Getting Through the Day: Strategies for Adults Hurt as Children

by Nancy J. Napier

Book Overview

This book enables adults who were traumatized as children to learn new strategies to meet the demands of daily living. While focusing on the effects of dissociation and including specific advice for multiples, Nancy Napier presents dozens of exercises helpful to anyone who finds that unresolved childhood feelings are blocking life's path.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393312429
• ISBN13: 9780393312423
• Release Date: September 1994
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 306 Pages
• Weight: 0.71 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Invaluable!!

This book has so many ways of helping you understand what is going on in your life, how to get through the tough times, to discover what is the true cause of adverse reactions and how to heal.Some of this information can come across as so completely foreign that it may take time for you to believe it. I remember reading some of the excercises and thinking "How hokey can you get!" After becoming desperate enough, I thought "Well nothing else has helped, why not give it a try." and it WORKED!!

Real Help When Day-to-Day Living is a Struggle

Sometimes daily life feels like climbing a hill through molasses. Even those who don't have MPD may have inner children (teenagers, pseudo-adults) who seem to be at war with each other, or extreme emotional reactions left over from childhood. This book has a wealth of strategies for soothing those inner selves in the context of the demands of daily living. If that was all, that would be enough for me to recommend this book, because I don't know of another book on the market that deals with practical strategies for daily life in terms of these inner selves (with suggestions for those who do have MPD). But I also appreciate the empathetic tone of the book. Sometimes that kind of tone, however well-meant, can come off as sappy or condescending, but I felt that here it was warm and sincere. I'd also like to recommend two other books: "How to Love Yourself When You Don't Know How" and "Internal Family Systems Therapy." Both are wonderful books about these inner selves and how they function in us. And while they don't deal with the day-to-day struggles and strategies that this book does, they are also resources for exploring the subpersonality issues that affect so many of us.

So helpful over and over again

I found this book so informative and helpful. Having PTSD from every kind of child abuse really does make it difficult to get through the day. This is a continous help to me.

Relief may be found within these pages!

Time and time again, I have come back to this book for grounding. For validation. For understanding. For direction...and it never lets me down. It is true that the author of a book can only... really.... take you as far as he/she has gone themselves! This books leads the way to what all other self-help books should aspire too! Absence of ego and a genuine sense and practical advice on how to move from point A to point B! I can not reccomend this book highly enough! Out of all the other books that I have on the subject...... this one... hands down... is the one that sits upon my night-stand! It is invaluable!!!!!

Napier's book has become a security blanket for me!

This book is a must-have for anyone who used dissociative strategies to survive physical, emotional, or sexual abuse as a child; their therapists, and support people. Napier does an outstanding job of explaining what it means to be dissociative, and how to cope with it. She also offers advice for multiple personalities.A particularly useful chapter covers how to find a therapist and what the therapist-client relationship should be. I have purchased copies for members of my support family as the book does an excellent job of demystifying dissociation and multiplicity.