demands on readers. In a sense, Peter Michaelson is his translator. He communicates Bergler’s ideas with a skill he has honed over many years of teaching these concepts and writing about them. It helps that he’s a former journalist and science writer.

This information shows that our human nature is, in a sense, operating with old software. We need to be upgraded. Microsoft can’t do it—only we can. For that to happen, we need new knowledge to see ourselves more clearly and objectively.

The human mind is hungry for truth and the human spirit is starving for consciousness. This book is a big mouthful of high-protein mental nutrition. Our desperate human race is now ready to swallow and digest this vital knowledge.