What can you tell us about the next book?

[Renee]

The first book (The Guide to Handling Cartoon Elephants) is a how-to book. However, the next book is going to The Guide to Handling Cartoon Elephants Do-It-Yourself Handbook.

It will include worksheets where you can write in your answers, circle or highlight adjectives that apply to you, list costs and benefits (with some of my ideas to help you), and use the Cartoon Rhinoceros Believability Scale. It's currently about 52 pages and full of some really powerful material to help people solve elephantine emotional problems. My current project is getting the "flow" so that the book isn't choppy or confusing. Sometimes the difficulty is that so many of the concepts I write about overlap, so it can go in many different directions. I guess to some extent I struggled with that in the first book.

[Renee]

The work that I do is a combination of my training and interest in group therapy and third wave behavior therapies. Thus, there are concepts that have to do with identifying the cost/ benefit of behaviors, identifying long term goals and values, clarifying and organizing emotional experience, getting "unhooked" from problematic thoughts and beliefs, and just figuring yourself out in general. Some of this may be familiar to you, but if you aren't a big reader of the self-help/ third wave therapies some of it may be very new.

And, even if you've had lots of therapy, are an avid reader of self-help books, etc. the whole book will be new. Because as I said in a different post- sometimes you need lots of variety and a range of different perspectives to grasp it (make it "stick"). And even when you've "gotten" it, you may need a reminder about it sometime in your future journey of emotional distress / emotional stuck-ness.