Category: GreatBooks

Book Announcement

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So… I did a thing…

Here’s a book! I wrote it. 

ROUTLEDGE published it, and the level of fanciness I feel saying that is not measurable. 

It’s a lot like this blog, only you can get it in paper and you have to pay for it. Oh, and it has no pictures. 🙂

Actually, it’s much more comprehensive and better structured than the blog, though the writing style is a lot the same and the idea is the same – let’s BE BETTER THERAPISTS. Let’s use theory and research and our colleagues to help us do that. 

Therapists, in general, I think will really like it and get a lot out of it. So will advanced practicum students and interns. 

At any rate, I’m supposed to tell important people. So, there you go! 

It is available at Routledge and through Amazon! Oh, and if you go to the new Book page on the blog, there’s a coupon code! 

 

 

Great Books Volume 5: Contemporary and Wildly Useful Books Written by People I Know

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Great Books Vol 5: Contemporary and Wildly Useful Books Written by People I Know (at least on Twitter!)

Transcend by Scott Barry Kaufman – This book is for everyone! It’s deeply humanistic and optimistic and transformational. If you thought you knew anything about Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs,” you should FOR SURE read this! It’ll both blow your mind and give you a great new metaphor for understanding human needs and actualization. Also, SBK is just this very cool, super authentic, and genuinely KIND human person. Oh, and he has the best podcast ever, too – The Psychology Podcast.

Show Your Anxiety Who’s Boss by Joel Minden – This is my favorite CBT book for clients. It’s easy to read, and the take-home message is simple and easy to remember (even though Joel knows I always roll my eyes at acronyms that are made to be cute, it turns out they are memorable!). One of my favorite things is how comprehensive it feels without turning into a long list of cognitive distortions. And I just really like the term “anxious fictions!” 

The Habit of a Happy Life: 30 Days to a Positive Addiction by Jeff Zeig. Jeff has written a lot of books, and I like all of them that I’ve read (because the way he thinks, especially about therapy, is just brilliant), but they’re not all for a very broad audience. This one, however, would be very useful for many clinicians and clients alike. If you ever read Positive Addiction by William Glasser, I’d say this is like an update version – same great concept, newer research, and I like Jeff’s writing better than Glasser’s, too! 

The Suicidal Thoughts Workbook by Kathryn Gordon – Is it weird to get really excited about a book on so heavy a topic? NO! Not for therapists, it’s not! Haven’t you lamented how few good resources there are for clients around suicide? This workbook is incredibly compassionate and thorough, gentle and practical. There’s no shying away from any difficult topics, and everything is handled with confidence in and grace for the reader. This is an indispensable resource for therapists, and I have no doubt it will be life-saving for clients. 

Brains Explained by Micah & Alie Caldwell (and sort of by their cats). Look, I know I’m an intense nerd and so you won’t like all the books I like. But if you’re one of the HUGE number of therapists who is both really interested in neuro/brain stuff but sometimes also intimidated by neuro/brain stuff, you’re going to SWOON for this book! There’s definitely enough in there that’s genuinely relevant to clinical practice to make it worth the buy on its own – but be prepared to accidentally get swept up in all the rest of it, too. It’s just so…. accessible and hilarious! And the chapters are almost bite-sized. They’re like…dessert-sized. What more could you want? (Oh, they have a fun YouTube channel, too!)

ZigZag by Michael Apter – Michael is one of my most treasured mentors. If you’ve read any of the Reversal Theory blog posts, you have also benefitted from his brilliance! He’s also written several books, but this one is the newest introduction to RT and it’s really accessible. So many more people (including your clients and yourself!) will find this book somewhere between interestingly useful and life-changing, so give it a try! 

Updated! Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski CAYA is my all time favorite book about sex!! Although it’s geared toward women, I almost always have men in relationships read it, too, especially if they’re in relationships with women. Emily is an incredible writer – she has a wild gift of taking really good, dense research and turning it into something both understandable and meaningful for the lay reader. Make sure you get the newest (revised & updated) version that was published in 2021, mostly because she says she likes it better. 

Also, CAYA has a workbook! (In fact, two cool things about the workbook. One is that I am one of the people who helped review it for initial edits, which was super fun! The second is that I’m pretty sure my husband is the reason the book exists – when we first read CAYA in 2013, before Emily was crazy famous and busy, he just emailed her to ask if she had any of the exercises in PDF, so we didn’t have to mark up the actual book and we could have 2 of each of them. So, she made them into PDFs and emailed them. Then, she put them on her website. Then, this book became a thing!)

And, yes, I’m a Nagoski superfan, so Burnout: Unlocking the Secret to the Stress Cycle (by Emily & Amelia Nagoski) makes this list, too. Incredibly useful, especially for that subset of adult female clients who grew up learning that they had to always play support roles, even unto exhaustion (and maybe developed resentment, anxiety, or low self esteem as a result). Goes along nicely with the podcast The Feminist Survival Project 2020. Just a note – both the book and the podcast lean pretty heavily liberal, but as long as I have warned my conservative clients about that, it’s been ok. 

Oh, and SURPRISE! I wrote a book, too! 😉 But you can’t have it until August! 

 

 

Comment below: What are your favorite therapy-oriented books these days? 

Great Books Volume 4: Books for Certain Clients

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Great Books Volume 4: Books for Certain Clients

This is a list of books that are definitely accessible to clients/laypersons, but I don’t think they’re right for just anyone. 

 

  • Barkley’s ADHD books
    • These book are filled with great behaviorally-based strategies. Only give them to conscientious clients who actually do their homework, though. (Note: This is sometimes harder to find in families with AD/HD!) If the strategies aren’t implemented well and consistently, clients will only get frustrated. You might consider a self-compassion kind of strategy if you think that might happen.
  • The Gifts of Imperfection (Brene Brown)
    • For myself, I find Brown a bit saccharine. However, there’s definitely a population of clients for whom her writing is needed and timely. Especially, it’s useful for those clients who have a very strong inner critic and who have a tendency to over-extend themselves on behalf of others. She seems to speak especially well to women. (Of note, this might be a good option for supplementing that self-compassion strategy mentioned above)
  • Come As You Are (Emily Nagoski)
    • This is, hands down, my absolute favorite book about sex, ever. Nagoski is hard science with a delightful and relational writing voice. Every client (individual and couple) I’ve ever offered this book to has had a good experience and gotten something from it. It’s incredibly validating and normalizing, and gives couples great language for talking about the dual-control model of sexuality. Really great in terms of diversity of sexual normalcy without being overwhelming, even for conservative clients.
  • Authentic Happiness (Martin Seligman)
    • I honestly didn’t like this book (or the one that came after it, about PERMA). Though I love strengths-based counseling, Seligman isn’t my kind of writer, and is a bit surface for me. BUT… this is a great book for some clients – when you want to use a strengths based approach with clients who like to do their own “research” (i.e., who tend to find too much awful stuff on google!) or those who have limited time/money to come into the office, this is a great book to give them a shared vocabulary to use with you. I’ve also found it can be really useful in couples’ work, when clients need help identifying and being aware of partners’ strengths, and for setting them on an upward trajectory, focused less on problems.
  • Twelve Rules for Life (Jordan Peterson)
    • Peterson is a controversial character, I admit. I think that’s more because he speaks in a brash and provocative, uncompromising way. But he has some good science behind him, and in it, clinical wisdom. He has a very strong grounding in Jungian psychology. His book speaks in an accessible way to the existential concepts of meaning, purpose, freedom, and responsibility. I think the reputation he has for speaking most eloquently into the lives of men (esp young men) is deserved. But the message isn’t only useful for young adult male clients. I’ve had a lot of clients enjoy and have success with this book, especially around issues of depression and demoralization.

 

Comment if you have other books to share that you’ve (1) read yourself, (2) recommended to clients, and (3) had good experiences with!

 

 

 

 

Great Books Volume 3: Divergent Classics

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Great Books Volume 3: Divergent Classics

Here’s a list of books that are well worth reading, written by fathers/mothers in the field, but that are a bit more specific (not quite so much emphasis on “how therapy works as a whole”). These tend to be a bit newer, and a bit shorter, if that has been something that’s kept you from reading along so far! You’ll see some of our favorite authors return on this list, as well…

 

  • Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl)
    • Short and incredibly powerful. More personally beneficial than clinically useful, which is why Doctor and the Soul made the first list
  • Love is Never Enough (Aaron Beck)
    • Although this is about working with couples, it’s a good cognitive therapy text without having to read Cognitive Therapy for Depression (although that’s a good one, too). Prisoners of Hate is also awesome!
  • Sex Without Guilt (Albert Ellis)
    • Sure, there are plenty of resources to learn REBT, but why read them when you can learn it while listening to Ellis pontificate about sex five decades ago?! (There’s also an updated version which is shockingly similar to the first edition!)
  • Let Your Body Interpret Your Dreams (Eugene Gendlin)
    • Hands down, the best dream interpretation book I’ve ever read, and it also really exemplifies the down-to-the-ground humanistic, phenomenologically-oriented theory of therapy
  • Emotional Awareness (Dalai Lama and Paul Ekman)
    • A brilliant, easy-to-read dialogue that covers the basics of universal emotional experience and gives insight into the real Buddhist tradition that the West has marred
  • Behind the One Way Mirror (Cloe Madanes)
    • If you were interested in Jay Haley’s Strategies of Psychotherapy, you’ll like this case-study rich exploration of strategic family therapy
  • The Family Crucible (Carl Whitaker and Augustus Napier)
    • This would be a treatise on systems-oriented family therapy if it were a huge, boring tome. Instead it’s a lively narrative that follows one family’s journey. You may end up with more questions than answers, but that’s ok!
  • Waking The Tiger (Peter Levine)
    • The book that effectively birthed Somatic Experiencing and other body-focused trauma therapies. This is readable on a client level, but still has a good science background. May change the way you see the whole mind-body connection, not just with trauma.
  • Flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
    • Really useful for those clients who needs more of a coaching or consultation style, or who have any kind of performance concern (professional, athletic, even relational). Very clear concept, well elaborated, easy to incorporate into your own life and into therapy
  • Gifts Differing (Isabel Briggs-Myers)
    • Great secondary text on Jung’s personality theory and great primary text on MBTI. So much more depth than what you learned in your assessment class, and it’ll give you useful constructs to work with, even if you don’t care for the actual instrument.
  • The Schopenhauer Cure (Irvin Yalom)
    • Existential classic in a very readable narrative form. Also, lots of good stuff about group therapy, all demonstrated rather than explained.
  • On Encounter Groups (Carl Rogers)
    • THE book on process groups. It’s brief and, if you’re a highlighter, prepare for more yellow than white – it’s so rich!

 

I really don’t mean to fill your bookshelves and/or drain your wallet. It’s just that they’re all SO GOOD. Comment below if you’ve read one of these and you want to recommend it for people to begin first! 

 

 

 

 

Undiscovered Self Jung

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Undiscovered Self (Carl Jung)

I love reading. And I’m such a psychology nerd that some of my favorite things to read are the classic texts written by the fathers and mothers of psychology and psychotherapy. So, in case you might want to read some of these – I’ll give you some glorious snippets as I come across them to entice you. (And for those who really don’t want to read these kinds of things, maybe still some good quotes to spice up your consultation meetings and help you feel psychologically erudite.) ?

Carl Jung’s The Undiscovered Self: The Dilemma of the Individual in Modern Society (1957)

This is a tiny, punchy little book! Coming in at just 112 pages, it’s pretty easy to read and fits nicely in a purse or laptop bag! Here’s one of my favorite lessons:

Individual reality can’t be expressed by statistical averages; every therapy client is a completely unique creature and needs to be treated as such.

The more a theory lays claim to universal validity, the less capable it is of doing justice to the individual facts. Any theory based on experience ins necessarily statistical; that is to say, it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them with an abstract mean. This mean is quite valid, though it need not necessarily occur in reality. … The exceptions at either extreme, though equally factual, do not appear in the final result at all, since they cancel each other out. (p. 7) … While [the average is] reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way. … Not to put too fine a point on it, one could say that the real picture consists of nothing but exceptions to the rule, and that, in consequence, absolute reality has predominantly the character of irregularity. … There is and can be no self-knowledge based on theoretical assumptions, for the object of self-knowledge is an individual – a relative exception and an irregular phenomenon. (p. 8) If I want to understand an individual human being, I must lay aside all scientific knowledge of the average man and discard all theories in order to adopt a completely new and unprejudiced attitude. …If the psychologist wants not only to classify his patient scientifically but also to understand him as a human being, he is threatened with a conflict of duties between the two diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive attitudes of knowledge, on the one hand, and understanding, on the other. This conflict cannot be solved by an either-or but only by a kind of two-way thinking: doing one thing while not losing sight of the other. (pp. 9-10)

That’s all I’ll give you here, but you should read it for these other gems:

  • How communism and capitalism both devalue the individual while purporting to do the opposite
  • How religion really exists through experience only, not dogma
  • The problem with ignoring your shadow and the good that can come from it
  • How art prophesies cultural shifts

 

Yes! All of that in this teensy, tiny book. Enjoy!

Comment below if you’ve read this book, or any Jung, and give your favorite quotes!

 

 

 

Great Books Volume 2: Indispensable “Psychology” Books

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Book List Volume 2: “Psychology” Books

Ok, I promised a follow-up post about great books by primary authors. There are too many to just do one additional post, so this one will be focused on “psychology” proper. These aren’t the most useful books, maybe, for psychotherapy, but they’re outrageously important in terms of fundamental psychological knowledge. Enjoy!

 

  • Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Sigmund Freud)
  • Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Sigmund Freud)
  • Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Carl Jung)
  • Principles of Psychology Volumes I and II (William James)
  • Games People Play (Eric Berne)
  • Theory of Human Motivation (Abraham Maslow)
  • Beyond Freedom and Dignity (BF Skinner)
  • The Making and Breaking of Attachments (John Bowlby)
  • The Neurotic Personality of Our Time (Karen Horney)
  • Mind: A Journey to the Heart of Being Human (Dan Siegel)
  • Change: The Principles of Problem Formation (Paul Watzlawick)
  • The Lucifer Effect (Philip Zimbardo)

I have a bunch more books I’d like to list, because I think they’ll be amazing. But I’ll practice what I preach: NEVER recommend a book you haven’t read. More to come!

Comment if there’s a book you think I missed for this post! Or if you have ever recommended a book to a client that you haven’t read and it came back to bite you! Haha!

 

 

 

 

Focusing – Gendlin

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Focusing

Recently, we talked about the 7+/-2 principle of working memory and how the brain is a pinball machine. We went on to talk about how therapy work like journaling and PCT can be effective, and how to maximize the 7 +/-2 principle in our work with clients. Which is great! And now, I want to see about taking things to a whole new dimension…

You can only THINK ABOUT  7+/-2 things at a time. Even when we’re maximizing that, clients can only experience a few of the multiple parts (e.g., thoughts, feelings, sensations) of any given situation in sequence. But you can SENSE the whole thing at once, if you allow yourself to do that and don’t rush to get ahead of yourself with words. This is called the felt sense. The felt sense (Gendlin, 1978) is different from feelings, emotions, thoughts, or regular body sensations. It is the fuzzy, unclear “gestalt” of awareness.

The felt edge is the next step that follows completely naturally from the complete felt sense and leads in the direction of more life in the body. Every natural experience has a natural next step, and only that next step will REALLY satisfy.

Hunger → eating; Arousal → orgasm; Grief → tears; Curiosity → exploration

What options do you have when you are thirsty?

Exercise? Reading a book? Vodka? Pineapple? Water? Gatorade? (Infinite options!) But which one is the one to which your thirst is leading? The BODY KNOWS.

The felt edge is like standing in patient readiness, without tension, observing all of the possible next steps and getting the sense of what feels like more life in the body.

Focusing  is the process by which we can experience the felt sense of any given problem or situation – the whole of it, at once –  and thus, approach the felt edge where we are most likely to have an awareness of the most right next movement.

The Six Steps of Focusing

  • Clearing a Space – Asking yourself: What is the main thing for me right now? Sense it, but don’t go inside
  • Felt Sense – Experience (“Feel”) the many parts of whatever it is, all together. Get a sense of what all of the problem feels like.
  • Handle – Give a name, phrase, or image to the quality of the whole felt sense.
  • Resonating – Gently go back and forth between the felt sense and the handle, patiently ensuring that you have just the right fit.
  • Asking – “What makes the problem so _____?” “What is ___ in this?” Be sure you are sensing freshly (not remembering!) the felt sense. If you get a quick answer, without feeling it in the body, let that go and stay with it.
  • Receiving – Be open, in a friendly way, to any shift in the body. This will be accompanied by some change in the whole of the problem. Accept that change gently.

 

If you want to learn more about this, you’ve absolutely got to read Focusing (Gendlin, 1978). It’ll change your life, your therapy, and your clients’ lives… guaranteed. And if you think you can’t learn something so experiential from a book…try it anyway. Focusing is all about tuning in to your own experience anyway; Gendlin’s voice through his writing may be all you need for direction.

 

Tons of other free resources and readings of Gendlin’s and The Focusing Institute here. 

Gendlin, E.T. (1978). Focusing (first edition). Everest House.

 

 

Comment below if you use Focusing in session, or if this is your first exposure!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Great Books Volume 1: Indispensable Psychotherapy Classics

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Great Books Volume 1: Indispensable Psychotherapy Classics

By far and away, one of the most common questions I get from students and supervisees is “what should I read to learn more about xyz?” Great question! And I love answering it, as well as teaching how to identify a good source (maybe that’s a good idea for a later post!).

I love to read books in the field, and I especially love to read the founding fathers and mothers of psychology and psychotherapy. I think this might come from having my own learning influences that emphasized primary source material, and also definitely from teaching Theories of Counseling and Psychotherapy. Textbooks never do justice to the real authors.

Definitely, in some later posts, I’ll talk some about specific books in more detail. Here, I’d like to give you a list of what I think are the best primary source books for psychotherapists. I’m defining “best” here as a combination of most foundational and most useful (so you’ll notice that Freud doesn’t make the list, even though he’s FREUD. And other favorites like William James’ Principles of Psychology. Sigh. Another day.) I’m also going to (painfully) limit myself to one per author.

 

  • On Becoming a Person (Carl Rogers)
  • What Life Could Mean to You (Alfred Adler)
  • The Undiscovered Self: The Individual in Modern Society (Carl Jung)
  • Your Many Faces (Virginia Satir)
  • The Gestalt Approach and Eye Witness to Therapy (Fritz Perls)
  • Focusing (Eugene Gendlin)
  • I’m OK, You’re OK (Thomas Harris)
  • Warning: Psychiatry Could Be Hazardous to Your Mental Health (William Glasser)
  • Strategies of Psychotherapy (Jay Haley)
  • The Doctor and The Soul (Viktor Frankl)
  • Life Without Fear (Joseph Wolpe)

 

Ok, I can already tell that future lists are imminent! There are SO many books that I’m having trouble not listing! But start with these. You’ll be glad you did!

Comment below and let me know the book you think I missed!