Book picks similar to
Therapy by Stephen Grosz
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psychology
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Get Out of Your Own Way: A Skeptic's Guide to Growth and Fulfillment
Dave Hollis - 2020
and husband of #1 New York Times bestselling author Rachel Hollis, refutes the lies people believe but don't talk about, keeping them stuck in a rut, and points the way for readers to finally start living the best versions of their lives.When Rachel Hollis began writing the #1 New York Times bestseller Girl, Wash Your Face, her husband Dave bristled at her transparency about her self-deceptions. Then he had a revelation: women aren't the only ones who believe lies. Both women and men buy into a host of lies that keep them from reaching their potential, often against a backdrop of ingrained ideas about how they should or shouldn't act, how they should or shouldn’t reach for help, or how they show up for life.Dave knows this personally. He believed all the lies, too. He found himself stuck in a rut, unmotivated, unfulfilled, and a version of himself he didn't like, all while being skeptical he could actually do anything about it. Then, he began to wake up. In his new book, he talks honestly about topics people aren't normally honest about--his impulse to solve instead of listen, his struggle to accept help or admit he needs it, even his insecurities about being a parent. Unpacking the untruths he once believed, he reveals how those lies held him back and outlines the tools that helped him change his life. Offering encouragement, challenge, and a hundred moments to laugh at himself, Dave points the way for others to drop bogus ideas and finally start living the best versions of their lives too.
The 5 Second Rule: Transform Your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage
Mel Robbins - 2017
What if the secret to having the confidence and courage to enrich your life and work is simply knowing how to push yourself? Using the science of habits, riveting stories and surprising facts from some of the most famous moments in history, art and business, Mel Robbins will explain the power of a “push moment.” Then, she’ll give you one simple tool you can use to become your greatest self. It takes just five seconds to use this tool, and every time you do, you’ll be in great company. More than 8 million people have watched Mel’s TEDx Talk, and executives inside of the world’s largest brands are using the tool to increase productivity, collaboration, and engagement. In The 5 Second Rule, you’ll discover it takes just five seconds to: Become confident Break the habit of procrastination and self-doubt Beat fear and uncertainty Stop worrying and feel happier Share your ideas with courage The 5 Second Rule is a simple, one-size-fits-all solution for the one problem we all face —we hold ourselves back. The secret isn’t knowing what to do—it’s knowing how to make yourself do it.
Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression
Sally Brampton - 2008
But behind the successful, glamorous career was a story that many of her friends and colleagues knew nothing about—her ongoing struggle with severe depression and alcoholism. Brampton's is a candid, tremendously honest telling of how she was finally able to "address the elephant in the room," and of a culture that sends the overriding message that people who suffer from depression are somehow responsible for their own illness. She offers readers a unique perspective of depression from the inside that is at times wrenching, but ultimately inspirational, as it charts her own coming back to life. Beyond her personal story, Brampton offers practical advice to all those affected by this illness. This book will resonate with any person whose life has been haunted by depression, at the same time offering help and understanding to those whose loved ones suffer from this debilitating condition.
The Book of Awesome
Neil Pasricha - 2010
With a 24/7 news cycle reporting that the polar ice caps are melting, hurricanes are swirling in the seas, wars are heating up around the world, and the job market is in a deep freeze, it's tempting to feel that the world is falling apart. But awesome things are all around us-sometimes we just need someone to point them out.The Book of Awesome reminds us that the best things in life are free (yes, your grandma was right). With laugh-out-loud observations from award- winning comedy writer Neil Pasricha, The Book of Awesome is filled with smile-inducing moments on every page that make you feel like a kid looking at the world for the first time. Read it and you'll remember all the things there are to feel good about. The Book of Awesome reminds us of all the little things that we often overlook but that make us smile. With touching, warm, and funny observations, each entry ends with the big booming feeling you'll get when you read through them: AWESOME!
When Nothing Matters Anymore: A Survival Guide for Depressed Teens
Bev Cobain - 1998
Bev Cobain is the cousin of Kurt, the rock star who took his own life in 1994.
What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence
Michele Filgate - 2019
It took her more than a decade to realize what she was actually trying to write: how this affected her relationship with her mother. When it was finally published, the essay went viral, shared on social media by Anne Lamott, Rebecca Solnit, and many others. The outpouring of responses gave Filgate an idea, and the resulting anthology offers a candid look at our relationships with our mothers. While some of the writers in this book are estranged from their mothers, others are extremely close. Leslie Jamison writes about trying to discover who her seemingly perfect mother was before ever becoming a mom. In Cathi Hanauer’s hilarious piece, she finally gets a chance to have a conversation with her mother that isn’t interrupted by her domineering (but lovable) father. André Aciman writes about what it was like to have a deaf mother. Melissa Febos uses mythology as a lens to look at her close-knit relationship with her psychotherapist mother. And Julianna Baggott talks about having a mom who tells her everything. As Filgate writes, “Our mothers are our first homes, and that’s why we’re always trying to return to them.” There’s relief in breaking the silence. Acknowledging what we couldn’t say for so long is one way to heal our relationships with others and, perhaps most important, with ourselves. Contributors include Cathi Hanauer, Melissa Febos, Alexander Chee, Dylan Landis, Bernice L. McFadden, Julianna Baggott, Lynn Steger Strong, Kiese Laymon, Carmen Maria Machado, André Aciman, Sari Botton, Nayomi Munaweera, Brandon Taylor, and Leslie Jamison.
Note to Self
Connor Franta - 2017
Exploring his past with humor and astounding insight, Connor reminded his fans of why they first fell in love with him on YouTube—and revealed to newcomers how he relates to his millions of dedicated followers.Now, two years later, Connor is ready to bring to light a side of himself he’s rarely shown on or off camera. In this diary-like look at his life since A Work In Progress, Connor talks about his battles with clinical depression, social anxiety, self-love, and acceptance; his desire to maintain an authentic self in a world that values shares and likes over true connections; his struggles with love and loss; and his renewed efforts to be in the moment—with others and himself.Told through short essays, letters to his past and future selves, poetry, and original photography, Note to Self is a raw, in-the-moment look at the fascinating interior life of a young creator turning inward in order to move forward.
The Courage to be Happy: True Contentment Is In Your Power
Ichiro Kishimi - 2016
In The Courage To Be Happy, Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga again distil their wisdom into simple yet profound advice to show us how we, too, can use twentieth-century psychological theory to find true happiness.
14,000 Things to Be Happy About: The Happy Book
Barbara Ann Kipfer - 1990
Strawberry ice cream. Making faces at monkeys in the zoo. Dog dishes that say "Good Dog." Carolers singing around a Norwegian spruce. Sun burning off the morning fog. Cabanas. It's the little things that make life worth living, and they can be found by the dozens in this obsessive, quirky, and utterly captivating compendium with over 950,000 copies in print. A pure, unadulterated listing, it offers not a single explanation, aside, or footnote, but reading it is as irresistible as eating popcorn. Randomly selected and catalogued over the course of twenty years-and illustrated with joyous and jewel-like precision by the gifted artist Pierre Le-Tan-14,000 THINGS is Barbara Ann Kipfer's perfect antidote to the all-too-frequently-mentioned things we should be unhappy about.It's a celebration of almost everything that's ever made us smile. And that itself is reason number 14,001.
Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding
Jessie Sholl - 2010
Because if my mother is one of those crazy junk-house people, then what does that make me?When her divorced mother was diagnosed with cancer, New York City writer Jessie Sholl returned to her hometown of Minneapolis to help her prepare for her upcoming surgery and get her affairs in order. While a daunting task for any adult dealing with an aging parent, it's compounded for Sholl by one lifelong, complex, and confounding truth: her mother is a compulsive hoarder. Dirty Secret is a daughter's powerful memoir of confronting her mother's disorder, of searching for the normalcy that was never hers as a child, and, finally, cleaning out the clutter of her mother's home in the hopes of salvaging the true heart of their relationship before it's too late.Growing up, young Jessie knew her mother wasn't like other mothers: chronically disorganized, she might forgo picking Jessie up from kindergarten to spend the afternoon thrift store shopping. Now, tracing the downward spiral in her mother's hoarding behavior to the death of a long-time boyfriend, she bravely wades into a pathological sea of stuff: broken appliances, moldy cowboy boots, twenty identical pairs of graying bargain-bin sneakers, abandoned arts and crafts, newspapers, magazines, a dresser drawer crammed with discarded eyeglasses, shovelfuls of junk mail . . . the things that become a hoarder's treasures. With candor, wit, and not a drop of sentimentality, Jessie Sholl explores the many personal and psychological ramifications of hoarding while telling an unforgettable mother-daughter tale.
13 Things That Don't Make Sense: The Most Baffling Scientific Mysteries of Our Time
Michael Brooks - 2008
The effects of homeopathy don’t go away under rigorous scientific conditions. The laws of nature aren’t what they used to be. Thirty years on, no one has an explanation for a seemingly intelligent signal received from outer space. The US Department of Energy is re-examining cold fusion because the experimental evidence seems too solid to ignore. The placebo effect is put to work in medicine while doctors can’t agree whether it even exists.In an age when science is supposed to be king, scientists are beset by experimental results they simply can’t explain. But, if the past is anything to go by, these anomalies contain the seeds of future revolutions. While taking readers on an entertaining tour d’horizon of the strangest of scientific findings – involving everything from our lack of free will to Martian methane that offers new evidence of life on the planet – Michael Brooks argues that the things we don’t understand are the key to what we are about to discover.This mind-boggling but entirely accessible survey of the outer limits of human knowledge is based on a short article by Michael Brooks for New Scientist magazine. It became the sixth most circulated story on the internet in 2005, and provoked widespread comment and compliments (Google “13 things that do not make sense” to see).Michael Brooks has now dug deeply into those mysteries, with extraordinary results.
To the Bridge
Nancy Rommelmann - 2018
Forty minutes later, rescuers found the body of four-year-old Eldon. Miraculously, his seven-year-old sister, Trinity, was saved. As the public cried out for blood, Amanda was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.Embarking on a seven-year quest for the truth, Rommelmann traced the roots of Amanda’s fury and desperation through thousands of pages of records, withheld documents, meetings with lawyers and convicts, and interviews with friends and family who felt shocked, confused, and emotionally swindled by a woman whose entire life was now defined by an unspeakable crime. At the heart of that crime: a tempestuous marriage, a family on the fast track to self-destruction, and a myriad of secrets and lies as dark and turbulent as the Willamette River. “In To the Bridge, Nancy Rommelmann takes what many consider the most unforgivable of crimes—a mother set on murdering her own children—and delivers something thoughtful and provocative: a deeply reported, sensitively told, all-too-relevant tragedy of addiction and codependency, toxic masculinity, and capricious justice. You won’t be able to look away—nor should any of us.” —Robert Kolker, New York Times bestselling author of Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery “How do you understand the not understandable and forgive the unforgivable? So asks one of the characters in this clear-eyed investigation into something we all turn away from. To the Bridge is a tour de force of both journalism and compassion, in the lineage of such masterpieces as In Cold Blood and The Executioner’s Song. Word by word, sentence by sentence, Rommelmann’s writing is that good. And so is her heart.” —Nick Flynn, PEN/Martha Albrand Award–winning author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
Bad Boyfriends: Using Attachment Theory to Avoid Mr. (or Ms.) Wrong and Make You a Better Partner
Jeb Kinnison - 2014
If you were brought up in the Western world, you’ve been trained on fairy tales of love and relationships that are misleading at best, and at worst have you making mistake after mistake in starting relationships with the wrong kinds of people who will waste your time and keep you from finding a loyal partner. Science has the answer! Or at least a guide to save you the time and effort of discovering for yourself how many wrong types of romantic partners there are. Reading this book will help you recognize the signs of some of the syndromes that prevent people from being good partners. We’ll go through those syndromes and point out some of the signs. Those little red flags you sometimes notice when you are getting to know someone? Often they speak loud and clear once you understand the types, and you can decide immediately to run away or approach with caution those who show them. If you’re young and just starting to look for a partner, good news—the world is swarming with well-adjusted, charming matches for you, if you know how to recognize them. The bad news: you are inexperienced and you may not recognize the right type of person when you date them. Many people expect to experience an immediate sense of excitement, an overwhelming rush of attraction, and to fall in love rapidly and equally with someone who feels the same. This rarely happens, and when it does it usually ends badly! And expecting it will cause you to let go of people who are steady, loving, and attentive, if you had given them a chance. So once you’ve identified someone who makes you laugh, answers your messages, and is there for you when you want them, don’t make the mistake of tossing them aside for the merely good-looking, sexy, or intriguing stranger. If you’re older, bad news: while you were spending time and effort on relationships you were hoping would turn out better, or even happily nestled in a good relationship or two, most of the secure, reliable, sane people in your age group got paired off. They’re married or happily enfamilied, and most of the people your age in the dating pool are tragically unable to form a good long-term relationship. You should always ask yourself, “why is this one still available?”—there may be a good answer (recently widowed or left a long-term relationship), or it may be that this person has just been extraordinarily unlucky in having over twenty short relationships in twenty years (to cite one case!) But it’s far more likely you have met someone with a problematic attachment style. As you age past 40, the percentage of the dating pool that is able to form a secure, stable relationship drops to less than 30%[1]; and since it can take months of dating to understand why Mr. or Ms. SeemsNice is really the future ex-partner from Hell, being able to recognize the difficult types will help you recognize them faster and move on to the next. This book outlines the basics (which might be all you need), and points you toward more resources if you want to understand more about your problem partner. If you're wondering if the guy or girl you've been hanging out with might not be quite right, this is the place to match those little red flags you've noticed with known bad types. And by getting out fast, you can avoid emotional damage and wasted time, and get going on finding someone who's really right for you. Study all of the bad types and you'll detect them before even getting involved. Or you could be one of the few people who recognizes their own problems in one of these types. There are study materials and plans of action for you, too.
Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic
Esther Perel - 2006
She invites us to explore the paradoxical union of domesticity and sexual desire, and explains what it takes to bring lust home.In her 20 years of clinical experience, Perel has treated hundreds of couples whose home lives are empty of passion. They describe relationships that are open and loving, yet sexually dull. What is going on?In this explosively original book, Perel explains that our cultural penchant for equality, togetherness, and absolute candor is antithetical to erotic desire for both men and women. Sexual excitement doesn't always play by the rules of good citizenship. It is politically incorrect. It thrives on power plays, unfair advantages, and the space between self and other. More exciting, playful, even poetic sex is possible, but first we must kick egalitarian ideals and emotional housekeeping out of our bedrooms.While Mating in Captivity shows why the domestic realm can feel like a cage, Perel's take on bedroom dynamics promises to liberate, enchant, and provoke. Flinging the doors open on erotic life and domesticity, she invites us to put the "X" back in sex.©2006 Esther Perel (P)2006 HarperCollins Publishers
The Empathy Exams
Leslie Jamison - 2014
She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory—from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration—in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.