Chatter

CW: mention of suicide.

In general, I found some parts of this book interesting but overall, much of the advice in it for calming one's inner chatter is not applicable to me. Especially the suggestion of development of little rituals to manage internal chatter: I do mental and external rituals to attempt to quell internal chatter so well that it's called obsessive-compulsive disorder. If you have OCD like me, these parts of the book may trigger your compulsions.

A thing that really bothered me is that he cites the marshmallow study uncritically, i.e., without mentioning that there are alternate explanations than self-control for why a kid would immediately eat the single marshmallow and not wait patiently for two marshmallows. Like growing up in poverty, where not immediately seizing an opportunity for a nice thing means you will not have an opportunity again, even if an adult promises otherwise, because poverty means your grownups often make promises that they cannot keep. The children who immediately ate the marshmallow had no reason to believe that the researcher was being truthful when they promised two marshmallows. This book is recent enough that the author should have been aware of this immense problem with the study.

It also bothered me that he uses terminology like “committed suicide” and describes the deceased person's method in more detail than is necessary, when describing someone who had died by suicide. For a book meant to help people develop tools to manage upsetting internal chatter, this is a very serious problem for any reader who struggles with suicidal ideation or who has lost a loved one as a result of suicide. I hope in future printings this is revised.

It gave me a bad taste in my mouth to read the author's praise of the It Gets Better project without mentioning that it spurred criticism from within the LGBTQ community that is still valid today, as well as other projects like the Make It Better project. I know that It Gets Better is the most well-known because of Dan Savage's fame, but I would expect an author in 2020 to do better research. It feels profoundly hollow to read the author lauding It Gets Better in a time when politicians are actively passing laws in many states to make it illegal for trans kids to be called their chosen name and pronoun in school, and to define validating your trans child as child abuse. To Savage's credit, when he developed It Gets Better, the political climate was quite different, and though progress is never linear, it absolutely looked like things were getting better and would continue to do so, without anyone succeeding in dramatically undoing that progress for very long.

I feel bad giving this book two stars, but I have to remind myself that two stars means “it was okay” and that it's an honest representation of how I experienced the book.