Free Yourself from Death Anxiety (Rachel E. Menzies and David Veale)
OVERVIEW
Free Yourself from Death Anxiety: A CBT Self-Help Guide for a Fear of Death and Dying is another fabulous resource from Rachel E. Menzies and from David Veale. Menzies, an expert on death anxiety, and Veale, a Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) specialist, make the perfect duo here. The authors start by asking and answering, what is death anxiety (fear of death and/or dying), how does it develop (the contributions of your ‘old brain’ and ‘new brain’), and how is it maintained (e.g., intolerance toward uncertainty, catastrophizing, and emotional reasoning – where you reason that feeling anxious must be evidence of a threat).
To free yourself from death anxiety, you will first need to identify your problems and goals – what are you most afraid of and how does that interfere with your life (the problem), and what do you want to change about your response to this fear (the goal)? Then, you’ll develop alternative ways for thinking about death – you’ll get comfortable challenging your thoughts and habitual responses. You’ll train yourself to ask, “is this thought realistic,” “am I worrying about something outside my control,” and “is there a helpful, more realistic perspective I could take?” After that, you’ll move on to facing your fears deliberately and repeatedly, often and long enough that you’ll learn to tolerate the anxiety. The aim is not to remove or banish fear, but to sit with it and develop a different relationship to it. “Tolerating something unwelcome means getting used to it so that the strength of your reaction reduces . . . Being willing to experience feelings of anxiety is crucial.” This is exposure therapy, and it gets easier the more you repeat it. Menzies and Veale lay out practical advice for developing exposure tasks and avoiding common pitfalls.
Lastly, there are 16 tasks to prepare you for death – maybe you write your own eulogy, read a book about death, attend a Death Café, or try some Swedish death cleaning. These tasks may be enlightening or deeply uncomfortable; they will often be both. That’s the point, to deliberately expose yourself to (and begin to tolerate better) the fear. This book is a great introduction to death anxiety and the CBT approach to freeing yourself from it.
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? Yes.
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? A CBT approach to death anxiety.
Who should read this book? Anyone in (or considering) therapy for thanatophobia, who is especially interested in a CBT approach.