The right to pursue happiness is the most personal of all of our inalienable rights. Unfortunately, many people experience difficulty in this pursuit due to flawed psychological life-programming they received during their formative years. This programming often came from well-meaning parents or parent substitutes. People who receive this type of programming frequently develop characteristics which prevent them from either pursuing or attaining consistent happiness in their lives. However, a simple strategy to remedy this situation is available for the millions of adults—including senior citizens—who wish to enjoy greater or more sustained happiness.

In It’s Never Too Late to Be Happy: Reparenting Yourself for Happiness (Quill Driver Books, $12.95), Muriel James, coauthor of the 4-million-copy best-seller Born to Win, presents a clear, layman-friendly self-reparenting program through which the reader can actually create a new internal parent—one which is fully functional, supporting, encouraging, and loving—to replace the old parent figure, whose negative psychological messages consistently thwart one’s hopes for happiness. Interestingly, the “parent figures” that James identifies as the molders of a child’s personality include not only one’s real parents (or stepparents, foster parents, grandparents), but also those influential adults outside of one’s family who also affect personality development, both in childhood and in later years, such as teachers, bosses, mentors, and coaches.

In the field of psychology, self-reparenting is recognized as a highly effective strategy for pursuing  happiness. Thousands of people worldwide have used it successfully to discover what went wrong in childhood and throughout their lives that restricted their freedom to succeed and be happy to move from discontenment to happiness—in effect reparenting themselves for a fuller, happier life.

Muriel James, marriage counselor, therapist, international lecturer, consultant in human communications, and pioneer in Transactional Analysis, has an impressive track record in assisting her clients to achieve greater degrees of happiness and success. Her 19 books, translated into 26 languages, have touched the lives of millions.

It’s Never Too Late to Be Happy presents coherent, straightforward insights into how personality is developed during a person’s early years, how parents use and misuse the parenting skills that influence personality, how children react to negative or inconsistent messages, and many other issues that work together to prohibit both satisfaction and happiness in later life. Combined with chapter by chapter self-analysis exercises, these insights will lead any reader through the reparenting process which will invariably lead to greatly increased happiness—at any age.

It’s Never Too Late to Be Happy: Reparenting Yourself for Happiness by Muriel James (Quill Driver Books, $12.95, ISBN 1-884956-26-2), is available at local bookstores, from online bookstores, or from the publisher at (800) 497-4909.