Books for Happy Holidays

[ysabetwordsmith]

I thought it might be useful to recommend a few books on people skills, in the interest of making the holidays actually happy.  If you don't need them yourself, consider them as potential gifts for someone who does.

When Holidays Are Hell: A Guide to Surviving Family Gatherings
Explains how to protect yourself while dealing with fractious or toxic relatives and dysfunctional family dynamics.

The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense
Details how hostile language works and how to defuse it safely; useful not just for deflecting attacks on yourself, but for making sure that you speak nicely with others.

The Grandmother Principles
Description of healthy family dynamics with advice tailored to a grandmother's role.  Some of the principles work only for grandmothers; many can be applied by older people in general, and some by anyone.  Every grandmother should be given a copy of this book along with her first grandchild.  While not all holiday-focused, there are some excellent tips on making holidays happy.

Regrettably, one of my best books got snitched a few years back, and now I can't find any reference to it online.  That was Johnson's Guide to Emotional First Aid and it included practical tips for raising positive emotions and lowering negative ones.  If anyone has the complete title/author/publication details for that, please let me know so I can refine my search.
Johnson's Emotional First Aid: How to Increase Your Happiness, Peace, and Joy by Victoria L. Saunders Johnson. Blue Dolphin Publishing, 1997.
Tricky to track down online, hence the extra detail. Offers practical tips for raising positive emotions and lowering negative ones.

Holiday Blues: Rediscovering the Art of Celebration; A 12-Month Guide to Getting Everything You Want Out of Holidays and Family Gatherings
I haven't read this one, but it popped up while I was looking up the others and seems quite promising.

Finally, pick any book on cooking with kids if your holiday gathering includes some.  Cooking and eating together is a wonderful way to strengthen family ties.  It helps to have tips that will make the learning process more fun and less stressful.  Learning early how to cook and enjoy teamwork is a valuable life skill.

Comments

Is this it?

[zianuray.livejournal.com]

http://www.amazon.com/Johnsons-Emotional-First-Aid-Happiness/dp/1577330153/ref=sr_1_8?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1290630877&sr=1-8

Re: Is this it?

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

Yes! Thank you. I'll touch up the data.

I love my audience.

[msstacy13.livejournal.com]

I just want to make clear that when you say "cooking with children" you're not talking about the ingredients...

*laugh*

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

Cooking as a team with members of various ages, including children and adults, yes.

[judifilksign.livejournal.com]

There is a sequel to the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense, too. Both books are wonderful. I think the sequel is More on the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense.

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

There's one about kids and one about work, too. I'd like to collect the set.

[hafoc.livejournal.com]

I have to protest, again, against The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense. It assumes women are always the victims and men always the attackers. For reasons I dare not say even now, I grew up knowing this was not true.

But what words did it have for men who were oppressed, not opressors? That we were actually the oppressors, we just didn't know it. We should struggle to be more sensitive so that some day we might realize just how horrible and despicable we really were.

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

The author is female, and tends to write from her own experience. Yes, men can be victims of verbal abuse too. Yes, women can use verbal attacks too. Some of the examples in the book are same-sex arguments and/or have female attackers. *ponder* I can't recall ever hearing a male use the "If you REALLY loved me..." attack, although I've heard of them trying to get sex that way. It's usually a women's ploy. Anyhow, you're entitled to dislike the book if it rubs you the wrong way.

So far, this is easily the most effective book I've found on defusing verbal attacks, and the material generalizes well to different contexts. Have you found one that addresses the specific issue of male victims of verbal abuse? If so, give me a title or link and I'll take a look.

Re: Well...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>Granted "see things from the other person's point of view" is about the dumbest advice ever, since it's impossible.<<

It's not impossible. It's just something that many people find very difficult, and not everyone can do. For me, I can do it fluently in fiction but I suck at it in person. I've spent a lot of years trying to learn how to do it, though, and I can see the progress. I've mostly quit trying to give people advice that would work for me but not for them, at least.

>>I think I'm especially bitter about this book because I went to it expressly hoping it might help me with being abused, controlled, and belittled by people I am required to love but still (irrationally) fear.<<

It sounds like the book you need has not been written yet. Maybe someone will pick up on that eventually -- there must be other folks who would benefit from it also. *ponder* It occurs to me that some of what male victims need is different from what female victims need, so much that a generalized approach doesn't cover enough ground to work. I've seen that problem with rape/sexual abuse survivor support. The social context is so far apart that the same techniques don't always suffice.

>>My opinion is that at least in the childhood years the females are much more sophisticated, on average, than the males. And are therefore much more able to crush the soul with words than the males are. <<

I think emotional manipulation tends to grow in quicker for girls. Plus it's tempting because it doesn't require either physical power or social rank to do a lot of damage quickly.

>>Of course I'd be a fool to ignore the statistics that my own gender is far more likely to fly off the deep end and resort to physical violence<<

True. When it comes to verbal abuse, though, men and women tend to manifest that in different ways. There are people I avoid because of their preference for emotional violence -- and of the worst in my close experience, one is male and the other female, and they do not load the same artillery.

>> although in my own case it went internal, only so far as sucking on a pistol barrel, and at this late remove I'm not even sure I was serious about the thought of pulling the trigger.<<

I'm sorry to hear that things have been so rough for you.

Re: Well...

[hafoc.livejournal.com]

They haven't been so rough for me. Not really. I just never handled them well.

It was always too easy to get me to burst into tears, you know? Not good- doesn't jibe well with the bulletproof, nothing ever hurts me standard gender role. :D

I got where I am, and it's not bad at all. I wish I could reach back and tell early-me not to take everything so seriously or personally. That's a hard one to learn, though.

Re: Well...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>They haven't been so rough for me. Not really. I just never handled them well.<<

I suspect you're underestimating that, but I'll let it alone.

>>It was always too easy to get me to burst into tears, you know? Not good- doesn't jibe well with the bulletproof, nothing ever hurts me standard gender role. <<

People probably attacked you because, in essence, you smelled like food. That doesn't make it okay, or mean that anything is wrong with you. (It doesn't even mean that something's wrong with all the attackers; sometimes the weaponry just grows in sooner than the safety catches do.)

>>I got where I am, and it's not bad at all.<<

That's good.

>>I wish I could reach back and tell early-me not to take everything so seriously or personally. That's a hard one to learn, though.<<

Eh. It's good to have the armor, but you shouldn't need armor just so people don't try to make you cry. It's not unreasonable to want people to treat you with basic courtesy. Sadly, courtesy is uncommon these days.

Re: Well...

[hafoc.livejournal.com]

Heh. Self-indulgent reply deleted. I whine too much. Sorry.

I regret I don't know any books about how to help men respond constructively to verbal abuse. I went to The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense to find help in that area, specifically in response to some dealings with female relatives of mine; and to find that the author SEEMED TO be blaming me for any possible problem merely because I was male, struck me harder than perhaps it should have.

I dare say we could use something like that. Gods know I'm too poor at it and too screwed up to try my hand at anything like that. Think I'll stick with space opera.

Re: Well...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>Heh. Self-indulgent reply deleted. I whine too much. Sorry.<<

1) I wish that people wouldn't delete things off my blog, it drives me nuts.

2) After your final example in that previous note, I would not describe the discussion as "whining" or "self-indulgent." You're lucky to have survived.

3) We're talking about a book. You're entitled to not like it if it doesn't meet your needs, or hate it if it makes you feel worse. I'm writer enough to find it useful to dissect what went wrong. It makes me stop and think about how I write, too, because I write a lot of how-to stuff and I'd rather not, you know, accidentally hurt someone in the process. It's not very common for a reader to be willing and able to articulate exactly why a book failed on them. Not a pleasant topic of discussion, but if you can't criticize, you can't optimize.

>>I regret I don't know any books about how to help men respond constructively to verbal abuse.<<

Okay, I'll keep an eye out.

>> I went to The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense to find help in that area, specifically in response to some dealings with female relatives of mine; and to find that the author SEEMED TO be blaming me for any possible problem merely because I was male, struck me harder than perhaps it should have.<<

Well, some injuries leave scars. One of the things abuse tends to do is leave people extra sensitive. So then working around that is harder. Support materials typically include, hmm, phrases that are intended to brace up the reader's ability to work through the material, and short-circuit whatever internal booby-traps the writer has anticipated. But it does better the finer the tuning is, and otherwise it can be like trying to disarm the wrong kind of bomb. And if nobody's worked up the schematics for the problem at hand yet, the results can be messy.

>>I dare say we could use something like that. Gods know I'm too poor at it and too screwed up to try my hand at anything like that. Think I'll stick with space opera.<<

Right, stick with writing what works for you. However, you might keep an ear open for other men with similar issues, if any of you are up to talking about the topic, just in case someone else feels up to writing it.

I don't think it's a topic I could help with -- my genderflex probably puts it outside my range. It needs a male author.