How to Heal Yourself When No One Else Can – Book Review

Book Review

This is a review of the book “how to heal yourself when no one else can” by Amy B. Scher. I will give a little bit of information on what the book talks about and a list of the sections and chapters so that you can get a good idea of whether this book is something that you would like to read. I will also give a little bit of information on how I got into reading this book and how it’s helped me so far.

Genre wise I would say it’s a self-help book, a healing book (with techniques that you can follow) and in some ways it would also fit into spiritual books as some of the practices that it talks about have a history within religion or a spiritual background.

How to Heal Yourself When No One Else Can – Amy B. Scher

How To Heal Yourself When No One Else Can by Amy B Scher

This book has a total of 271 pages and is split into three sections and eleven chapters. Section two (chapters 3-10) is further sub-divided into three parts.

Section One

‘An Introduction in to the Energy Body and Self-healing’ (Chapters 1 – 3)
It starts by giving a bit of background into Amy’s story and how she has tried and tested many ways of healing after being diagnosed with a variety of health issues including late stage Lyme disease. It also looks at what ‘the energy body’ is and what self-heal is, explaining a little bit about past life energies and generational energy, finished up with a brief outline of her three step approach to healing.

Section Two

‘A Tried and True Healing Process’ (Chapters 3 – 10)
This section is also dived in to ‘parts’; part one is chapters 3 and 4. Part two is chapters 5 and 6.Part three is chapters 7 – 10. These chapters are the bits where you start to learn about the various techniques and practices that can help you to heal. Each technique or practice is discussed in enough detail for you to understand how it works and how to use it effectively. You don’t have to be at all religious or spiritual to practice any of the techniques but if you are it explains how you can incorporate this into them (i.e. the wording that you use – in religious terms you may direct your focus or ‘voice’ your desires to god. Someone who is not spiritual or religious can just talk out loud to the universe or talk to their inner being).

Section Three

‘Final Insights and Encouragement’ (Chapters 11 -12)
This is the section that pulls everything you have learnt together. Its sort of a wrap up of the book giving you an idea of where to start, some final tips and guided direction.

Chapter by Chapter

Chapter One Is all about Amys story and how being sick lead her to trying different treatments. It talks about her relapses and how she started looking to more holistic and natural techniques to help deal with her stresses and underlying emotional issues, which she believes were holding her back from full recovery.

Chapter Two disucces Amys approach to mind – body – spirit healing and starts to explain how stress, negative thinking and ‘energy’ impacts on the body.

Chapter Three – Part One
Chapter three is split into three parts; part one expalins about how to surrender and stop ‘fighting’ against the body and allow yourself to move with the flow. It explains about how surrendering can help you and gives the first two practices that can help you to do this; they are chanting and grateful begging).

Chapter four discusses how to create a more solid foundation for yourself in order to heal and discusses grounding, the body’s polarities, energy cross overs, your thymus gland, focusing on better thoughts, Amy’s perspective of the law of attraction and journaling.

Chapter Five – Part Two
Part two goes on to discuss blockages and starts with chapter five, explaining about the sub conscious mind. It then goes on to discuss how to access the subconscious mind using muscle testing – what it is and how to use it as well as other useful tips. Chapter six then starts to look at learning the ‘language of your body’. This is about listening to what your body is telling you via symptoms, it talks about how to connect with your body, using your symptoms as clues to deeper issues that you might not be aware of. It also explains about the chakras of the body and how they are linked to certain health issues and what they may mean.

Chapter Seven – Part Three
Chapter seven talks about changing your relationship with stress and begins by explaining and looking at unprocessed experiences that we may be holding in our body. It talks more about using muscle testing to help identify past events or emotions that we might be holding on to unknowingly. It then gives two different techniques that can be used to help clear these unprocessed experiences (once we have used muscle testing to work out which events are holding us back). It’s within this section that you will learn about ‘thymus tap and test’ and about the ‘Emotional Freedom Technique’ (EFT).

Chapter Eight looks into releasing harmful beliefs, explaining how harmful beliefs can hold you back and block you from healing. It then gives two techniques that can be used to help to clean harmful beliefs, explaining in detail each technique so that you can decide which feels better for you and works best for you. The first technique is called the ‘sweep’ and the second is chakra tapping.

Chapter nine looks at transforming unhealthy emotional patterns such as negative self-talk, draining vocabulary and negative thought loops. Each of these (as well as a few other types of unhealthy emotional patterns) is explained in the book. It discusses ways of over-coming these types of negative emotional patterns and gives another technique called the three hearts, which can also be used to help deal with unprocessed experiences.

Chapter Ten discusses fear – what it is, the different types of fear, how it impacts on your life and how to overcome it. It looks at various ways of clearing these negative emotions and again goes through the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) and chakra tapping as well as other tips and ideas to help clear these negative emotions.

Chapter Eleven has a diagram of the ‘Healing Tree’ which is discussed at the start of the book. It is accompanied with questions which can be used with muscle testing to help you to identify where to start your healing journey. For example using the diagram and doing muscle testing you can ask “would it the most beneficial for me to work on _______?” and you could say “Chakras”. If muscle testing gave a ‘yes’ answer then you could start to use the techniques give in the book around chakras. This chapter also gives tips and other advice on how to help clear negative emotions as well as explaining the importance of creating a new routine.

Chapter Twelve is about moving forward in your healing journey. It discusses how you will likely have ups and downs and how to deal with them. It gives you a few tips on recognising the signs that you might be healing and explains how ‘baby steps’ are important. There are a few final reminders and a final note from Amy.

The End
The book finishes with some questions for those who read the book as part of a book club and additional resources.

Rating

I have to give this book a whopping 5 out of 5.
I’ve read a lot of books of this nature and I have to say that this is a good ‘all-rounder book’. What I mean when I say that, is that it gives you an insight in to a whole range of techniques and practices without going into too much detail. It’s very ‘to the point’, clear and easy to follow. All the techniques are talked though step by step and if you want more help Amy has a website and Facebook page where you can watch videos and ask further questions. Throughout, there are references to studies and research on the various techniques so that you can find out more if you want to.

I think that anyone who has a chronic health condition or reoccurring health issues should consider reading this book, because it helps you to understand how past experiences and behaviours may be hindering your ability to be well. Now I am not saying that your health issue is in your head – not at all, but the way we behave can be detrimental to our recovery (but we might not realise we are even behaving in such a way).

Now, I know that CFS/ ME and Lyme are two of the most tricky chronic health conditions that you can have, firstly because the NHS are pretty much useless in treating CFS/ ME and tend to slap the label on you and leave you to shrivel up and be alive but not living! Secondly they are incredibly behind on the Lyme issue that they still insist it’s ‘not possible to have an infection years after a becoming infected’ (oh really, let’s not talk about malaria or syphilis shall we – doh). And both of these conditions (ME/CFS & Lyme) are often slated by those who ‘don’t buy into it’ and regularly tagged as being “all in the head”. Those of us with these issues will know it’s not in our head, but there can be underlying issues, relating to how we behave and react emotionally that could be holding us back and triggering relapses.
For example as we go through life and deal with situations we can get stuck in behaviour patterns that can keep your ‘fight of flight’ system turned on. When this happens your body does what it has to in order to fight (whatever perceived threat it faces) or flight (run away from the perceived threat). The body doesn’t realise that the threat that you are faced with might be losing your job – it only responds to the body’s trigger of stress. It stops your body from doing silly things like digesting food or healing, because as far as its concerned, you are being chased by a tiger and need to stand up and fight or take flight, therefore it floods your body with adrenaline in order to do either of these things. If you are in a constant state of worry and stress because you think you may be losing your job, your body will be in a constant state of fight or flight. Even after you have lost your job and your circumstances change, your body can still be in this state and it starts to take its toll. Unless you take steps to take your body out of this state, no matter what drugs you take to heal your body, whatever herbs, supplements or foods you eat – until you fix that stress response, your body will never fully heal.

So that’s why it’s important to read a book like Amy’s – especially if you have been through a number of cycles of healing only to relapse again. It could be that some of the behaviours that you have, which at one point in your life would have been crucial to you getting through a situation, may now be holding you back.

You don’t even have to be religious or spiritual, the practices can just be used and seen as tools you use to help destress and allow yourself some time to zone out whenever you need to.

My Personal experience

I came across Amy’s book via a health coach who I follow on Instagram, who holds monthly book clubs (Amy’s book was the chosen book for that month). The title alone grasped my interest as I have health issues myself, and when I read about Amy’s experience with Lyme disease (which I also have) I felt that I had to at least read what the reviews had to say. I bought my book from Amazon as the reviews were so good and a lot of the things that people were saying connected with my own story and how I also felt.

Many of the practices and techniques were new to me, or were things I had heard of, but didn’t know what it entailed. I found the book so easy to read that I read a little bit every day and I was able to complete the book in just a few weeks.

Since I started the book I have been practising a few of the techniques daily or at least every few days and they can really help me to relax and let go of tension. Its also helped me to identify past emotions that I believed I had dealt with, but may actually still holding me back.
As a result of reading Amy’s book I have gone one to purchase a quite a few other books within the same genre, some related to the techniques that she discussed and some by the authors listed in the additional reading list.

I aim to also review a few of the other books that I have read that link to Amy’s book and the techniques she discusses, so watch out for other up-coming reviews.

Other Helpful Books

If you liked this book review you may also be interested in my other reviews of similar books, such as You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay, The Magic by Rhonda Byrne or You Are The Placebo by Dr Joe Diszpena.