NLP–By Steve Bavister and Amanda Vickers

I only got up to chapter three in this book before I had to give up. I was not impressed, I must admit. It was published under the ‘teach yourself’ series and I wonder how anyone can learn from that.


Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP for short) is a very vaguely written book. It somehow manages to write pages upon pages of words without actually telling you what’s going on. Here are two of the claims it makes:

• To help you to know what you want and how to get it
• Put you in the driving seat of your life

Tell me this; how can a book tell YOU what YOU want?! How?!?!? It can give the reader suggestions, but it can’t just blatantly say that, YOU want to be a doctor, YOU want a car, YOU want a job, because it’s a BOOOK!!! And the latter just annoyed and bemused me so much so, that I don’t actually know what to say.

It all sounds far too much like motivational drivel to be deemed as scientific. From what I’ve read, there isn’t even any experimental evidence to back it up!

So, in conclusion, if you really, really, really, really want to read it, then go right ahead.

You may get more out of it than I did.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy For Dummies – Rhena Branch and Rob Willson

Quite an appropriate name really. This book was incredibly helpful in giving the reader a good basis of understanding of what cognitive behavioural therapy actually is and how it’s used, through starting at the very beginning. It also helps the reader gain a greater understanding of emotional disorders as the authors directs their advice and techniques to the reader specifically, as if they had the disorder themselves.

This is extremely useful as then the book can be read by both those who want knowledge (me) and those who genuinely want self-help.

CBT is basically a technique that help you change the way you think, in order to combat negative thoughts and strengthen positive beliefs. It was also said that it could be read alongside professional counselling in order to deal with anxiety, depression, OCD, anger issues and a good few more.

The thing I found, as a reader with not too much interest in the self help side of things, that was quite interesting was the thought patterns explained behind the different emotional illnesses named above.

For example, depression is normally fuelled by rumination. This is a thought process a depressed person maintains by going over and over thoughts in their head. These may be questioning why they feel so down, or ruminating on the events that got them to this point. Rumination results in a low mood and the low mood results in inactivity and social withdrawal, which contributes to allowing the person time to continue ruminating on their problems instead of getting up and distracting themselves from it.

Either way, CBT offers a way of trying to get out of this process of continuous negative thinking by giving a large dose of common sense (and some very nice worksheets to fill in).

Personally, I would recommend this book to those who need it for self help reasons and those who have a genuine interest in the workings of thinking patterns and these disorders. Everyone else, I think, may struggle to maintain interest as it’s not really relevant to them.