Healing the Future: Personal Recovery from Societal Wounding

Dennis Linn, Matthew Linn, Sheila Fabricant Linn, Paulist Press

The Linn family all share in this book as they recount their teaching methods in courses conducted throughout North America.

Working together as a team, they help participants come to terms with what they see as, “different economic, political and spiritual assumptions” to avoid being “overwhelmed by the toxic aspects of our society”.

Similar methods are used to help overcome each of a number of symptomatic emotions. Emphasis is given to meditation and a form of prayer, accompanied by relaxation and deep breathing, at the same time as feeling the heart, both physically and emotionally.

A time is set to recall pleasant aspects from past experience to help understand how the present may be transformed to bring about personal recovery.

In places it seems they are trying too hard to make “one method fix all”.

The book is specific to American readers and you may find irritating the switch in authors from one family member to another. We were told a long time ago that “every second American is a drug store psychologist”.

This book will go down well over there and add to the success of the number they have already written. However, to give them their due, trying out their method and then taking my blood pressure, it certainly went down.

John Atkinson