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Bookshelf & Audio Learning Recommendations

Platforms for Therapeutic Learning & Practices

For creative blocks: Muscle Music 6-week program (scholarships available on their website)
For brief online workshops on topics like Betrayal, Codependency, Narcissistic Abuse, and Trauma Recovery: Avaiya University
For parenting: Happily Family Conference and Dr. Becky's workshops and communication scripts
For Asian Americans: The Yellow Chair Collective
For meditation and mindfulness: Tara Brach, iRest
For Inner Child Work: The Adult Chair

Webinars and Podcasts

The Adult Chair - Michelle Chalfant offers her own approach, sort of a simplified parts model, to therapy with a Child Chair, Adolescent Chair, and Adult Chair. On her podcast, she interviews experts in spirituality and psychology, allowing listeners to understand how the Chair concept interacts with other theories and practices.
The Avaiya Institute - a platform for online, multi-day webinar series on topics such as: narcissistic abuse, co-dependency, depression, childhood trauma, low self-esteem, and many more
HowWeLove Attachment Styles and Core Pattern - a therapy model website that offers an Attachment Style inventory, as well as, shows how a couple's differing Attachment Styles interact in a relationship.
Brene Brown - author and speaker who mostly speaks about shame, vulnerability, and trust, has a podcast, a summary audiobook with her narration, many books, Tedtalks, interviews, and articles that are all great reads/listens
- - She has a wonderful brief 3-minute animated video that shares the difference between sympathy and empathy
Help Me Be Me - for people who want self-help to not feel like self-help
- Episode 182 "Codependency in Relationships--Stepping back from a habit of controlling"
Sleepy Cat and Michelle's Sanctuary - Sleep Sounds for people who feel comforted by someone's voice putting them to sleep
Workshop for Boundaries with Parents

Addiction

Anxiety

Britt Frank, LSCSW speaks from experience directly to individuals who battle the shame that comes from thinking "if my coping strategies aren't working, then there is something wrong with me, I must be broken." She uses simple metaphors for understanding anxiety in the nervous system, so readers really can get to know the function of their personal anxiety when it rises up. She addresses the idea that we can't really be emotionally healthy adults until we address the grief underneath the anxiety that fears repeated relational wounding.

Quote: "The role of grieving is to find your way home to yourself."

Kelly McGonigal, PH.D. teaches the different types and functions of stress. She helps illuminate how to listen to your body cues when stress signals are helpful, and, teaches strategies for working with stress that is serving a function disproportionate to your current needs.

Grief

William Worden's Tasks of Mourning

Task I: To accept the reality of the loss

Task II: To process the pain of grief

Task III: To adjust to a world without the deceased

External: How has the death affected everyday life?
Internal: How has the death affected feelings about self and abilities?
Spiritual: How has the death affected spiritual beliefs and views of the world?

Task IV: To find an enduring connection with the deceased in the midst of embarking on a new life.

Mindfulness

Caroline Leaf's Possibility Mindset for Uncomfortable Emotion(s)

Embrace: Gather awareness and allow yourself to feel whatever is there
Process: Reflect and Write
Recheck: Look at what you've written and worked through, see how it can be looked at differently. What is the solution? What did you learn? How can you move forward?
Action

Practice RAIN

Recognize what is happening;
Allow the experience to be there, just as it is;
Investigate with interest and care;
Nurture with self-compassion.

Practice HEAL Yourself

ACTIVATION

Have a beneficial experience: Notice it or create it.

INSTALLATION

Enrich it: Stay with it, feeling it fully
Absorb it: Receive it into yourself
Link it (optional): Use it to soothe and replace painful, harmful psychological material

Resources included: Safety, Satisfaction, Connection, Compassion, Mindfulness, Learning, Grit, Gratitude, Confidence, Calm, Motivation, Intimacy, Courage, Aspiration, Generosity

Steps of Focusing

Clearing a space: Slowing down, turning attention inward
Felt Sense: Observing one problem to focus on
Handle: Stay with the quality of Felt Sense until you find a word or phrase that fits it just right.
Resonating: Go back and forth between the Felt Sense and Word/Phrase and check that there is a feeling of resonance. Let the felt sense change, and with it the word/phrase change to fit it just right.
Asking: Be with the whole felt sense and ask: "What is it about this whole felt sense that feels so [word/phrase]?" Then stay with it until you feel a bit of a shift or release.
Receiving: Receive whatever comes in a friendly way. Stay with the shift for a few moments.

More shifts will come through repeating the steps.

Relationships: Attachment Theory

Relationships: Committed Relationships

Relationships: Dating

Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT gives a sort of timeline for hormonal balance in different stages of a new relationship. He identifies how we can prevent over-committing to a relationship that had red flags from the start by assigning the people who know you really well 'jobs' such as ensuring you are your best self when around your new partner. This book gives you the information necessary to be the director of your dating journey, accompanied by great backseat drivers.

Relationships: Breakups, Divorce, Widowed

Shame & Self-Esteem

Trauma (sit down with a cup of tea and cozy up-type books)

A book for those who have experienced childhood trauma and want to heal, and/or, are surrounded by kids who they care about and want the information necessary to identify and prevent trauma. Levine and Kline believe in children's innate ability to rebound when they have the appropriate support.

Trauma (academic books)

I highly recommend ensuring not to read these books right before bed, before engaging in a difficult task, or before connecting with someone who has a history of treating you in such a way that you end up in a fight-flight-freeze-faint response.

Dr. Bessel van der Kolk has written the foundational book for all psychotherapy approaches for working with trauma. He gives an account of what trauma is and the types of trauma that humans have and do experience. He interweaves his own research with the collaborative research of others as he depicts how different traumas impact the literal physiology of both brain and body. He also discusses different therapy approaches for treating trauma that remains unprocessed and potentially detrimental in the body. Nearly any trauma training, class, book, and podcast references The Body Keeps the Score. The title of his book is often used as a statement and reminder in moments where fight-flight-freeze-faint energy may be hindering functioning in present daily activities.

Pete Walker, LMFT takes a multimodal approach to treating C-PTSD, valuing empathy, vulnerability, authenticity and mutuality. He guides individuals who have felt unwanted, unliked, rejected, hated and/or despised for a lengthy portion of their childhood to recover from their lingering childhood trauma. He acknowledges the range of experiences that can cause C-PTSD as: severe neglect to monstrous abuse. Both of which can cause trauma to be deeply ingrained in the mind, soul and body. He uses personal account and the account of many clients as he walks the reader through their own trauma healing journey.

Peter Levine is the founder of Somatic Experiencing (SE), a psychotherapeutic approach that works with the physiological fear response energy that remains in the body following shock trauma and complex trauma. He uses client accounts as he explores the application of principles and practices from SE. He normalizes trauma symptoms that occur from responding to a range of ordinary to threatening events. Levine discusses the overwhelming body responses to trauma and names the steps necessary to move through the experience by observing how animals can be threatened and not traumatized in the wild. His work often mimics how an impala naturally protects itself from a predator by collapsing after its flight effort is not enough. He guides readers to learn practices with body sensation awareness to work through powerful impulses that govern our responses to overwhelming life events.

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