Thoughtful Thursday

*Note: Thoughtful Thursday is for those books that we have yet to review and have been published more then a year ago...*

Secrets of Transformation by Eva Dillner

Pub date: November 10, 2008
Publisher: Divine Design
Summary: It Started like a Fairy Tale... He was Prince Charming. At first. The abuse came later, when he thought he owned her. It started with verbal attacks. She had done something wrong, he screamed. She couldn't do anything right, it seemed. Other days, Prince Charming was back. One day he raped her. On two occasions he tried to kill her. She survived. She went on a quest to heal, to understand, to gather the pieces of the puzzle, to make whole. Her inner and outer journeys took her deep into a chain of ancestral pain. Along the way she learned the secrets of transformation. She left the past behind and changed her life. Are you tired of tripping over your past? Do you keep repeating the same relationship scenarios over and over again? Do you wonder why some people manage to move past the dreadful things that have happened to them? Find out how to quit your whining, leave your baggage behind and create a new you. Eva Dillner is a writer, artist and teacher working with creative and therapeutic processes for inspiration and transformation. Originally an engineer, she turned to alternative therapies when life skidded to a halt in the early nineties. She trained with the best in the business from Seattle to Edinburgh and beyond. In the last five years she's published five books and has toured Europe and the United States to hold Eva Parties - instead of Tupperware, you get Eva live and in the moment.

Iona Tamsin Has Said: I received this book free in return for a review.

I prefer not to write negative reviews, but, unfortunately, this book is not for me. It is more like something the author has disgorged over various periods for the sake of therapy, and in fact it apparently was written for this purpose. 

I find the book a bit too intense, since it deals solely with the author’s subjective, negative, experiences. I didn’t find it to be particularly well written, since it contained grammatical errors, such as an incorrect use of apostrophes, which is a particular irritation to me. For instance, she writes at one point: “Teenage lust at it’s best”. 

The book deals with Eva Dillner’s various relationships, including one with her abusive husband, her parents’ emotional neglect of her, and the work she carried out to resolve her resultant problems. 

I do admire her constant work with herself. Her life appears to have been one long therapy, and obviously it helps to write about one’s problems and process. 

The book seems confused, and is confusing. At the beginning Ms Dillner refers to Shen therapy, which she has used extensively, but not until much later in the book is this form of therapy explained. Part of the problem is probably due to the book not being written from beginning to end but at varying times, the author then later attempting to collect the various writings and diary entries together to form a coherent work. 

The final section, “Secrets of Transformation”, concludes the book, although the book as a whole has been given this title. The few good insights, in my opinion, are contained in this section. 

I can’t recommend this book, but some may get something out of this account of Ms Dillner’s various problems and how she worked to turn her life around. She states that she received much praise for one of her earlier books, so there must be some fans of hers out there.