"Remember: their style of perception is to notice and be bothered by what's not right with things. And their need to guard their emotions may make it hard for them to show positive feelings or appreciation."

Spot on. My poor family...having to put up with this shit. Oye. In any case, very eye-opening book. So eye-opening, in fact, that I stopped reading it for a year and a half because it hit too close to home. ( )

Pretty mediocre, not great for any one purpose but just barely adequate for most--whether for self-help, amateur education, professional education, or reference

Ultimately I'll probably keep it around just for the few thankfully concise bits of general reference to the phenomenon of American obsessiveness without getting bogged down in diagnostic debates

The general structure of the book and organization of the TOC is excellent for this topic however--another one of the main reasons I'll prolly try to keep this on my shelf for a bit

In the end--too many examples (repetitive, most obvious/boring, little added insight), confused and unfocused tone/direction in elaborating on examples, and waaaaay too little theory, hardly any theory at all; abstaining from ANY discussion of theory does not make a book more accessible, it merely obscures the authors underlying thought process and justificatory Logic, while restraining the potential reach of what insight ur offering to readers

And ofc, as always w the american mental health industry, much of the book is an apology for the american capitalist mode of work; this is smthg some theory might have pushed the authors towards discussing--the cultural background of more or less objective psychological phenomena; but alas the authors go so far as to assert that the problem underlying workaholism is not our model of work itself

In fact I can't imagine any obsessive person reading this book and then feeling a sense of hope and direction afterwards, as the authors seem to suggest all obsessive problems stem merely from some ineffable notion of obsession that permeates modern America in an unplaceable way, more or less shifting the fault of the matter onto a person's self-awareness and childhood situation, and as remedy the authors can only offer that potential patients better conform themselves to the cisheteronormative conventions of sex and romance, and the rote daily structures of work-leisure under capitalism ( )