cover image Learning to Love Yourself

Learning to Love Yourself

Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse. Health Communications, $10.95 (125pp) ISBN 978-0-932194-39-8

The director of a Texas clinic that specializes in treating chemical dependencies and family problems, Wegscheider-Cruse gears this guide specifically to adult children of alcoholics and generally to anyone suffering from low self-esteem. She offers a definition of self-worth""my valuable identity deserving all good things''and urges readers to change damaging habits, rethink past experiences and develop new behaviors that enhance emotional growth. Her detailed advice is sometimes sensibleto raise self-worth, she writes, we need to become aware of of the ``forces of our past which have held us back.'' But sometimes she is unhelpful, as when she suggests that those who cover their low self-worth with compulsive busyness ``make home-made bread'' or ``build a birdhouse.'' (April)