Battling to overcome the emotionally devastating challenge of shyness all her life, author Helen Rivas-Rose, in her memoir Brave: A Memoir of Overcoming Shyness (Periwinkle Publishing; ISBN: 978-0-9827433-0-0) shows how lack of love and understanding in her childhood left her with invisible, yet socially damning, scars that she has only been able to overcome after years of counseling and therapy. Few who have not experienced the paralyzing fear of having to cope with social situations without the necessary skills to do so could possibly in the past have easily related to such situations prior to the publication of Brave. However, in this groundbreaking memoir Rivas-Rose shows at first-hand what such an experience is like.
As Rivas-Rose writes in her prologue to Brave, “For decades, this trait [shyness] skewed my decisions about every single significant choice I made—about my work, where I lived, whom I married and even how I raised my children. That demoralizing force cheated me of what could have been a more mature, productive and happy life. If only I’d sought professional help earlier!”
Brave shows how it doesn’t matter whether you cross continents (Rivas-Rose spent years abroad in Spain and Portugal), are able to develop a whole range of skills of which most people are proud (Rivas-Rose’s knowledge of the Spanish language, for example, is phenomenal), are in loving relationships with those around you (the author’s involvement with her partner and children became marked by caring over the years), and are a qualified professional (Rivas-Rose was a qualified educator), unless you have come to terms with yourself and your being in this world, you can be so socially limited by shyness that, without appropriate counseling and guidance and a willingness to work exceptionally hard on overcoming your own limitations, you will not be able to level the barriers that you have erected around yourself, so that you can fulfill your true role in this world. That the author has been able to do so is largely due to her ultimate realization that she was able to take on the onerous task of maturing at a later stage than most, overcoming the scars left by numerous encounters with others that ended unhappily due to her inability to trust herself sufficiently to express her real needs and desires.
Brave is recommended for anyone who has ever considered undergoing Jungian analysis for socially debilitating illness, as it is through such a means that Rivas-Rose was able to learn how to apply compassion-focused therapy to her own life, in such a way that she was able to learn how to become kind and gentle to herself as no one else, not even her parents, had ever before been. The author currently leads a fulfilling and fruitful life partly in her Kennebunk, Maine home and partly in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where her linguistic skills come in handy not only in enabling her to speak the native language, but also in her writing career. Her ability to express herself creatively in both singing and writing have allowed her to flourish during the second half of her life in ways in which she never imagined as a shy child, teenager and young adult. If you, or a family member or friend, are afflicted by shyness, be kind to yourself or your meaningful other, and acquire a copy of Brave—it might be the bravest step that you take all year!
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