Blog Tour and Giveaway: Protecting Yourself from Emotional Predators by Steven J Wolhandler JD MA LPC

Book Details: Book Title:  Protecting Yourself from Emotional Predators: Neutralize the Users, Abusers and Manipulators Hidden Among Us Category:  Adult Non-Fiction Genre:  psychology, self-help, relationships, divorce Publisher:  Amare Press Release date:   January, 2019 Tour dates: Sept 9 to Sept 27, 2019 Content Rating: G  Book Description: Steven Wolhandler, JD, MA, LPC knows how abusive and manipulative people prey on the emotions of good people - and how good people can protect themselves. He offers a radically different view of these Emotional Predators and provides practical effective solutions. For Emotional Predators, life is a strategy game to dominate and control, and you are either a player to be defeated or a game piece to be used. Without empathy or remorse, they’ll ruin your life, and traditional approaches will make things worse. You’ll learn 5 essential steps for protecting yourself, valuable guidance for safe relationships and over 30 specific defensive tactics for:     Distinguishing romance from intimacy     Restoring your self-esteem     Removing your emotional triggers     Using gratitude and humor     Playing their games better than they do - without becoming like them     Screening professionals to be sure they can help     Regaining control in family court     Breaking an addiction to an Emotional Predator     Re-balancing power in your favor     Adjusting beliefs that keep you trapped     Responding strategically, instead of reacting emotionally BUY THE BOOK: Amazon * Tattered Cover Book Store Add to Goodreads​​​

Meet the Author:

Steven Wolhandler, JD, MA, LPC is a psychotherapist, mediator, arbitrator, custody evaluator, national consultant and retired attorney. He has decades of experience dealing with, and learning from, difficult and manipulative people, and helping their victims with penetrating insight, effective solutions, warmth and humor. He lives in Colorado, consults with people internationally through www.creativeresolutions.org.

Connect with the author: Website​    Facebook


Guest Post:Knowing your emotional blind spots and triggers is essential for protecting yourself from abuse and manipulation. Knowing yourself is at the core of all defenses against Emotional Predators.  Because Emotional Predators operate by knowing you better than you know yourself, it’s essential to reverse that situation and know yourself better than they know you.  The better you know yourself, the more effectively you can implement the defensive tactics described in Protecting Yourself from Emotional Predators: Neutralize the Users, Abusers and Manipulators Hidden Among Us. Knowing yourself is your most important resource for protecting yourself, particularly knowing your emotional triggers, blind spots and values.  Your emotional reactions can be a blinder or a reliable guide, depending on how well you know yourself, particularly what triggers you and what you want and value.  The more dispassionate you are about yourself, the more accurately you’ll know yourself.  The more accurately you know yourself, the more clearly and quickly you can see an Emotional Predator. A particularly useful thing to notice about yourself is how your current inner states may differ from before you became involved with another person.  Are you more confused, angry, ashamed, depressed, guilty or frustrated?  Were you like that before this person entered your life?  Be honest with yourself (but not with a suspected Emotional Predator) about yourself.  Have the courage to learn about yourself, using whatever tools work best for you. An Emotional Predator will strive to know your weak places and attack you there.  Unless you know your emotional vulnerabilities at least as well as he does, you can’t know where you need to defend.  So know your weak places, strengthen them and divert attacks away from them and toward your strong places.  (Chapter 7 of Protecting Yourself from Emotional Predators looks at specific strategies for protecting yourself, including things like misleading an Emotional Predator to make your weak places appear strong and your strong places appear weak, to trick him into attacking where he can’t prevail.) Learning about your unexamined assumptions, beliefs and core values protects you in many ways.  It helps you recognize how you are undefended and how your habitual emotional reactions give an Emotional Predator ways to control you, and it lets you see Emotional Predators for what they are.  It also helps you resist provocations, respond strategically, manage information, recover calm, immunize yourself, and regain control (all things explained in detail in Part 2 of the book). Knowing yourself better clears your vision in two principal ways.  First it lets you see emotionally sensitive parts of yourself that are undefended and vulnerable to manipulation.  An Emotional Predator will manipulate you by provoking emotional reactions from you, so you need to know the emotionally reactive buttons within you.  Once you know them, you can start to conceal them.  Eventually you can change your stories about yourself and the world to remove your emotional reactivity entirely.  An Emotional Predator can’t push an emotional button that you’ve hidden or eliminated. Knowing yourself better also lets you see Emotional Predators for the manipulative abusers that they are.  Your unexamined assumptions and beliefs distort your perceptions, making you gullible and blind to their charming facades.  Knowing yourself limits the places they can hide among your distortions.  A visible Emotional Predator is a weakened Emotional Predator. So an essential line of defense is to uncover your own blind spots and emotional triggers.  We all have blind spots - aspects of ourselves that we don’t see.  Emotional Predators count on that.  You can begin to get a glimpse of your blind spots when you look for issues, beliefs or situations that are emotionally charged for you.  What are you passionate about, both as positive and as negative experiences?  What brings you anger?  Sadness?  Joy?  Despair?  Hope?  What do you pay attention to?  What do you ignore?  What do you avoid?  What do you believe is required of you before you can be worthy of being loved for who you are? To review, coming to know your core beliefs, values and assumptions, the stories you live by, specific things about your emotional history that leave you emotionally reactive and your habitual stress responses is vital for protecting yourself.  Better knowledge of self clears your vision for spotting dangerous people behind their charming and seductive facades.  Better knowledge of self helps you know what feeds you and what drains you, information they will use to manipulate you.  Better knowledge of self lets you replace emotional reactions with strategic responses. Please freely copy and distribute this post, but be sure to include that it was written by Steven Wolhandler, author of Protecting Yourself from Emotional Predators.  (It’s copyright, Steven Wolhandler, 2019) Thanks!        

BOOK TOUR SCHEDULE:

Sept 9 – A Mama's Corner of the World – book spotlight / giveaway
Sept 9 – Just Another Reader – book spotlight
Sept 11 – Rockin' Book Reviews – book spotlight / guest post / giveaway
Sept 12 – Locks, Hooks and Books – book spotlight / guest post / giveaway
Sept 13 – Books for Books – book spotlight
Sept 16 – Celticlady's Reviews – book spotlight / guest post / giveaway
Sept 16 - Phy Roselle – book spotlight / guest post / giveaway
Sept 17 – 100 Pages A Day – book spotlight
Sept 18 – Library of Clean Reads – book spotlight / author interview / giveaway
Sept 19 – Sefina Hawke's Books – book spotlight / giveaway
Sept 23 – JBronder Book Reviews – book spotlight / guest post / giveaway
Sept 24 – fundinmental – book spotlight / giveaway
Sept 25 – #redhead.with.book – book spotlight / giveaway
Sept 26 – Literary Flits – book spotlight / guest post / giveaway

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