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Recommended Reading

Maybe you should talk to someone

Lori Gottlieb

Meet Lori Gottlieb, an insightful and compassionate therapist whose clients present with all kinds of problems. There’s the struggling new parents; the older woman who feels she has nothing to live for; the self-destructive young alcoholic; and the terminally ill 35-year-old newlywed. And there’s John, a narcissistic television producer, who frankly just seems to be a bit of a jerk. Over the course of a year, they all make progress. But Gottlieb is not just a therapist ― she’s also a patient who's on a journey of her own. Interspersed with the stories of her clients are her own therapy sessions, as Gottlieb goes in search of the hidden roots of a devastating and life-changing event.

Personal, revealing, funny, and wise, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone opens a rare window onto a world that is most often bound by secrecy, offering an illuminating tour of a profoundly private process.

When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Pema Chodron

There is a fundamental opportunity for happiness right within our reach, yet we usually miss it—ironically while we are caught up in attempts to escape pain and suffering. Drawn from traditional Buddhist wisdom, Pema Chödrön's radical and compassionate advice for what to do when things fall apart in our lives goes against the grain of our usual habits and expectations. There is only one approach to suffering that is of lasting benefit, Pema teaches, and that approach involves moving toward painful situations with friendliness and curiosity, relaxing into the essential groundlessness of our entire situation. It is there, in the midst of chaos, that we can discover the truth and love that are indestructible. 

Yoga For Mental Health

Heather Mason & Kelly Birch

This book is an industry reference guide for how and why yoga therapy can be used as an adjunct treatment in mental health. The first two chapters detail yoga's history as a mental health intervention and the underlying physiological mechanisms, while following chapters look in depth at different mental health conditions from both a yoga and clinical perspective exploring the use of yoga in therapeutic practice. Not only will the book serve as a reference, but also a bridge between yoga therapy and healthcare, helping to add to the process of growing integration.

Cracked

James Davies

One in four people in the UK and US will develop mental health challenges in any given year. That’s what psychiatry tells us. But many – even most – will not actually be mentally ill. Thanks to pseudo-science and corporate greed, psychiatry is letting us down. 

Why is psychiatry such big business? Why are so many psychiatric drugs prescribed – 47 million antidepressant prescriptions in the UK alone each year – and why, without solid scientific justification, has the number of mental disorders risen from 106 in 1952 to 374 today? 

The everyday sufferings and setbacks of life are now ‘medicalised’ into illnesses that require treatment – usually with highly profitable drugs. Psychological therapist James Davies uses his insider knowledge to illustrate for a general readership how psychiatry has put riches and medical status above patients’ well-being.

The charge sheet is damning: negative drug trials routinely buried; antidepressants that work no better than placebos; research regularly manipulated to produce positive results; doctors, seduced by huge pharmaceutical rewards, creating more disorders and prescribing more pills; and ethical, scientific and treatment flaws unscrupulously concealed by mass-marketing.  Cracked reveals for the first time the true human cost of an industry that, in the name of helping others, has actually been helping itself.

The Road Less Travelled

M. Scott Peck

Confronting and solving problems is a painful process which most of us attempt to avoid. Avoiding resolution results in greater pain and an inability to grow both mentally and spiritually. Drawing heavily on his own professional experience, Dr M. Scott Peck, a psychiatrist, suggests ways in which facing our difficulties - and suffering through the changes - can enable us to reach a higher level of self-understanding. He discusses the nature of loving relationships: how to distinguish dependency from love; how to become one's own person and how to be a more sensitive parent.This is a book that can show you how to embrace reality and yet achieve serenity and a richer existence. Hugely influential, it has now sold over ten million copies - and has changed many people's lives round the globe. It may change yours.

Mindsight - Transform Your Brain with the New Science of Kindness

Daniel Siegel

Daniel Siegel coined the term 'mindsight' to describe the innovative integration of brain science with the practice of psychotherapy.

Using interactive examples and case histories from his clinical practice, Dr Siegel shows how mindsight can be applied to alleviate a range of psychological and interpersonal problems. With warmth and humour, he shows us how to observe the working of our minds, allowing us to understand why we think, feel, and act the way we do, and how, by following the proper steps, we can literally change the wiring and architecture of our brains.

The Body Keeps the Score

Bessel Van de Kolk

What causes people to continually relive what they most want to forget, and what treatments could help restore them to a life with purpose and joy? Here, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk offers a new paradigm for effectively treating traumatic stress.  Neither talking nor drug therapies have proven entirely satisfactory. With stories of his own work and those of specialists around the globe, The Body Keeps the Score sheds new light on the routes away from trauma - which lie in the regulation and syncing of body and mind, using sport, drama, yoga, mindfulness, meditation and other routes to equilibrium.

The Emotionally Absent Mother

Jasmin Lee Cori

Was your mother too busy, too tired, or too checked-out emotionally to provide you with the nurturing you needed as a child? Men and women who were undermothered as children often struggle with intimate relationships, in part because of their unmet need for maternal care. "The Emotionally Absent Mother" will help you understand what was missing from your childhood, how this relates to your mother s own history, and how you can fill the mother gap by: Examining the past with compassion for yourself and your mother - Finding the child inside of you and learning to mother yourself - Opening to the archetype of the Good Mother - Allowing friends and loved ones to provide support, guidance, and other elements of good mothering that you missed

Home Coming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child

John Bradshaw

In Homecoming John Bradshaw one of the world's leading figures in the field of psychology and recovery, explains his revolutionary techniques to reveal the inner child. He believes that the wounds we receive during childhood and adolescence can continue to contaminate our adult lives. His methods explained clearly in this book, help people to reach back to the child inside and heal those wounds.Homecoming includes unique questionnaires which allow readers to work through John Bradshaw's world-famous inner child course themselves. There are specifically designed exercises that allow you to reclaim and nurture your inner child, so that you as an adult can grow and move on

Why People Don't Heal & how they Can

Caroline Myss

For more than fifteen years, Caroline Myss has studied why some people heal, while others do not. In her previous book, Anatomy of the Spirit, Dr. Myss illuminated the hidden interactions of belief and body, soul and cell to show how, as she inimitably puts it, "your biography becomes your biology." In this new book, she builds on her earlier teachings of the seven different energy centers of the body to provide a vital self-healing program for physical and spiritual disorders. With her characteristic no-nonsense style and high-voltage storytelling, she exposes and explodes the five myths about healing, explains the cultural and individual contexts in which people become physically and spiritually ill and invested in "woundology," and teaches new methods of working with the challenges that the seven energy centers embody.

First & Last Freedom

Jiddu Krishnamurti

A leading spiritual teacher of our century cuts away symbols and false associations in the search for pure truth and perfect freedom. The freedom of which Krishnamurti writes is the breaking of the debilitating, consuming concern with the self. Once people find this first freedom, they are liberated from the unfulfilling and destructive obsessions of society. In 'The First and Last Freedom', the discussion ranges wide – on suffering, on fear, on gossip, on sex, among other topics – but continually returns to this core concept of freedom. Here Krishnamurti's quest becomes the reader's, an undertaking of tremendous significance.

The Velvet Rage

Alan Downs

The gay male world today is characterised by seductive beauty, artful creativity, flamboyant sexuality, and, encouragingly, unprecedented acceptability in society. Yet despite the progress of the recent past, gay men still find themselves asking, "Are we really better off?" The inevitable by product of growing up gay in a straight world continues to be the internalization of shame, a shame gay men may strive to obscure with a fade of beauty, creativity, or material success. Drawing on contemporary psychological research, the author's own journey to be free of anger and of shame, as well as the stories of many of his friends and clients, The Velvet Rage outlines the three distinct stages to emotional well-being for gay men. Offering profoundly beneficial strategies to stop the insidious cycle of avoidance and self-defeating behaviour  The Velvet Rage is an empowering book that will influence the public discourse on gay culture, and positively change the lives of gay men who read it

The Power of Now

Eckhart Tolle

To make the journey into The Power of Now we will need to leave our analytical mind and its false created self, the ego, behind. Although the journey is challenging, Eckhart Tolle offers simple language and a question and answer format to guide us.Surrender to the present moment, where problems do not exist. It is here we find our joy, are able to embrace our true selves and discover that we are already complete and perfect. If we are able to be fully present and take each step in the Now we will be opening ourselves to the transforming experience of THE POWER OF NOW. It's a book to be revisited again and again.An international bestselling phenomenon, this book has inspired a generation and is as popular today as it was a decade ago when first published.

Surviving Infidelity

Rona B. Subotnik

Nothing your marriage has sustained in the past compares to the pain of discovering that your spouse has been unfaithful. The betrayal, rage, sadness, and jealousy is unlike anything you've experienced before. And yet it is possible to move forward, decide what to do in your marriage, and most important, heal .For more than 10 years, Surviving Infidelity has been offering sage advice and compassionate, non-judgemental analysis. Based on the private practices of licensed marriage and family therapist Rona B. Subotnik and clinical psychologist Gloria G. Harris, Ph.D., this third edition has been completely updated and gives you strategies to understanding the different kinds of affairs and why they happen, cope with your emotions from grief to rage, repair the marriage if you choose to and learn what it takes to be a survivor

The Body Remembers

Babette Rothschild

It is now thought that people who have been traumatised hold an implicit memory of traumatic events in their brains and bodies. That memory is often expressed in the symptomatology of posttraumatic stress disorder — nightmares, flashbacks, startle responses, and dissociative behaviours. In essence, the body of the traumatised individual refuses to be ignored. While reducing the chasm between scientific theory and clinical practice and bridging the gap between talk therapy and body therapy, Rothschild presents principles and non-touch techniques for giving the body its due. With an eye to its relevance for clinicians, she consolidates current knowledge about the psychobiology of the stress response both in normally challenging situations and during extreme and prolonged trauma. 

Waking the Tiger

Peter Levine

Waking the Tiger offers a new and hopeful vision of trauma. It views the human animal as a unique being, endowed with an instinctual capacity. It asks and answers an intriguing question: why are animals in the wild, though threatened routinely, rarely traumatised? By understanding the dynamics that make wild animals virtually immune to traumatic symptoms, the mystery of human trauma is revealed. Waking the Tiger normalises the symptoms of trauma and the steps needed to heal them. People are often traumatised by seemingly ordinary experiences. The reader is taken on a guided tour of the subtle, yet powerful impulses that govern our responses to overwhelming life events. To do this, it employs a series of exercises that help us focus on bodily sensations. Through heightened awareness of these sensations trauma can be healed.

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