Walking Through Hell: A Guide For Those Who Have Wounded Themselves And Lost Their Way addresses a specific audience: people who have screwed up their lives. Those of you wounded by others may find some consolation and help in these pages, but I have written Walking Through Hell for those whose wounds were self-inflicted. The man who by his infidelity lost the love of his wife; the drunk fired from her job; the embezzler sitting in a prison cell, shunned by family and friends; the father whose children despise him for having abandoned their mother twenty years earlier; all those lost, stumbling souls who have committed some great wrong, intentionally or unintentionally: You are the ones for whom I write.Walking Through Hell, then, is no ordinary self-help book, nor am I a professional self-help guru. I have no degrees in marketing, counseling, or psychology, I am not some recognized expert on depression or despair, I don't travel the country making inspirational speeches (though I hope to comfort and inspire you), I have never delivered my message on television or radio, and I don't have a million followers on Twitter. (You won't find me there at all.)So why the book?Because I am one of you.We are comrades, you and I, walking the same road through hell. The journey is different for each of us, because we are individuals who have suffered trials unique to our circumstances, but all of us share the realities of sadness and despair, regret and shame, hopelessness and isolation. We are the ones who carry our guilt like a cancer. We are the ones who know you don't have to die to go to hell.We are the walking dead, casualties whose sins have eaten away a part of our souls. For two years, I served in these ranks, shuffling along, a prisoner of shame. We in this penitential battalion stand apart from other transgressors for three reasons: we own what we have done, we feel deep regret for our misdeeds, and we realize we can never remove completely the brand of dishonor burned onto our psyche.How do we deal with such self-inflicted suffering? Can we find healing? Can we restore our hearts and souls to some kind of health? I invite you to walk with me and find out. In this exploration of pain and recovery, Durant draws on his own experiences, and those of friends, acquaintances, celebrities, and figures of history, all victims of their own failings and misdeeds. By these examples, Durant shows readers they are not alone, that many others have plummeted into the depths of despair and self-accusation, and then climbed out of that pit to start over and begin a new life. Here, too, are dozens of exercises to help you who have fallen get to your feet and find the right path. If you have harmed others and yourself, if you want to escape the prison cell of your past, and if you are looking for encouragement and help on your journey back from anguish, remorse, and failure, Walking Through Hell is a compass pointing you in the right direction.
