I wasn't sure I would even review this book, or what to say about this book, if I did try to review it -- but for what it's worth, I did like it (even though I don't consider myself a "prepper") and I was glad that I bought it.
The reason I'm not sure what to say about this book is that it, quite by accident, it "validated" a lot of my childhood suffering, from having grown up with a mentally ill pair of parents, and an extended local environment that did not suit me, or much of any other child, at all. That a book about poop hitting the proverbial fan would -- or even could, I suppose -- end up telling me (in a reading between the lines kind of way) that, yup, for sure, my childhood sucked considerably worse than even I had told myself it did, was not what I was expecting. But I read "self-help" books all of the time, and get a lot out of them; so, albeit accidentally, this book became one of those kinds of books.
I think the biggest single thing, the mentally-most-helpful-thing I took from this book (so far?) was the idea that full-on-and-total collapse isn't the only option available. It was helpful to me to hear someone else, who had been through way more than I had been through, that there is a wide spectrum of "partially collapsed, and partially sort of working, but almost never functioning as ideally intended" types of systems and places. In thinking in those terms, I realized I'd spent half a century in such places. And I've survived them -- with some psychological and physical scars, "gained" along the path. To show what I mean, about having seen my share of some "not good, but not the absolute worst that a situation could ever be" sorts of place: I currently live in a U.S. state that is, to put it mildly, historically known for having long periods of intense amounts of governmental corruption. When I was a kid, I was growing up in another U.S. state, but in a place where only low-income housing was available; with all sorts of problems we locals all had to put up with. So when I was reading page 183, and I saw the author saying, "Some people say that the SHTF is here already, but it is not a real collapse. There is a system still there, it is a crooked, corrupted, and completely wrong system, but it is there. I consider it a real collapse (SHTF) situation when (for whatever reason) the system actually collapsed, and trucks (with goods) have completely stopped moving". Which gives me pause, since hundreds of local houses and businesses are up for sale, with no one buying; and various stores and businesses closing, is becoming all too frequent, in the small rural town I live in. If the "overall system" is still functioning, outside of one's town, but trucks are coming with less and less frequency to your area, due to fewer businesses asking them to come to stock up the stores that are closing, how bad are things getting, locally? I'll have to consider that, I suppose, in light of this same author's comments about two frogs: one of which is (in theory) thrown into a pan of dangerously heated water (and because of that, the frog exits, in a hurry) and another frog is placed into a pan with water that is not as clearly dangerous, but, the water's slowly increasingly heat might become equally problematic, over a longer period. Quoting from page 72: "Most of us are frogs in a big bowl of water that is gradually heated to the boiling point and let me tell you, that water is getting pretty warm". I think for those already accustomed to being abused or neglected, pretty much from birth on, that's a really helpful idea to ponder, because we may be so used to bad situations that we "notice it" way less than others?
There were plenty of other chapters I liked, as food for thought, in various ways, but the chapters called "When you survived but you are dead inside" and "There was no real recovery" were the ones that most affected me, emotionally, in regards to my "not great" childhood. Those chapter's thoughts made me think back on other kids I once knew, decades ago, and how many of them ended up dealing with their problems by running towards things like chronic addictions to substances, or made other really bad and hurtful life choices. Or literally ended up dead, long before their statistical time, for one reason or another.
I think anyone who had a substantially-less-than-ideal childhood might gain something from this book, even if what is gained is the idea that it is okay to survive a childhood that some other kids did not survive (giving yourself permission to not have what some people might call "survivor's guilt".) It sucks to have to compare a person's childhood to a book about society completely breaking down, and chaos reigning in your life, but, sometimes, for some of us, that's what our early childhood's largely were: a serious breakdown of how things were supposed to be, or a deviation from what is supposed to be, under ideal circumstances, "normal". I certainly wasn't expecting a self-help kind of message, in a book like this, but that's what I ended up getting out of it. Sometimes it may be enough to just "survive" a given situation, but without putting the additional pressure on one's self to "be totally normal" or to "get past it, as if it had never happened," afterwards. The chapters I mentioned, as well as random comments throughout the book, very helpfully addressed the idea that it's both "normal" and "okay" to end up being different from other people, maybe even in significant ways, due to having been placed in bad situations that other's didn't not have to live through.
Some quotes from page 215 might begin to clarify what I mean: "Do you think that you can go through months of collapse and a whole bunch of life-threatening events and then come clean from all of that and have a normal life? You can't. It is not romantic like that at all." Hearing that was helpful to me, even though what I'd gone through was a lousy childhood, where I was ending up in a hospital, over and over, before Kindergarten, due to parental abuse and neglect; not due to a general social collapse.
As a person who writes, often, for my own self-help type of needs, decades later, page 216 also resonated strongly with me, when the author of this book said: "I slowly glue my broken parts together again, also writing this here today. Writing is my therapy and for you who read this it is what is called 'primary prevention' in psychology. That means exposure to real scenarios help to prepare you mentally for what can happen. It is a win-win situation. Just never forget your mind on the battlefield or one day you wake up alive but empty".
That helps. Weirdly, and wholly unexpectedly, but on several important levels: that helps.
Another example of how, if you've had a "toxic enough" childhood or younger years, this book might be good to read: pages 286 and 287 talk about some things I learned in The Projects, when I was growing up. It's validating to hear it said, in other words, in a book like this. Quoting the book: "If the level of violence rises around you, you want to still 'blend in'. Do not stick out as weak and not as extra tough. Maybe a bit more tough than average but that is enough". In the projects, as a young man, I realized I had no real chance, physically, against larger (and more numerous) other kids my age; so I "side-stepped" that problem, and used the brain I had, and I "fought with that" instead of with my fists. But even then, I quickly learned that all you're doing, by seeking a total domination of medium-level predators who are threats to you, is to become attractive to higher-level predators.
To see bits and pieces of my old, hard-won, self-talk or self-advice, originating from my early teen years, come back to me four decades later, in the form of a "SHTF" book, tells me a lot about my childhood that maybe I wasn't fully ready to accept, before a book like this, by an author like this, arrived in my mailbox? Hearing thoughts like the ones in this book, and comparing that man's good advice to my own survival goals, and life advice, as a young person, might help me to take a few more steps along my own personal "healing journey" -- if only by better seeing how truly unpleasant and life-changing those years were, for me.
After a childhood full of what Pete Walker's book on Complex PTSD might have called something like a "wide spectrum of abuse and neglect," I'm more ready than ever to change my expectations -- not necessarily "lowering them," just changing them -- and being okay with it, if, after a lifetime of struggling to survive, in ways that might be hard to explain to others, all I'm doing in my older years is having a halfway-normal life, and blending into society reasonably well, but not having much to show beyond that: maybe that's a huge victory, in itself? I never expected that to be what I took away, from this book; but since it's there, others "in my same boat" might also benefit.
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Reviews with images
Awesome book, read it 5 times already
Updated review, this book is awesome. I'm writing my own book and many ideas are the same. Facing reality for its harsh environment when all things become worst case scenario.
Top reviews from other countries
GamingIsFun
A real eye-opener and first hand account of what it's like when SHTF
Reviewed in Canada on December 30, 2019
Duncan Ellwood
Written in a nice easy style.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 1, 2019leics man
Essential information contained within these pages
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 21, 2019