Healing Your Emotional Self: A Powerful Program to Help You Raise Your Self-Esteem, Quiet Your Inner Critic, and Overcome Your Shame »

Beverly Engel is an internationally recognized expert in emotional and sexual abuse. She is the author of several other self-help books, including the highly successful The Emotionally Abusive Relationship, Loving Him without Losing You, and The Emotionally Abused Woman. Engel conducts workshops and professional training programs and has appeared on many national television shows, including Oprah, Starting Over, Donahue, and Ricki Lake.

Parents act as a mirror to show a child who she or he is. Throughout childhood there will be other mirrors, but children inevitably return to the reflection in that original mirror in order to determine their goodness, importance, and self-worth. In Healing Your Emotional Self, Engel offers her highly effective Mirror Therapy program to help you reject the distorted images your parents either intentionally or unintentionally projected onto you. She explores the seven types of emotionally abusive or neglectful parents and the seven most common parental mirrors, providing specific advice and recovery strategies for each one.

Helping you raise your self-esteem and improve your self-image, this innovative step-by-step program provides you with the skills you need to:

• Create a positive self-image separate from your abusive parents' distorted picture
• Separate emotionally from your parents and provide for yourself what you missed as a child
• Discover who you really are—including your likes, dislikes, values, goals, and dreams—by creating a word self-portrait and using other Mirror Therapy techniques
• Overcome your tendency toward self-blame, self-hatred, and self-destructiveness
• Learn self-nurturing and set effective limits to help you control your tendency to overeat, drink too much, overspend, and/or overwork
• Become the person you are meant to be by being more accepting of yourself

Learn to love who you see in the mirror with the breakthrough program found in Healing Your Emotional Self.

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction     1
How Your Parents Shape Your Self-Esteem, Self-Image, and Body Image
Our Parents as Mirrors     9
The Seven Types of Negative Parental Mirrors     29
Your Body as a Mirror     63
How Mirror Therapy Works     77
Shattering Your Distorted Parental Mirror
Rejecting Your Parents' Negative Reflection     87
Emotionally Separating from Your Parents     104
Quieting and Countering Your Inner Critic     117
Creating a New Mirror
Looking Deeper into the Mirror: Discovering the Real You     139
Providing for Yourself What You Missed as a Child     156
Learning to Love Your Body     175
Specialized Help
If You Were Neglected, Rejected, or Abandoned: Healing the "I Am Unlovable" and "I Am Worthless" Mirrors     187
If You Were Overprotected or Emotionally Smothered: Healing the "I Am Nothing without My Parent" Mirror     204
If You Were Overly Controlled or Tyrannized: Healing the "I Am Powerless" Mirror     212
If You Had Overly Critical, Shaming, or Perfectionistic Parents: Healing the "I Am Bad," "I Am Unacceptable," and "I Am Not Good Enough" Mirrors     220
If You Had a Self-Absorbed or Narcissistic Parent: Healing the "I Don't Matter" Mirror     229
Continuing to Heal     238
Recommended Therapies     243
References     249
Recommended Reading     251
Index     255