Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

healing

“Dynamic Aging” by Katy Bowman

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With: Joan Viginia Allen, Shelah M. Wilgus, Lora Woods, and Joyce Faber
Subtitle: Simple Exercises for Whole-Body Mobility

Recommended to me by: Amy Bennett

This is a kind, gentle book aimed at “goldeners” – also known as senior citizens – who don’t move much (anymore, or yet) but it can apply to any of us, since we’re all aging, and few of us move fluidly in all our joints. Katy Bowman is the teacher and main author, and four of her longtime class members, all in their seventies, contribute their experiences.

The first lesson is that fear and negative expectations can contribute to stiffness and immobility, which is why the people in Katy Bowman’s class choose to step away from the usual language for their age group and invent the new term “goldeners.” If we can’t imagine ourselves in motion, or we expect that motion leads to pain and injury, then we don’t move.

The book has easy, gentle exercises for each part of the body, starting at the feet, moving through knee and hip alignment and hip mobility, rib alignment and shoulder mobility. Balance, rising from a chair, confident walking, and movements needed for driving are emphasized. Line drawings help clarify each movement.

A note: Just because these exercises are simple and gentle, doesn’t mean you can’t overdo it. Start a little at a time!

The book is set in larger than usual type, double spaced, for ease of reading by older eyes. First the exercises are presented as part of a narrative about how they can fit into your life. Then a whole exercise routine is shown. Then each exercise is illustrated and described in a reference section. It’s a quick, enjoyable read, and has a lot of material for further exploration.

Recommended for anyone who wants to move more easily for more years, and especially for older people who need a reassuring re-introduction to movement.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Your Resonant Self” by Sarah Peyton

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Subtitle: Guided Meditations and Exercises to Engage Your Brain’s Capacity for Healing

Recommended to me by: Amy Bennett

This book hooked me with, “The inner voice can be a constant flow of emotional warmth.” Yes please! Where do I sign up? It did take me a couple of months to get all the way through it, and would have taken longer if I hadn’t decided to finish reading it and write an article about it for May.

The book has a lot of detailed information about different parts of the brain, how they work together, and how trauma isolates them from each other. It’s not clear which parts of this are Interpersonal Neurobiology, but that’s in there. There are lots of TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms). Also lots of NVC (Non-Violent Communication), guessing about feelings and needs, which is one way to express empathy, but not the only way.

Emotional warmth is defined as being met or meeting others with affection and welcome, with a feeling of being cared for, nourished, and nurtured.

Resonance is defined as sensing that another being fully understands us and sees us with emotional warmth and generosity. Resonance is a two-person relational experience, being a “we.”

“We are social animals created to live in groups, like honey bees, ant colonies, or parades of elephants. Our brains are meant to be soothed by other human brains.”

The Default Mode Network (DMN) is the part of our brain that talks to us when we’re idle. It can be warmly kind, neutrally factual, or viciously negative.

We can choose to speak warmly to our attention as we watch it in meditation. We can begin to be warm toward parts of ourselves. We can find a part called Resonating Self Witness (RSW), and have that part resonate with other parts that need hearing and healing.

There are chapters on the inner critic, anxiety, editing old trauma narratives, anger, fears, dissociation, attachment, self-hate, depression, addiction, and community. There is a huge amount of material in the book, and I’m barely touching on what’s there and my responses to it.

The guided meditations that go with the chapters can be downloaded from yourresonantself.com. You get added to a marketing-heavy mailing list, but it’s easy to unsubscribe.

The way that criminality is associated with disorganized attachment sounds like the way some people say abusers abuse because they were abused themselves. No, plenty of us were abused and don’t go on to abuse anyone. Plenty of us had disorganized or disorganizing attachment and don’t end up in prison.

The Resonating Self Witness is similar to Self In Presence from Inner Relationship Focusing. That system’s way of listening and reflecting feels like a better fit for me than the questions about feelings and needs that this book suggests. Perhaps for people who do not yet have words for their emotions and needs, the NVC approach is more helpful.

I like the model that healing from trauma is about getting isolated parts of the brain back into connection. After working through all the guided meditations, I feel like I did learn more about how to be warm in relation to myself. I like the idea that resonance is available inside us rather than being dependent on finding it externally. I continue to be suspicious of the idea that internal resonance is just as good as interpersonal resonance, or even good enough, but I’m sure it’s better than nothing.

Recommended if you’re curious about interpersonal neurobiology and want to spend some quality time investigating and changing how you relate with yourself.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Not the Price of Admission” by Laura S. Brown PhD

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Subtitle: Healthy relationships after childhood trauma

Recommended to me by: a client

Relationships are hard for everyone. For people with less-than-adequate caregivers early in life, the difficulty feels personal, a cause for shame as well as sadness. Laura Brown, a feminist psychologist, kindly lays out the likely consequences of early attachment wounds and repeatedly advocates for self-compassion.

Feminist therapy looks at people’s experiences in the context of marginalized identities that often lead to disempowerment and maltreatment, rather than saying that all the problems are inside the individual. The first example in the book is about a same-sex couple. And they’re not the only ones. The book fairly bursts with same-sex couples, as well as emotionally important friendships and work relationships, not just heterosexual romantic partnerships, in a matter-of-fact, “you are all welcome here” way.

I also felt welcomed by seeing quotes from Jewish scholars and traditions. She translates Yom Kippur as “Day of Return,” day of mending connections. And, even though I never watched it, quotes from “Deep Space Nine,” a science-fiction TV show felt welcoming as well.

There is a lot of great material densely packed into this book. It does not skip disorganized attachment like many relationship books do. It shifts the focus to disorganizing caregivers, since the disorganization is not inherent to the child.

Frozen-in-time child states are called EPs, short for Emotional Parts. The book also emphasizes that emotions are positive and useful, so that didn’t seem like the most helpful terminology. EPs are in contrast to ANPs, Apparently Normal Parts that handle day-to-day adult tasks like going to work.

Relationships similar to what we experienced as babies will have limbic resonance and feel “right,” even when they hurt.

The goal is to mindfully notice when a pattern from childhood has taken over, and compassionately self-soothe and notice what is happening in the present, both positive and negative. It’s okay to be imperfect. We don’t have to be abused or used or ignored to be in relationship. We can tolerate conflict that has the goal of reaching better understanding, rather than causing more hurt.

Highly recommended. There is so much more useful material in the book than I can even begin to summarize.

Available at bookshop.org.

“A Safe Place for Pearl” by Ani Rose Whaleswan

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Recommended to me by: Ani Rose Whaleswan. I’ve known the author for a long time online, and I contributed an essay to her collection We Have Come Far.

“A Safe Place for Pearl” is a gentle offering of artwork, dreams, and narration, full of hope and inner resources. When there is no human support available, Nature and Spirit step in to support a child going through hard times. (The hard times are not described.) The remembering adult is supported as well. This book powerfully answers the question, “How did you survive? What helped you through?”

Recommended as support for looking inside and trusting what supports you, even if it is not visible to others.

Available at Amazon.

“It Didn’t Start With You” by Mark Wolynn

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Subtitle: How inherited family trauma shapes who we are and how to end the cycle

Recommended to me by: a client

The book starts with Mark Wolynn’s story. He had sudden trouble with an eye and, fearing blindness, traveled in southeast Asia seeking gurus and healers who could help him. Finally, two separate gurus said, “Go home and call your mother and your father.” He went home, healed his relationship with his parents, felt much better, and incidentally his vision returned.

The next section reviews scientific research on epigenetics, how people’s cortisol levels and behaviors are affected by trauma experienced by their parents. When our grandmother is pregnant with our mother, the precursor cell of the egg that will become us is already formed. It makes sense that bodies would be prepared for a dangerous environment if the parents experience danger.

The next section has case histories of how an early break in the maternal relationship can cause ongoing problems. Parents are described as an ongoing source of the flow of life, so being estranged from them interrupts that flow. Since the author solved his problem by reconnecting with his parents, everyone should reconnect with their parents. Bizarrely, for a book about inherited trauma, actively abusive parents are never mentioned.

A person can unconsciously act out a parent’s or other relative’s story, even if they don’t know about the past events. Anything that is hidden can surface inside a relative.

The remedy, in addition to reconciling with your parents “even if you’d rather eat thumbtacks,” is to identify your core sentence and listen for echoes of past stories. Write down your worst fear, and look for phrases that are more intense or resonate with the past. When a family is affected by war or atrocities like the Holocaust, trauma can reverberate through the generations.

We can imagine making contact with past relatives, and respectfully return their feelings to them, and imagine them wishing us well. We can similarly imagine returning parents’ feelings to them if it is not safe to contact them directly.

Accepting our parents is important. As Martha Beck said in (I think) “Leaving the Saints,” it’s possible to accept a rattlesnake exactly as it is and stay respectfully out of range of its fangs.

Recommended as food for thought, as long as you remember that the author’s solution will not be the solution for everyone. Since my family tree has several branches chopped short by the Holocaust, it’s good to see an acknowledgment of the repercussions for later generations.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Trauma Is Really Strange” by Steve Haines, art by Sophie Standing

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Recommended to me by: boxofdelights

This is a graphic “novel” (although it’s non-fiction) or comic, or graphic medicine book. Each page is divided into panels with drawings and word bubbles, sometimes with additional explanations in tiny red print at the bottom of the page.

This is a solid introduction to the nervous system and how it responds to stress, including the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and Porges’ polyvagal theory, all in a friendly reassuring format. Trauma is defined as events that exceed our ability to cope with them. Healing is focused on being present and tolerating intense internal sensations, rather than reworking the past or experiencing big emotional catharsis. The goal is to tone down the reflexes of fight-or-flight and dissociation.

“Healing trauma is about meeting the body. In trauma, old parts of the brain change how the body works. By paying attention to feelings in the body and learning to self-regulate we can reboot the brain.”

The material is familiar to me, with a different emphasis than I’m used to, perhaps because the book is British.

The people in the drawings almost all come across as male. A few have more detail and come across as female. The people do have a wide range of skin colors, which is great. There is a drawing of a baby being born out of a disembodied blob – apparently it was too hard to draw a whole person giving birth. There was a surprisingly ableist use of “blindly” that brought me up short.

The book covers a lot of ground in a clear way. Of course it can’t cover everything. At the same time, I would have liked to see a disclaimer that everyone’s experience with trauma is different, and everyone’s healing path is different. Near the end, there is an entire page dedicated to Trauma Release Exercises (TRE), and the whole book feels skewed toward people for whom that’s the answer.

Yes, it’s less neat and reassuring to say, “This works for some people, not all,” but it is more honest, and more kind to those for whom it is all more complicated.  The last thing a traumatized person needs is to hear, “This works for everyone,” when that thing doesn’t work for them.

Available at bookshop.org.