Here are 100 books that The Emotional Incest Syndrome fans have personally recommended if you like
The Emotional Incest Syndrome.
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I’m a Canadian writer, and a mother of three. I think I do qualify as an ACOH (Adult Child of Hippies). My mom taught elementary school, and my dad was a university professor, but otherwise they fully embraced the hippy movement. It was a rich childhood in terms of nature, literature, art, and foreign cultures, but dysfunctional and confusing on the emotional front. Sadly, dropping a lot of acid leads to a lifetime of anxiety and depression. My father descended into mental illness and opiate addiction when I was an adult, eventually leading to his suicide. I came to terms with his death by writing Corridor Nine.
I love this book because it makes me realize mine wasn’t the only crazy bohemian family out there! This extremely funny read with authentic ’60s photos is structured as a test to determine if you really are an ACOH (Adult Child of Hippies). People might find this strange, but humour was a necessary ingredient in my coming to terms with my father’s suicide (and the reason my novel is both tragic and funny). Although my father struggled with mental illness and addiction, he had a wickedly funny black sense of humour. For me, it is a tribute to my father to see the ridiculous and laugh even in the face of grief. Certainly, there is much to laugh about in the flower child era.
Do you have a name such as Willow, River, Oak, or Sunshine? Have you ever lived in a commune, or done yoga naked with your family? If yes, then you are an Adult Child of Hippies (ACOH). ACOHs grew up in extreme conditions: eating sprouts, and lugging herbal tea to school in their Thermoses (if they were fortunate enough to make it to school). ACOHs were born and brought up mostly in the 70s and 80s. As their parents reveled in the counterculture, their children struggled with basic hygiene, not to mention broader social acceptance. Until now, this group has…
I’m a Canadian writer, and a mother of three. I think I do qualify as an ACOH (Adult Child of Hippies). My mom taught elementary school, and my dad was a university professor, but otherwise they fully embraced the hippy movement. It was a rich childhood in terms of nature, literature, art, and foreign cultures, but dysfunctional and confusing on the emotional front. Sadly, dropping a lot of acid leads to a lifetime of anxiety and depression. My father descended into mental illness and opiate addiction when I was an adult, eventually leading to his suicide. I came to terms with his death by writing Corridor Nine.
Gayle Brandeis’s intimate memoir of wrestling with her mother’s suicide following a long mental illness kept me company in the ways it mirrored my own experience. It is sometimes easier to mourn a stranger’s pain, as you edge towards your own grief. Brandeis’s reading through her mother’s letters, with their paranoid delusions and grandiose aspirations, “passionate and creatively punctuated,” rang true to my father’s crazy literary outpourings. Her experiences of entering her mother’s home to witness the evidence of her last activities, to the almost physical trauma of learning the stark details of her mother’s suicide method, comforted me in their familiarity. The suicide of a mentally ill parent leaves a lot of guilt and confusion in its wake. Anger and resentment aren’t what one “should” feel after a death of a parent, but Brandeis doesn’t sugarcoat the complex mess of emotions that needs to be untangled.
Award-winning novelist and poet Gayle Brandeis’s wrenching memoir of her complicated family history and her mother’s suicide
Gayle Brandeis’s mother disappeared just after Gayle gave birth to her youngest child. Several days later, her body was found: she had hanged herself in the utility closet of a Pasadena parking garage. In this searing, formally inventive memoir, Gayle describes the dissonance between being a new mother, a sweet-smelling infant at her chest, and a grieving daughter trying to piece together what happened, who her mother was, and all she had and hadn’t understood about her.
From my term paper in 11th grade on Life After Death, I’ve always been fascinated with what happens when we pass away, reincarnation, and all things unexplained. After I lost a few important people in my life, I was more compelled than ever to find answers. A trip to a medium, who mentioned the challenges we’re meant to learn and the fact that we reincarnate with the same “soul family,” sent me off to the races reading every book I could find on the topic. What I uncovered left me wanting to tell a story of my own that would leave people wondering if there’s more than we realize—before, during, and after this life.
From my eleventh-grade term paper about life after death, I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of reincarnation.
This extremely insightful book only fueled that interest. It explores the idea that our souls pre-plan the challenges in each lifetime with purpose.
This book made me look at the struggles I’ve experienced much differently. Now the question I always ask myself is, “What was I supposed to learn from that?”
In his groundbreaking first book, Your Soul's Plan: Discovering the Real Meaning of the Life You Planned Before You Were Born, Robert Schwartz brought the idea of pre-birth planning into the mainstream. Now, his compelling sequel delves even deeper. With detailed discussion and the deeply personal stories of his interviewees, Schwartz offers an incredible guide map to the soul and encourages his readers to heal at a profound level. Through complex ideas such as the development of greater self-love, an emergence from victim consciousness, and understanding the qualities you came into this lifetime to cultivate and express, Schwartz bestows practical…
I’m a Canadian writer, and a mother of three. I think I do qualify as an ACOH (Adult Child of Hippies). My mom taught elementary school, and my dad was a university professor, but otherwise they fully embraced the hippy movement. It was a rich childhood in terms of nature, literature, art, and foreign cultures, but dysfunctional and confusing on the emotional front. Sadly, dropping a lot of acid leads to a lifetime of anxiety and depression. My father descended into mental illness and opiate addiction when I was an adult, eventually leading to his suicide. I came to terms with his death by writing Corridor Nine.
This helpful book digs into the stigma of suicide, how it has been viewed as taboo, and how the bodies of people who committed suicide have traditionally even been denied burial. The people left behind find themselves isolated by their shame and the fear that others will shy away from a topic considered sinful in most religions. This was certainly my experience. Had my father died of cancer or a heart attack, I would have talked openly of his death and received a lot of support. But I felt his mental illness, addiction, and suicide too dark a topic to impose on anyone.
Happy, functional families don’t go through things like this. It was an extension of the shame I’d internalized as a child growing up with socially divergent parents who struggled with mental health issues. Alexander, who lost her own mother to suicide, gives links to survivor support groups,…
Breathtaking stories of incredible power for anyone struggling to find the meaning in the suicidal death of a loved one--and for all readers seeking writing that moves and inspires. After author Victoria Alexander's mother took her life, she spent the next ten years collecting stories from people, like herself, who have walked through one of life's most difficult journeys. The result is a beautifully written book of powerful, spellbinding stories told by those who were left behind--parents, children, spouses, lovers, friends, and colleagues. In the Wake of Suicide offers survivors the understanding, compassion, and hope they need to guide them…
Corey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South. He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry.His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain, is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On, which won The Memphis Film Prize in 2017. With his wife he runs Burke’s Book Store (est. 1875) in Memphis. I have a fondness for novels written by writers who are primarily poets. These five books are my favorites in that contracted genre.
This book is more autobiographical, based on his struggle with alcoholism. Berryman had already written a book of poems,The Dream Songs(my favorite book of poems), which practically reads like a novel. It’s full of wit and playfulness and jerry-rigged syntax. Recovery is also witty but not quite as playful. It’s darker, of course. Perhaps one’s perception of it is colored by the knowledge that Berryman had committed suicide in 1972, a year before its release. So, it’s a melancholy book, yet its difficulties are human and common and, here, well-wrought by a poet’s grace.
I'm a physician, scientist, and food as medicine researcher who has spent three decades studying how the body defends itself against disease to protect health. A major focus of this has been on how your body responds to what you feed it. I'm an internationally renowned physician, scientist and author of the New York Times bestseller Eat to Beat Disease: The New Science of How Your Body Can Heal Itself. My work has led to the development of more than 30 new medical treatments and impacts care for more than 70 diseases. My TED Talk, “Can We Eat to Starve Cancer?” has garnered more than 11 million views.
Dean Ornish is a legend in the world of lifestyle medicine. He was the first to show you can reverse heart disease with diet and lifestyle, and his work has gone on to study many of the diseases we care about, from diabetes to prostate cancer to Alzheimer’s disease. Undo It is a wonderful synthesis of Dr. Ornish’s research, and it suggests a unifying hypothesis for disease. This book also is co-authored by Anne Ornish, who brings a holistic dimension to lifestyle medicine.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • By the pioneer of lifestyle medicine, a simple, scientifically program proven to often reverse the progression of the most common and costly chronic diseases and even begin reversing aging at a cellular level! Long rated “#1 for Heart Health” by U.S. News & World Report, Dr. Ornish’s Program is now covered by Medicare when offered virtually at home.
Dean Ornish, M.D., has directed revolutionary research proving, for the first time, that lifestyle changes can often reverse—undo!—the progression of many of the most common and costly chronic diseases and even begin reversing aging at a cellular level.
As a physician and attorney, I’ve always been fascinated by the nexus where my two professions meet. During the course of my career, I have been asked to advise colleagues on topics as far-reaching as whether a death row inmate should receive an organ transplant to how to offer psychotherapy ethically to a conjoined twin. Although questions like these do not arise every day, even the everyday questions in my field – on such topics as confidentiality, boundaries, and informed consent – never grow old.
Fins combines personal narratives of patients he has encountered who have suffered severe neurological injuries with data from the field of neurology to explore the complex question of what it means to be in a persistent vegetative state—as well as one’s prognosis for recovery. A deeply compassionate volume that will make readers question what they believe about comas, death, and the gray area in between.
Through the sobering story of Maggie Worthen and her mother, Nancy, this book tells of one family's struggle with severe brain injury and how developments in neuroscience call for a reconsideration of what society owes patients at the edge of consciousness. Drawing upon over fifty in-depth family interviews, the history of severe brain injury from Quinlan to Schiavo, and his participation in landmark clinical trials, such as the first use of deep brain stimulation in the minimally conscious state, Joseph J. Fins captures the paradox of medical and societal neglect even as advances in neuroscience suggest new ways to mend…
I am a registered nurse, author, and dementia daughter. As a nurse and hospital case manager, I spent many years caring for people living with dementia and their families. This inspired me to write a novel, Blue Hydrangeas, an Alzheimer’s love story. I soon encountered difficulties marketing my book. I reached out to two other dementia daughters I’d met online who had also written books on the subject from personal experience and together we founded the non-profit organization AlzAuthors.com. Our mission is to carefully vet resources – stories of personal caregiving – to help busy caregivers find the information and inspiration they need for their own journeys. To date, we are 300+ authors strong.
Jennifer Bute is a medical doctor living in the United Kingdom. After being diagnosed with dementia she had to retire from her practice and moved into an assisted living facility. Here, she continues caring for others by offering seminars on living with dementia and writing about her journey on her blog and on Facebook, as well as in this beautiful book. Her story is brave and inspiring and dispels many myths about living with dementia.
Jennifer Bute, author of Dementia from the Inside, was a highly qualified senior doctor in a large clinical practice, whose patients included those with dementia. Then she began to notice symptoms in herself. She was finally given a diagnosis of Young Onset Dementia in 2009.
After resigning as a GP, Jennifer resolved to explore what could be done to slow the progress of dementia. She and Louise Morse decided to co-write this book, Dementia from the Inside as a practical resource for those who are living with dementia.
The book tells readers what it's like to live with dementia, how…
As a police psychologist and mystery writer—I call myself a shrink with ink—I love to read how other authors portray therapists in their novels.It’s challenging to bring tension, action, and conflict to a 50-minute session that primarily involves quiet conversation, perhaps salted with tears. I started out writing non-fiction. Then I got tired of reality and began writing mysteries inspired by real police officers and their families. Writing fiction was harder, but more fun. Sometimes it’s been therapeutic. I especially enjoy the opportunity to take potshots at cops who treated me poorly, incompetent psychologists, and two of my ex-husbands.
I first read this book in the mid-1990s as I was honing my skills as a therapist.
It hit me hard, as if the author, a psychiatrist, had been a fly on the wall of my childhood home. Miller holds no punches about what drives some people to become clinicians.
Part One of her book is titled “The Drama of the Gifted Child and How We Became Psychotherapists.” It helped me get clear about my choice of career. It was painful reading, but critical to my skills as a clinician and my own mental well-being. I’ve never forgotten it.
Whether you are a therapist, thinking about becoming one, or want to read a book that tears the cover off the myths of childhood, this is essential reading.
Why are many of the most successful people plagued by feelings of emptiness and alienation? This wise and profound book has provided thousands of readers with an answer,and has helped them to apply it to their own lives.Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own feelings, needs, and memories skillfully in order to meet our parents' expectations and win their "love." Alice Miller writes, "When I used the word 'gifted' in the title, I had in mind neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. I simply…
By Andrew E. Budson and Maureen K. O'Connor
Author
Why are we passionate about this?
As a neurologist and neuropsychologist team who have spent their entire clinical, teaching, and research careers focused on individuals and their families experiencing memory loss, Alzheimer’s disease, and dementia, our goal is simple. We want to empower individuals and their families with the tools they need to manage memory loss, Alzheimer’s disease, and dementia. We work to balance pharmacological and nonpharmacological management, as well as the needs of the individual with those of their family. Reading books like the ones in our list plus articles in medical journals keeps us current with the progress in the science of dementia and the humanity of individuals and families living with the disease.
This book is wonderful for so many reasons. It reminds us that simple, commonsense approaches often work to solve or ameliorate daily problems. It shows us ways that communication is possible even when language fails. It encourages us to see through the individual’s eyes and live in their world. It urges us to focus on what the person is still able to do, and to compensate for or simply ignore what they cannot. And it inspires us to create moments of success and laughter along the way.
A guide to more successful communication for the millions of Americans caring for someone with dementia: “Offers a fresh approach and hope.”—NPR
Revolutionizing the way we perceive and live with Alzheimer’s, Joanne Koenig Coste offers a practical approach to the emotional well-being of both patients and caregivers that emphasizes relating to patients in their own reality. Her accessible and comprehensive method, which she calls habilitation, works to enhance communication between carepartners and patients and has proven successful with thousands of people living with dementia.
Learning to Speak Alzheimer’s also offers hundreds of practical tips, including how to -Cope with the…
