Book Review: Am I Loved

About the Book: Am I Loved

How can we function as sophisticated emotional beings when we can neither understand nor control our emotions? That is the question. 

#Gifted

This book is about nothing if not about being human. It is about love and human needs, about misunderstandings, tragedy, faith and despair, but mostly about love. It is not another novel or self-help book on relationships, just a book that is truly stranger than fiction. 

It is a book about us, about secrets, life, how life has been protected and lived by a parade of humanity 65 billion names long. This book defines the human condition and the fundamental roles played in our existence by the greatest of all human needs: the need to be loved. It translates the language and reveals the purpose of our emotions so that, at last, we can understand and take charge of them.

Our emotions exist not to benefit us but to safeguard our genes, protecting the life within us. This is the language of our emotions translated for us to understand, their crucial interaction with the greatest human need of all, our need to be loved, duly explained. All else flows from this. We spend our lives intent on surviving when fulfilment comes from loving and being loved. Nature's Protections serve to liberate us yet we allow them to inhibit our lives without realising that the majority of our many emotional problems are solvable simply by a proper understanding of the human condition.

Am I Loved? explores the way we live from the cradle through the playground to adult life and thereafter. John D Bieber's thesis is that everyone, right back to the first Cro Magnon caveman, has got it wrong and this is a guide as to how we can get it right and live better, happier lives. Understanding what we do not understand will be a hugely fulfilling experience significantly enhancing the quality of our lives. Am I Loved? explains how this may be done enabling us to get everything right.

My thoughts on Am I Loved

This is not a self-help book.  This is about why we feel the way we do rather than how we can adjust our feelings, thoughts and behaviours.

It's rather a fascinating read and a different view on explaining why we behave and think the way we do.  I don't feel it is a light read or one you can dip in and out of.  You do need time to read this book, it's not something you can pick up for half an hour in the morning before the day begins, at least that is how I felt.

I love a self-help book, but this is not that.  I, therefore, did find my mind wander slightly and I struggled to keep track of all the metaphors.  

About the Author: John Bieber

John Bieber was born and brought up in London, the youngest of three children. He qualified as a Solicitor with Goodman Derrick &Co where he remained as a Partner with the great Lord Goodman for 10 years. Thereafter he founded his own firm, leaving after 9 years to spend more time with his family. He and his wife (whom he married in 1977) had four children by then under the age of five and help was needed! And so his children had both parents growing up wild in the small farm where he still lives in Sussex with his wife.

Having acted in many divorces John was concerned to help clients avoid a bad divorce following on a bad marriage, and so he wrote, ‘If Divorce is the Only Way: An Emotional and Practical Guide to the Dos and Don'ts of Divorce and Marital Breakdown,' which was published by Penguin. Realising that there was a vacuum of understanding about the role that emotions play in our lives led John to what he calls the obvious question: "How can we function as sophisticated emotional human beings when we can neither understand nor control our emotions?"

Eventually, after much research and deep thinking ‘Am I Loved?' emerged to answer that question.