Confiding

the long version

In Confiding Susan Baur relates her lively, unconventional approach to therapy and expounds on an urgent theme introduced in The Dinosaur Man: how the stories we believe about ourselves shape our lives. She discusses how these stories provide us with our identities and influence our future, and how the stories people tell their therapists have a profound effect on their treatment. It is her belief that an individual's road to health lies in working out a new story with a therapist willing to leave the beaten track in search of an imaginative alternative. Baur alternates heartrending incidents derived from examinations of fascinating new theories with her own experiences as a therapist to reveal surprising new things about the human condition. She provides an exploration of the valiant ways the mentally ill strive to make sense of their lives and sheds new light not only on the state of contemporary mental health care, but on the psyches of all of us struggling with the dilemmas of the modern world.