Jacqueline M. Dierks PH.D
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What About Me? A Novel Approach to Personal Growth
By Jacqueline M. Dierks, Ph.D.
Sentence Description
A moving novel and self-help book about a woman’s quest for a satisfying life, the significant therapy sessions that teach her to cope with a dysfunctional family, and her thrilling discovery of self.
Short Description
Therapist Jacqueline M. Dierks has delivered a gift to everyone searching for joy, contentment, and a terrific novel. In What About Me? A Novel Approach to Personal Growth, we meet Samantha, a woman of thirty who has spent her life trying to please her family. With a manipulative, passive-aggressive mother and a father who disappears into silence and alcohol, her need for love and acceptance is crippling. She turns to Maggie, a therapist who guides Samantha toward awareness. In addition to her moving novel, Dr. Dierks offers worksheets through which readers can explore their own emotional patterns and needs. The novel shifts from therapy sessions, in which Maggie assigns an exercise (available to readers in an appendix) that her patient must complete during the week, and Samantha’s daily life, in which she puts these new-found exercises into practice. This self-help format is an important adjunct to a very moving and powerful story about a woman’s journey toward self-discovery.
Extended Description
What About Me? A Novel Approach to Personal Growth, by psychotherapist and author Jacqueline M. Dierks, Ph.D., is a singular and highly creative novel. Dierks has crafted a compelling story about Samantha, a woman searching for balance in a life controlled by insecurity, sadness, and the anger and manipulation of a dysfunctional family. What makes this novel especially unique and important is not only the moving story around Samantha’s emotional journey toward self-discovery, but the self-help platform in which the author has created worksheets, each one explained clearly by Maggie, the therapist Samantha seeks out for guidance and support. Readers can turn to these exercises and use them as their personal guide toward understanding and healing. With chapters alternating between therapy sessions and Samantha’s personal life, readers can follow Samantha’s exciting and sometimes painful journey as she begins to understand the reasons for her failed relationships with men and her stressful and caustic relationships with her parents and siblings, while experiencing in real time how each exercise she completes drives her closer to the at-peace woman she longs to be.
Back Cover Text
In What About Me? A Novel Approach to Personal Growth, a beautifully crafted novel of self-discovery, psychotherapist Jacqueline M. Dierks, Ph.D. tells the story of Samantha, a young woman beset by the need to please a family that seems to disapprove of everything she is. The anger of her passive-aggressive mother and the silence of her alcoholic father translate as unloving and uncaring. It is through Maggie, a therapist who works with Samantha, that she finally understands the dysfunctional nature of her family. This is also a self-help book. The worksheets Maggie assigns to Samantha each week are in the book’s appendices, allowing readers who wish to experience their own therapy to do so at a comfortable pace. Can fiction and self-help exist together in our quest for happiness and self-discovery? In this book, the response is a dramatic Yes!
Author Biography
Jacqueline M. Dierks, Ph.D., LCSW, earned her doctorate in Clinical Social Work at Arizona State University. Her thesis “The Effects of a Personal Empowerment Program Upon the Perceived Self-Efficacy of Women in Social Situations,” developed a treatment program for women confronting the limitations placed on them by society. A former instructor at ASU, she is a published author and frequent trainer at workshops for therapists. Dr. Dierks has been a member of the mental health field since 1984 and is in private practice, where her focus is primarily on women’s issues.
