Book Review: Three Steps Forward Two Steps Back

I give up. Serena's illness took up too much of the day. I'm not going to be able to finish reading a new Christian book in Spanish and write a fair review of it, today. So here is a review of a classic book that I happen to have for sale.

Title: Three Steps Forward Two Steps Back 

Author: Charles R. Swindoll

Date: 1980

Publisher: Thomas Nelson

ISBN: 0-8407-5723-9

Length: 191 pages

Quote: “More of us in God’s family ought to admit that there are more ‘growig and learning’ days than ‘great and fantastic’ days.”

Like all of Swindoll's books this one is well written and uplifting. Nevertheless, it has disappointing patches. 

According to the blurb on the back jacket, Swindoll recognized that “life’s problems can’t be solved by all-too-easy cliches” and attempted to offer “practical ways to cope with fear, stress, misunderstanding, inferiority, personal loss, anger, and temptation.” I hate to imagine how airy the other books of advice for people facing these problems must have been...well, it was the period immediately before Dave Hunt debunked Positive Thinking. In any case, much of what this book contains are now, if they weren’t then, all-too-easy cliches.

What actually does help people “persevere through pressure”? Duh...try letting some of the pressure off? (For example, it’s easy to relieve money pressure.)

The poetic summary of people who always have a pep talk to offer to anyone who has a problem used to be well known: “The Toad beneath the Harrow knows exactly where each tooth-point goes. The Butterfly upon the Road preaches Contentment to the Toad.” And there may actually be times when people appreciate the “help” of a Butterfly upon the Road; there are times when anger is useful...but what Butterflies upon the Road do for pressure is raise it. Blood pressure, specifically.

Then again, Swindoll was counselling yuppies in California, who did not typically see themselves as Toads Beneath the Harrow during the Reagan years. To borrow another cliché of the same vintage, they saw the World as Their Oyster.

So maybe it’s the focus on the feelings that makes this book seem out of touch to me. We “feel” emotions associated with the mix of hormones in our bodies, and some psychologists currently think that that’s why people report a similar range of emotions about wildly diverse life experiences, but most of us do realize that some of the events about which we have emotional feelings are more life-threatening than others. Swindoll doesn’t, quite. He hands out the same little pep talks for people who’ve lost their homes or their children that he offers to people who’ve lost their jobs. For the people who’ve only lost jobs, pep talks may be helpful.

Swindoll is known for writing Bible studies for use in counselling. He does that well. If you know (or are) a melodramatic type who tends to think of the insolence of a store manager who doesn’t want to give you a refund by analogy with the murderous persecutions of the mad King Saul, then it might be helpful to sit down and work through the emotions by working out the analogy between your strictly emotional crisis and the life-and-death crises narrated in the Bible

This strategy should not be used if you or the person you are counselling is having a life-and-death crisis. In that case, a better therapeutic approach might be Duct Tape Therapy, in which the person tempted to sit around “counselling” applies duct tape firmly to his or her mouth so that he or she will be able to focus on doing something useful.

My college classmates and I found this book helpful for talking ourselves through the socioemotional crises of late adolescence. If I’m blasting it with faint praise now, it’s probably because I’ve not found “Just rise above your feelings...you can do it...all by yourself...you can do anything” at all helpful in any situation that still stirs up my faded, jaded, middle-aged emotions. My suggestion would be: if tempted to turn to this book, ask yourself whether anyone has been materially harmed, or placed in danger of material harm. If so, do not use this book. Use DuctTape Therapy.