Almost a Psychopath: Do I (or Does Someone I Know) Have a Problem with Manipulation and Lack of Empathy?


Ronald Schouten - 2012
    Pathological lying. Manipulation. Lack of remorse. Shallowness. Exploitation for financial gain. These are the qualities of Almost Psychopaths. They are not the deranged criminals or serial killers that might be coined "psychopaths" in the movies or on TV. They are spouses, coworkers, bosses, neighbors, and people in the news who exhibit many of the same behaviors as a full-blown psychopath, but with less intensity and consistency.In Almost a Psychopath, Ronald Schouten, MD, JD, and James Silver, JD, draw on scientific research and their own experiences to help you identify if you are an Almost Psychopath and, if so, guide you to interventions and resources to change your behavior.If you think you have encountered an Almost Psychopath, they offer practical tools to help you: recognize the behavior, attitudes, and characteristics of the Almost Psychopath; make sense of interactions you've had with Almost Psychopaths; devise strategies for dealing with them in the present; make informed decisions about your next steps; and learn ways to help an Almost Psychopath get better control of their behavior.The Almost Effect™ Series presents books written by Harvard Medical School faculty and other experts that offer guidance on common behavioral and physical problems falling in the spectrum between normal health and a full-blown medical condition. These are the first publications to help general readers recognize and address these problems.

Love Worth Making: How to Have Ridiculously Great Sex in a Lasting Relationship


Stephen Snyder - 2018
    With a click of the mouse you can learn the names for sex acts your grandparents never knew existed. But are people any happier in bed? Probably not. Research from the Kinsey Institute suggests that 25% of American women in heterosexual relationships are markedly distressed about their sex lives.There’s no shortage of books these days on sex technique. But that’s not what most people are interested in. What they really want is to have great sex in a committed relationship, in which case all the technical expertise in the world won’t help you very much. For that, you need to understand sexual feelings—how they operate, what rules they follow, and how they connect to the rest of who you are.Dr. Stephen Snyder's unique approach has helped over 1,500 individuals and couples master the erotic challenges of long-term relationships. Integrating the latest research on human sexuality with compelling stories from his 30 years of experience working with over 1,500 individuals and couples, Love Worth Making will help people of all ages and backgrounds master the erotic challenges of long-term relationships, understand their sexual feelings, and enjoy them for life.

The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence


Gavin de Becker - 1996
    The new nanny gives a mother an uneasy feeling. A stranger in a deserted parking lot offers unsolicited help. The threat of violence surrounds us every day. But we can protect ourselves, by learning to trust—and act on—our gut instincts.In this empowering book, Gavin de Becker, the man Oprah Winfrey calls the nation's leading expert on violent behavior, shows you how to spot even subtle signs of danger—before it's too late. Shattering the myth that most violent acts are unpredictable, de Becker, whose clients include top Hollywood stars and government agencies, offers specific ways to protect yourself and those you love, including how to act when approached by a stranger, when you should fear someone close to you, what to do if you are being stalked, how to uncover the source of anonymous threats or phone calls, the biggest mistake you can make with a threatening person, and more. Learn to spot the danger signals others miss. It might just save your life.

The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again


Catherine Price - 2021
    We often think of fun as indulgent, even immature and selfish. We claim to not have time for it, even as we find hours a day for what Price calls "Fake Fun"--bingeing on television, doom-scrolling the news, or posting photos to social media, all in hopes of filling some of the emptiness we feel inside..In this follow-up to her hit book, How to Break Up with Your Phone, Price makes the case that True Fun--which she defines as the magical confluence of playfulness, connection, and flow--will give us the fulfillment we so desperately seek. If you use True Fun as your compass, you will be happier and healthier. You will be more productive, less resentful, and less stressed. You will have more energy. You will find community and a sense of purpose. You will stop languishing and start flourishing. And best of all? You'll enjoy the process.Weaving together scientific research with personal experience, Price reveals the surprising mental, physical, and cognitive benefits of fun, and offers a practical, personalized plan for how we can achieve better screen/life balance and attract more True Fun into our daily lives--without feeling overwhelmed.

Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls


Lisa Damour - 2019
    Research finds that the number of girls who said that they often felt nervous, worried, or fearful jumped 55 percent from 2009 to 2014, while the comparable number for adolescent boys has remained unchanged. As a clinical psychologist who specializes in working with girls, Lisa Damour, Ph.D., has witnessed this rising tide of stress and anxiety in her own research, in private practice, and in the all-girls’ school where she consults. She knew this had to be the topic of her new book. In the engaging, anecdotal style and reassuring tone that won over thousands of readers of her first book, Untangled, Damour starts by addressing the facts about psychological pressure. She explains the surprising and underappreciated value of stress and anxiety: that stress can helpfully stretch us beyond our comfort zones, and anxiety can play a key role in keeping girls safe. When we emphasize the benefits of stress and anxiety, we can help our daughters take them in stride. But no parents want their daughter to suffer from emotional overload, so Damour then turns to the many facets of girls’ lives where tension takes hold: their interactions at home, pressures at school, social anxiety among other girls and among boys, and their lives online. As readers move through the layers of girls’ lives, they’ll learn about the critical steps that adults can take to shield their daughters from the toxic pressures to which our culture—including we, as parents—subjects girls. Readers who know Damour from Untangled or the New York Times, or from her regular appearances on CBS News, will be drawn to this important new contribution to understanding and supporting today’s girls.Praise for Under Pressure “Truly a must-read for parents, teachers, coaches, and mentors wanting to help girls along the path to adulthood.”—Julie Lythcott-Haims, New York Times bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult

Reading People: How Seeing the World through the Lens of Personality Changes Everything


Anne Bogel - 2017
    But what we're finding is this: knowing which Harry Potter character you are is easy, but actually knowing yourself isn't as simple as just checking a few boxes on an online quiz.For readers who long to dig deeper into what makes them uniquely them (and why that matters), popular blogger Anne Bogel has done the hard part--collecting, exploring, and explaining the most popular personality frameworks, such as Myers-Briggs, StrengthsFinder, Enneagram, and others. She explains to readers the life-changing insights that can be gained from each and shares specific, practical real-life applications across all facets of life, including love and marriage, productivity, parenting, the workplace, and spiritual life. In her friendly, relatable style, Bogel shares engaging personal stories that show firsthand how understanding personality can revolutionize the way we live, love, work, and pray.

It Didn't Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle


Mark Wolynn - 2016
    Anxiety. Chronic Pain. Phobias. Obsessive thoughts. The evidence is compelling: the roots of these difficulties may not reside in our immediate life experience or in chemical imbalances in our brains—but in the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. The latest scientific research, now making headlines, supports what many have long intuited—that traumatic experience can be passed down through generations. It Didn’t Start with You builds on the work of leading experts in post-traumatic stress, including Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score. Even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died, or the story has been forgotten or silenced, memory and feelings can live on. These emotional legacies are often hidden, encoded in everything from gene expression to everyday language, and they play a far greater role in our emotional and physical health than has ever before been understood.   As a pioneer in the field of inherited family trauma, Mark Wolynn has worked with individuals and groups on a therapeutic level for over twenty years. It Didn’t Start with You offers a pragmatic and prescriptive guide to his method, the Core Language Approach. Diagnostic self-inventories provide a way to uncover the fears and anxieties conveyed through everyday words, behaviors, and physical symptoms. Techniques for developing a genogram or extended family tree create a map of experiences going back through the generations. And visualization, active imagination, and direct dialogue create pathways to reconnection, integration, and reclaiming life and health. It Didn’t Start With You is a transformative approach to resolving longstanding difficulties that in many cases, traditional therapy, drugs, or other interventions have not had the capacity to touch.

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos


Jordan B. Peterson - 2018
    Peterson's answer to this most difficult of questions uniquely combines the hard-won truths of ancient tradition with the stunning revelations of cutting-edge scientific research.Humorous, surprising, and informative, Dr. Peterson tells us why skateboarding boys and girls must be left alone, what terrible fate awaits those who criticize too easily, and why you should always pet a cat when you meet one on the street.What does the nervous system of the lowly lobster have to tell us about standing up straight (with our shoulders back) and about success in life? Why did ancient Egyptians worship the capacity to pay careful attention as the highest of gods? What dreadful paths do people tread when they become resentful, arrogant, and vengeful? Dr. Peterson journeys broadly, discussing discipline, freedom, adventure, and responsibility, distilling the world's wisdom into 12 practical and profound rules for life. 12 Rules for Life shatters the modern commonplaces of science, faith, and human nature while transforming and ennobling the mind and spirit of its listeners.

The 6 Husbands Every Wife Should Have: How Couples Who Change Together Stay Together


Steven Craig - 2012
    Steven Craig offers a revolutionary book that helps couples identify the six different people they need to become over the course of their relationship in order to grow together rather than apart.Throughout his career as a marriage counselor, Dr. Craig has identified a common thread in strained relationships: the belief that change should be avoided at all costs. Determined to destroy this harmful myth, Dr. Craig presents a concept as straightforward as it is original: Marriages don’t fail when people change; they fail when people don’t change.In 6 Husbands, Dr. Craig divides the typical marriage into six stages, outlining both the common misconceptions and opportunities for growth at each level. From the earliest stage of becoming the right person for your spouse in the new marriage; to thinking and acting like a team; to adjusting to the dynamics of parenthood; to caring for older children and elderly parents; to adapting to the empty nest; and then to growing into the golden years and becoming a dependable companion, Dr. Craig offers new communication tools, rules for intimacy, checklists, and assessments designed to inspire change.The 6 Husbands Every Wife Should Have will revitalize readers’ notions of marriage and turn it into an ongoing activity that husband and wife can conquer actively—together.

Sex After . . .: Women Share How Intimacy Changes as Life Changes


Iris Krasnow - 2014
     Women of the baby boomer generation know and trust Iris Krasnow as a writer who speaks candidly to the issues that concern them most. In the months following the publication of her most recent book, The Secret Lives of Wives, Krasnow addressed thousands of women, and she discovered that two subjects dominated her audiences’ conversations: sex and change. Whether women are worried about marriage and divorce or illness and death, they’re all asking: “How do I handle the shifts in my sexuality caused by these events?” Sex After . . . holds the answers to everything from regaining sexual confidence after childbirth and breast cancer to navigating the dating scene in senior communities. As with all of Krasnow’s books since her New York Times bestseller Surrendering to Marriage, the narrative is driven by real women’s stories: raw, intimate, and, most importantly, true. Prescriptive, emancipating, and insightful, Sex After . . . addresses a range of circumstances, including what happens:When you or your spouse doesn’t want sex anymoreAfter cancer, amputation, PTSD, or another illness maims the bodyIf you come out of the closet at middle ageWhen your marriage is damaged by adulteryIf you’re dating again after twenty-five years with the same sexual partnerWhen your husband is addicted to Viagra Filled with edgy and honest stories of carnal challenge and triumph from women of all backgrounds and life stages, Sex After . . . is Krasnow’s signature take on Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask—during all of life’s passages. Krasnow is a media and lecture tour favorite, and readers—whether in the heat of an initial can’t-eat-can’t-sleep attraction or rounding the corner to their sixtieth anniversary—will applaud her eye-opening perspectives on the one issue that can change lives for better or worse like nothing else.

You've Already Changed Your Life


Jade Chang - 2021
    the World and the Amazon Original The List comes a timely and thought-provoking exploration of the small moments that change us in big ways.In You’ve Already Changed Your Life, Jade Chang posits that humans are infinitely adaptable, that the seeds of personal transformation are sown when we least expect it, and that identifying your own small (but profound!) shifts will help you retell the story of your life.As Jade shares the unlikely moments that changed her forever, we join her on a quest to understand what makes people who they are. She takes us from a surprising history of personality tests to a debunking of the popular science theory of the reptile brain, with several unexpected stops along the way, all with her characteristic charm and wit. Part memoir, part investigation into the science of the mind, this Audible Original questions the old stories we’ve told ourselves about our capacity for change and gives you a blueprint to discover all the ways that you have, indeed, already changed your life.

The Teenage Brain: A Neuroscientist's Survival Guide to Raising Adolescents and Young Adults


Frances E. Jensen - 2014
    Frances E. Jensen, a mother, teacher, researcher, and internationally known expert in neurology, introduces us to the mystery and magic of the teen brain. One of the first books to focus exclusively on the neurological development of adolescents, The Teenage Brain presents new findings, dispels widespread myths, and provides practical suggestions for negotiating this difficult and dynamic life stage for both adults and adolescents.Interweaving easy-to-follow scientific data with anecdotes drawn from her experiences as a parent, clinician, and public speaker, Dr. Jensen explores adolescent brain functioning and development, including learning and memory, and investigates the impact of influences such as drugs, multitasking, sleep, and stress. The Teenage Brain reveals how: Adolescents may not be as resilient to the effects of drugs as we previously thought. Occasional use of marijuana has been shown to cause lingering memory problems, and long-term use can affect later adulthood I.Q. Multi-tasking causes divided attention and can reduce learning ability. Emotionally stressful situations in adolescence can have permanent effects on mental health, and may lead to higher risk for certain neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression.Rigorous yet accessible, warm yet direct, The Teenage Brain sheds new light on young adults, and provides practical suggestions for how parents, schools, and even the legal system can better help them during this crucial period.

How to Improve Your Marriage Without Talking About It: Finding Love Beyond Words


Patricia Love - 2007
    Don't make a man feel like a woman by talking to him like you would your girlfriend.

Doing It!: Let's Talk About Sex


Hannah Witton - 2017
    VIRGINITY. CONSENT. THE BIG O... Sex-positive vlogger Hannah Witton covers it all.Nobody really has sex all figured out. So Hannah Witton wrote a book full of honest, hilarious (and sometimes awkward) anecdotes, confessions, and revelations. Hannah talks about doing it safely. Doing it joyfully. Doing it when you're ready. Not doing it. Basically, doing it the way you want, when you want (if you want).Doing It works as an introduction to sex as well as a guidebook for those who are already sexually active, with insight on topics such as healthy relationships, porn, contraception, sex shaming, and more. Approachable and empowering, this is a go-to resource for all things s-e-x.

Women on Top


Nancy Friday - 1991
    Women on Top looks at a new generation of women and asks: what are women's sexual fantasies today? How have they responded to the changes brought about by feminism? In a world wallpapered with erotic images, but which still denies them full sexual freedom, women are more determined than ever that they'll be 'nice girls' no longer. Explicit, iconoclastic, often shocking, these erotic daydreams - angry, lustful, tender and dark - blow apart the old taboos. Nothing is forbidden.