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Books for Understanding & Healing Trauma
The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma written by Bessel van der Kolk, M.D. is an in-depth book covering research, etiology, diagnosis and treatment. A great book to read if you want to better understand how trauma effects the body and brain and evidence based treatment suggestions.
Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr. van der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal—and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.
Self-Therapy: A Step-By-Step Guide to Creating Wholeness and Healing Your Inner Child Using IFS is an intense self guided book to working with childhood or adult wounds and protective parts. I typically assign this read to client and process more in depth during individual sessions.
Understand your psyche in a clear and comprehensive way, and resolve deep-seated emotional issues. Self-Therapy makes the power of a cutting-edge psychotherapy approach accessible to everyone. Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS) has been spreading rapidly across the country in the past decade. It is incredibly effective on a wide variety of life issues, such as self-esteem, procrastination, depression, and relationship issues. IFS is also user-friendly; it helps you to comprehend the complexity of your psyche. Dr. Earley shows how IFS is a complete method for psychological healing that you can use on your own.Self-Therapy is also helpful for therapists because it presents the IFS model in such detail that it is a manual for the method.
This workbook is a companion to Self Therapy by Jay Earley. It is a clear and concise description of the steps in the IFS process designed for people using IFS to do personal work on themselves or professionals introducing the material to their clients. It provides written exercises that give readers a chance to process their experience and track their internal work. It includes sample answers that clarify how to do the exercises, and illustrations that provide a visual understanding the material.
Books when you need inspiration
The Path Made Clear: Discovering Your Life's Direction and Purpose by Oprah Winfrey is a short read but packs a powerful motivating punch! In her book, The Path Made Clear, Oprah shares what she sees as a guide for activating your deepest vision of yourself, offering the framework for creating not just a life of success, but one of significance. The book’s ten chapters are organised to help you recognize the important milestones along the road to self-discovery, laying out what you really need in order to achieve personal contentment, and what life’s detours are there to teach us.
Oprah opens each chapter by sharing her own key lessons and the personal stories that helped set the course for her best life. She then brings together wisdom and insights from luminaries in a wide array of fields, inspiring readers to consider what they’re meant to do in the world and how to pursue it with passion and focus. Renowned figures such as Ellen DeGeneres, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Brené Brown, Elizabeth Gilbert, Eckhart Tolle and Jay-Z share the greatest lessons from their own journeys toward a life filled with purpose.
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl is a classic and focuses on identifying and creating meaning in order to live a passionate life. This seminal book, which has been called “one of the outstanding contributions to psychological thought” by Carl Rogers and “one of the great books of our time” by Harold Kushner, has been translated into more than fifty languages and sold over sixteen million copies. “An enduring work of survival literature,” according to the New York Times, Viktor Frankl’s riveting account of his time in the Nazi concentration camps, and his insightful exploration of the human will to find meaning in spite of the worst adversity, has offered solace and guidance to generations of readers since it was first published in 1946. At the heart of Frankl’s theory of logotherapy (from the Greek word for “meaning”) is a conviction that the primary human drive is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but rather the discovery and pursuit of what the individual finds meaningful. Today, as new generations face new challenges and an ever more complex and uncertain world, Frankl’s classic work continues to inspire us all to find significance in the very act of living, in spite of all obstacles.
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch is a heart felt message from a man dying of cancer; his message is about overcoming obstacles, living out your dreams, and living life to the fullest. When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer. But the lecture he gave - "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" - wasn't about dying. It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have...and you may find one day that you have less than you think"). It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe. It was about living.
Books on Relationships including Parent-Child, Marriage, and Dating
Unhappy Teenagers by William Glasser (creator of choice therapy) gives you a window into real therapy sessions between teens and their parents. He explains the seven deadly habits parents engage in and how to move closer to your teen. A great read for clinicians and parents. During his decades-long career as a therapist, Dr. William Glasser has often counseled parents and teenagers, healing shattered families and changing lives with his advice. Now, in his first book on the lessons he has learned, he asks parents to reject the "common sense" that tells them to "lay down the law" by grounding teens, or to try to coerce them into changing their behavior. These strategies have never worked, asserts Dr. Glasser, and never will. Instead he offers a different approach based upon Choice Theory.
Glasser spells out the seven deadly habits parents practice, and then shows them how to accomplish goals by changing their own behavior. Most important, however, in Unhappy Teenagers, Dr. Glasser provides a groundbreaking method that all parents can use with confidence and love to keep a strong relationship with their child.
In The Mastery of Love, don Miguel Ruiz illuminates the fear-based beliefs and assumptions that undermine love and lead to suffering and drama in our relationships. Using insightful stories to bring his message to life, Ruiz shows us how to heal our emotional wounds, recover the freedom and joy that are our birthright, and restore the spirit of playfulness that is vital to loving relationships.
• Why "domestication" and the "image of perfection" lead to self-rejection
• The war of control that slowly destroys most relationships
• Why we hunt for love in others, and how to capture the love inside us
• How to finally accept and forgive ourselves and others
At once practical, playful, and spiritually sound, this book is about creating a new love story in your life. Drawing from Christian, Buddhist, Sufi and other spiritual traditions, If the Buddha Dated shows how to find a partner without losing yourself. Kasl, a practicing psychotherapist, workshop leader, and Reiki healer for thirty years, offers practical wisdom on using the path to love as a means of awakening.
If the Buddha Dated teaches that when you stay loyal to your spiritual journey, you will bring curiosity, fascination, and a light heart to the dating process.
Falling in love is easy. Staying in love—that’s the challenge. How can you keep your relationship fresh and growing amid the demands, conflicts, and just plain boredom of everyday life?
In the #1 New York Times international bestseller The 5 Love Languages, you’ll discover the secret that has transformed millions of relationships worldwide. Whether your relationship is flourishing or failing, Dr. Gary Chapman’s proven approach to showing and receiving love will help you experience deeper and richer levels of intimacy with your partner—starting today.
The 5 Love Languages is as practical as it is insightful. Updated to reflect the complexities of relationships today, this new edition reveals intrinsic truths and applies relevant, actionable wisdom in ways that work.
Includes the Couple's Personal Profile assessment so you can discover your love language and that of your loved one.
In this revolutionary book, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Amir Levine and Rachel Heller scientifically explain why why some people seem to navigate relationships effortlessly, while others struggle.
Discover how an understanding of adult attachment—the most advanced relationship science in existence today—can help us find and sustain love. Pioneered by psychologist John Bowlby in the 1950s, the field of attachment posits that each of us behaves in relationships in one of three distinct ways:
• Anxious people are often preoccupied with their relationships and tend to worry about their partner's ability to love them back
• Avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness.
• Secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving.
Attached guides readers in determining what attachment style they and their mate (or potential mate) follow, offering a road map for building stronger, more fulfilling connections with the people they love.
The message of Hold Me Tight is simple: Forget about learning how to argue better, analyzing your early childhood, making grand romantic gestures, or experimenting with new sexual positions. Instead, get to the emotional underpinnings of your relationship by recognizing that you are emotionally attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing, and protection. Dr. Johnson teaches that the way to enhance or save a relationship is to be open, attuned, and responsive to each other and to reestablish emotional connection. With this in mind, she focuses on key moments in a relationship and uses them as touch points for seven healing conversations, including:
Recognizing the Demon Dialogues
Finding the Raw Spots
Revisiting a Rocky Moment
Forgiving Injuries
Keeping Your Love Alive
These conversations give you insight into the defining moments in your relationship and guide you in reshaping these moments to create a secure and lasting bond.
Books Written by Women for Women
Within every woman there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. She is the Wild Woman, who represents the instinctual nature of women. But she is an endangered species. For though the gifts of wildish nature belong to us at birth, society’s attempt to “civilize” us into rigid roles has muffled the deep, life-giving messages of our own souls.
In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés unfolds rich intercultural myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories, many from her own traditions, in order to help women reconnect with the fierce, healthy, visionary attributes of this instinctual nature. Through the stories and commentaries in this remarkable book, we retrieve, examine, love, and understand the Wild Woman, and hold her against our deep psyches as one who is both magic and medicine.
Dr. Estés has created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, it is a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.
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