PREFACE

A BEAUTIFUL WORLD CALLS OUT TO YOU, ITS SUNNY DAYS INVITING YOU TO
explore its wonders, a thousand open roads ready and waiting to
take you wherever it is your head and heart might lead you. A grat-
ifying world, its rainy nights inviting the warmth of hearth and
home, a safe place for reflection on your life’s journey so far – the
satisfying endings, the planning of new beginnings. A world of
answered prayers, and a world of neverending new hopes and
dreams. A world eager and waiting to receive your unique contri-
bution to the human story.
Each new day as you awake in your bed, you can hear the call. You
can see it just outside your window, you can almost taste it on the
morning breeze. But there it remains, the invitation unanswered. And
so the day is dismissed, like every other day before, in favor of that
one day, someday, to come. That day when you will “start” your life,
again, for real. The coming day that, you now fear more and more,
with the endless passings of day after day, will never really come.
The simple pleasure of good times, of a fine meal, of celebrations
shared with family and friends awaits you, as does the common mir-
acle of a truly fulfilling romantic love. You see the families laugh
and hug in their many gathering places, and the happy couples pass-
ing you on their journey, as if inviting you by example to find what
they have found. But it all seems to be just out of reach, passing you
by yet again – always and forever passing you by. All the usual, “nor-
mal” things promised to you in childhood. Things that other people
PREFACE

get to do, having come by with seemingly little effort. An unremark-

able natural birthright. But to you they seem like lucky souls who

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THE SELF IMAGE SOLUTION must have won some rigged lottery. They have somehow “won” that
other kind of life that you can only watch from the sidelines.
It’s always someone else’s movie. And you are forever just another
anonymous audience member, alone in the dark – never the star of
your own movie, shining in the light.
Why it has to be this way – that’s the question that never fails to
float up into your consciousness, grabbing hold of at least some por-
tion of your every day’s waking thoughts. Sometimes it’s present as
only a chronic dull ache, an accepted reality to be dealt with. Some-
times it flares into a sharp pain, an unacceptable agony that you
know must be ended in order for you to survive.
And you just can’t seem to find the answer to the question.
All you know for certain is that you are alone. No matter how close
the proximity of your family members and friends and acquaintances.
No matter your marriage status or the current state of your love life.
No matter your financial successes or woes, your life’s great achieve-
ments or terrible disappointments. You know that you are alone,
separated from all the others, separated from any sort of spiritual
source or meaningful center, separated from the fading memory of
whatever it was you once knew you were or dreamed of becoming.
Somewhere along the way, you have become alienated from your
own feelings and affections and desires. Somewhere along the way,
you have become forgetful of what you were all about, and you have
become disconnected from yourself. It’s as if you’ve carelessly lost
the lucky penny that protected your hopes and dreams. Left it long
ago in jeans going out in the wash, never realizing the true value,
the true magic, in the simple joys of living that were once the most
precious moments in your life.
You have lost you.
And you are alone and you are unhappy.
And you know that until you find your way back to your own
personal place of happiness, or find a place of happiness you’ve
never known, that you will never be able to go forward, and never
be able to forever leave behind the lonely, unforgiving and ever-
darkening place that has become your invisible, suffocating prison.
 If life as I’ve described it, in the words you have just read, is a life
almost entirely alien and unimaginable to you in the life you are liv-
ing, then let me wish you continued success and every happiness in
experiencing a fulfilling and rewarding life. Your present state of
affairs may be due to healthy life choices or to happy circumstance,
and in either case, I wish you well. I truly hope you will never find
yourself lost in the dark places – the soul-killing dead-ends so many
find themselves at after making their desperate escape attempts,
physically and mentally, trying to find a way out of their unhappy
lives. I have made a life’s work of understanding the need for an
escape plan to find a way out, and replacing that need with the rescue
plan that shows the way in – a personal map transforming the desire
to escape a failing life into the desire to embrace a thriving life.
If you have come to find yourself dreaming of open roads, but
rising each morning only to face the same brick wall at the end of
your own personal cul-de-sac; if short-cuts and compromises and
accepted defeats have dead-ended your life and all but convinced
you that you are capable of nothing more; and if these words are
now resonating in your heart and mind as a welcomed message of
concern and understanding – or if you know and care about some-
one waiting to receive this message – then I hope you will read on.
Because I am glad I have found you, and I know I can help you find
the answers that have eluded you for too long. I know I can help
you realize the wondrous and fulfilling life you deserve to be living
– the life we all deserve to be living.

0
When a depressed or otherwise afflicted and symptomatic individ-
ual comes to me, seeking help through the program I have
developed over the past twenty years, I assure that person, during
our first meeting, that after the fourth or fifth week of my program,
he or she will no longer be crippled from the symptoms that have
ruined his or her existence. His or her symptoms will have become
manageable to the point of no longer being in control of his or her
PREFACE

life. To say that those suffering from years of chronic, clinical depres-
sion – let alone those severely drug-addicted or those paralyzed with

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THE SELF IMAGE SOLUTION phobias – are usually highly skeptical would be a huge understate-
ment. Even though they have found their way to me through an
acquaintance who found just such relief – that is, through word-of-
mouth. I’ve never needed to promote or advertise my program. My
former clients have always brought me more suffering friends, family
and acquaintances in need than I could ever hope to have the time
to help. That constraint of too-little time frustrating my efforts is the
reason, in fact, for my deciding to write this book. I also tell the
afflicted individual that after the tenth week of my program, the
depression or other symptom will not only be controllable for now,
but can remain so for the rest of his or her life. Sometimes, at this
point, my prospective clients slowly pull their defeated bodies up
out of their chairs, shaking their heads sadly, smirking slightly, know-
ingly, and walk out on me and my outlandish claims. But they
usually come back. After all, there’s the living, thriving example of
that person they know, or know of, now living in control of his or
her symptoms because of my program. The newly transformed life
that person is now enjoying is a powerful reason to come back, to
listen to me, to try the program – despite the skepticism, even if it’s
been a lifetime of skepticism borne out again and again.
They have their reasons for being skeptical.
They have usually found only frustration with any one of the sev-
eral standard therapies they had hoped would end their symptoms.
These therapies, after all the best intentions and valiant efforts of
both therapist and client, many times result in only a temporary
respite from the affliction. And then there is the mocking return of
the symptoms or syndrome. Sometimes they have exhausted several
or even a whole host of competing therapies. They have made their
way through the “self-help library” and the motivational training
seminars, graduated the 12-step programs and cleansed their bodies
through dietary management cures. They have patiently recounted
lifetimes of regrets, failings and grievances to their psychologists.
They have desperately sought relief in their psychiatrists’ pharma-
copoeias. They may have even endured institutionalization. Some
finally find their lucky match of sufferer to therapy and another
human mind is cleared enough and another human heart unbur-
dened enough to find a better way forward. But my experience has
been with those finding little comfort and no clear way forward in
these methodologies. They arrive at my door wearing their cynicism
and skepticism and soul-weariness like a soldier’s uniform, torn and
tattered from an endless losing campaign.
It was not the original grand intention in my life to identify a
common cause at the core of most all modern maladies. Nor was it
my original intent to identify a common defect that inherently
undermines most therapies trying to address these maladies. I didn’t
start out consciously looking for a key to creating a universally heal-
ing solution, a common sense but powerful program that really
manages and controls symptoms forever and builds lifelong well-
being. There was no miraculous vision, no sudden insight, that set
me on course for what would become the focus and fulfillment of
my life’s passion. There was, instead, a lifetime of daily caring and
helping, a lifetime of fathering and teaching and coaching, and
above all, of always thoughtfully observing, understanding and lov-
ing those who have needed what I could give them.
What I can now give them is something that has been effective
in managing and controlling the suffering caused from drug addic-
tion, alcoholism, anxiety, depression, the gamut of phobias,
anorexia-bulimia and other disorders. It is something that has
evolved over the decades of my personal and professional involve-
ment in the community of those laboring to make a difference in
the fields of psychology and education. This evolution was greatly
accelerated most especially by my chronic questioning of, and some-
times career-threatening rebellions against, the set-in-stone ideas
and accepted formulas that I found from my experience to have too
limited a record of any meaningful “success.”
My diversion away from accepted psychiatric and therapeutic
paths was really born from no more than elemental human compas-
sion. And enough intelligence and honesty to know that the
methodologies I had been trained in were often well-intentioned but
no guarantee of a lifelong solution. It began with a simple recognition
PREFACE

that there was too much unnecessary pain in the daily lives of too
many, and a hardheadedness in refusing to accept this as an unavoid-

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THE SELF IMAGE SOLUTION able demographic of human society – that a certain number will
always suffer. I refused to believe that there is an “acceptable” num-
ber. I refused to believe that the only effective treatment lies in
endlessly treating and temporarily alleviating symptoms…and hoping
for eventual remission. It began in simply refusing to accept what I
had been taught to believe was an “acceptable” amount of well-being.
Constitutionally incapable of turning away people in pain, I
found more and more of my time consumed by meeting and advis-
ing troubled individuals, even after I had departed the formal halls
of mental health establishments to work in teaching and special edu-
cation. Private educational tutoring sessions always seemed to
default into counseling the underlying reasons for the academic fail-
ure. There were always underlying, unaddressed real reasons why
Johnny couldn’t spell or add or read or stay focused. I found great
success in eliminating the symptoms of poor grades and disciplinary
problems through training the students – and the students’ parents
– in communicating on a positive level. I taught them to take imme-
diate positive action in their lives to counter and reverse the many
negatives holding the children back. I helped them create the pos-
itive atmosphere that is essential to learning. Over time, more and
more people in the community were seeking help from my methods
for personal and family problems not directly linked to academic
achievement. Word spread of “The Helper” who could talk to the
child non-responsive to available therapy and on the fast-track to
institutionalization; who could talk to the addicted cousin nearing
the final mistake of suicide; who could talk to the brother too
depressed to leave the house to find work; who could talk to the
husband and wife who had forgotten how to love.
What began as a wealth of life experience rich in practical knowl-
edge about what would and would not help these desperate people
in their disparate struggles became transformed over time – neces-
sitated by the ever-increasing volume of afflicted finding their way
to my home in need of sitting and speaking with me at the kitchen
table. My ideas and methods became gradually systematized into a
scheduled program, a graduated series of meetings and “homework”
exercises that have been sometimes described as “miraculous” in
helping to control and manage the symptoms, syndromes and
degradations of the mental and social disorders too-long borne by
those who found their way to my door.
What I have gleaned from my formative experiences in the crucible
of the mental health industry and in the field of private education,
and all the amazing and gratifying experiences that I’ve enjoyed as a
committed “helper,” have now found expression in my formally
authoring this program. In this way I can finally speak out and reach
out far beyond the constraints of my private teaching and training
sessions. I have always applied myself to the best of my abilities to
become and to always remain a living instrument of caring for and
healing those around me in need. I believe that with this book I have
created the perfect tool for building the self-image of any and every
person, cast from all I have observed and analyzed and intuited and
discovered and “field-tested” so many times over. I hope it has found
its way into your hands if you are still searching and have not yet
found the way to help yourself. But I also hope it finds its way to those
of you still searching for the way to truly help the friends and family
members who need you, and your positive guidance.

PREFACE

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