Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

healing

“The Radical Acceptance of Everything” by Ann Weiser Cornell

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Subtitle: Living a Focusing Life

Recommended to me by: Ann Weiser Cornell’s website

I bought this book because of my excitement about The Power of Focusing. I was not disappointed.

These essays by Ann Weiser Cornell and her working partner Barbara McGavin describe both the theory and practice of Inner Relationship Focusing, as well as some of the history behind its development. They show specific, concrete ways to radically accept everything, including Inner Critics, exiled parts, internal conflicts, and non-response.

I started reading the book on the train, but stopped because I was embarrassed to cry next to my seatmate. The tears came from recognition and longing. This is how I want to be heard, and how I want to hear others. This is how I want exiled parts of me to be welcomed home.

Highly recommended.

Available at bookshop.org.

“8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back” by Esther Gokhale, L.Ac. with Susan Adams

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Subtitle: Remember When It Didn’t Hurt

Recommended to me by: Rosalind Bell

This book is a beautifully photographed and illustrated step-by-step guide to moving well as a human. It is also a carefully crafted sales brochure for the author’s clinic and method, with testimonials sprinkled liberally through the text.

Esther Gokhale (“Go-clay”) grew up in India, studied biochemistry and acupuncture in the US, and, inspired by her own back pain, conducted research on body mechanics in Burkina Faso, India, Portugal, and elsewhere.

She suggests that we integrate stretchsitting, stretchlying, tallstanding, and glidewalking into our lives to regain our birthright of healthy pain-free movement. The foundation of these movements is to allow the pelvis to tip forward so the top is lower in front and the sacrum protrudes slightly in back. The rest of the back remains relatively straight, with the shoulders settled down and back.

In contrast, many of us learned to tuck the pelvis so that if we had a tail, we’d be sitting on it.

The photographs of babies and adults from around the world are gorgeous and convincing. The book is carefully respectful of traditional cultures and full-figured people. I would have liked to see photos of people of color from the USA, and white people from traditional cultures, rather than the strict divide with only white people from the USA and people of color from traditional cultures.

While there is a lot of discussion about cultural influences on posture, there is no reference to the long-term effects of physical and emotional trauma. For some people there is more to healing than learning to move with a stretched back.

I highly recommend this book for the photos, for new ways of observing movement and posture, and for useful exercises to improve the use of your body.

More information about the Gokhale Method.

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Gift of Therapy” by Irvin Yalom, MD

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Subtitle: An Open Letter to a New Generation of Therapists and Their Patients

Recommended to me by: Rachel Manija

This is a collection of short tips about psychotherapy from a longtime practitioner. I loved his tips about creating a warm, safe, positive relationship with the client and processing the here-and-now of the relationship for clues about how to help the client with external relationships. I loved that he starts with the assumption that he is helping to remove obstacles, because everyone naturally grows and develops given the chance. I loved that he sees himself as a fellow traveler with his clients.

This quote early in the book of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer expresses our common expectations that life should go well, and that we’ve done something wrong if it doesn’t, and yet it so often doesn’t.

In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theater before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like condemned prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all uncounscious of what their sentence means.

I found the stated assumption that clients are causing their own problems frustrating and condescending. He overtly says he makes that assumption because that is how he can be effective in helping the client. Reminds me of someone looking for lost keys under the streetlight because they can see better there.

Of course it’s true in many cases, and looking at one’s role in a recurring problem can be a fruitful exploration. He seems to say that it is universally true, and does not acknowledge the work a client may already have done in that arena. Some clients need help to stop blaming themselves. I hear an underlying assumption that clients are broken, despite his starting assertion that growth simply requires the removal of blocks.

I think as a white male doctor he has a lot more experience of agency in his life than a lot of his clients, and he would also naturally discuss in his book the clients who benefited most from his approach. It makes me angry that the book made me question myself again on the topic, and I imagine he had that effect on some clients as well.

He repeatedly brings up the damaging effect on psychotherapy of insurance, “managed care,” lower compensation, less training, and “evidence-based” treatments. This book is a defense of long-term therapy toward profound change.

The book is a quick read. I recommend it as a tool to learn about psychotherapy, although I would not personally benefit from a therapist who followed all these practices.

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Myth of Sanity” by Martha Stout, Ph.D.

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Subtitle: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness; Tales of Multiple Personality in Everyday Life

Recommended to me by: a client

This book contains a therapist’s compassionate, engaging views on people who have Dissociative Identity Disorder (previously known as Multiple Personality Disorder) and how they can heal. Martha Stout discusses both specific cases and general themes of survival, courage, integrity, and the process of healing.

After trauma, she says the core question is, “Shall I choose to die, or shall I choose to live?” Those who choose to live, live fully, passionately. Anything less would not be worth the struggle and pain of healing.

Healing requires going back and revisiting traumatic memories while the whole nervous system shouts, “No! Danger!” They don’t all have to be revisited, and perfect recall is not required, but at least a few frozen traumatic memories have to be transformed into narrative memory.

The key predictor of healing is a sense of responsibility for one’s actions. Conversely, prioritizing self-protection above responsibility acts to keep dissociative mechanisms in place. A sense of integrity, or the lack of it, shines through all the dissociative fragments of a person.

We see dramatic portrayals of Dissociative Identity Disorder in books and movies and believe it to be very rare, but most people with DID switch quietly, unnoticed, in higher numbers than we believe. Martha Stout says it is because most people aren’t such good actors, and I think people also try to camouflage switching as much as possible. She validates the anger, frustration, and bewilderment of coping with someone’s quicksilver changes and lack of memory for their own recent words and actions.

She also says that we all dissociate to some extent, whether arriving at a destination without remembering the drive, or being absorbed in a movie, or suppressing “inconvenient” emotions.

For trauma survivors she recommends:

  • Find help, a steady witness, whether a therapist or a friend.
  • Be as safe as possible in the present. Provide your nervous system with a calm environment.
  • Buy comforts, keep a pet, fall in love with silence.
  • Separate yourself from difficult, crisis-addicted, rageful, and violent people.
  • Have routines. Make them sacred. Sleep every night.
  • Meditate.
  • Keep a journal. Note your dreams.

This book is unreservedly recommended!

Available at bookshop.org.

“Embracing Your Subconscious” by Jenny Davidow

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Subtitle: Bringing All Parts of You Into Creative Partnership: Conscious & Subconscious, Head & Heart, Masculine & Feminine, Adult & Child, Waking & Dreaming

Recommended to me by: Jenny Davidow

Jenny Davidow’s clear, practical, non-judgmental book covers a surprising array of techniques to make friends with your subconscious. Learn to decode your dream symbols, negotiate inner alliances, create positive endings, take fantasy vacations, transform outdated beliefs, heal your inner child, dream lucidly, connect with your creativity, and widen your choices in your waking life. Vivid examples and detailed exercises encourage you to make these techniques your own.

As seen in the parallel paired contrasts in the subtitle, the book emphasizes stereotypical, Jungian ideas about masculine and feminine attributes. In addition to being passive and receptive, femininity is paired with childhood and innocence. In several examples, women resolve relationship issues, while men resolve career issues.

Both outer relationships and the “inner marriage” between (stereotypical) masculine and feminine aspects are heterosexual, with no discussion of other possibilities.

This book safely skirts the realm of “you control external reality with your thoughts” while offering practical tools to negotiate improvements in your internal reality. Recommended, with the noted caveats.

Available at biblio.com.

“Trigger Point Self-Care Manual” by Donna Finando

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Subtitle: For Pain-Free Movement

Trigger points are small knots of tension within muscles. They cause local taut bands of muscle fibers and dispersed pain in predictable patterns. Steady, firm but not aggressive pressure helps resolve trigger points and the seemingly intractable pain they cause.

Clear, detailed, and encouraging, this book helps you find and treat your own trigger points. Donna Finando covers each major section of the body, including diagrams of trigger point pain patterns for the relevant muscles. The pain patterns, actions, and stretches are discussed for each muscle.

The full discussion for muscles that affect more than one section of the body is repeated in each section. For example, the scalenes appear three times, since they can cause pain in the neck, shoulder, and down into the arm and hand. Some of the introductory material is also repeated.

The repetition is annoying when reading through the book, but could be useful when using the book as a reference, eliminating the need to flip between sections.

Highly recommended if you have ongoing pain of mysterious origin. Even if the pain has some other underlying source, there may be trigger points involved. You’ll become more familiar with your body as well as reduce pain when you seek out and treat your own trigger points.

Available at bookshop.org.