Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

psychology

“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to decode your dream symbols, negotiate inner alliances, create positive endings, take fantasy vacations, transform outdated beliefs, heal your inner child, dream lucidly, connect with your creativity, and widen your choices in your waking life.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.

“Forgive for Love” by Dr. Fred Luskin

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Subtitle: The Missing Ingredient for a Healthy and Lasting Relationship

Recommended to me by: my sister

There are some good ideas in this book, delivered in a patronizing, lecturing tone with a lot of repetition. Yes, people choose each other for a reason, and it’s useful to remember that when times get hard. No, staying with someone when pregnant and later having more children with them is not always an uncomplicated free choice in our misogynist society.

One of the recommended techniques is deep breathing to calm the nervous system. I liked the explicit tie from nervous system activation (stress) to continued struggles, and from nervous system calming to forgiveness. The more we can calm our nervous systems, the better we feel, regardless of how others behave.

I also liked the repeated statement that forgiveness and acceptance are two different things. One can forgive someone for behaving badly, and still get out of range of their bad behavior.

Being forgiving means understanding that you can’t force your lover to change just because you are uncomfortable, inconvenienced, or disturbed. It is up to you to manage your emotional reactions, not the responsibility of your partner. Once you are able to forgive, you can deal with the [original] problem with dignity and openness, not blame.”

Other good advice: Notice what does work, since our attention is often drawn to what doesn’t work. Be grateful for the blessing of being loved. Change “You must …” to “I wish…” and drop unenforceable rules. Grieve the losses when you don’t get what you want. Both recognize that you are flawed, and give yourself a break. Forgive yourself.

Sadly, the example couples are all heterosexual and all painfully adherent to their stereotypical gender roles, except in two examples where the roles are still stereotypical but it looks like the names have been swapped.

Race, ethnicity, and income are not mentioned, but all the names and stories read as white, European-American, and middle class.

There was one great example where, early in Dr. Luskin’s couple’s therapy career, a man came in with a long list of complaints about his wife. The therapist sat stunned, thinking that the wife deserved combat pay for putting up with this, and finally responded, “If she met your standards, why would this superwoman hang out with you?” His main point was that the wife forgave the husband for being critical. To me, that highlights the difficult line between forgiving people for having human failings, and tolerating abuse.

Recommended as a first book about forgiveness for heterosexual gender-role compliant white people in monogamous couples, or for anyone else who can be forgiving of the book’s weak points.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Transition and Beyond” by Reid Vanderburgh

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Transition and Beyond

Subtitle: Observations on Gender Identity

Recommended to me by: Reid Vanderburgh, MA, LMFT

Speaking as both a trans man and a psychotherapist, Vanderburgh provides a compassionate, detailed tour through all the aspects of gender transition, from contemplation to completion. Client vignettes provide real-world examples.

The book candidly addresses every question I had about gender transition as well as many I had never considered. It does leave lingering differences to grow up socialized as one gender and transition to another. Conscious resocialization is needed. People transitioning male to female learn about losing male privilege and taking up less conversational and physical space to fit in with other women.

People with DID (multiple personalities) can be transgender, and at the same time a history of abuse is a complicating factor. In abusive families, children may desire to be a different gender to feel less vulnerable or identify with a less abusive parent.

Throughout, the book emphasizes the physically dissonant aspects of having the wrong hormones for one’s gender identity.

If a person is capable of developing truly intimate, honest, fulfilling adult relationships in the gender assigned to them at birth—they’re probably not trans. Part of what it means to be trans is an inability to truly mature into adulthood in one’s birth gender assignment.

Vanderburgh advocates a slow, self-observant approach to hormone therapy to help adult clients confirm that they are on the right path. Some transgender children are certain of their identity from toddlerhood and should be fully supported in social and physical transition when they are ready.

Recommended for anyone who is interested in learning in more depth about what it means to be transgender and how to help make transition easier.

Vanderburgh recently announced the closure of his therapeutic practice to pursue teaching and writing opportunities.

Available at Vanderburgh’s website.

“The Mother’s Voice” by Kathy Weingarten

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Subtitle: Strengthening Intimacy in Families

I read this by coincidence, and it fits perfectly with themes I’ve been thinking about lately. Kathy Weingarten, a family therapist, addresses double binds that society creates for women around acceptable roles and definitions of success. She talks about dominating behaviors in men and how to address them. She weaves her personal story of motherhood, illness, and family together with societal trends. Throughout, she maintains awareness of intersectional issues of race, class, sexual orientation, and gender.

When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she realized that her need to focus on her health conflicted directly with her need to be a “good mother” by focusing wholly on her pre-adolescent children. This contrast brought to light the invisible constraints society placed on her thoughts about mothering. She includes thoughts about the roles of wives and fathers as well.

At age 7, her son bullied her daughter, then 3 years old. She withdrew from his dominating behavior, and had to consciously reconnect with him. As she connects with him as “like her” rather than disconnecting as “alien, unlike her,” she has leverage to change the roles society prescribes for boys, sons, and men, as well as for mothers.

When she shares her true feelings and thoughts with her children in age-appropriate ways rather than maintaining a perfectly serene front, she builds real connections with them and allows them to see her as a separate person.

I appreciate how much consciousness and intention Weingarten brings to her mothering.

Some passages become repetitive, perhaps in an attempt to convince the reader, but that is a minor flaw. Overall, this is a beautifully written, carefully thought out, intimate gift of a book. Highly recommended.

Available at biblio.com

“I Thought We’d Never Speak Again” by Laura Davis

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Subtitle: The Road from Estrangement to Reconciliation

Recommended to me by: Laura Davis’s website

Laura Davis is co-author of the classic book about healing from incest, “The Courage to Heal.”

This book is written with compassionate awareness that not all stories have happy endings and not all estrangements can be reconciled. Nevertheless, I cried while reading it, for all the estrangements I have been unable to reconcile, and for all the reconciliations that turned out to be grave mistakes, and for all the fears that I should have been able to do it all better.

It has concrete suggestions for how to evaluate the possibility of reconciliation and take steps toward it, as well as a variety of gritty, beautiful stories about others’ attempts and successes. Davis’ reconciliation with her mother is woven through the book.

Recommended, if you have the time and energy to work through the feelings it might bring up.

Available at bookshop.org.

“In an Unspoken Voice” by Peter A. Levine, PhD

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Subtitle: How the Body Releases Trauma and Restores Goodness

This book is billed as a “culmination of his life’s work” on the back cover. It recapitulates material from Peter Levine’s earlier book “Waking the Tiger” about trauma and the nervous system, and uses many of the same case studies covered in the Somatic Experiencing curriculum. Somatic Experiencing is Levine’s protocol for healing trauma, taught through the Foundation for Human Enrichment.

I liked his emphasis on the need for therapists to be present, flexible, and cooperative, rather than distant, rigid, and controlling. I liked his quote from an (unidentified) soldier returned from Iraq: “I have a Post-Traumatic Stress Injury, not Disorder.”

I liked his distinction between awareness and introspection: awareness is experiencing the inner glow of an ember, while introspection is examining it with an external flashlight. Awareness allows; introspection dissects. He also distinguishes between feelings (bodily sensations), and emotions (fear, anger, etc.) which arise when impulses are interrupted.

There are some annoying aspects to the book, starting with overuse of italics for emphasis. When discussing the history of scientific discoveries about trauma, emotions, and the nervous system, he repeatedly uses the words “prescience” or “prescient” regarding earlier researchers, even though they clearly did actual science. When talking about the calming effect of being near a peaceful person, he names three specific famous men and the generic “loving mother peacefully nursing her infant.”

This book would make a good textbook for Somatic Experiencing classes (aside from the annoying bits). It is too dense for a layperson to enjoy, and yet doesn’t cover the healing process in enough detail to be a technical reference on its own.

Available at bookshop.org.