The human side of human beings: The theory of re-evaluation counseling

By Harvey Jackins

Book Overview

Pages clean and unmarked. Slight wear from time on shelf like you would see on a major chain. Immediate shipping This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0911214607
• ISBN13: 9780911214604
• Release Date: January 1978
• Publisher: Rational Island Publishers
• Length: 105 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 19.8" x 14.7" x 14.7"

Customer Reviews

The Roadmap a Peaceful, Joyful and Thinking Mind

This book leads you into a method of revealing the peaceful, joyful and intelligent person underneath old patterns of distress. It's simple truths are refreshing and empowering. The impact on my life, my friends and family is beyond astonishing.

Give it six stars.

The Human Side of Human Beings is one of those rare books which deserves more than five stars. Give it six. Harvey Jackins deftly outlines what we've always known, deep down, to be true about people. And does it in a way where you realize you've always known these things. There are things each of us has a tough time remembering. This book takes universal truths that are often submerged in cultures and individuals and brings them back up where we can use them. Jackins also adds some insights to the human pot of knowledge. His concept of a "distress pattern" makes it easier to picture how fear and sadness get stored, and how greatly they can interfere with every good goal. And he shows how recovering from distress, a process every baby fully understands, can be readily accomplished by adults, even while that same distress is trying to run our lives. I've given this book to about forty friends. I once took a copy to my brother in prison. The guards in the lobby had to look at everything I intended to take inside. While I waited for him to be brought up to the visiting area, they established that the gifts were safe, then spent the rest of time reading the small book with the plain blue cover. When my name was called, I walked over to get my stuff. "This is really good," one guard said. "I'm going to get a copy." His co-worker smiled. "Me too." If you're interested in a better world, great friendships, teaching, parenting, addictions, genius, learning processes, global peace, or good science, this is a must-read.

A Skeptic Who's Grown to Believe in and Support the Theory

This theory, at first, seemed to wrap up too neatly the complexity of human emotional distress and its relation to irrational thinking and acting. It's a small book and I've re-read it a few times, and I have a very, very hard time coming up with specific criticisms.This book was recommended to me by a practicing re-evaluation counselor and very likely the most intelligent AND most genuinely happy person I've ever known--as well as a dear and trusted friend. My limited experience with co-counseling in my own life and his decades of positive, life changing experience with the theory have grown on me and turned me into a supporter.Another reviewer mentioned similarities to L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics/Scientology. Not coincidentally, Jackins and Hubbard worked together on this theory (allegedly), and Hubbard saw an opportunity to spice the theory up at the expense of its integrity and package it for the marketplace.In short, the book is a 30-minute read that offers an interesting theory on the human mind and what separates us from other living creatures. It promotes tolerance, listening, the building of strong interpersonal relationships, and offers hope for drastically improving your life by making reasonable efforts and self-bettering sacrifices. And unlike Hubbard's theory, it doesn't claim to be able to remedy all of your current and potential psychological and emotional problems.Come into reading it with an intelligent, critical, and open mind and it can only help. Needless to say, this is only my own humble, yet genuine and informed, opinion.

Useful, no-nonsense perspective

I happened upon this book about 25 years ago, after reading lots and lots of psychology books. The ideas presented here are simple, but profound. I've used the idea that rigid behavior results from moments of distress, and that the emotional damage done to people can be healed by listening to them, in a wide range of ways since then. Jackins takes a refreshing departure from psychobabble, and I use his perspective daily in my work with parents and children, to explain why we parents have to make such an effort not to repeat the behavior of our parents when we're under stress, and why children seem to get upset over the smallest things over and over again. Overall, it's a generous attitude toward human nature that is taken, one that offers hope and simple things one can do to help oneself and to help others in a practical yet significant way. It's worth a read!

Most helpfull book on human psychology

I found this book many years ago. And I am glad that it is still out there. It was the first book on selfhelp I ever found. It helped me in uderstanding my own and human unnecessary suffering. It explains that we, as human beings have an inherent nature to be happy, intelligent creatures with inbuilt natural healing mechanisms for stress and trauma. Namely, the process of tears and uninterrupted crying. It also explains how, when this mechanism is not utilized, information taken in by our senses is miss-stored and miss-classified (this taking place all the way since childhood) and that that is why we cannot make sense of things from there own. If you are looking for self-understandind about the unsensible things in your psychology, this book is a must.