A short, inspirational memoir about unleashing life in the face of death, by the co-author of the influential New York Times bestseller The Tools.
At the peak of his career, Barry Michels was a psychotherapist who treated Hollywood’s power elite—studio heads, power brokers, actors, writers, directors. He was so revered and sought-after, so essential to the creative output of his patients, that he became the subject of a 2011 New Yorker profile, with the likes of Judd Apatow, Will Ferrell, Miranda July, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jimmy Fallon, among others going on the record to talk about Barry’s unique, no-holds-barred therapeutic approach. Along with his mentor, Phil Stutz (the subject of Jonah Hill’s documentary, Stutz), Barry went on to write about their transformative method in The Tools, a buzzy New York Times bestseller (“The motivation book that everyone in Hollywood is obsessed with.”—Vanity Fair). Barry was a driven, Type A personality who loved his family and found his work tremendously rewarding—and yet when he wasn’t working, he was tormented by the dark, suicidal thoughts that had stalked him since childhood. His response was to push harder, throw himself further into his practice, and bury the demons.
And then, he was blind-sided. A neurologist matter-of-factly informed him that the smattering of physical and neurological symptoms revealed a diagnosis of Lewy Body Dementia, a degenerative disease that would, in a matter of years, inexorably erode his physical and intellectual abilities and result in his death. The same illness that had taken his father’s life would take his own. At first, Barry was plunged into an abyss of despair. He withdrew from his family, finding respite only in his practice and on long, defiant, arduous hikes. Before long, he was compelled, as if from a force outside himself, to tell people of his diagnosis—patients, friends, his mentor Stutz—and somehow in this process of activating his community for the first time on his own behalf, Barry was transformed. He found relief, inspiration, even joy. His creativity was unleashed. His capacity to love was unfettered. He became a connoisseur of the sublime. And most surprising of all, this lifelong atheist embraced the divine.
Life Abounding is the story of Barry’s spiritual, emotional, and creative transformation. It offers dispatches from the edge of the abyss that those of us in the middle of the journey of life would do well to heed.
