Several of the most painful petards upon which people become hoisted during an unhappy childhood are neatly dispatched here by two cognitive therapists, who attack 11 common "lifetraps"--destructive patterns that underlie a variety of emotional problems. Young, director of New York City's Cognitive Therapy Center and a faculty member of the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry, and Klosko, co-director of the Cognitive Therapy Center of Long Island, ably demonstrate how to deal with issues of abandonment, dependence, trust, social rejection, emotional deprivation, failure and vulnerability. They provide meaningful case histories, perceptive descriptions, diagnostic tests and a variety of nugget-sized, easily understood lists detailing the causes, danger signs and effects of negative impulses and actions, as well as ways to short-circuit them.--Publishers Weekly

Jeffrey E. Young, PhD, serves on the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University. He is director of the Cognitive Therapy Center of New York as well as the Schema Therapy Institute. Dr. Young founded schema therapy, and is a founding fellow of the Academy of Cognitive Therapy. Dr. Young has lectured and presented workshops on cognitive and schema therapies for the past 25 years and consistently receives outstanding evaluations internationally for his teaching skills. He has published extensively, including two major books, Schema Therapy: A Practitioner's Guide, for mental health professionals, andReinventing Your Life, a bestselling self-help book. Dr. Young is coauthor of a psychotherapy outcome study evaluating the effectiveness of cognitive therapy in comparison to antidepressant medication. He has also served as consultant on many cognitive and schema therapy research grants, including the NIMH Collaborative Study of Depression, and on the editorial boards of journals includingCognitive Therapy and ResearchandCognitive & Behavioral Practice. For his exceptional teaching skills, Dr. Young was awarded the prestigious NEEI Mental Health Educator of the Year award in 2003. Janet S. Klosko, PhD, Codirector of the Cognitive Therapy Center of Long Island, in Great Neck, New York, is senior psychologist at the Schema Therapy Institute and at Woodstock Women's Health in Woodstock, New York."