Book Review: Complete Confidence

Complete Confidence
By Sheenah Hankin

Copyright 2009

Kindle Edition

Approximately 250 pages

I'm fairly sure this was a free book. I found it in my Kindle library, at any rate, and I don't generally buy books for Kindle. The thing is full of books, but they are all the free kind. I read them at the doctors' offices.

At any rate, I am always looking to improve myself, so I pulled this up on my cellphone to read one day while I was out, seeing as how I'd finished The Lord of the Rings.

It's a right winger's self-help book. I could tell that almost immediately, because anyone who needed therapy this author pinned as a "loser" even though she never actually said that. It came through loud and clear in her writing - if you're reading this book, then you're a loser. You also need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and mental illness isn't a real thing, and only something like 10 people in a million really suffer from depression, and nobody ever needs to take an antidepressant.

Then she confirmed my suspicions by talking about being a guest on Fox News.

Her premise in the book isn't that self-esteem is the problem people have, it's lack of confidence. She doesn't address why people may have lack of confidence (or low self-esteem), really, except to occasionally allude to poor parenting. She also offers little help to anyone who really had a crappy childhood, you know, those who were physically and sexually abused, which is at least half the population if not more. 

There is also nothing here for anyone who suffers from chronic pain. Basically, she writes as if such things don't exist (which, I have discovered, is the thinking of many folks who lean right in their politics) and anyway, if you're struggling, it's your own fault.

This is a bit off-putting, but I read the entire book, nevertheless, to see what someone like this actually might offer.

The takeaways, other than the fact that I'm already a loser and have nowhere to go but up, were these:

Don't complain.

Don't whine.

Don't procrastinate.

Create a motto or a sentence that you can use to "calm yourself" if you're upset and acting "emotionally immature," which, according to this author, I am emotionally immature in multiple factors of 10 zillion times infinity.

It's basically Cognitive Behavorial Therapy without a pinch of reality. Because the reality is, lots of folks suffer all the things she considers to be "emotionally immature" behavior (think Ted Cruz yelling, "Don't you know who I am?" at the airport, or any of the Republican questions to the most recent Supreme Court candidate would likely qualify as emotionally immature examples) for a myriad of reasons.

She does not suffer these emotionally weak people (they are fools) and I honestly worried about the folks she might be seeing in actual practice, even though she proclaims time and again that she was once a loser too (but she got better).

I can't find much about this author online, which in itself is suspicious. She seems to have cleaned her Internet presence and I don't know why. If she really was a guest on Fox, shouldn't there be some bragging rights there? There are two reviews on health websites, both giving her 1 star. I found her on Facebook but she's not posted anything public since 2020, and then she was whining (ha, she said don't whine and she does!) about Covid and quarantines.

The four takeaways mentioned above I will keep in my brain, losing the rest of this overbearing book in the process. I think not whining, complaining, and procrastinating are good notions, even though she didn't really give any method of overcoming the latter (I'm a terrible procrastinator, but then, I'm also emotionally immature to the nth degree, according to this author, so there's that). I like the idea of calming yourself, if you can realize it in the moment and shut up and settle down. 

So far the only thing I've come up with as a motto for this is "Be Still" with the image of a pond in my head, but then the Eagles song, Learn to Be Still, started popping into my head and it says "you never will learn to be still" so I'm thinking this won't work as a motto.

I prefer not to use the words "Calm down" because that is what men frequently tell women, and my husband has been told numerous times not to say that to me, so I need something else.

So, motto suggestions welcome. 

But don't read the book.