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Posts Tagged ‘psychotherapy books’

Existential Freefall – Part II

April 22, 2015 60 comments

This is the second part of a two part series, for part I, see Existential Freefall – Part I

So in my last post, I explained the background and issues I was taking into my session last Friday (and then evidently, left people hanging off a cliff. 😀 ). So here’s the rest of the story. Continue Reading

(Belated) Happy New Year!

January 2, 2015 15 comments

Greetings Gentle Readers,

I want to wish everyone a Happy New Year and hope that the coming year is filled with peace, healing and self-discovery! I am presently on vacation and will have no internet access from January 4th – January 14th. I wanted to post a quick update. My husband is doing really well, the ablation seems to have really helped regulate his heart. We literally went to his cardiologist on the way out of town, who cleared him to go on vacation. I am very grateful that he is out of danger. Continue Reading

Book Review: How We Heal and Grow

October 27, 2014 18 comments

I have been following Dr. Jeffery Smith’s blog, Moments of Change for some time now and was very honored when he asked to send me a pre-publication copy of his new book, How We Heal and Grow: The Power of Facing Your Feelings for review. I have long been a fan of his lucid, clear writing and his gift for so clearly explaining the often mysterious and elusive interplay of therapy. This book has proved to be no exception to that rule.

If you read only one book about healing this year, or even this decade, let it be How We Heal and Grow. The book is well written and easy to read, with clear prose and carefully delineated arguments. Continue Reading

Fantastic Book on Your Brain and How to Get Along with it.

August 20, 2012 1 comment

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.

Helpful Books

October 7, 2011 14 comments

I am a compulsive reader, always have been. So if a problem rears it’s head, my first reaction is “is there a book about this?” Part of it, to be honest, was an attempt to stay in my left brain and intellectualize away from those messy, confusing feelings. I really struggled with the fact that I couldn’t get through the healing process just by understanding it. The Boundary Ninja often said that if it was just about knowing the facts, that when a client came through the door, he would be able to just hand them a book “How to Heal” and say, have a nice life. 🙂 I often found that to be incredibly frustrating. Later, as I came to understand that the real healing in therapy wasn’t about what you knew, but about what you experienced with your therapist, I kept reading to keep my left brain occupied and out of the way (not to mention the fact that I just became fascinated about the brain, human development and psychotherapy). But, as the Boundary Ninja and I once discussed, it wasn’t just about distraction. My ability to understand the process and the necessity of experiencing the feelings helped me to find the courage to actually feel.

Below is a short list of books I found especially helpful along the way, with a short description of why. As for General Theory of  Love,  I’ve pushed this book so hard I really should consider contacting the publisher and asking for a commission. Big Grin
Continue Reading