Book picks similar to
The Primal Wound: Understanding The Adopted Child by Nancy Verrier
adoption
non-fiction
psychology
parenting
The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
Jonathan Haidt - 2018
These three Great Untruths are part of a larger philosophy that sees young people as fragile creatures who must be protected and supervised by adults. But despite the good intentions of the adults who impart them, the Great Untruths are harming kids by teaching them the opposite of ancient wisdom and the opposite of modern psychological findings on grit, growth, and antifragility. The result is rising rates of depression and anxiety, along with endless stories of college campuses torn apart by moralistic divisions and mutual recriminations. This is a book about how we got here. First Amendment expert Greg Lukianoff and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt take us on a tour of the social trends stretching back to the 1980s that have produced the confusion and conflict on campus today, including the loss of unsupervised play time and the birth of social media, all during a time of rising political polarization. This is a book about how to fix the mess. The culture of “safety” and its intolerance of opposing viewpoints has left many young people anxious and unprepared for adult life, with devastating consequences for them, for their parents, for the companies that will soon hire them, and for a democracy that is already pushed to the brink of violence over its growing political divisions. Lukianoff and Haidt offer a comprehensive set of reforms that will strengthen young people and institutions, allowing us all to reap the benefits of diversity, including viewpoint diversity. This is a book for anyone who is confused by what’s happening on college campuses today, or has children, or is concerned about the growing inability of Americans to live and work and cooperate across party lines.
I Hear You: The Surprisingly Simple Skill Behind Extraordinary Relationships
Michael S. Sorensen - 2017
Whether you’re looking to improve your relationship with your spouse, navigate difficult conversations at work, or connect on a deeper level with friends and family, this book delivers simple, practical, proven techniques for improving any relationship in your life. Mastery of this simple skill will enable you to: • Calm (and sometimes even eliminate) the concerns, fears, and uncertainties of others • Increase feelings of love, respect, and appreciation in your romantic relationships • Quickly resolve, or even prevent, arguments • Help others become open to your point of view • Give advice and feedback that sticks • Provide support and encouragement to others, even when you don’t know how to “fix” the problem • And much more In short: this skill is powerful. Give the principles and practices in this book a chance and you’ll be amazed at the difference they can make.
Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before
Jean M. Twenge - 2006
In this provocative new book, headline-making psychologist and social commentator Dr. Jean Twenge explores why the young people she calls "Generation Me" -- those born in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s -- are tolerant, confident, open-minded, and ambitious but also cynical, depressed, lonely, and anxious.Herself a member of Generation Me, Dr. Twenge uses findings from the largest intergenerational research study ever conducted -- with data from 1.3 million respondents spanning six decades -- to reveal how profoundly different today's young adults are. Here are the often shocking truths about this generation, including dramatic differences in sexual behavior, as well as controversial predictions about what the future holds for them and society as a whole. Her often humorous, eyebrow-raising stories about real people vividly bring to life the hopes and dreams, disappointments and challenges of Generation Me.GenMe has created a profound shift in the American character, changing what it means to be an individual in today's society. The collision of this generation's entitled self-focus and today's competitive marketplace will create one of the most daunting challenges of the new century. Engaging, controversial, prescriptive, funny, "Generation Me" will give Boomers new insight into their offspring, and help those in their teens, 20s, and 30s finally make sense of themselves and their goals and find their road to happiness.
Borderline Personality Disorder Demystified: An Essential Guide for Understanding and Living with BPD
Robert O. Friedel - 2004
In Borderline Personality Disorder Demystified, Dr. Robert Friedel, a leading expert in BPD and a pioneer in its treatment, has turned his vast personal experience into a useful and supportive guide for everyone living with and seeking to understand this condition. Friedel helps readers grasp the etiology of Borderline Personality Disorder, the course it takes, the difficulties in diagnosing it, the types of treatment available, strategies for coping, and much more. Borderline Personality Disorder Demystified is an invaluable resource for everyone diagnosed with BPD, those who think they might have the illness, and friends and family who love and support them.
Crazy: A Father's Search Through America's Mental Health Madness
Pete Earley - 2006
But it was only when his own son-in the throes of a manic episode-broke into a neighbor's house that he learned what happens to mentally ill people who break a law. This is the Earley family's compelling story, a troubling look at bureaucratic apathy and the countless thousands who suffer confinement instead of care, brutal conditions instead of treatment, in the "revolving doors" between hospital and jail. With mass deinstitutionalization, large numbers of state mental patients are homeless or in jail-an experience little better than the horrors of a century ago. Earley takes us directly into that experience-and into that of a father and award-winning journalist trying to fight for a better way.
How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community
Mia Birdsong - 2020
They have family, friends, and colleagues, yet they still feel like they're standing alone. They're "winning" at the American Dream, but they're lonely, disconnected, and unsatisfied.It seems counterintuitive that living the "good life"--the well-paying job, the nuclear family, the upward mobility--can make us feel isolated and unhappy. But in a divided America, where only a quarter of us know our neighbors and everyone is either a winner or a loser, we've forgotten the key element that helped us make progress in the first place: community. In this provocative, groundbreaking work, Mia Birdsong shows that what separates us isn't only the ever-present injustices built around race, class, gender, values, and beliefs, but also our denial of our interdependence and need for belonging. In response to the fear and discomfort we feel, we've built walls, and instead of leaning on each other, we find ourselves leaning on concrete.Through research, interviews, and stories of lived experience, How We Show Up returns us to our inherent connectedness where we find strength, safety, and support in vulnerability and generosity, in asking for help, and in being accountable. Showing up--literally and figuratively--points us toward the promise of our collective vitality and leads us to the liberated well-being we all want.
Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief
Pauline G. Boss - 1999
We take comfort in the rituals that mark the passing, and we turn to those around us for support. But what happens when there is no closure, when a family member or a friend who may be still alive is lost to us nonetheless? How, for example, does the mother whose soldier son is missing in action, or the family of an Alzheimer's patient who is suffering from severe dementia, deal with the uncertainty surrounding this kind of loss?In this sensitive and lucid account, Pauline Boss explains that, all too often, those confronted with such ambiguous loss fluctuate between hope and hopelessness. Suffered too long, these emotions can deaden feeling and make it impossible for people to move on with their lives. Yet the central message of this book is that they can move on. Drawing on her research and clinical experience, Boss suggests strategies that can cushion the pain and help families come to terms with their grief. Her work features the heartening narratives of those who cope with ambiguous loss and manage to leave their sadness behind, including those who have lost family members to divorce, immigration, adoption, chronic mental illness, and brain injury. With its message of hope, this eloquent book offers guidance and understanding to those struggling to regain their lives.
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
Lori Gottlieb - 2019
One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose office she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but. As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients' lives -- a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can't stop hooking up with the wrong guys -- she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell. With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is revolutionary in its candor, offering a deeply personal yet universal tour of our hearts and minds and providing the rarest of gifts: a boldly revealing portrait of what it means to be human, and a disarmingly funny and illuminating account of our own mysterious lives and our power to transform them.
Taking Charge of ADHD: The Complete, Authoritative Guide for Parents
Russell A. Barkley - 1995
From internationally renowned ADHD expert Russell A. Barkley, the book empowers parents by arming them with the knowledge, expert guidance, and confidence they need. Included are:*A step-by-step plan for behavior management that has helped thousands of children.*Current information on medications, including coverage of Strattera and extended-release stimulants.*Strategies that help children succeed at school and in social situations.*Advances in research on the causes of ADHD.*Practical advice on managing stress and keeping peace in the family.*Descriptions of books, organizations, and Internet resources that families can trust.
The Definitive Book of Body Language
Allan Pease - 2004
Yet most of us don’t know how to read body language–and don’t realize how our own physical movements speak to others. Now the world’s foremost experts on the subject share their techniques for reading body language signals to achieve success in every area of life.Drawing upon more than thirty years in the field, as well as cutting-edge research from evolutionary biology, psychology, and medical technologies that demonstrate what happens in the brain, the authors examine each component of body language and give you the basic vocabulary to read attitudes and emotions through behavior. Discover:• How palms and handshakes are used to gain control• The most common gestures of liars• How the legs reveal what the mind wants to do• The most common male and female courtship gestures and signals• The secret signals of cigarettes, glasses, and makeup• The magic of smiles–including smiling advice for women• How to use nonverbal cues and signals to communicate more effectively and get the reactions you wantFilled with fascinating insights, humorous observations, and simple strategies that you can apply to any situation, this intriguing book will enrich your communication with and understanding of others–as well as yourself.
The Power of Attachment: How to Create Deep and Lasting Intimate Relationships
Diane Poole Heller - 2019
From our earliest years, we develop an attachment style that follows us through life, replaying in our daily emotional landscape, our relationships, and how we feel about ourselves. And in the wake of a traumatic event—such as a car accident, severe illness, loss of a loved one, or experience of abuse—that attachment style can deeply influence what happens next. In The Power of Attachment, Dr. Diane Poole Heller, a pioneer in attachment theory and trauma resolution, shows how overwhelming experiences can disrupt our most important connections— with the parts of ourselves within, with the physical world around us, and with others. The good news is that we can restore and reconnect at all levels, regardless of our past. Here, you’ll learn key insights and practices to help you: • Restore the broken connections caused by trauma • Get embodied and grounded in your body • Integrate the parts of yourself that feel wounded and fragmented • Emerge from grief, fear, and powerlessness to regain strength, joy, and resiliency • Reclaim access to your inner resources and spiritual nature "We are fundamentally designed to heal," teaches Dr. Heller. "Even if our childhood is less than ideal, our secure attachment system is biologically programmed in us, and our job is to simply find out what’s interfering with it—and learn what we can do to make those secure tendencies more dominant." With expertise drawn from Dr. Heller’s research, clinical work, and training programs, this book invites you to begin that journey back to wholeness.
Strange Situation: A Mother's Journey Into the Science of Attachment
Bethany Saltman - 2020
. . searingly honest, brazenly fresh, and startlingly rich."--Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday DemonWhen professional researcher and writer Bethany Saltman gave birth to her daughter, Azalea, she loved her deeply but felt as if something was missing. Looking back at her lonely childhood, dangerous teenage years, and love-addicted early adulthood, Saltman thought maybe she was broken.Then she discovered the science of attachment, the field of psychology that explores the question of why--from an evolutionary point of view--love exists between parents and children. Saltman went on a ten-year journey visiting labs, archives, and training sessions, while learning the meaning of "delight" from Mary Ainsworth, one of psychology's most important but unsung researchers, who died in 1999.Saltman went deep into the history and findings from Ainsworth's famous laboratory procedure, the Strange Situation, which, like an X-ray, is still used today by scientists around the world to catch a glimpse of the internal workings of attachment. In this simple twenty-minute procedure, a baby and a caregiver enter an ordinary room with two chairs and some toys. During a series of comings and goings, a trained observer studies the minutiae of the pair's back-and-forth with each other.Through the science of attachment, what Saltman discovered was a radical departure from everything she thought she knew--about love and about her own family, her story, and herself. She was far from broken--she saw that love is too powerful to ever break.Strange Situation is a scientific, lyrical, life-affirming exploration of love. Not only will readers be taken on an emotional ride through one mother's reckoning with her own past and her family's future, but they will also be given the tools with which to better understand their own life histories and their relationships today.
Growing Up Again: Parenting Ourselves, Parenting Our Children
Jean Illsley Clarke - 1996
Now, substantially revised and expanded, Growing Up Again offers further guidance on providing children with the structure and nurturing that are so critical to their healthy development--and to our own. Jean Illsley Clarke and Connie Dawson provide the information every adult caring for children should know--about ages and stages of development, ways to nurture our children and ourselves, and tools for personal and family growth. This new edition also addresses the special demands of parenting adopted children and the problem of overindulgence; a recognition and exploration of prenatal life and our final days as unique life stages; new examples of nurturing, structuring, and discounting, as well as concise ways to identify them; help for handling parenting conflicts in blended families, and guidelines on supporting children's spiritual growth. About the Authors: Jean Illsley Clarke is a parent educator, teacher trainer, the author of Self-Esteem: A Family Affair, and co-author of the Help! for Parents series. She is a popular international lecturer and workshop presenter on the topics of self-esteem, parenting, family dynamics, and adult children of alcoholics. Clarke resides in Plymouth, Minnesota. Connie Dawson is a consultant and lecturer who works with adults who work with kids. A former teacher, she trains youth workers to identify and help young people who are at risk. Dawson lives in Evergreen, Colorado.
The Man Who Couldn't Stop
David Adam - 2014
In this captivating fusion of science, history and personal memoir, writer David Adam explores the weird thoughts that exist within every mind, and how they drive millions of us towards obsessions and compulsions.David has suffered from OCD for twenty years, and The Man Who Couldn’t Stop is his unflinchingly honest attempt to understand the condition and his experiences. What might lead an Ethiopian schoolgirl to eat a wall of her house, piece by piece; or a pair of brothers to die beneath an avalanche of household junk that they had compulsively hoarded? At what point does a harmless idea, a snowflake in a clear summer sky, become a blinding blizzard of unwanted thoughts? Drawing on the latest research on the brain, as well as historical accounts of patients and their treatments, this is a book that will challenge the way you think about what is normal, and what is mental illness.Told with fierce clarity, humour and urgent lyricism, this extraordinary book is both the haunting story of a personal nightmare, and a fascinating doorway into the darkest corners of our minds.
Rejection Proof: How I Beat Fear and Became Invincible Through 100 Days of Rejection
Jia Jiang - 2015
Despite early success in the corporate world, his first attempt to pursue his entrepreneurial dream ended in rejection. Jia was crushed and spiraled into a period of deep self-doubt. But he realized that his fear of rejection was a bigger obstacle than any single rejection would ever be, and he needed to find a way to cope with being told no without letting it destroy him. Thus was born his "100 days of rejection" experiment, during which he willfully sought rejection on a daily basis - from requesting a lesson in sales from a car salesman (no) to asking a flight attendant if he could make an announcement on the loudspeaker (yes) to his famous request to get Krispy Kreme doughnuts in the shape of Olympic rings (yes, with a viral video to prove it).Jia learned that even the most preposterous wish may be granted if you ask in the right way, and here he shares the secret of successful asking, how to pick targets, and how to tell when an initial no can be converted into something positive. But more important, he learned techniques for steeling himself against rejection and ways to develop his own confidence - a plan that can't be derailed by a single setback.Filled with great stories and valuable insight, Rejection Proof is a fun and thoughtful examination of how to overcome fear and dare to live more boldly.