Since 2001 I’ve been working in the field of mental health and I am passionate about finding new and better ways of helping my clients – to understand themselves, to find the energy and power within themselves to keep going and make positive changes, and to reduce their suffering and build a life worth living. I’ve often found that when I can ground the skills I’m teaching or the strategies I’m using with my client to science, I get more buy-in and follow-through from people.
When you have difficulties managing your emotions, it can feel like you’re losing control of your whole life. Anger, hurt, grief, worry, and other intense feelings can be overwhelming, and how you react to these emotions can impact your ability to maintain relationships, succeed at work, or even think straight! If you find it difficult to understand, express, and process intense emotions—and most of us do—this book is for you.
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The memoir of world-renowned psychologist Marsha Linehan, who happens to be someone I greatly admire for creating the treatment that I use: Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). This book relays Linehan’s struggles as a teen and adult with her own mental health condition, including self-harming behaviors and thoughts of suicide, and how her experience contributed to her creation of a therapy that has likely saved millions of lives.
This is the true story of a neuroanatomist’s own stroke at the age of 37. Reading this book helped me to understand the power of the brain and neuroplasticity (the idea that we can change our own brains). Bolte Taylor’s story demonstrates the power of mindfulness to help us change our mind for the better, whether it’s a stroke we’re dealing with, or a mental health problem such as depression or anxiety.
This is a book that nicely combines self-help and concrete strategies (the why) with science (the how) in a wonderfully understandable and approachable way. Hanson paves the way for people to not only learn how to make changes to improve their emotional wellness, but to understand how the strategies they’re learning actually help.
Not only does this book help trauma survivors understand their experience (therefore also validating their experience of their trauma symptoms), but it provides hope to survivors of trauma through discussion of different treatments to help them move toward healing. For clinicians like myself working with survivors of trauma, Van Der Kolk’s work helps us understand the rationale for the strategies we’re teaching our clients, helping us be better informed in order to help our clients recover.
Filled with moving stories of real people, this is a book that I’ve often recommended to my clients when their physical health is compromised. This book examines the mind-body connection, helping people recognize what their body is trying to tell them through chronic illness, and often resulting in positive change.
5,888 authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them. Browse their picks for the best books about the brain, PTSD, and love.
We think you will like Revolutionary Ride, The War of Art, and Nonviolent Communication if you like this list.
From Aryanne's list on workplace bullying.
I include this refreshing travel memoir for escapism – something to be savoured as well as to stretch the mind. Written by an open-minded British author, it describes her solo trip around the Islamic Republic on a motorcycle. By turns entertaining, amusing and full of love for a country and people of which she had no knowledge beyond Western propaganda, it is brilliantly written. Pryce challenges her own assumptions, widens her perspective and has a blast in an engrossing, compelling, easy-to-read travelogue.
From Jon's list on to help you become unafraid of the dark.
For me, as an artist, there is no greater feeling than bringing a vision into reality and welcoming the formless into form. Having to wrestle with the angels of creativity and the demons of resistance is exhausting, soul-enlivening work. Steven Pressfield brilliantly describes and guides readers through this process in his seminal work The War of Art. Steven invites us to square our shoulders towards all that we’ve been resisting, as a means of facing the life we know we’re capable of and called to live. The book is divided into three parts, or books within the book: Book One is called, simply “Resistance: Defining The Enemy.” Book Two is titled “Combating Resistance: Turning Pro” and outlines the differences between an amateur and a professional, and Book Three is my personal favorite: “Beyond Resistance: The Higher Realm” where he waxes poetic about our connection to the Muses and the mystical—which can be cultivated by practicing going beyond what our reluctant-egoic selves don’t want to do, but so desperately long for.
From Elisa's list on for personal growth.
Learning to communicate in a way that creates a win-win situation for everyone is a skill. Often we get what we want to the detriment of others or the other way round. Nobody wins and the ultimate consequence is nobody is happy. I really like how practical this book is and how it taught me to speak in a different way entirely! It’s all well and good to know the theory of how negative language can destroy relationships but knowing how to communicate differently is what really matters. I like books with exercises I can put into practice as well as the theory that underpins them. This is what gets me to pick this book up and go through it again twenty years after I first bought it.