Making Good Choices: New Book By Psychology Professor Karen Sherman

Brookville, N.Y. – Can a seemingly-harmless experiences that happened to you as a child years ago negatively affect your life today? How long does it take an old emotional wound to heal? Can a person truly be happy?

In her new book, “Mindfulness and the Art of Choice: Transform Your Life” (Loving Healing Press, 2008), Karen Sherman, Ph.D., a relationship expert and an adjunct professor in the psychology department at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University, offers a set of time-tested tools to help those who feel like negative past experiences are holding them back, whether it is in their relationships with others or their day-to-day happiness with themselves.

Dr. Sherman says that many people don’t realize that their life behavior is the result of patterned responses based on childhood experiences. She readily admits that for a long time, she was one of them. But through the powerful tools presented in her book, she freed herself from the prison of the past.

The book shares Dr. Sherman’s personal journey of how she worked through her emotional baggage to create a more fulfilling life and teaches readers how to break free from patterns based on their childhood and open up to a world of potential choices. Tools and methods presented in the text are ones Dr. Sherman uses with her own private practice clients.

“The key to transforming your life is mindfulness -- an active effort to pay attention to how you react to present situations,” Dr. Sherman said. She presents exercises to increase one’s mindfulness and deal with negative past experiences, allowing old wounds to heal and healthy relationships to develop. “The book aims to help readers know their lives better and learn how to create the life they want.”

Dr. Sherman has been in private practice for over 20 years. Her first book, “Marriage Magic! Find It, Keep It, and Make It Last” was originally published in 2004 with co-author Dale Klein. She is also a contributing author to “101 Ways to Self-Improvement, Vol. 2,” a featured writer on “Yahoo Personals,” has a weekly blog on ThirdAge.com, and writes the Disputes column for Hitchedmag.com. She is interviewed regularly in the media, and is a frequent guest on both national and international talk radio stations. Dr. Sherman conducts a variety of workshops on relationships and lifestyle issues and she is active in many counseling associations. She is married and has two daughters.

“The main message is that no matter what your experiences have been in the past, how you live your life is a choice,” Dr. Sherman says. “I truly believe that not only does each person have responsibility for what happens to him or her, but that therein also lies his or her power. This book is about letting people know that they can have the life they want--that it's actually something they can choose to create.”

Posted July 1, 2008