Feelings Buried Alive Never Die, by Karol K. Truman

One of the biggest problems with self-help books in general (and also with any kind of truth) is that the principles of self-help are fairly easy and straightforward, but the practice and discipline of such habits is difficult. This book attempts to manage that problem through the unusual (to me at least) adoption of a marketing technique that is familiar to those who have worked in sales, in order to attempt to lead to consistent patterns of behavior by saying the same message over and over again. Those who are not inclined to sales or who find such repetition to be vain and inauthentic will probably find this book a bit of an oversell.

This is, over all, a very excellent book. That does not mean that I found it to be flawless, because I did not, but rather that I recognized the biblical truth that undergirds much of the book, even if it does use a lot of new age language that I found to be a little off-putting, even though I knew it was to appeal to the market of new age self-help readers in general. Similarly, I thought the book oversold the relationship between emotions and physical disease. There is a proper balance between all aspects of our lives, and even though the general tendency among people (especially in the medical profession) is to downplay the emotional causes of many physical problems, I found this book went to the opposite extreme in ways that I found rather uncomfortable. To give but one example of this, I found it unacceptable that a cause of sexually transmitted diseases would be “feeling guilty about sexual activity” rather than engaging in that sexual activity.

These criticisms aside, the book is very useful in some major aspects of mental health that I personally struggle with (and that many others do as well). One of these aspects is the deep-set cause of difficulties springing from early childhood, which are serious issues that I do not feel it necessary to describe in great detail. That is one aspect I knew going into the book. The book is also helpful in relating different problems with different parts of the body, in ways that are also, if taken with some degree of moderation, very helpful as well, as a way of diagnosing the deeper influences of physical suffering. A reminder of the power of the words we tell ourselves is helpful, as some of us are rather careless and unnecessarily negative in our communications, and this book is a helpful reminder to think more positively.

So, overall I would say that a careful reader who is willing to reword some of the statements of this book will find much that is profitable in this book. An informal poll of those people I knew who had read and recommended this book showed a marked bias toward the ladies (strikingly, it seemed to be women that were most interested in this book, probably because it talked about feelings). Nonetheless, despite its title, the book deals a great deal with both thinking and feeling, and how body and mind and heart and spirit are all closely interconnected, topics that are of interest to both men and women who are looking to overcome patterns of feeling and thinking that cause problems in life.

So, with some minor reservations, I recommend this book warmly to others who are engaged in this same personal struggle, so long as they have the will to apply it consistently and to engage in year-round self-examination. Having read the book, I plan on taking some additional notes to keep for myself before returning it to its original owner. I figure that any book that could be useful to me as this one is would probably be of use to others, as long as they were properly prepared for its contents (which include a great deal of quotation from other works in what would generally be termed “new age” psychology as well as personal observations from the life of the author, her family, and others), and were prepared to do the work necessary to put this book into practice for themselves. After all, knowledge is easy–application is difficult.