How to Be an Adult: A Handbook on Psychological and Spiritual Integration

By David Richo

Book Overview

Living life as a happy, mature adult does not always come easily to all of us. In this best-selling work, David Richo conveys to his readers just how to do this, based on his many years' experience as a psychotherapist and workshop leader. The author uses as a model the heroic journey whose three phases--departure, struggle, and return--explain what happens in us as we evolve from neurotic ego through healthy ego to the spiritual Self. Departure is explored by helping the reader deal with fear, anger, and guilt, and building self-esteem. Through struggle one learns to maintain boundaries and build intimacy in relationships. And the result is a return to wholeness and love through integration. This thoughtful, approachable work is filled with checklists, diagrams, and literary quotations for meditation, making this a book to read and digest a little at a time for best results. How to Be an Adult will guide readers on their positive journey from fear, through power, to love. +

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0809132230
• ISBN13: 9780809132232
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Paulist Press
• Length: 144 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Functional and Clear & Concise

Our bookshelf has over fifty self-help genre books I am guessing. I just got this one and it stands out. It's highly readable and offers important principles to live by. Much wisdom in here. Get this book for yourself and pass it around to your friends. We can all learn these lessons.

Absolutely inspiring and useful!

I have read many books on relationships and I have been disappointed many times. This book, however, is not one of those. It helps us put not only our relationships but also our lives in perspective and provides us with extremely useful advice about life and relationships. I think I can honestly say that I am a more mature person after working with this book. If you are interested in this topic, you will also like "The Ever-Transcending Spirit" by Toru Sato because it is a very fascinating theoretical book on human development and relationships! It provides us with a map of where we are and where we are going in our development and our evolution as living beings. Both of these books are just excellent!

Outstanding and Highly Recommended

A superb, to the point book. Its advice is cogent, wise, and the distillation of many years of practice by an excellent therapist. This book outlines so many of the areas of life we need to take responsibility for in our own personal growth as adults in order to be happy. Of particular value is the emphasis on our need to "self-parent." This book is so densely filled with useful advice that you cannot read more than a page without putting it down to reflect on how applicable it is. It's that good.

Thoughts from a professional.

I am a clinical psychologist and am loathe to recommend self-help books as most of them are just ways for the author to make money by tapping into the reader's anxieties about themselves. Most offer superficial and simplistic solutions that offer little more than false hope but will keep the reader "coming back for more" from the self-help industry. NOT SO THIS LITTLE GEM! It is one of the two most solidly written and thought through books on personal growth I know of (the other is The Road Less Travelled, by Scot Peck). It's the kind of book you will need to read slowly and meditatively, perhaps even only a page at a sitting. It's also the kind of book you can expect to benefit from reading through again after a year or two on your shelf.