Curious, Healing
Books about healing, business, and fun
Subtitle: Transcending Diets and Dogma to Nourish the Natural Self
Recommended to me by: a client
A compassionate, wise look at our food choices. What are we saying yes to? How can we bring more kind attention to the nurturance and nutrition our bodies need? How do our food needs relate to the rest of our lives? An invitation to allow rather than coerce.
Highly recommended.
Subtitle: A Relational/Neurobiological Approach
Recommended to me by: Ani Rose Whaleswan
Patricia DeYoung says that although shame feels like a one-person problem, believing “There is something terribly wrong with me,” she defines it as a relational problem: Shame is an experience of our felt sense of self disintegrating in relation to a dysregulating other. Expecting attunement or regulation, we experience fragmentation instead, and immediately push that intolerable experience out of consciousness.
Shame is healed by right-brain connection, not left-brain reasoning and affirmations.
The book is filled with both lively client stories and technical psychological theory. It’s validating to know that researchers are beginning to understand relational trauma at a neurological level. It’s even better to know that relational therapists are holding this information about shame compassionately in mind while creating a healing space for their clients.
When our clients are able to feel their shame, letting the light and air get at it, we must stay honestly present with them. We have to encourage them to feel this most difficult emotion when what we want to say is: No, you are not ugly or worthless. No, I have never experienced you as selfish or stupid. Of course we would like to convince them that they are worthy, lovable persons. Instead, we must help them push through the language of ugly, stupid and worthless to the even more painful feelings of deep shame, feelings of not mattering at all to anyone, feelings of needing someone and finding no one, and feelings of disintegration and annihilation.
(Italics in original)
There is procedural advice for therapists: how to create a non-shaming environment, how to co-create narratives that include right-brain processing, how to discuss shame directly. Oddly, for a book about right-brain healing, touch is not mentioned anywhere.
Unlike many books that skip over the disorganized attachment style, this book addresses it and its “fearful chaos” directly.
The book also discusses mutual enactment, when client and therapist trigger each other’s deep shame, and yet keep working together with underlying good intentions. The mutually stuck pattern shifts not with dramatic insights, but incrementally, yielding little by little to moments of seeing each other more as whole people rather than just threats.
Highly recommended for therapists and others willing to wade through sections of psychological theory.
I read this back when it originally came out in 2001. I remembered the overall story arc and the spectacular image of Tehanu at the end, but none of the details at all. It was great to have a visit with Ged and Tenar and Tehanu, but the characters felt oddly distant, not emotionally engaging. It felt like they were moving through their assigned parts in the repair of their world’s storyline, but they didn’t really have a choice. I did like the careful attention to the disposition of a cat.
Oddly, for a book by Le Guin in the 21st century, the main actors are men. Yes, women are involved and consulted and even central to the storyline, but I was left with the sense that they were pushing their way in from the sidelines, and the men were awkwardly surprised to see them.
Recommended if you want a visit with Earthsea.
Subtitle: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love
Dr. Sue Johnson, creator of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, applies attachment theory to adult relationships, and everything suddenly makes sense. Attachment relationships provide an anchor and sense of safety in the world. They feel just as essential to our survival as attachment relationships do to children, so it makes sense we fight or flee when they feel threatened.
The seven conversations are:
There is more than one gay couple in this book! And one couple of Asian descent. Women and men are individuals, not stereotyped caricatures. The client stories are realistic, practical, and encouraging.
Despite the pop-psych title and Overuse of Capital Letters, this book is solidly researched and makes a lot of sense. Highly recommended.
Also read Dr. Sue Johnson’s more recent Love Sense, which covers a lot of the same material, with more information about the neurochemistry of attachment. Oddly, she leaves out the disorganized attachment style entirely. There is an extended example of a couple repairing their relationship.
Subtitle: Using Your Felt Sense to Solve Problems, Effect Change & Liberate Creativity
This is a gentle, step by step introduction to Focusing, with exercises for each section and personal annotated examples of Focusing sessions. David Rome calls his approach Mindful Focusing. He explains how to be with ourselves in a Focusing way without a Companion to hold space for us.
It starts with GAP, Grounded Aware Presence. Settle into the support of your chair, or the ground if you’re standing. Notice the sights and sounds of your environment. Sense into your heart and breathing, right in this moment. I like the quick simplicity of that.
The second exercise is friendly attending, being with whatever comes the way we would be with a shy frightened creature, available, observant, warm, allowing it to approach when it’s ready.
The book continues with gateways to the felt sense (mind, body, emotions), and working with felt senses in the context of specific situations. The second half talks about finding actions steps, deep listening with others, and working with conflicts.
There are a lot of words about how to find a felt sense and how to interact with it. I’m still not sure when I’m in contact with one and when I’m in contact with something different (but what would that be). It seems to be part of Focusing for me to be uncertain if I’m doing it right.
Recommended for people interested in exploring Focusing, especially those already familiar with mindfulness practice.
Available at bookshop.org (half-price on remainder as of 12-Mar-2016).
Subtitle: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
This book is intense to read. I dipped in and out, wanting to read it, but not wanting to get overwhelmed with the dramatic abuse stories that are included. There is a lot of great research on trauma here, lucidly and understandably presented. I was happy to notice that I already knew about most of it, partly because I took a two day seminar with Bessel van der Kolk a few years ago.
The one treatment that was new to me was Albert Pesso’s and Diane Boyden-Pesso’s psychomotor therapy with “structures”, where one person, the protagonist, places other people from the group in a 3-D representation of their internal landscape. It’s reparative, including ideal parents as well as parents as they actually were. The therapist makes witnessing statements and carefully tracks the physical and emotional reactions of the protagonist, helping them feel safe and seen. Pesso Boyden System Psychomotor Therapy
This book talks about the most extreme effects of trauma. Adults who can’t feel their bodies at all. Kids who act out and get treatment rather than quietly going to school. It also talks about intensive interventions by skilled practitioners. It feels both daunting and tantalizing.
At the same time, it’s reassuring in a sense. If I don’t have all those dramatic symptoms, maybe I’m doing something right all this time.
I had Opinions about some of van der Kolk’s statements. His organization focuses on treating traumatized children, because that gives them the most leverage. On the one hand, yes, that makes sense. On the other hand, way to tell a whole lot of traumatized adults that we don’t matter – again. My sense is that both are equally important, even from a leverage point of view. Those healing children need healing adults around them.
He also thinks research is more important than “deep, subjective resonance.” Yes, research is important, and I’m glad he’s doing it. At the same time, my body says deep subjective resonance is more important for healing.
Recommended as an overview of current scientific thinking on trauma mechanisms and healing.