Stop Being Pushed Around!: A Practical Guide
Lynda Bevan
Loving Healing Press (2008)
ISBN: 9781932690453
Stop Being Pushed Around!, as its subtitle says, is a very practical guide. For anyone who wants to take back control of his or her life, this book is an excellent start. While the book is a bit limited on all the areas where a person may be pushed around, concentrating primarily on one’s major relationship, with a short section on the workplace, the book offers many examples of how to improve your relationships which can be applied to various situations.
Anyone who is in an abusive relationship will especially find this book useful. The book’s early sections focus on offering help for victims. Bevan provides examples of what constitutes being a victim, how people become victims, and how fear prevents people from escaping their victim status. What I found most helpful throughout the book, and especially in these sections on victimization, were Bevan’s many examples of behaviors, negative and positive. For example, she provides a list of negative ways to respond to someone who always wants his own way, such as giving in, begging your partner to agree with you, and retaliating with anger. These examples help people identify their behaviors that are backfiring on them. Bevan then provides positive responses to a demanding person, such as simple silence, not reacting so the would-be controller will finally run out of steam, and only starting honest conversations during quiet and peaceful times in the relationship.
Following her discussion of victim situations, Bevan goes on to help the victim decide to change and then implement that change. Most effective in these sections of the book were the two chapters on defining what are your long-term and short-term strategies. You cannot change someone, and you cannot change yourself overnight. Bevan provides practical steps to help a person begin the process of change, and during that process, to decide how the relationship will be affected, and whether to stay in the relationship, based on how your partner reacts to your new behaviors. While Bevan does not use the term co-dependency, she is definitely discussing it in its manifestations as emotional and love addiction as well as being a caretaker.
The final appendix on bullying in the workplace is also effective, although I wish it had been longer and had more positive examples of how people can overcome such bullies rather than just describing the bullying. Bevan does not provide examples for other situations, such as being a victim within one’s church or religion, or being a victim in a parent-child relationship. For this reason, I felt the book could have been expanded to be more thorough—it is only just over 100 pages. However, with a little imagination, one can apply many of Bevan’s suggestions to other situations where a person is being pushed around.
Stop Being Pushed Around! is Book 3 in the 10-Step Empowerment Series by Loving Healing Press. Readers may want to explore other books in the series, especially Bevan’s Life After Your Lover Walks Out and Life After Betrayal. For more information, visit the author’s website www.LyndaBevan.com or the publisher www.lovinghealing.com . Stop Being Pushed Around! is a great place to start taking back your life as your own.
Tyler R. Tichelaar, Ph.D., author of The Marquette Trilogy
