Stephanie Dowrick is a psychotherapist and interfaith minister who co-founded publishing house The Women's Press.
She has written several personal development books including international bestseller Intimacy And Solitude, which was first published around 30 years ago.
The title has now been updated to reflect a post-covid experience of "...finding new closeness and self-trust in a distanced world".
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Dowrick tells Kim Hill that the book jumped out at her as the right reading for our Covid-19 times.
“The major thing I did was to recast the book in my own mind in order to write the long introduction and to say, with some emphasis and increasing compassion, why these topics; how we live inside ourselves, how with we live with one another, have come into a kind of new focus in this particular time.
“These are timeless issues, they apply across cultures, across every so-called difference we could possibly imagine, and yet they come into a poignant immediacy in particular times and this is one of them.”
She says that our wellbeing and happiness is dependent on how we are able to care for one another and we need to find a sense of community to thrive.
“That’s the wonderful lesson; in caring for others, we are caring for ourselves and vice versa. It’s absolute nonsense that we are individuals and we lose our freedom if we wear a mask, it’s a travesty of the truth.”
Dowrick says that individuals who refuse to wear masks or refute the science of Covid-19 have an insecurity and, by gaining a stronger sense of self, can examine their prejudices.
“We need to look at ourselves and say, does it make sense that I would rather not wear a mask and put others at risk… when we have a strong enough sense of self to interrogate some of our own prejudices, and we all have them, then we come into a much stronger sense not only of who we are, but who the so-called ‘other’ is.”
With the book being 30 years old, Dowrick has had several good and bad life experiences that have changed her perspective on what she wrote. There have also been advances in psychology in that time.
“We’ve become used to a very different psychological approach which is loosely called cognitive behavioural therapy – that is, change your thinking and you can change your life. I would question that, I think it’s really useful in some situations but not in all.”
