Here are 100 books that Essential Art Therapy Exercises fans have personally recommended if you like
Essential Art Therapy Exercises.
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I am a childhood abuse survivor, author, and therapist, and I am always looking for books to help me better understand the crazy healing process. I have done over two decades of therapy and have been working with clients for over twenty-eight years. In addition, I serve as an expert witness on behalf of plaintiffs who have experienced different types of trauma. Educating myself and getting the perspective from other clinicians and experts has helped me be a better therapist and expedited my therapy process!
This book, by Bessel Van Der Kolk, MD (Viking, September 2014), a bestseller, is probably the most renowned book on childhood trauma. His book changed my life and the way I look at healing from childhood trauma. \
Bessel has received praise from laypeople and professionals for this highly readable book. In it, Kolk emphasizes how the brain understands trauma and how, through different strategies, the brain can rewire itself to filter out thoughts and feelings associated with trauma.
Neuro-feedback, mindfulness, yoga, and play are included in the book to give the reader different methods for how to change the way the brain holds onto trauma. I have raved about Kolk’s title and the authenticity of his writing.
"Essential reading for anyone interested in understanding and treating traumatic stress and the scope of its impact on society." -Alexander McFarlane, Director of the Centre for Traumatic Stress Studies
A pioneering researcher transforms our understanding of trauma and offers a bold new paradigm for healing in this New York Times bestseller
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…
I’ve sat in many grief circles and listened to fellow grievers share their pain at being abandoned or misunderstood by their friends and families as they grieve. Often we suffer the secondary loss of community because our culture has not taught us how to grieve or how to be a friend to those in grief. My wife and I found some invaluable tools that helped us communicate our needs to our community, and keep them close on our grief journey. One of those tools is grief books. I’ve read dozens of them, and while everyone responds to grief books differently, I think these five books are the very best.
Devine does a wonderful job of validating our feelings and our needs as we grieve.
It is filled with many wonderful pieces of wisdom about grief. The most helpful insight she offered me was the distinction she drew between the healthy pain of grief versus the unnecessary and unhelpful suffering that so often accompanies grief.
She provides practical advice on how to be kind to ourselves as we grieve. We can’t “fix” our grief and loss, but we can be kind to ourselves on this difficult journey.
As seen in THE NEW YORK TIMES * READER'S DIGEST * SPIRITUALITY & HEALTH * HUFFPOST
Featured on NPR's RADIO TIMES and WISCONSIN PUBLIC RADIO
When a painful loss or life-shattering event upends your world, here is the first thing to know: there is nothing wrong with grief. "Grief is simply love in its most wild and painful form," says Megan Devine. "It is a natural and sane response to loss."
So, why does our culture treat grief like a disease to be cured as quickly as possible?
In It's OK That You're Not OK, Megan Devine offers a profound…
I have a B.S. degree in Medical Technology and connect my stories with science. The more I began researching problematic issues in our society for the subject matter of my trilogy, the more I began to empathize with the different kinds of suffering that people endure. I’ve incorporated traumas in all of my Euphoria trilogy stories, from illicit drugs, illnesses, loss, burns, skin regeneration, and human trafficking. Societal awareness is my passion; presenting issues to people who don’t realize these problems are as widespread as they actually are.
I like how
Twisted Lies addressed a young woman’s trauma and loss using fiction. C.B.
Clark’s writing style flows smoothly and has a lot of description. Clark brings
realistic problems like alcohol as a focus in the character’s life, but also
intertwines romance and mystery in the characters. I laughed and cried as I
read Twisted Lies. The case behind the story had me guessing up until the end.
Athena Cooper's tragic past drives her to seek solace in a bottle. The addiction threatens her legal career, and she risks spiraling out of control. When her dog engineers a meeting with an all-too-handsome hunk, it's lust at first sight…until she discovers his identity.
Businessman Russell Crawford is desperate to find the woman who cheated him out of his inheritance. His shock when she's the gorgeous redhead he'd met briefly is only intensified when she claims his father was a murderer.
Athena and Russ declare a truce and join forces to investigate the mystery of her parents' disappearance from an…
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
I have a B.S. degree in Medical Technology and connect my stories with science. The more I began researching problematic issues in our society for the subject matter of my trilogy, the more I began to empathize with the different kinds of suffering that people endure. I’ve incorporated traumas in all of my Euphoria trilogy stories, from illicit drugs, illnesses, loss, burns, skin regeneration, and human trafficking. Societal awareness is my passion; presenting issues to people who don’t realize these problems are as widespread as they actually are.
I found the novel The Sand Dancer a compelling
mystery. I felt sorry for Carrie, the main character, who lost her parents when
she was two years old. As I read about Carrie’s troubling life, bouncing from
one foster family to another until she turned eighteen, I wanted her to find
some answers to her past to have that closure and move on with her future. The
suspense in this story is quite a page-turner. She showed that she was a strong
woman and quick thinker.
Two-year-old Carrie Morton was found alone in a cabin behind the man the county sheriff had just shot to death. Although a game warden reported seeing a woman at the cabin, the woman was never found. The woman's identity and disappearance remained the subject of rumors that followed Carrie as she moved through a series of foster homes on her way to adulthood.
After Carrie left her last foster home, she remained in Sanstone, living a life without close ties to anyone. Her treasured moments were on a small section of the beach where she could be alone and escape…
As a pastor, I thought I had to be a put-together person. Sure, I was allowed to have problems, but I wasn’t really allowed to struggle. Then I was diagnosed with clinical depression. I thought I was alone. I thought I’d have to leave the ministry. I was wrong. I needed to find other people who struggled, though. Through other books, I was able to find them. These books have helped me in my journey so, so much, and if you struggle with depression, I hope it helps with your journey, too!
I bought this book, thinking it would be about Andrew Peterson’s creative process as he writes songs. Well, yeah, it’s about that. It’s also about his struggle with depression. He talks candidly about how he hid from others, wept, and thought he was worthless. And as I read his descriptions of his depression… I knew I was not alone. This is an intimate look at a singer and the darkness he battles. Thankfully, it’s not only brutal about depression, but also points to the light we have in Jesus.
From the bestselling author of The Wingfeather Saga and award-winning musician and storyteller, Andrew Peterson. Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, WORLD Magazine each named Adorning the Dark as one of their books of the year.
Making something beautiful in a broken world can be harrowing work, and it can’t be done alone.
Over the last twenty years, Andrew Peterson has performed thousands of concerts, published four novels, released ten albums, taught college and seminary classes on writing, founded a nonprofit ministry for Christians in the arts, and executive-produced a film—all in a belief that God calls us to proclaim the…
I have worked in scientific research and teaching for over 30 years, and maintained a love of art and music as well, but am saddened when I hear statements, especially from high-school pupils, that ‘there is no room for creativity or imagination in science.’ Like all working scientists, I know that imagination is the most important faculty for a scientist. The Poetry and Music of Science is my project to tease out the creative threads in the scientific process, and also to find the buried pathways that link science with the arts and humanities. The journey of discovery has been full of surprises and delights for me.
David Bohm is celebrated for creating a completely different theory of quantum mechanics, equally adept and accounting for experiments but conceptually irreconcilable from those of Schrödinger and Heisenberg. Put that together with his broad and deep understanding of culture, and you have a uniquely sensitive and original take on creativity. I particularly like his sharp critique of superficial ‘creativity’ which he claims is mostly reflex. Bohm helps his readers to see that ‘discovery’ and ‘creation’ cannot easily be disentangled.
Creativity is fundamental to human experience. In On Creativity David Bohm, the world-renowned scientist, investigates the phenomenon from all sides: not only the creativity of invention and of imagination but also that of perception and of discovery. This is a remarkable and life-affirming book by one of the most far-sighted thinkers of modern times.
The first memoir I ever read—Road Songby Natalie Kusz—pierced me in ways I did not know were possible. Kusz had written, in this elegantly crafted book, of an Alaskan childhood, a life-changing accident, early motherhood, and family love. She had written, I mean to say, of transcending truths. I have spent much of my life ever since deconstructing the ways in which true stories get told, and writing them myself. I’ve taught memoir to five-year-olds, Ivy League students, master’s level writers, and retirees. I co-founded Juncture Workshops, write a monthly newsletter on the form, and today create blank books into which other writers might begin to tell their stories.
Sometimes we just want to know how it feels to be someone else living the writer’s life. In this collection, forty-six writers ranging from Roxane Gay and Billy Collins to Edwidge Danticat and Amy Tan answer one single question: What inspires you? My favorite response comes from Marilynne Robinson, who writes “I’m drawn to that movement toward essentials, away from all secondary definitions, all extraneous props, and ornaments.” What about you? What inspires you? Why are you writing in the first place? You’ll ponder that question while you read these short pieces by writers who shine a light in dark places.
A stunning masterclass on the creative process, the craft of writing, and the art of finding inspiration from Stephen King, Elizabeth Gilbert, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, Roxane Gay, Neil Gaiman, and more of the most acclaimed writers at work today
"For artists in need of a creative fix, Light the Dark is as good as a visit from the divine muse." -Bookpage
What inspires you? That's the simple, but profound question posed to forty-six renowned authors in LIGHT THE DARK. Each writer begins with a favorite passage from a novel, a song, a poem—something that gets them started and keeps…
I taught at Yale for 33 years and I hold advanced degrees from the Sorbonne. I am interested in literature as lessons for life, but I am mostly a passionate letter writer, especially to the great authors who have marked me. They are never really dead. I carry them around with me.
I selected the category of Offbeat Memoirs because I have written one. I also have an Italian alter-ego, Donatella de Poitiers, who authors a blog in which she muses about how a lifelong Francophile could have forsaken la Belle France for la dolce vita in the Umbrian countryside, where the food and fresh air are way better than the roads.
What do the writers you are drawn to reveal about you? Why at certain points in our lives do we become “attached” to certain authors? The process of attachment is mysterious. As we age (and change) some things remain constant. Our attachment to a particular author may have begun in our youth, but evolved as we have. To reconnect with a favorite author can put us in touch with our younger self in unexpected ways. Mead shows how much Middlemarch has “spoken” to her throughout her life. This book is perhaps more in harmony with my own than any on the list. I have come to love books that underscore how what we read can be inseparable from the person we become.
A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch--and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories.
Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the greatest English novel. After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described…
These books I’ve traveled with, many I’ve known longer than most friends. They are, indeed, cold but intimate friends. Good company when the world feels rattled and roughed up. I’ve always loved the magic of reading, of going into the mind and onto the universe's outer reaches on nothing more than words. These platforms are for ideas, places, music, and vision. So I take these books with me, fewer than more, for their quality counsel and enlivening entertainment. But like psychopomps or recording angels, they are and always have been a steadfast company on the fast ride of life. I read slowly, and I absorb.
The world may be ending, but something will come in its place. How to see it? How do I engage the senses to feel my way into that next world? Mary Oliver!
Her book is a practice on presence, a workshop on vision and perception. The natural world is a much more quietly exploding landscape of magic after looking through Mary Oliver’s eyes. It’s personal as skin and universal as wonder. I return to it to breathe, to eat. When all the rest has run out, I head Upstream.
One of O, The Oprah Magazine's Ten Best Books of the Year
The New York Times bestselling collection of essays from beloved poet, Mary Oliver.
"There's hardly a page in my copy of Upstream that isn't folded down or underlined and scribbled on, so charged is Oliver's language . . ." -Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air
"Uniting essays from Oliver's previous books and elsewhere, this gem of a collection offers a compelling synthesis of the poet's thoughts on the natural, spiritual and artistic worlds . . ." -The New York Times
The constellation we know as Taurus goes all the way back to cave paintings of aurochs at Lascaux. This book traces the story of the bull in the sky, a journey through the history of what has become known as the sacred bull.
Robert Quinn is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan School of Business. His research and writing focus on purpose, leadership, culture, and change. He has published 18 books on these subjects. He is passionate about speaking and teaching and his recent talk to Google on finding your purpose was viewed by over 18 million people.
This is a classic and has been foundational to my thinking and work. Fritz explains that we all live on the path of least resistance. Our lives change when we learn to ask one question; “What result do I want to create?” We all think we ask this question, but we do not. We ask; “How do I get what I want?” The difference is critical in the impact it can have on our lives. This book is filled with practical insight and wisdom.
A revolutionary program for creating anything, from a functional kitchen to a computer program, to a work of art, Robert Fritz demonstrates that any of us has the innate power to create. Discover the steps of creating; the importance of creating what you truly love, how to focus on the creative process to move from where you are to where you want to be, and much more.
