Why Do I Keep Doing That? Why Do I Keep Doing That?: Breaking the Negative Patterns in Your Life

Why We Do What We Don’t Want to Do--and How to Stop

Why Do I Keep Doing That? Why Do I Keep Doing That? explains why we all experience the “compulsion to repeat” and discover the most successful ways to stop doing what we don’t want to do . . . whether we drink it, smoke it, snort it, pop it, spend it, gamble it, eat it, work it, feel it, or have sex or a relationship with it.

As a recovering alcoholic, Dennis Wholey knows firsthand what it takes to break an addiction. In his New York Times bestseller The Courage to Change, Wholey brilliantly changed the way people viewed the negative pattern of substance addiction. Now, in this highly anticipated book, Why Do I Keep Doing That? Why Do I Keep Doing That?, Wholey expands the exploration of the compulsion to repeat by tackling other negative and self-defeating patterns of various types and degrees.

Habits are hard to break--especially destructive ones that bring about pain in our lives, create continuous problems or obstacles, keep us with people who are bad for us, and prevent us from reaching our full potential.

We all have our own answer and our own path to healing. Dennis Wholey helps you find yours. He shows us how to make these changes with expert insights from his team of behavioral experts along with personal stories of different negative behaviors and lifestyles, questionnaires, evaluations, and “personal inventories” that dig into your own life and background. Why Do I Keep Doing That? Why Do I Keep Doing That? shows you how to find the answers you seek, the support you deserve, and the understanding you must have to forge your way to a happier, more rewarding life--and a truer sense of who you are.

"Frustrated by his own self-defeating behavior and inspired by Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, talk show host Wholey (PBS's This Is America) explains repetition compulsion — a tendency to repeat behavior that has already proved unhealthy — using interviews with mental health experts and the testimony of ordinary people who have conquered their problems. Dealing with pitfalls such as people pleasing, procrastination and rage, these regular people explain their specific problems, theorize about what drives their 'compulsion to repeat' and offer their commonsense suggestions for change. The experts — including Peter Kramer (Listening to Prozac), Nathaniel Branden (Six Pillars of Self-Esteem), Harvard clinical psychiatry professor E. Virginia Demos and others — reinforce Freud's belief that such behavior is rooted in childhood experience. Wholey (The Miracle of Change) himself sticks to pep talks and questionnaires designed to illuminate the reader's problems. This encouraging guide offers the fundamental advice that one should seek professional help. Though readers stuck in negative patterns may recognize themselves in Wholey's case studies, those who have already graced a therapist's couch won't find any new insight here." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

A much-needed How-Not-To guide from the author of The New York Times bestseller The Courage to Change.

Damaging relationships. Bad financial and career decisions. Substance abuse. Ceaseless approval seeking. To some degree, we all create and give in to patterns of behavior that lead to pain, harm and self-defeat. Aren't we supposed to " know better?"

Forget such unhelpful platitudes! Dennis Wholey has assembled a top-flight team— bestsellers Peter Kramer (Listening to Prozac), Dr. Natalie Shainess (Sweet Suffering) and Brad Blanton (Radical Honesty) among them— to skillfully guide every reader into a way of life unhindered by compulsive, repetitive urges.

The book's first section explores just what makes us us, from genetics to childhood programming, and explains how and why we write the destructive mini-scripts that can hold sway over us even in adulthood. (Invaluable for proactive parents!)

Next we meet real people, once slaves to their impulses, to hear firsthand their inspiring accounts of liberation. Finally, the book’ s last section integrates all that has come before to offer effective— and doable— methods for living compulsion-free. Professional and group therapy is candidly discussed, and plain-English " self-quizzes" engage and sustain the reader throughout.

It's about getting better, not " knowing better." So, ask yourself: Why Do I Keep Doing That?

Dennis Wholey is the host of the weekly public affairs series This Is America on PBS, which is distributed to 400 cities in the United States, Canada, 160 foreign countries via PBS stations, the American Life TV Cable Network and Voice of America Television. Wholey is the author of The New York Times bestselling book The Courage to Change, and he has written several other popular books on personal growth and psychology.