I based this book in part on a trip I took through the Middle East in early 1996. It is about an initiation, a gateway I went through. It is about a gateway many of us are passing through as we approach and enter the millennium.
It could be labeled another self-help book, but it isn’t a book of labels. We don’t need any more. We’ve got too many of them. They’re too convenient. They let us talk without thinking. They let us give advice without compassion. They make criticism and judgment too easy in a world where criticism and judgment come easily enough. It’s not a book about pointing a finger at anyone and saying, “You’re doing it wrong.”
This is a book about learning to be kinder. It’s about learning to be kinder to the world and people around us, as much as possible. Most importantly, it is a book about learning the art of being kinder to ourselves. It’s a book about learning to love ourselves at the deepest levels, at levels perhaps deeper than anyone has trained or encouraged us to love ourselves before. It’s about examining the different ways we torture, punish, abuse, and torment ourselves—and in the process of uncovering that, perhaps discovering some of the ways we torment those we love. Stop Being Mean to Yourself is a book about learning the art of living and loving, and the art of learning to live joyfully in a world where many of us wonder if that’s possible.
I wrote it for people struggling and tired of it, people who have tried everything they know to heal themselves and their lives and who still wonder, in the wee hours of the night, if they should talk to their doctor about going on Prozac. It’s for people already on antidepressants. It’s for people who wonder if they can trust what they’ve learned, where they’ve been, or where they’re going; people who have read all the books about the wonders of the upcoming millennium and still find themselves dealing with the reality of today; people who consistently quote the first paragraph from M. Scott Peck’s book The Road Less Traveled where he says “life is difficult” because that’s what they remember most. It’s for people tired of jargon; people tired of working so hard on themselves only to find themselves staying essentially the same except for minor changes in circumstance and occasional revelations they would have had anyway; people who no longer believe the grass is greener on the other side, but even that thought doesn’t console them because the idea that many people are miserable is perhaps even more frightening than the idea that they’ve been singled out. It’s for people who have studied past lives, been to psychics, attended all the workshops, regularly visited their therapists, and still don’t get what it’s all about; people who know how to deal with their feelings and wonder if that overwhelming process will ever end; people who have given control of their lives, or a part of it, to others only to find themselves repeatedly disappointed when they discovered the people they turned to knew less than they did. It’s for people who have glimpses that something revolutionary, spiritual, and transformational is going on, but aren’t quite sure what that is.
I wrote this book for young people, middle-aged people, baby boomers, and older people.
I wrote this book for myself.
In 1986 I wrote a book entitled Codependent No More. In some ways, Stop Being Mean to Yourself is a follow-up or completion book to that one, kind of a Codependent No More Some More. It’s a spiritual warrior’s guide, a handbook for the millennium as we watch and wonder about events to come.
Come with me now to the land of Scheherazade, the fabled storyteller of the Arabian Nights. Let the messages you find in the pages that follow call to you on whatever level they will. I hope—no, I know, Insha’a Allah—you will be stirred, summoned to an adventure in your life the way I was by the mysterious, loving, enrapturing power of a crescent moon and star illuminating the sky one quiet Christmas night.
Melody