The authors draw their techniques for unburdening yourself from past baggage and harnessing your full potential from Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing, a landmark work of psychotherapeutic theory and technique, thoughtfully adapting and translating his ideas for contemporary readers. In doing so, Untangling explores many terms—“getting a felt-sense,” “Parts,” “Self-in-Presence”—which are both key to its power as an actionable resource and its potential undoing. Readers who master these patiently explained and readily understood terms will find that they easily interlock to produce potent, multivalent meanings that can be effectively converted from theory into practice. But this language sometimes slips into the cryptic, and the urgent meaning behind it can become obscured.
Fortunately, McGavin and Cornell are highly trained and intuitive teachers. Their personal stories of overcoming alcoholism and depression ground the ideological advance of the book whenever it becomes unmoored from its pragmatic tracks. Clear analogies also aid understanding, as when they explain “change alone” not being enough to heal: “If the ocean liner is sinking, it doesn’t help to rearrange the deck chairs!” The volume of itemized, actionable information, such as how to practice the five “Powers of Presence” to create an environment conducive to untangling, or “resourcing” to remain “relaxed, open, and energized,” is so ample that it’s hard to imagine the reader who won’t come away better off.
Takeaway: Methodically detailed motivational program for anyone who’s ever felt stuck.
Comparable Titles: Manis Friedman and Rivka GoldsteinCreating a Life That Matters, Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly.
Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
Barbara and Ann have written an insightful and compassionate guide for working with life’s most difficult challenges. Drawing on deeply personal and intimate experience, coupled with years of study and inquiry, Untangling offers insight and practical tools for anyone attempting to break free from their limitations and unhelpful patterns. This book is for anyone seeking to shift from ‘stuckness’ and move into a place of transformation and flow.
- Dr. Scott Lyons, holistic psychologist, mind-body medicine specialist, founder of The Embody Lab, and author of Addicted to Drama.
Barbara McGavin and Ann Weiser Cornell's transformative self-help guide Untangling cuts to the heart of life's most complex problems, providing concrete directions for addressing the internal knots that stop people from living their most authentic and expansive lives.
The book’s accessible, nonjudgmental instructions urge connecting with one’s inner world and dark places with intentional empathy and love. Throughout, the prose and structure of the guide mirror its flexible, personalized message. The sections chart a clear step-by-step path through the process. Each section and subsection is well labeled and focused, making it easy to find and return to important passages while moving through the process. Chapter-ending summaries revisit the most important aspects of each section with memorable bullet points, supporting the book’s compelling suggestions for working through even extreme difficulties.
The illuminating self-help guide Untangling is about working through one’s problems with honesty and empathy to secure a renewed sense of freedom, autonomy, and joy.
Every once in a while, I discover a modality that is grounded in the teachings of Eugene Gendlin, whose work is a basis for many somatic practices. This book provides valuable support to becoming a more whole, vital you. Untangling, developed by Barbara McGavin and Ann Weiser Cornell, is a transformative somatic method that enables us to cultivate healing through empathy and by attuning to our bodies through the felt-sense. Using this method, we can begin to heal our relationship to ourselves, in an embodied way, and can transform our connection to self, others, and our world. Untangling is a path well worth exploring.
—Peter Levine, author of In an Unspoken Voice and Waking the Tiger, and founder of Somatic Experiencing International
Untangling is a path of profound transformation that can bring healing to even our most deep and stuck places. The authors introduce accessible, potent practices through their own personal and compelling stories, a pioneering and brilliant use of language, and most important, their thorough, inside-out wisdom as to what enables authentic inner freedom. Highly recommended!
Tara Brach, Author of Radical Acceptance
