Tales of a Boundary Ninja

I am presently reading a really good book on our brains and how they work. I’m still reading it, but already know it’s worth recommending. The book is The User’s Guide to the Human Mind: Why Our Brains Make Us Unhappy, Anxious, and Neurotic and What We Can Do about It. The author, Shawn T. Smith, Psy.D.,  is a psychologist whose blog, Ironshrink,  I have followed for a while. This is his first book and wow, did he hit the ground running. The book addresses the basic premise that our brains have evolved not to make us happy, but to make sure we survive. But we now live in a different environment than that in which our brains evolved and so have life and death reactions to situations that aren’t. I wish I had been able to read this book awhile back. The author lays out , in a very clear and concise manner, why we think and react the way we do and how we can learn to step back from our feelings and be more deliberate in how we act. How we can learn to live with our brains, instead of fighting them.

This is a book written for laymen and very clearly so. It also contains a lot of simple, easy to implement, mindfulness exercises to teach you how to take control of your brain and your feelings so that you can choose how to react based on your values. For anyone struggling to heal from disorganized attachment and all the trust struggles that can occur based on their history of abuse, this book is a treasure. It provides a lot of insight into why we behave as we do, normalizes that behavior and offers solutions for coping with our maladaptive beliefs.