A Fair Trade Book
Title: Don't Sweat the Small Stuff for Women
Title: Don't Sweat the Small Stuff for Women
Author: Kristine Carlson
Date: 2001
Publisher: Hyperion
ISBN: 0-7868-8602-1
Length: 264 pages
Quote: “For the most part, women have never had it so
good...Along with the many options we have created for ourselves, however,
comes some very real confusion accompanied by a sense of being overwhelmed.”
For a short time toward the end of his stress-shortened life,
Richard Carlson was pumping out variations on his bestselling first book, Don'tSweat the Small Stuff. He became an industry. He enlisted his admittedly
PMSsy wife, a full-time mother, to write the inevitable volume titled Don't
Sweat the Small Stuff for Women.
It's better, I say, than the first volume, because the
Carlsons were finally running out of “We don't give a flip what your problem
is” wisecracks, and Kristine Carlson had to move a little closer to the
position from which counselling can be useful:
FIX FACTS FIRST; FEELINGS FOLLOW.
There is some actual, practical, potentially useful advice in
this book: Garden. Make memories with children. Insist that husbands and
children do their full share of housework. Pack light. Step out of your “rut of
routine.”
There's also some potentially harmful advice. It would be quite a feat for any writer to generate 100 tips for living a happier life and not come up with something that's likely to help any reader, although what this book has to offer you may or may not be new to you. So there are parts of this book that you'll probably appreciate. But it's not the Bible; you may want to bear in mind that the writer's husband died “old” at a horribly early age.
I often object to the way writers confuse “forgiveness” and “releasing the emotions” when you are the one who wants to feel better. “You don't have to believe that what they did was acceptable, just forgive them...” No. That line of thinking interferes with people's ability either to give or to receive real forgiveness. If “they” was a teacher who molested you when you were fourteen, and they're still teaching and molesting students today, you cannot forgive them. What you're likely to feel better for having done is to denounce them, to make sure they can't go on being teachers. Even while you're doing that you might choose to begin to release the emotional reaction you had ten years ago. You would do that if you found it easier to be a hero when you've not reliving being a victim. But none of that has anything to do with Christian forgiveness, which begins with the molester confessing that s/he did wrong and asking for help to change and atone. When we need to practice Christian forgiveness, I've not found that “Just sweep everything under the rug” type thinking helps at all.
I often object to the way writers confuse “forgiveness” and “releasing the emotions” when you are the one who wants to feel better. “You don't have to believe that what they did was acceptable, just forgive them...” No. That line of thinking interferes with people's ability either to give or to receive real forgiveness. If “they” was a teacher who molested you when you were fourteen, and they're still teaching and molesting students today, you cannot forgive them. What you're likely to feel better for having done is to denounce them, to make sure they can't go on being teachers. Even while you're doing that you might choose to begin to release the emotional reaction you had ten years ago. You would do that if you found it easier to be a hero when you've not reliving being a victim. But none of that has anything to do with Christian forgiveness, which begins with the molester confessing that s/he did wrong and asking for help to change and atone. When we need to practice Christian forgiveness, I've not found that “Just sweep everything under the rug” type thinking helps at all.
Among Christians I've seen substantial harm done by this
confusion between the practice of good will and the practice of forgiveness. People
who wanted to feel good about “being a forgiving person”were manipulated into
hiring a convicted thief as a security guard (yes, that happened; yes, he stole stuff) or
admitting confessed “emissaries of the Church of Satan whose mission was to
confuse and corrupt Christians” to full membership in churches, and so on. What
followed were some good object lessons that Christian forgiveness is a longer,
slower, more objective process than a mere decision to let ourselves focus on other things that evoke more pleasant feelings.
The case can be made that the Christian wife who says “I've
released the anger I felt about my husband's adultery, but I'm still very
hesitant to try to rebuild the marriage” and the one who says “I've forgiven my
husband's adultery, but I'm still not willing to try to rebuild the marriage”
are describing the same things in two different ways. Does it matter? I don't
know how much it matters to those women, but to writers I say that it
does matter, because it inevitably affects the way we understand God's
forgiveness; it may well determine whether we are able to perceive ourselves in
any kind of relationship to Powerful Goodness, and it may well determine
whether we have anything worthwhile to say about that relationship to readers.
I say that if she's forgiven her husband's adultery, then she's actively
working to rebuild the marriage. If she's merely released the anger, she's probably dating other guys.
That's one quibble. Readers who are aware of it can fold a
corner of page 83 down over page 82 so they just skip that section, and enjoy
the book. Still, there are other sections that may totally not work for you,
either. On page 87 Carlson dithers, “I think it would be a good idea if all
women had a sign to put on their bedroom doors, which says: P.S.--I'm PMS!” Oh
really... “Pre-Menstrual Syndromes” are real medical conditions, but they
may be the only medical conditions ever to have been politicized out of all
relation to reality from both sides. Many women don't have PMS; when we do, it's a symptom of some sort of disease condition, whether major or minor, treatable or untreatable, and improving our health (if possible) makes more sense than advertising our illness.
It's very easy to be flippant and nonchalant about other people's concerns being "small stuff" as far as we're concerned; Wayne Dyer, his disciple Richard Carlson, and Carlson's widow and disciple Kristine Carlson, notoriously encouraged this undesirable tendency most of us have. On the whole I've not found their approach as helpful as those that focus more directly on physically controlling blood pressure and muscle tension, which can free us to fix facts without the need to write unpleasant realities off as "small stuff." I note that Wayne Dyer died at a fairly early age, Richard Carlson died looking unusually "old" at a very early age, and Kristine Carlson's not looking so good either--which suggests that sweeping unpleasant facts under the rug and focussing on the feelings don't work for those who practice it as a spiritual discipline...
Still, many people find some useful ideas in the "small stuff" books. They're popular. I've been given copies of them to resell, and I can't say they're unfit to resell. Gardening, cuddling children, and training family members to become "self-cleaning" are very useful suggestions for women who want to reduce the stress levels in their lives. Most people who appreciate being reminded to organize and minimize their baggage for a less stressful trip are old enough to spot the less functional ideas in books like this one.
So...I have these books. I've read some of them. If you buy them here, under this web site's rules, since Kristine Carlson is still alive, the ones that are widely available as secondhand books become Fair Trade Books: $5 per book, $5 per package (I think eight of these books might fit into a package, which would cost $45), plus $1 per online payment, and we send $1 per book to Carlson or a charity of her choice.
It's very easy to be flippant and nonchalant about other people's concerns being "small stuff" as far as we're concerned; Wayne Dyer, his disciple Richard Carlson, and Carlson's widow and disciple Kristine Carlson, notoriously encouraged this undesirable tendency most of us have. On the whole I've not found their approach as helpful as those that focus more directly on physically controlling blood pressure and muscle tension, which can free us to fix facts without the need to write unpleasant realities off as "small stuff." I note that Wayne Dyer died at a fairly early age, Richard Carlson died looking unusually "old" at a very early age, and Kristine Carlson's not looking so good either--which suggests that sweeping unpleasant facts under the rug and focussing on the feelings don't work for those who practice it as a spiritual discipline...
Still, many people find some useful ideas in the "small stuff" books. They're popular. I've been given copies of them to resell, and I can't say they're unfit to resell. Gardening, cuddling children, and training family members to become "self-cleaning" are very useful suggestions for women who want to reduce the stress levels in their lives. Most people who appreciate being reminded to organize and minimize their baggage for a less stressful trip are old enough to spot the less functional ideas in books like this one.
So...I have these books. I've read some of them. If you buy them here, under this web site's rules, since Kristine Carlson is still alive, the ones that are widely available as secondhand books become Fair Trade Books: $5 per book, $5 per package (I think eight of these books might fit into a package, which would cost $45), plus $1 per online payment, and we send $1 per book to Carlson or a charity of her choice.
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