She is 50 years old, and was for 30 years a respected teacher and educational manager. She is married with three grown children. But ever since she was four years old, Ruth has lived with other people in her head. Ruth isn't certain when the sexual abuse started but her first memories are of being assualted by her grandfather, so it was certainly happening by the time she was four. Her response to the massive trauma was to detach herself from it completely. Unconsciously, she invented an alter ego to take her place and take her pain. The technique was so successful that she continued to invent personalities to deal with anything stressful that happened to her. And a lot of awful things happened. Her father abused her too; her mother was severely mentally ill, and for years, as the personalities inside her mind multiplied, Ruth was terrifed that she too was mad. On the outside, Ruth grew up to be a successful adult, but inside, all was chaos. Eventually she could no longer cope and she suffered a breakdown. Since then she has learned how to manage her condition and these days she works with research psychologists to increase the understanding and treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder.

    She became pregnant as one woman and gave birth as another. She moved in seconds from vibrant youth to trembling old age. She changed in her husband's arms from a loving wife to a savage shrew. And, finally, she desperately tried and failed and tried again with the aid of doctors, family and loved ones to find her own true face behind the tortured masks. From Chris Costner Sizemore's own memories, her torment and hard-won triumph, comes the most remarkable true story that any woman ever lived.

    This is the essential book on health anxiety from David Veale, the bestselling author of 'Overcoming Obsessive Compulsive Disorder'.

    What surfaced was terrifying: she was inhabited by 'the Troops'-92 individual personalities. This groundbreaking true story is made all the more extraordinary in that it was written by the Troops themselves. What they reveal is a spellbinding descent into a personal hell-and an ultimate deliverance for the woman they became.

    From exercises to help you put your worries into perspective, to relaxation methods for when anxiety attacks, Dr Aaron Balick shows you how to feel more at ease and sustain a sense of calm

    It reassures people that their responses which may seem frightening and painful are an integral part of this difficult time but can become manageable with compassionate support and the right information. This valuable aid helps the grieving understand their emotions and enables friends and family to offer support and comfort where and when it is most needed.

    In it, she's only eight years old and posing for her mother's beguiling boyfriend, Gary Lundquist an elementary school teacher, neighborhood stalwart, and brutal pedophile. Later that night, Gary locks Michelle in a cage, tortures her repeatedly, and uses her to quench his voracious and deviant sexual whims.Michelle can also pinpoint the moment she reconstituted the splintered pieces of her life. Just a few years after being confined to a mental hospital and at the mercy of an alternate personality who kept trolling for sadistic men, she's in cap and gown receiving her Ph.D. in psychology and the university's award for best dissertation. The distance between these two points is the improbable journey from torture, loss, and mental illness to recovery that is Michelle Stevens' powerful memoir, Scared Selfless.Gary Lundquist kept Michelle as his sex slave for six years. During that time, he waged a campaign of unimaginable cruelty. He pimped her out to countless men for prostitution and forced her to perform in kiddie porn when it was legal and shown in Times Square.It took fifteen years, three hospitalizations, and multiple suicide attempts for Michelle to work through Gary's dark legacy. She suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety, depression, and developed multiple personalities. There was Chelsey, the rebellious teenager who told her boss to shove it; Vicious, a tween with homicidal rage; and Sarah, a sweet little girl who brought her teddy bear on a first date.In this harrowing yet unflinching look at her own experience, Michelle, who was inspired to help others heal by becoming a psychotherapist, sheds light on the all-too-real threat of child sexual abuse and the psychological effects on its victims and best methods for healing, based on her own struggle with PTSD and dissociative identity disorder (more commonly known as multiple personality disorder). Scared Selfless is an examination at the extraordinary and inexplicable feats of the mind in the face of unspeakably horrifying trauma and the story of Michelle's courageous road to healing, recovery, and triumph.

     Stress is a lot like love – hard to define, but you know it when you feel it. This book will explore the nature of stress and how it infiltrates every level of your life, including the physical, emotional, cognitive, relational and even spiritual. You’ll find ways to nurture resilience, rationality and relaxation in your every day life, and learn how to loosen the grip of worry and anxiety. Through techniques that get to the heart of your unique stress response, and an exploration of how stress can affect your relationships, you'll discover how to control stress instead of letting it control you. This book shows you how. But this book is not just another “anti-stress” book. Here, we will not be concerned with only reducing the symptoms of stress. Rather, we'll try to understand exactly what stress is and the role it plays in our lives. We'll attempt to dig deep to really understand the real sources of our anxiety and how to take ownership of them. Using the power of habit and several techniques for smoothing out the stressful wrinkles in our day-to-day lives, we'll move towards a real-world solution to living with less stress, more confidence and a deep spiritual resilience that will insulate you from the inevitable pressures of life. By adopting a trusting, open and relaxed attitude, we'll bring something more of ourselves to relationships of all kinds. This book will take a look at dating and relationships without stress and worry, as well as ways to bring tranquility and balance into your home and family life. Again, this book is not about eradicating stress from your life forever. We'll end with a consideration of the positive side of negative thinking, and how we can use stress and worry to our advantage. We will address physical, emotional, relational, spiritual, and cognitive and behavioral symptoms of stress. And while most stress-management solutions offer relief for symptoms in only one or two of the above areas, this book will show you how all five areas are important, and a successful stress solution will touch on each of them. Here Is What You Will Learn After Reading This Book: A deeper understanding of what stress really is and the role it plays in our lives The real sources of our anxiety and how to take ownership of them A real-world solution to living with less stress Dating and relationships without stress and worry Ways to bring tranquility and balance into your home and family life And much more! Tags: worrying, stop worrying, overcome worry, how to stop worrying, social anxiety, anxiety, overcome social anxiety, relationship jealousy, overcome relationship jealousy, insecurity, insecure, stop being insecure, stress, negativity, overcome stress, stop negative thinking, overcome negative thinking, negative thinking, start living, de-stress, be happy, happiness, worry free, worry cure, living again, relaxation, anxiety relief, stress relief, worry, relax, worry free life, healthy living, stress free, stress relief, relieve stress, worry habit, break the worry habit, how to break the worry habit, codependency, codependency guide, living stress free, no more worrying, stop worry, worry, worry free

    This work includes strategies that provide teachers and teaching assistants with different perspectives, practical tools and the confidence for supporting these children.

    It illustrates the emotional and psychological devastation inflicted on young girls when they experience childhood sexual abuse, exploring varied situations and settings in which this abuse takes place, focusing on the child's experiences at the time of the assault, as well as the emotional, behavioral, and psychological problems that emerge in adolescence and adulthood. A common theme emerges in therapy sessions: self-hatred, low self-esteem, fearfulness, and an abiding sense of personal debasement. But this book offers an uplifting message. In addition to giving therapists and other helpers an empathic insight, Stolen Tomorrows will enable the survivor to recognize herself in both her personal history and her current struggle to overcome the legacy of abuse.

    THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLERThe brilliant new book from the multiple Sunday Times bestselling author that will explain the principles behind maintaining a healthy mind and body.The mind and body are often talked about as separate entities, but it’s only when they work in harmony with one another that one can truly push oneself to the highest heights.In his new book, Ant Middleton lays out and explains the principles that he lives by to best keep his mindset and body as strong as they can possibly be.

    

    In Part One, we join him on an engaging, often hilarious, and compelling personal journey.... through decades of tasting from a banquet of spiritual approaches. Through his direct experience, fierce exploration, and scintillating discernment, Brown exposes the fragmented, ungrounded and dissociative notions of spirituality that have imprisoned our consciousness and obstructed our awakening since time immemorial. In his cuttingly straight style, he reveals that much of what we have been calling "spirituality" is actually a patriarchal, emotionally bereft construct that perpetuates our self-avoidance. He then proves to us--point by brilliant point--that true spirituality is a whole-being awakening, one that wonderfully embraces our entire human experience. In many spiritual practices, emotional healing processes (blockage clearing, issue resolution, the working through of the shadow) have been bypassed and trivialized, as though the 'real' spiritual realm exists independent of our feelings. Brown makes no distinction between these realms, revealing that emotional maturity and spiritual maturity are synonymous, and that any spirituality that desacralizes our selfhood is not enlightenment at all. It is a bypass of that which is fundamentally human: our feelings, our stories, our bodies, our relationships with each other and the earth that houses us. In his words, "Detachment is a tool- not a life. If you can't find your transformation in the village, you haven't found a thing." In Part Two, Brown engages in a riveting dialogue with an ungrounded seeker named "Michael." Their dialogues unfurl in warmth, humor, playfulness, personal story, threaded with challenging confrontation and cutting truth. Hands-on exercises are dispersed throughout--providing readers with a direct experience of a new, inclusive model. Here the author lays down the tracks for a more balanced, heartfelt and relational spirituality- one that leaves us "enrealed," integrated, and purposeful. Not awakened, but awakening. Not escaping our humanness, but finding our meaning and spirituality deep within it. Out of the ashes of old ways of being, a bright new paradigm comes into view. An inclusive, self-honoring, and healing spiritual perspective that will be a welcomed relief for any seeker.In the author's words, "It's one thing to briefly detach from story in the hopes of gaining a different perspective--it's quite another to deny our storied roots altogether. What will we stand in, then? At a time when our personal stories have been shamed and shunned in the spiritual community, it is all the more imperative to revive them and makes luminous their sacred, transformative properties. The past is not an illusion, as many would suggest. It is the ground of our being, the karmic field for our soul's transformation- the mystery that threads right through our history. Story is where we come from. Story is what roots us in the present. Story is how we arrive at the next place intact. A spirituality without story is like a body without breath. Dead to the world." What we need now are models that lead us back into our hearts, into relatedness, into a deep and reverential regard for the self's journey through time. In this magnificent book, Brown endeavors to hearticulate one such path, reminding us that heaven on earth begins and ends deep within the recesses of our enlivened humanness. At long last, we can lay down our weary heads, burdened by the impossibility of transcending our human experience. Back to our roots, back into our bodies, back into all that makes us marvelously human. Home at last.

    But the cliché is true: happiness truly is in the journey, not the destination.Psychologist Cassandra Dunn believes that happiness is available to all of us – and not just in some picture-perfect ideal life. Cass has helped thousands of people get from Crappy to Happy with her hit podcast. In this book Cass expands on those conversations and provides even more information and practical tools, helping you learn to let go, to find your people, to determine your direction and more.Your journey to living your best life begins right here and now.