The central premise of Living the Truth is that any time we try to hide from the truth in our lives, we sabotage ourselves. Demonstrating with stories from his own clinical experience, Ablow shows how hiding or denying painful memories keeps us stuck in negative patterns. He offers strategies for helping us to see how and when we resist the truth of our personal stories, and he presents strategies to help us transform shame into self love, fiction into personal authenticity, repressed emotional pain and unresolved unconscious conflicts into the power of actually living our lives.

Ablow is extremely good at showing us how keeping our fears bottled up leads to paralysis and lack of fulfillment. It seems to this reviewer, however, that turning our fictions into truths is where Ablow's approach falls short. He offers a workbook on disk 3 that could be very helpful to those seriously in denial of truths they keep from themselves, but the exercises meant to show the way out seem less than adequate. Living the Truth is an excellent resource to help someone decipher his/her own personal truths. If we are to overcome destructive emotional patterns we must, without doubt, first discover the source of the problem. Yet, this step alone will not be transformative.

Ablow’s case analyses often seem like detective work as he surprises his clients with the true story under their fictional lives. If your underlying story is already clear to you, this audio material will underscore what you already know, or help you to uncover hidden facets of your unpolished diamond. Yet, what Ablow is really advising is deep, long term psychiatric counseling or analysis. This may indeed be the best and the hardest answer for this quick-fix age to accept. This material is a beginning, a first leap in finding your psychological barriers and, if it leads to further hurdles, more power to your bounding toward the truth of your own being.