nonfiction

“What Fresh Hell Is This?” by Heather Corinna

February 15, 2022 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: Perimenopause, Menopause, Other Indignities, and You

Recommended to me by: Captain Awkward

This book is for anyone with a uterus who is moving toward or in menopause, whether due to aging or medical procedures. Heather Corinna’s writing is funny, profoundly inclusive, and tends to run long, as seen on her teen sex ed website Scarleteen. She likes to cover all the possibilities and include all the possible disclaimers.

She writes about the history of how menopause has been perceived and treated (or not) in the past, mostly by men. She interviewed experts (mostly women, many BIPOC) on a variety of topics and includes quotes from them, opening up a cornucopia of further reading.

She makes self-care suggestions along with compassion for their difficulty. She acknowledges the irony of recommending better sleep to help with hot flashes which often disrupt sleep. Stress and trauma tend to worsen perimenopause effects, adding another reason to reduce stress and work on healing trauma.

She covers both negative and positive effects of menopause. Contrary to popular myth, it does not bring life and love to an end. It does prompt an evaluation of what is and isn’t working in one’s life and can lead to sweeping changes.

Highly recommended to anyone who might walk this road or knows someone who is walking it.

Heather Corinna’s website.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Being In My Body” by Toni Rahman

January 29, 2022 by Sonia Connolly 1 Comment

Subtitle: What you Might Not Have Known about Trauma, Dissociation and the Brain

Recommended to me by: a client

This book covers a lot of ground, and does it well. Toni Rahman summarizes current research into developmental trauma, CPTSD, dissociation, emotions, attachment, and polyvagal theory, as well as sharing some of her own story and client stories. She applies this material to parenting, inhabiting the body, and healthy adult intimacy.

Some of the many ideas in the book:

We are designed, from birth, to take refuge in the trusting bonds we have with others.
What children need from their caring adults is flexibility and openness balanced with a strong enough sense of self and one’s own limits, with curiosity about who this child is.
Regression is leaving the present moment and reliving the past instead. This can also be called an emotional flashback.
Feeling an emotion is acknowledging it, allowing it to be in the body. Emoting is acting it out: yelling, crying, etc.
Via Karla McLaren, event trauma happens not just from something difficult or overwhelming, but from not being welcomed back into the tribe afterward. A full initiation includes both surviving challenging circumstances, and being received with adequate attention, empathy, and care afterwards.
For an infant or small child, chronic or prolonged parental misattunement without adequate repair represents a traumatic threat to life.
Feeling threatened by a parent who is also a source of care is a problem in itself, compounded by not having support to express or resolve the problem. This is disorganized attachment.
For someone with unhealed disorganized attachment or CPTSD, intimacy is triggering and terrifying rather than soothing and nurturing.
How your body responds to intimacy is an echo of your early experiences.
We can approach our own bodies with care to build secure attachment and intimacy with ourselves.
You will know what you like because just thinking of it will make you feel soft, relaxed, and light, not restricted, guarded, or confused.

There are a couple of distracting textual errors in the book: duplicated client quotes, and at least one misspelling of a place name.

Overall, highly recommended for anyone interested in trauma, inhabiting the body, and healthy intimacy.

Toni Rahman’s website.

Available at bookshop.org.

“You Don’t Look Adopted” by Anne Heffron

December 26, 2021 by Sonia Connolly 1 Comment

Recommended to me by: an adopted client

Anne Heffron shines a light on the seams that adoption leaves behind, by sharing her story and her thoughts with painful honesty. She was adopted into a “good” (white, middle class, well-intentioned) family and is pressured by her emotionally fragile mother and all of society to act like her adoption was a blip that no longer affected her. But she feels chaotic and terrified inside. When her life has entirely fallen apart, she finally writes the book she always wanted to write.

“In a parallel universe, the universe of my imagination, I was sitting at an entirely different table with entirely different people, eating entirely different food, so it seemed pointless to give myself one hundred percent to my life.”

“I have heard too many stories to think adoption is something that happens at birth or in childhood and then fades into I am part of this family with no repercussions—no emotional issues, no health issues, no fear of future abandonment, no fear of loss.”

“I want to write the book that, if I had read it at seventeen, I wouldn’t have felt so badly about myself, so wrong, so destined for a shaky future.”

The book is written in brief sections with all-caps headers. Distractingly, the headers are sometimes at the bottom of one page and the section continues on the next page. She says the book is written in fragments to express her sense of being fragmented inside.

Highly recommended to anyone who is involved with adoption (adoptee, birth family, adopted family) or wants to understand adoption better.

Anne Heffron’s website.

Available at Amazon.

“Set Boundaries, Find Peace” by Nedra Glover Tawwab

November 22, 2021 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: a guide to reclaiming yourself

Recommended to me by: Renay at Lady Business

Nedra Glover Tawwab is a therapist and an Instagram influencer. Her book is a solid introduction to boundaries and how to use them in a variety of contexts. She defines boundaries as “expectations and needs that help you feel safe and comfortable in your relationships.”

Among many heterosexual examples, her vignettes include two lesbian couples, where one of the couples breaks up. Gender roles are reasonably varied. Race wasn’t signaled in the examples. The author is Black.

She briefly addresses microaggressions as boundary violations. The suggested solutions are to assertively call out the problem, for example, “I notice that you said, ‘I don’t sound Black.’ What does that mean?” And/or suggest more appropriate behavior, for example, a woman CEO who is called “bossy” could say that she is simply assertive and willing to lead.

Boundaries are great! Assertiveness is great! Implying that they can solve discrimination, and saying outright that we need to teach others how to treat us, is less great. I agree that it’s worth explicitly asking for what one needs before giving up on a relationship. At the same time, Ask vs. Guess culture is not discussed, where Guess culture imposes a social penalty for explicitly expressing boundaries and needs.

There is an extended example where one person in a relationship blames the other for “poor communication” where the actual problem is that the blamer is using manipulation and guilt-tripping. Again the solution is to call it out as guilt-tripping. Gaslighting, abuse, and inappropriate blame are mentioned, with the same appearance of neat solutions.

This book explicitly puts the responsibility for policing boundaries on the boundary-setter. As someone who bought into “Boundaries will fix everything!” many years ago and worked very hard at them, it’s painful to find that assumption woven through the book. While it is important to take action where we can, it is also important to take a step back when it doesn’t work, rather than endlessly trying harder. That balancing act is not as straightforward as this book makes it seem.

This is a clear, detailed, encouraging manual for learning about boundaries. Recommended if the idea of assertive boundaries is new to you. They can definitely improve difficult situations and clear up problems with over-commitment and hidden assumptions.

There is a forthcoming Set Boundaries Workbook.

Nedra Glover Tawwab’s website

Available at bookshop.org.

“disarming the narcissist” by Wendy T. Behary, LCSW

October 28, 2021 by Sonia Connolly 1 Comment

Subtitle: Surviving & Thriving with the Self-Absorbed

Wendy Behary specializes in psychotherapy for narcissists and their struggling family members. She can be firm and kind while not being overwhelmed by negative behaviors.

She suggests using “we” language (“Our common goals are…”), offering the benefit of the doubt (“I know you didn’t mean to be hurtful”), and still giving honest feedback (“and it’s hurtful when you interrupt and criticize me.”) If you want the narcissist to agree to something in a negotiation, preemptively give them credit for the idea.

She suggests: Plant seeds of more kind and considerate behavior by calmly mentioning what you expect many times and hoping it pays off years in the future. Offer a good example by being kind and considerate yourself. In my experience, narcissists aren’t paying attention, so the ongoing good example goes unnoticed or is taken for granted.

For the terrible self-doubt that narcissists’ oblivious certainty awakens, she suggests understanding your “schemas,” patterns and expectations from childhood. It gives a framework to recognize triggers, separate past from present, and offer gentle care for the hurt child within. She recommends understanding the schemas of the narcissist as well.

Wendy Behary collaborates with Jeffrey Young, who created Schema Therapy. His 18 schemas are:

Abandonment/instability
Mistrust/abuse
Emotional deprivation – lack of nurturance, empathy, protection
Defectiveness/shame
Social isolation/alienation
Dependence/incompetence
Vulnerability to harm or illness
Enmeshment/undeveloped self
Failure
Entitlement/grandiosity
Insufficient self-control/self-discipline
Subjugation of needs, emotions
Self-sacrifice
Approval-seeking/recognition-seeking
Negativity/pessimism
Emotional inhibition
Unrelenting standards/hypercriticalness – perfectionism, rules and shoulds, preoccupation with time and efficiency
Punitiveness

“Heal your childhood schemas. Don’t get triggered by the narcissist. Be sturdy and calm.” Sure, sounds great. Takes a little more than reading one book.

She often mentions seeing a therapist, but does not mention getting bodywork. There is a half-page section titled Somatic Experiencing that mentions body work and describes one Somatic Experiencing technique, without mentioning Peter Levine who originated that work.

She offers a mindfulness technique I liked: Feel your abdomen expand as you breathe in. On the next breath, feel your lungs expand. On the next breath feel the cool incoming air and warm outgoing air at your nostrils. Repeat. She adds paying attention to each of your senses as well.

She states several times during the book that if you are in danger, don’t try to reform the narcissist. Make a safety plan and work on getting out. The book is written for those who have decided to stay, at least for the moment, or are in the process of getting a divorce or co-parenting afterward.

She discusses hypersexual and perilous narcissists. The connection between what is usually called malignant narcissism and sexual acting out makes sense. However, the negative stereotypes about sex workers made this section hard to get through.

This is a thorough, knowledgeable book about how to live or work with a mild to moderate narcissist as an adult. It does not really address people who were raised by narcissists and can be emotionally difficult to read. Recommended if you need more tools to handle narcissists, and have already done enough healing to tolerate the slightly breezy tone about the healing process.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Quiet” by Susan Cain

October 6, 2021 by Sonia Connolly Leave a Comment

Subtitle: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking

Recommended to me by: Leah K. Walsh

This is a carefully researched, well written, engaging book that says, “Introverts really are good enough!” Since I didn’t go in doubting that, I felt off-balance as I read, especially since I thought it would be a book about small business marketing for introverts.

From the summary at the end:

This book is about introversion as seen from a cultural point of view. Its primary concern is the age-old dichotomy between the “man of action” and the “man of contemplation,” and how we could improve the world if only there were a greater balance of power between the two types. It focuses on the person who recognizes him- or herself somewhere in the following constellation of attributes: reflective, cerebral, bookish, unassuming, sensitive, thoughtful, serious, contemplative, subtle, introspective, inner-directed, gentle, calm, modest, solitude-seeking, shy, risk-averse, thin-skinned. Quiet is also about this person’s opposite number: the “man of action” who is ebullient, expansive, sociable, gregarious, excitable, dominant, assertive, active, risk-taking, thick-skinned, outer-directed, light-hearted, bold, and comfortable in the spotlight.

The book starts with the story of Rosa Parks refusing to get off the bus, celebrating her for doing it in a quiet, unassuming way, without saying that racism required someone exactly like that for her role. It does come back to her story later and say that she was already trained in nonviolent resistance.

There are historical portraits of Eleanor Roosevelt, Dale Carnegie, and Steve Wozniak. Interviews with students at Harvard Business School where everything is done in groups, noting how influential the graduates are. Scientific studies involving tormenting monkeys to see the effects of a gene for processing serotonin. (No one seems to note the problems with animal research in books like this.) Other studies showing that group brainstorming is not as creative or innovative as people working alone, unless it’s done online. A longitudinal study showing that babies who are highly reactive tend to become introverted kids and adults.

There is a big emphasis on spouses and “mates.” It’s okay that the introverts were unpopular in high school, because of how happy they are with their mates and kids now. The vast majority are heterosexual. I vaguely remember mention of a gay couple, but it went by fast, in contrast with the extensive profiles of several heterosexual couples.

Gender roles are never overtly discussed, but it feels like this whole book is struggling with what it means to be a good valued person without having qualities traditionally valued in men (see the quote above about men of action).

If you feel defensive about being an introvert and care about the world of influential people, this might be the book for you.

Available at bookshop.org.