Healing the Child Within: Discovery and Recovery for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families


Charles L. Whitfield - 1987
    Whitfield provides a clear and effective introduction to the basic principles of recovery. This book is a modern classic, as fresh and useful today as it was more than a decade ago when first published. Here, frontline physician and therapist Charles Whitfield describes the process of wounding that the Child Within (True Self) experiences and shows how to differentiate the True Self from the false self. He also describes the core issues of recovery and more. Other writings on this topic have come and gone, while Healing the Child Within has remained a strong introduction to recognizing and healing from the painful effects of childhood trauma. Highly recommended by therapists and survivors of trauma.

Will I Ever Be Good Enough? Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers


Karyl McBride - 2008
    The first book for the millions of daughters suffering from the emotional abuse of selfish, self-involved mothers, Will I Ever Be Good Enough? provides the expert advice readers need to overcome debilitating histories and reclaim their lives.

The Anxious Truth : A Step-By-Step Guide To Understanding and Overcoming Panic, Anxiety, and Agoraphobia


Drew Linsalata - 2020
    At 70,000 words and 450 pages, The Anxious Truth goes well beyond just telling that that you'll get better. It actually shows you exactly how! You're anxious all the time, experiencing panic attacks over and over, and maybe afraid to leave your house or to be left alone for even a few minutes. You are avoiding simple things like driving, eating in restaurants, attending family functions, or going to the supermarket. You are terrified of the next wave of anxiety or the next panic attack. Your anxiety problems are ruining your relationships, your family life, and your career. Your anxiety problems have you afraid, confused, lost, and feeling hopeless. How did you get here? What went wrong? You've tried so many things, but nothing has cured your anxiety? What can you do now?This book, written by a former anxiety sufferer, best-selling author of "An Anxiety Story", and host of The Anxious Truth podcast will walk you through exactly how you got to where you are today, why you are not broken or ill, and what the true nature of your anxiety disorder is. Next, the book will walk you through what it takes to solve your anxiety problems, how to make an anxiety recovery plan, then how to correctly execute that plan.The Anxious Truth isn't always what you want to hear, but it's what you NEED to hear in order to solve this problem once and for all and move toward the life you so desperately want. Based firmly on the principles of cognitive behavioral therapies that have been shown over decades to be most effective in treating anxiety problems, the Anxious Truth will teach you how to move past your anxiety symptoms, past endless digging for hidden "root causes", and into an action oriented plan that will help your brain un-learn the bad reaction and fear habits that have gotten you into this predicament. The Anxious Truth will take the cognitive mechanism that got you into a corner, throw it in reverse, and use it to your advantage, backing you out of this jam and into a life free from irrational fear and needless avoidance.More than just a book, The Anxious Truth goes hand-in-hand with The Anxious Truth podcast (theanxioustruth.com) and the growing and vibrant social media community surrounding it. Read the book, listen to five years worth of free podcasts chock full of helpful advice and information, and join a large online community of fellow anxiety sufferers that are done talking about this problem and ready to actually take action to solve it. Change is possible. No matter how long you've suffered with your anxiety issues, you can get better. The Anxious Truth will tell you what you need to hear and will arm you with the information, understanding, and skills you need to get the job done.Let's do this together!

Released from Shame: Moving Beyond the Pain of the Past


Sandra D. Wilson - 2002
    Often shame comes from being raised in a family that has an impaired ability to provide its members with healthy nurturing. As a result, you carry emotional scars into adult life, longing for happiness but feeling unworthy of it. Sandra Wilson knows much about shame-based families--both from personal experience and from her years as a family therapist. Drawing from this background, she teaches you biblical principles that have helped her and many others work through painful issues and learn new, healthier ways to live. In this revised edition, Wilson also includes help for parents who want to break the intergenerational cycle of shame and give their children a grace-based foundation for life.

Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors: Overcoming Internal Self-Alienation


Janina Fisher - 2016
    Readers will be exposed to a model that emphasizes resolution--a transformation in the relationship to one's self, replacing shame, self-loathing, and assumptions of guilt with compassionate acceptance. Its unique interventions have been adapted from a number of cutting-edge therapeutic approaches, including Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, Internal Family Systems, mindfulness-based therapies, and clinical hypnosis. Readers will close the pages of Healing the Fragmented Selves of Trauma Survivors with a solid grasp of therapeutic approaches to traumatic attachment, working with undiagnosed dissociative symptoms and disorders, integrating right brain-to-right brain treatment methods, and much more. Most of all, they will come away with tools for helping clients create an internal sense of safety and compassionate connection to even their most dis-owned selves.

The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life


Robin Stern - 2007
    You constantly second-guess yourself.2. You wonder, “Am I being too sensitive?” a dozen times a day.3. You wonder frequently if you are a “good enough” girlfriend/wife/employee/friend/daughter.4. You have trouble making simple decisions.5. You think twice before bringing up innocent topics of conversation.6. You frequently make excuses for your partner’s behavior to friends and family.Your husband crosses the line in his flirtations with another woman at a dinner party. When you confront him, he asks you to stop being insecure and controlling. After a long argument, you apologize for giving him a hard time.Your boss backed you on a project when you met privately in his office, and you went full steam ahead. But at a large gathering of staff—including yours—he suddenly changes his tune and publicly criticizes your poor judgment. When you tell him your concerns for how this will affect your authority, he tells you that the project was ill-conceived and you’ll have to be more careful in the future. You begin to question your competence. Your mother belittles your clothes, your job, your friends, and your boyfriend. But instead of fighting back as your friends encourage you to do, you tell them that your mother is often right and that a mature person should be able to take a little criticism. If you think things like this can’t happen to you, think again. Gaslighting is when someone wants you to do what you know you shouldn’t and to believe the unbelieveable. It can happen to you and it probably already has. Gaslighting is an insidious form of emotional abuse and manipulation that is difficult to recognize and even harder to break free from.

F*** You Cancer: How to face the big C, live your life and still be yourself


Deborah James - 2018
    Arghh, I wanted to scream, run away and tell every well-meaning person to go and do one!Whilst this book doesn’t advocate throwing all advice down the kitchen sink, it will empower you to do things your way as you navigate the big C roller coaster. Deborah James, campaigner and co-presenter of the top-charting podcast You, Me and the Big C, will take you through every twist and turn, reminding you that it’s okay to feel one hundred different things in the space of a minute and showing you how you can still live your life and BE YOURSELF with cancer. Taking you from diagnosis (welcome to the club you never wanted to join), to coping with family and friends (can everyone just fuck off sometimes?!), looking good and feeling better (drink the wine), and celebrating milestones along the way (drink more wine!), this inspiring cancer coach in a book will transform your outlook and encourage you to shout #FUCKYOUCANCER as loudly as you can!

The Silent Marriage: How Passive Aggression Steals Your Happiness; The Complete Guide to Passive Aggression Book 5


Nora Femenia - 2012
    This behavior is particularly hard on women subject to the silent treatment, cold shoulder, or other ways of emotional withholding from their partner. It causes women to develop a progressive feeling of isolation, of being left emotionally dry and bereft precisely in the most intimate of relationship. Whatever the degree of emotional detachment they experience, the impact in their self-esteem is very profound and long lasting.In this new, revised edition this book actually describes the frustration of your emotional needs caused by the silent marriage, followed by mental confusion, imprecise guilt feelings, the impression of walking on eggshells to avoid being rejected, together with extreme loneliness and constant sadness to no end. This is an important book because builds on cold shoulder as the main toxic behavior, going to describe the whole passive aggressive marriage and its impact on your self-esteem and well being. Even when you don’t consider his withholding of connection a kind of abuse in marriage, the fact that spouses are emotionally dependent on each other for love and support makes you chronically starved for his love and attention. You can even wonder if this is his way to control your happiness in life? In this case, resentment creeps in and destroys any remaining trust.Once you can identify these emotional states, you can go on learning strategies and alternatives to counter his passive aggression communication style, without resorting to violence, begging or other tricks. It will also gives you a map that could actually help your partner to see through his behavior and understand what is he doing to sabotage the marriage.Overall this expanded and revised 2015 edition is full of practical tips and strategies to protect yourself and motivate you to be happier with or without him. It will help you to move your relationship from the current stand still to a place where you can enjoy a better experience with more love and respect.

Skin Game


Caroline Kettlewell - 1999
    Skin Game employs clear language and candid reflection to grant general readers as well as students an uncensored profile of a complex and unsettling disorder. "[This] mesmeric memoir examines the obsession with cutting that is believed to afflict somewhere around two million Americans, nearly all of them female," Francine Prose noted in Elle. "[Kettlewell's] language soars and its intensity deepens whenever she is recalling the lost joys and the thrilling sensation of sharp steel against her tender skin."

Celebrate Recovery Updated Leader's Guide


John Baker - 1998
    Since 1991, more than 200,000 people have participated in the Celebrate Recovery programs offered at more than 3,500 churches, prisons, and rescue missions. Drawn from the Beatitudes, Celebrate Recovery helps people resolve painful problems in the context of the church as a whole.'And then there's pastor John Baker, the founder of Celebrate Recovery... Big John and I shared something in common. We used to drink too much. And our hearts changed, and then we quit. That is a tried-and-true formula. The problem is government is not good at changing hearts. But people like John Baker have been good about it and successful doing that.' ---President George W. Bush on Celebrate Recovery and its founder, John Baker, at the Faith- Based and Community Initiatives Conference, March 3, 2004.

Letting Go of Shame: Understanding How Shame Affects Your Life


Ronald T. Potter-Efron - 1989
    This book helps us recognize shame for what it is, and affirm our basic humanity, humility, autonomy, and competence.As we identify shame and use recovery skills to work through it, Letting Go of Shame: Understanding How Shame Affects Your Life helps to explain the emotion of shame and its impact on our self-image and relationships. The authors offer us a way that we can personalize a plan of action to help build our self-esteem, and they suggest exercises to help us identify our feelings of shame.

The Batterer as Parent: Addressing the Impact of Domestic Violence on Family Dynamics


Lundy Bancroft - 2002
    Bancroft and Silverman show how partner abuse affects each relationship in a family, and explains how children's emotional recovery is inextricably linked to the healing and empowerment of their mothers. The authors cover the important but often-overlooked area of the post-separation parenting behaviors of men who batter, including their use of custody litigation as a tool of abuse. Readers also are guided in evaluating change in the parenting of men who batter, assessing risk to children from unsupervised visitation, and supporting the emotional recovery of children. Although the book is written primarily for professionals, its accessible style makes it engaging and useful for abused mothers and anyone else wishing to assist children exposed to battering.

Boys Don't Cry: Why I Hid My Depression and Why Men Need to Talk about Their Mental Health


Tim Grayburn - 2017
    Depression and undiagnosed mental illness are huge contributors to these deaths as they're often more difficult to diagnose in men. And those men don't tend to talk about the typical symptoms or visit their doctor. Meet Tim.For nearly a decade he kept his depression secret. It made him feel so weak and shameful he thought it would destroy his whole life if anyone found out.And Tim is not alone.After finally opening up he realised that mental illness was affecting many men around the globe - and he knew that wasn't ok.A brutally honest, wickedly warming and heart-breaking tale about what it really takes to be a 'real man', written by one who decided that he wanted to change the world by no longer being silent.This is Tim's story, but it could be yours too.

Start Here: A Crash Course in Understanding, Navigating, and Healing From Narcissistic Abuse


Dana Morningstar - 2017
    Crazy making. Draining. Does this describe your relationship? Do you wonder if they will ever change? Do you want to know why they lie so much...even when the truth would work better? Have you wondered why they never seem to change—no matter how much you are willing to do for them, or how much love, understanding, rehab, religion, therapy, second (or twenty second) chances you’ve given them? If so, you are not alone and this book is a great place to start. This book covers the most common words, definitions, concepts, and questions surrounding narcissism, and narcissistic abuse, such as: Flying monkeys Hoovering Narcissistic abuse Love bombing Trauma bonding, C-PTSD Scapegoat Reactive abuse …and dozens more. - The cycle of narcissistic abuse (and what it really looks like in motion). - The different ways that narcissists and other types of manipulators go about exploiting your vulnerabilities. - How to create a safety plan if you are trying to leave. - A section for friends, family, and mental health professionals who are trying to better understand what's going on and how to help. - Frequently asked questions about narcissists, such as: What is the difference between a selfish jerk and a narcissist? How do I know for sure if they are a narcissist? Can a narcissist change? Why do I miss them? How can I stop attracting narcissists? How do I handle all this intense anger I have towards them? And much, much more.

Detach and Survive: A Book of Self-Care for the Wives of Midlife Crisis Men


Midlife Maze - 2012
    You may fall into the trap of trying to "fix him" or "fix" your marriage. Unfortunately you can't fix him and, despite many claims to the contrary, you can't fix this marriage all by yourself either. All you can really do is take care of yourself. This little book aims to help you get through this difficult time by focusing on yourself, taking care of your own wants and needs and letting go of that which you cannot control.If you are looking for a book to help you understand the Midlife Crisis Man or to tell you what you can do to attempt to save your marriage, then Detach and Survive is NOT the book for you.However, if you are ready to start taking care of yourself and want to survive his crisis with a little self respect and not destroy yourself in the process.If you are ready to take responsibility for that which you can control and let go of that which you can't,then buy this book. Learning to Detach and Survive can help you through.