Title: A Pain in the Gut
Author: Joseph C. Way
Publisher: Word Wright International
ISBN: 0-9700615-1-X
Genre: Self-Help
Pages: 89
Reviewed by: Allison Walker
Hollywood Book Reviews
A Pain the Gut is about the ways everyone, universally, engages in addictive and unhealthy behaviors; not about colonoscopies, as you might have been thinking. Author Joseph C. Way maintains we all sometimes have a pain in our gut which we are seeking to ease. We may choose to ease this gut feeling with alcoholism, or seeing the negative in every situation, or being inflexible in our routines. The presence or absence of this gut feeling drives our self-destructive or self-affirming behaviors. In his book, A Pain in the Gut, Joseph C. Way shares his observations and experience earned over more than forty years as a chaplain, pastor, counselor and therapist specializing in drug and alcohol treatment.
One of the greatest compliments he can receive as a counselor, Way writes, is when a patient assumes he himself is a recovering addict because “You can’t know what it’s like to be an abuser, as you obviously do, unless you are one.” While he never personally struggled with drug or alcohol abuse, Way realized that he is addicted to other things in his life and that all people, in one way or another, are abusers or addicts of something. In his own words, Way explains, “I now believe I understood them because I had some understanding of myself and the human condition. I empathized with their struggle because it is also my struggle and the struggle of every person.”
Readers will appreciate even though he’s writing a self-help book about a methodology he developed over the course of his professional career, Way never says, “Read My Book And Be Cured!” His overall tone is much more, read my book and learn something about yourself. It’s a refreshing break from the overwritten, psychologist-salesman type self-help book. In fact, Way tells all. He holds nothing back. There’s no secret key, no pay wall, to his help. The model Way creates is an interesting and universal diagram. He reviews it’s use in something as banal as deciding what type of car to buy, to something as complex as why we do things we know will hurt us. Its simplicity is brilliant; universality unites us all.
When it comes to better understanding people suffering from addiction, Way’s book does more to create empathy than any childhood tear-jerker story. Reading A Pain in the Gut, you come to understand the ways in your own life you sought to ease that pain in your gut, how you allowed yourself to become addicted to unhealthy habits, why you tried to find materialistic comforts to ease emotional discomfort. As Way says and readers will come to understand, “Their struggle was my struggle.”
If you’re wondering, Way never explicitly explains why he refers to the cause of addictive and abusive behaviors as a “pain in the gut.” He says we have a gut feeling. Maybe he means that stomach dropping or stomach clenching feeling a person gets when you anticipate something unpleasant happening. But maybe he means anxiety-induced diarrhea. It’s a little unclear. If you were astute enough to pick up his book, by the final chapter it will make sense, anyway. After all, we’re all just acting out according to the presence or absence of a pain in our gut.