The Only Way Through It

About the Book

Do you have unhealthy attachments?  Do you get stuck in dead-end relationships?  Do you use substances, whether food, drugs, alcohol, or something else, to escape from what is real?  Perhaps you have other behaviors that consistently undermine you.  Most people do.

All of these attachments have as at least one of their functions that they help us convince ourselves that we are the people we think we ought to be, rather than the people we really are.

In this book Samantha Sayers shows us how she reoriented her life so as to shed her many unhealthy attachments, and become her own true self.  And she shows us how the path she designed for herself can point the way for others who are seriously interested in finding The Only Way Through It: discovering who they really are, and, perhaps more importantly, who they want to become.

Once sick, miserable, and on the brink of death, in the late 1980’s Sayers turned her life around.  In this book, she illustrates the ten phases of this process with poignant and humorous examples from her own experience, and concrete directions for anyone who wants to try this life experiment.  

She illustrates her own unfolding transformation, beginning with her acknowledgment of her many human frailties, her willingness to be open to new possibilities, and her reorientation in the direction of the unfamiliar—in the direction of what she did not want to know, good and bad.  The middle phase of this process of change, of growing up, entailed taking a good hard look at herself as she really was, obtaining from people she trusted a series of reality checks on what she found, and a concerted effort to face down her own internal shadows.  Finally, she launched her new self into action by righting old wrongs, by paying close attention to doing the right thing consistently, and by staying open into unfamiliar possibilities.

Each of the chapters in this book describes one of these phases in detail, enriched with many examples of her own experiences and those of people she has encountered along the way.  The Only Way Through It can help anyone reorient in the way this author has.

About the Author

Samantha Sayers, a biologist and painter, had a near-death experience which she traces to her blind attachment to an image of who she thought she should be, rather than who she actually was. She then turned her life around by constructing a new path, by going through a process of becoming honest about her attachments and her true self. She shows that The Only Way Through It is, in fact, through it.