Becoming Your Best Self: Healing Through Self-Integration

“Becoming Your Best Self” implies that there are other selves that might not be “best” all of the time, but you are striving to be better, not perfect. It also builds on other “parts” of therapy models which are most helpful.

Donna has found a way to describe our unhappiness in a non-pathological way, and promotes the idea that symptoms previously thought of as pathological are adaptations—both understanding their value and how they can help or hurt us. She has taken the Transactional Analysis PAC model and updated it by putting a new spin on it. It recognizes the importance of family of origin without requiring years of investigation.

Donna’s Self-Integration model promotes the idea of self-healing as opposed to healing through medication. I believe more and more in the idea that healing yourself in your efforts to have a better life will become more accepted. Donna’s use of case examples will help individuals and therapists understand this model: it’s teachable, understandable and therapists can relate to it.  

I had the opportunity to observe a live demonstration of the SIM model at Donna’s book launch. After previewing the book itself, I can confidently say that this creative and intelligent model offers a new and brilliant blend of many well established and successful therapeutic modalities.

What makes it unique, is that it is equally user friendly, educative and useful for both Practitioners and anyone who is seeking more personal growth and healing. Donna’s model provides an in depth recipe for positively altering the re-enactment of unhealthy and dysfunctional patterns from our past.

Donna Jacob’s new book, “Becoming Your Best Self: Healing Though Self-Integration” is a new entry in the self-help category that takes the willing reader on a healing trip to self-awareness and mindfulness. Using easy-to-understand techniques garnered from many years of clinical practice as a therapist, the Self-Integration Model (SIM) is a 6-step healing process that helps troubled readers regain control over their lives and relationships and respond to life’s challenges in more wholesome ways. With the SIM, she has created a cast of characters, some familiar, some new that are present in our everyday lives. These characters come to life by the use of examples and worksheets that simulate a therapeutic setting to help people cope with their problematic feelings. A great deal of attention has lately been paid to health and fitness “integration” in the form of activity trackers; the Fitbit, for example. While a Fitbit for the mind doesn’t exist yet, the Self-Integration Model brings it a step closer.

I personally benefitted enormously from reading this book. It has helped me to understand how and why I react to situations and challenges in my life and how I can come from a healthier space to deal with them. Donna Jacobs offers a Self-Integration Model that consists of three levels: Parent, Adult and Child. At any given moment, we come from one of those levels and it is by looking at that dynamic that you learn why you do the things you do. For example, my mother used to scare me with ominous warnings about my body. She’d say things like, “You’re going to get sick if you don’t come in from the cold; you’re going to break your leg if you don’t come down from that tree; you’re going to lose your arm if you stick it out the car window. In Donna’s model, my mother was a Catastrophizing Parent. And guess what? I incorporated those scary visions and feelings of fear in my own Inner Child. And so whenever something goes wrong with my body, like my back goes into spasm, I go to the deepest darkest place. I think I’ll never be able to walk without pain again.

But in her book, Donna offers a way to “reparent” myself by developing my healthy Nurturing Parent. There’s also the Critical Parent and the Neglectful/Indulgent Parent. On the positive healthy side, along with the Nurturing Parent, there are the Protective Parent and Guiding Parent. There’s more to the book for sure, and you’ll need to pick it up and find out for yourself. You won’t be disappointed! If you’ve been looking for a way to better your life, then Donna Jacobs’s book can point you in the right direction. Donna is a Psychologist with 40 years experience and she has taken that experience and put it all in a book that is very easy to read and incorporate into your day-to-day life. Her model is based on 40 years of research, client interactions and examples. She uses her own life as a model, too, which is super cool.

In the world of our complex psychological lives, finding a roadmap to understanding ourselves is difficult. In her book, Becoming Your Best Self: Healing through self-integration, Donna Jacobs has thoughtfully offered us a clear direction. In a very comprehensive way she demonstrates a 6-step–healing process to help people manage their emotional and relationship challenges. In revealing how our early attachment figures impact us and explaining the adaptations we acquire in order to manage, she helps us to unravel the ways in which we contribute to our own distress. Donna provides us with a solid framework to build on. With tools in hand, individuals are able to make the positive changes they need to reduce their struggle and to discover their Best Self.