Read: Braiding Sweetgrass

By Robin Wall Kimmerer

I have had this book on my radar for a while now, and while I knew I would love it for the unique perspective on plant healing, and indigenous plant wisdom, I found it to be even more psychologically relevant than I anticipated. Various forms of ancient healing are returning to the spotlight after a long wave of Western medicine sitting front and center. Of course, ancient practices have continuously been upheld in particular circles (and thank goodness for the hearth tenders of this history), but in the escalating mental health crisis that we find ourselves in, there is an upswell of curiosity and willingness to explore these methods entering the mainstream.

Kimmerer offers a beautiful lens on relating to nature through her heritage as a member of the Potawatomi Nation and through sharing what she has learned from other indigenous cultures. One of the themes that struck me from a psychological perspective were her thoughts on language. She explains the striking discrepancies in how English relates to the world through an endless stream of inanimate nouns, where her native language is composed of substantially more verbs. These verbs extend the animated world around her, and in so doing illuminate more potential relationships between humans and the environment.

For example, if we see a tree as an it, how much easier is it to cut it down? How does it limit our relationship to see this being as a noun, vs seeing a tree as a she, engaged in all the verbs of being a tree- growing, waving, rooting, breathing. This perspective locates humans in a wider web of connection, something we have been longing for as a cultural whole, all the more so since Covid.

How might your mood shift if you rarely felt loneliness because of your connection with nature? How might your frame on your life widen if you saw yourself as the younger generation to elder plant beings? Seeing ourselves in this family context with the natural world may not only lend itself to an easy inclination towards environmentalism, but it may also be part of the antidote we need in our isolated and manufactured modern existence.

Read: Nature and the Human Soul

By Bill Plotkin

This book is not quite the casual read given its sheer size. However, Plotkin weaves a comprehensive and layered theoretical approach to healing that is striking in its complexity. The book follows a life cycle layout that is written in a cyclical fashion. Plotkin pulls from a variety of teachings across various groups that share this cyclic lens, or wheel of life, and layers myth and poetry to further illustrate each stage. While not nearly a novel concept, it is in fact an ancient one, onto which Plotkin overlays a variety of psychological theory for both the individual and the group. He explores what gives maximum potential meaning in each life stage and on the contrary, what blocks growth.

Plotkin’s primary illustration is that modern, capitalist, Western society is living collectively, in a state of stuck “pathological adolescence.” He explains that our society at large is in an ego driven state that mirrors adolescence with the following themes, “self-criticism, codependency, perfectionism, emotional suppression and conformity.” He explores in detail the many ways our culture fails to evolve as a whole into a place of wise eldership, and the intergenerational cost of this, economically, environmentally, psychologically and spiritually. Most folks would say they would not want to go back to their adolescent years, knowing how challenging and painful they were. Now, imagine that we are all in that stage as a collective, in perpetual adolescence that we cannot extricate ourselves from, Motivated to try something different…?

A primary thread woven throughout is the value of time and deep connection spent with nature at every life stage. While his analysis on what has gone awry is complex, his solutions are graspable and inspiringly laid out. Plotkin offers a mass of varied suggestions on how we can each push forward our individual evolution depending on what stage we find ourselves in. This book will surely humble the reader who has aligned themselves with modern societal teachings of what constitutes a meaningful life. But ultimately it will offer the tools we need to take our cultural psyche to the next level of insight, wisdom, connectedness and peace.

Read: Belonging

By Toko-Pa Turner

This book is a beautiful, transportive ride into the inner psyche and the collective unconscious. Turner, works from the fascinating frame of dreamwork, rooted in Jungian concepts and also branching out into her own archetypes. Each chapter centers around an archetype, their relevance in dreams as well as in general human evolution of the self. Turner writes lyrically and makes some of these generally harder to grasp concepts quite palatable (and deliciously so). In a world suffering from so much loneliness and felt sense of isolation, this book is a beautiful bridge of the individual into the collective both now and across time. Turner helps the reader locate the self in a wider context, positioning where we each are on our own hero’s journey. If you’re feeling a little lost at sea these days, allow Turner’s story telling to be your compass.

View: How To Change Your Mind

The book that created lots of buzz is now an easy to watch 4 part series on Netflix. Chances are, you have heard of Michael Pollan, the renowned journalist who has taken his readers on many a deep dive into his varied interests. His most recent writings (and now the series), center around the world of psychedelic medicines from both a historical and present day exploration. Most of the series is dedicated to debunking the stigma that these substances have endured for decades, which has lead to fear and hidden use in the shadows of society. Pollan’s goal, is to correct some of the misinformation regarding these substances and raise awareness and support for ways in which they can be used to help ease the major mental health crisis unfolding globally.

This series is as informative as it is entertaining. A few episodes center around the clinical research being done with psilocybin and MDMA to work with individuals with significant trauma and/or those facing terminal diagnoses and end of life. Both of these populations live with immense emotional and psychological distress and seeing how each substance has lead to radical ease and existential calm for these individuals is deeply moving. A powerful and educational correction to the “just say no,” and D.A.R.E education models of the past, I highly recommend this series. Bring all of your doubts and fears to the couch, and then see just how easy it is to change your mind.

Read: "The Age of Reopening Anxiety"

By Anna Russel Article Link

This is the first week I am back in the office and as thrilled as I am to return, it’s also surreal. I came in to my dead plants, the clock that had long since stopped working and a general sense of lifelessness. There are so many clients who have begun sessions in the past year that I have never even met in person. Together, we would be discovering this space and readjusting to being in it together, without masks (safely vaccinated) once again. Admittedly, I was having my own reopening anxiety leading up to this week.

Anna Russel does a beautiful job explaining this shared phenomenon of coming back to the world after this period of withdrawal. There is the very real social anxiety aspect that was alleviated in many ways throughout COVID and now is back with a vengeance as folks worry about what to say, how to act and get stuck in a bit of observer perspective on their own behavior. There is lots of discourse around social atrophy, the very real feeling of having lost a bit of stamina in this arena. It’s been a time of re-evaluation and big life changes for so many. There has been grief and loss that we have largely navigated in isolation and that has left us different versions of ourselves than we were before. How do we bridge the gap?

Russel offers a collection of strategies from various mental health professionals for anxiety management that are useful and largely exposure based. However, I think what was of most value was her insight into COVID having been a time of big questions for all of us, many of which still remain unanswered.

“We have to ask the questions that reëntry asks. They start with practical questions like, Do I wear my mask? Do I say yes to this invitation? Do I take my children even if they’re not vaccinated?” What seem like logistical queries are actually “philosophical and existential questions,” Parker said. “Like, Who are my people? How do I want to spend my time?”

Read: "I'm not languishing, I'm dormant"

Art by Corita Kent, Article by Austin Kleon

As this article notes, you have likely heard the new buzzword to describe our collective malaise these days, “languishing,” thanks to this recent NYTimes article, ps://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/well/mind/covid-mental-health-languishing.html. However, this far less widely circulated article https://austinkleon.com/2021/04/26/im-not-languishing-im-dormant/ by Austin Kleon, really spoke to me in a way the NYTimes article failed to do, despite the mass appeal and desperation for common language that catapulted it to quick popularity. What the NYTimes article failed to explain was to note that languishing is a term for the resulting fatigue that comes with “trying to flourish in terrible conditions,” as Kleon beautifully puts it. While that article did offer some solutions to help ease the languishing feeling, it should be noted that one was just uninterrupted time without trying to do much specifically. Sounds like being dormant to me!

Kleon goes on to use various gardening and nature metaphors to illustrate how there is a time and a season for all things and that constant productivity and constant flourishing is not something nature does, that attempt is uniquely human (and mightily flawed). Throughout the pandemic, I have reminded clients often that this is a time to survive, not a time to thrive and I have noted a mix of relief at that as well as interesting resistance. In a society so fixated on productive value, we have struggled collectively to take this as a time to slow down or outright collapse as the need has been. Now, as folks are getting their first and second vaccines and the summer season is arriving, there is again some mixed emotion. I hear excitement to regain some normalcy and hesitation to let go of the quiet that has come with this time and gained appreciation. Turns out we have learned to appreciate our dormant state in surprising ways when we push back on the pressures of productivity.

Can we continue to maintain this mentality that there are seasons of life that are meant for quiet, for retreat, for our own personal winters? Can we give ourselves permission to challenge the idea that constant flourishing is the norm? If Isaac Newton and Michaelangelo had to accept personal winters and still left such legacies (as the article explains), might that be good enough for the rest of us too?

Read: Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

With vaccines rolling forward and spring on the way it feels like we are all breathing a little easier these days. At the risk of being too on the nose, this book seems fitting for these days. I initially dove into this book thinking it might expand on some of the therapeutic benefits to breathing (which are many and my clients hear about them all the time). While Nestor does touch on that theme, he does a massively deep dive into every element of breathing I can imagine. He covers everything from why breathing through your nose is so important not only for anxiety but for the structural integrity of your palette and sinuses, to the importance of chewing to maintain jaw integrity to support breath to how free divers and monks have harnessed breath in ways that are almost superhuman. Nestor explores the mundane and universal aspects of breath as well as the exceptional and unusual aspects of breath with equal enthusiasm.

Nestor is pretty convinced that most issues begin and end with breathing and while I think there may be more complexity there, it sure is nice to know we have a built in mechanism that is such a game changer. The appendix of this book makes it very user friendly, summarizing the various breathing techniques he references in more detail throughout the book, so if you get lost in the detail this is really all you need to come back to.

Content warning: There are some brief mentions in this book that pertain to healthism.

Read: The Body Is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love

My love for this book is rich and deep so let me put that bias on the table right away. I can think of no better themed book for Valentine’s season than this one about radical self love. Sonya Renee Taylor is a poet, activist, writer and speaker. Her unique ability to capture complex social concepts with poetic sensibility is a treasure. There is a lot packed into this book wrapped around social theory of body image and what distorts self-perception in our society. Taylor has woven in journaling and reflection prompts to make this book as much a self-guided tool as it is a theoretical education.

Her views are widely encompassing and highlight the multilayers of work to be done on these subjects.

“Racism, sexism, ableism, homo- and transphobia, ageism, fatphobia, are algorithms created by humans’ struggle to make peace with the body. A radical self-love world is a world free from the systems of oppression that make it difficult and sometimes deadly to live in our bodies.”

Taylor explains that this work has to be radical. It has to be radical because of all that we are up against and it has to be radical because things like self-acceptance and body neutrality cannot be the final goal (though perhaps very important ports in the storm).

“Before body shame stripped us of our inherent sense of self-worth, it stripped us of compassion. We saw failure in every mirror, we judged our every thought. We berated and abused ourselves because we were berated and abused by others. We thought the outside voice was our own, and we let it run roughshod over our lives.”

Taylor invites us to see the devastation that comes from body shame as an expansive poison covering far more terrain than we initially see. Our judgment of ourselves becomes our lens on the world, our lack of self compassion leads to diminished compassion for others, greater perceived division and sense of competition.

Radical self-love is far more than body image work, it is a way of shifting our perception internally and externally to freely and powerfully move throughout a world that is built for us to implode. If this sounds ambitious, rest assured that Taylor will walk you through this process one clear step at a time. If you’re curious to get a taste for her work, she had a brilliant appearance on Brené Brown’s podcast where you can hear her coaching Brené through her own radical self-love work in real time.

https://brenebrown.com/podcast/brene-with-sonya-renee-taylor-on-the-body-is-not-an-apology/

Read: Hope In The Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

On the week of the inauguration, I think it’s safe to say that we are collectively holding our breath for one reason or another. The events earlier this month were certainly impactful on our shared psyche as a nation. In times of social unrest and political division, I think hopelessness can creep into our hearts and start making a home all too easily and without our permission. Buffering against hopelessness cannot be a passive process, it takes effort and work. While of course my area of expertise lies in the mental and emotional tools to support that effort, sometimes I find myself needing my own buffers and resources slightly outside of this field.

Enter Rebecca Solnit, a brilliant essayist and social researcher who scours the world looking for historical and current social evidence to offer a little “hope in the dark,” where we need it most. In this book, she examines the various social and political events that occurred largely during the Bush administration that have continued to set in motion a ripple effect over the past decade. She challenges the stories that have become mainstream that are often used to uphold division and uncovers triumphant stories of deep humanity that are swept under the rug in order to perpetuate hatred.

While it can be challenging to read, Solnit invites us to view apathy and hopelessness as a miseducation. Given the many moments of surprising outcomes that history offers to us, to fall into despair is something she considers naive.

“People have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.”

She explores various international and historical moments where there was ample reason for despair and paralysis and yet, something else entirely showed up. She invites the reader to consider how the news and media might be motivated to hide these more uplifting stories and the importance of finding these stories and spreading them loudly to combat the dominant narratives that uphold division and paralysis.

“We who had been through the quake were present and connected. Connected to death, to fear, to the unknown, but in being so connected one could feel empathy, passion, and heroism as well. We could feel strongly, and that is itself something hard to find in the anesthetizing distractions of this society.”

So this week, whatever unfolds, I hope you are present, connected and able to find some fragments of hope in the dark.

Read: "How We Survive Winter"

Today is the winter solstice, the day of the year with the least sunlight that marks the turning of the tide back towards longer days. The solstice has been marked and honored by a wide range of peoples since ancient times. This year, the symbolism feels all the more needed and fitting. In a year of so much darkness for so many, hope feels like it may be cresting on the horizon. The article does a beautiful job illustrating some ancient and modern reflections on the solstice tradition and symbolism. I find it to be a truly fitting symbol for therapeutic work.

“The great irony of winter is that the moment darkness is greatest is also the moment light is about to return. Each year the winter solstice comes with the promise that the next day will be brighter.”

In moments of our deepest struggles, how do we recall the other times we were most in the dark, only to find the light was awaiting us right around the corner? How can we pull from this knowledge year after year in times of our most profound despair?

This year, most of us are slowing way down, safe at home with little to do nor places to go. How can we use this time for what it is versus being in resistance to it? This season is the season of retreat and rest, it is also the season that tests our very existence with the harshest conditions. I keep reminding my clients that this is not a time for maximizing productivity, this is a time of survival.

“I’ve stopped trying to handle the darkness. I let the darkness handle me instead. Most of the time all it wants to do is hold me for a while — slow me down, keep me from running, cover me up long enough to remember that being in the dark doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with me. It means I’m alive, and this is part of the deal.”

Wishing you a peaceful day of darkness, warm in the knowledge that light is coming.

View: "How can we face the future without fear, together"

Bi Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

What a wild ride the past week has been! There has been a collectively held tension in the air and while it does feel like an exhale for so many, there is also so much wounding left to attend to. The election statistics revealed beyond all doubts how deeply divided our nation has become. For many of us, this division is not held externally, but felt deeply within our own family systems. In a time of great physical isolation due to COVID-19, a sense of collective unity is even harder to tap into. So we sit here fragmented in ideology, separated physically and anxiety, despair and fear are at an all time high. Not a coincidence.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks passed away this weekend. He has been a profound leader for so many across varied religious ideology. This TED Talk was given in 2017 in reference to the 2016 election yet his words feel deeply relevant today. So many of us might not feel ready to move towards collective healing. So many of us have been actively harmed in real and deep ways by what we’d call the opposition and if that is you, then this is not your work right now.

But for anyone who feels able to look towards collective healing, this paints a beautiful pathway of how to begin walking towards that in our own hearts and minds. One of the most resonant themes in this talk is the shift from the ideology of the self to of the other. He urges a collective sense of responsibility for the other as a way of breaking through our isolation and hopelessness and uplifting ourselves as a whole. He points to the magical thinking in belief that a single elected leader can save a society and stresses the importance of unification from the ground up, “We the people,” being one of his favorite phrases.

So if you are feeling a spark of hope, or if you are feeling the deep wounds of division, or if you are feeling the heartbreak of loss, this may be a path forward. In therapy, our work is so often about the individual, but seeing our future as a collective humanity may just be the shift we all need right now.

View: "Everything Happens For A Reason,"- and other lies I've loved

In all of the varied pain that has been felt so widely these past few months, I have struggled with clients to hold onto a sense of meaning in life. Whether it has been the ravages of COVID-19 on vulnerable loved ones, on household financial stability, and general future plan making or the heartbreak that continues to fuel the Black Lives Matter movement in the face of ongoing brutality and negligence,. There is a lot of profound pain and fear circulating our collective lives.

Something that we as therapists often do in times of hardship for our clients is pull forward internal resources to help buffer the pain. These may be religious beliefs, ancient philosophies, personal doctrines, lived experiences or stories passed down from one generation to the next within a family. However, I have been witnessing the failing of this strategy for many folks. In the large unknown landscape of our current lives, these previously strong buffers seem to fall short.

In her TED Talk, Kate Bowler shares her own story of suffering that also lead to the shattering of her personal and religious buffers. At the age of 35, after arriving at what felt like the culmination of hard work and great effort, at the peak of her lived happiness , she is diagnosed with stage IV cancer. What happens from there is the story of her initial disbelief, fear and disconnection from her prior buffers that gave way to profound and unexpected connection and peace in the heart of that fear.

“I was entering a world of people just like me. People stumbling around in the debris of dreams they were entitled to and plans they hadn’t realized they had made.”

This sentence captures so well the universal feeling that I am hearing from clients these days and quite frankly, that I have felt myself.

However, she does not come out of her pain and struggle succumbing to a dark and hopeless acceptance of inevitable human difficulty. She is able to locate a feeling of love in her darkest moments that defies her own explanation. Ultimately, she is left with this unexpected and beautiful sense of acceptance.

“I’m learning to live without counting the cost, without reasons and assurances that nothing will be lost.”

For all of my perfectionistic, driven, high-achieving clients, for all of us who have internalized the promise that good things happen to good people, this level of acceptance around that illusion may seem frightening. But Kate does a beautiful job of showing us the power of liberation from this perspective and the love and connection that comes with it.

Read: Untamed

This book has been passing through the hands of so many people I know these days and after reading it, I can absolutely see why! Doyle is a wordsmith and with this skill, she articulates so many of the invisible external influences and internal forces that so many women today struggle to verbalize but can deeply resonate with. Doyle is a model of bravery and authenticity even when it is far from convenient, even when it blows up her whole life over and over again. Yet, she calls from the other side of the fence, letting readers know that the view is better there, it is worth it. She is an icon for all women and for the LGBTQIA+ community.

Working primarily with teenage and young women, there were pages in this book that I flagged for many of my clients to explore. These pages centered primarily around her understanding of the many barriers that women face when trying to find themselves in a sea of societal expectation. She does not shy away from acknowledging that freeing herself from these expectations was painful, and she explains how pain and hard feelings serve as information, as indicators and alarm bells to be attended to thoroughly, not avoided. This is a message I stress so often to clients, especially my clients who use self-harm and disordered eating to shut away these feelings that are so crucial to their deeper understanding of themselves.

“I learned I would never be free from pain, but I could be free from the fear of pain and that was enough…I can use pain to become…to be alive is a perpetual state of revolution.”

This concept of self-evolution is one I have long been fond of, rather than the idea of arriving at an end version of the self. It gives us permission to be less attached to the results of our lives and to reinvent the end goal many times over.

Glennon shares her story of leaving her marriage after falling in love with a woman and the undeniable pull that was behind it. It would have been the socially safe thing in her life to ignore that pull, but her bravery was deeply rewarded and her pages about her and her wife will tug at even the hardest of heart strings. Glennon avoids boxes when it comes to her sexual identity, instead, modeling a more fluid perspective on love and what it means to follow the heart, across gender and across the country.

This book touches on a range of advocacy themes and Glennon shares her own steps towards breaking through her feelings of paralysis and overwhelm into action. This feeling of overwhelm has been so front and center for many of my clients and learning how to channel our passions into action is a way of cultivating momentum not only in the world around us, but also internally.

“In order to avoid becoming complicit with those upstream, we must become the people of And/Both. We must commit to pulling our brothers and sisters out of the river and also commit to going upstream to identify, confront and hold accountable those who are pushing them in.”

That line makes my social work heart sing.

This is a book about feminism, queer identity, motherhood, race, injustice, religious exploration and marriage, but most of all it is a call to bravery in whatever ways your individual life is presenting it to you.

Read/Listen: Talking to Strangers

In a culture right not with rising tensions, this book is a bridge to understanding.

Gladwell reveals the many cultural and systemic biases we have when we attempt to decode others, that routinely lead us astray and the massive social price we pay for our lack of awareness around them. I do want to give a reader content warning, Gladwell explores some heavy topics and while not used egregiously, this content may be difficult for some. However, I firmly feel that everyone could benefit from this book in learning to slow down, consider our contexts more carefully and question our (often fraught) snap judgments. I highly recommend purchasing this on audiobook as it utilizes a multitude of interview and direct audio sources that deeply enrich the experience.

In true Gladwell form, we are taken through a range of stories and excerpts that are seemingly unrelated, only to arrive at a perfectly interwoven summary of novel concepts by the end. Gladwell teaches us the many errors we make when we attempt to draw hasty conclusions from brief interactions with those who are unfamiliar to us. To name a couple, Gladwell explains our general tendency towards default to truth which often blinds us from attending to our doubts when they pop up and our assumption of transparency in others-meaning our belief that everyone displays their truthful emotional experience in a visible and congruent way.

It is a reminder as a therapist as well as just a citizen of the world, to always practice a humble and non-assumptive perspective not just because it is kind, but because it is more accurate. These themes are illustrated in the high intensity encounters of sexual assault, torture, ponzi schemes, murder and police violence and Gladwell shows how many of these tragic outcomes may have gone differently if we knew better, how to talk to strangers.

Gladwell does not propose a state of constant self-doubt, hyper-vigilance or fear, despite teaching us some of the grave consequences that come from our failure to talk to strangers effectively. Instead, he paves a path towards expanding our own humility and deepening our respect for others which make us safer and more astute in our inevitable interactions with strangers throughout our daily lives.

If you are looking around these days wondering what can I do to be a bridge in a time of divisiveness, this book is your guide,

Read: Why We Sleep

If you’re still feeling a little bit of a drag from Daylight Savings, you are not alone! Amongst a myriad of mind boggling studies and stats, we learn from Walker that this little one hour adjustment leads to a substantial spike in cardiac arrests. That should give a little insight into just how precious and delicate our sleep truly is.

There are a lot of myths floating in our culture when it comes to sleep. Most prevalently is this idea that we can “catch up,” on sleep loss. Sadly, Walker illuminates the risks of inadequate sleep and the impossibility of making up for lost time. He explains the science behind memory formation and how the college students up late cramming or pulling all-nighters are getting a real diminished return on the precious investment they are making with their sleep loss. He explores not only our very real psychological and physical losses with inadequate sleep, but also the larger economic and social losses that come from a sea of sleep-deprived underperforming individuals. Whether you are a single adult, a parent, an employee or a an employer, Walker invites us all into the startling concerns about how our inadequate sleep is harming us and those around us.

Perhaps most frightening and most notable is the research Walker uses to show that when we are sleep deprived, we fail to witness our own impairment and therefore fail to create change when it is very much needed. He couples this with substantial research showing that only a very rare few of us can actually function properly on minimal sleep each night (odds are dramatically less than being struck by lightening, that you are indeed the lucky few).

As someone who works with exhausted adolescents, I feel one of my primary missions is encouraging good sleep habits. However, given the unique circadian rhythms of teens which differ from adults and the early waking times imposed by school systems, this feels like an uphill battle even when there is buy-in on an individual level. The very best of intentions to fill after school schedules, work hard, study late and wake early to be on time, are short changing our youth in ways they will not ever recover from fully. If that sounds extreme, it is meant to!

While sleep is crucial for daily functioning, it becomes even more imperative with trauma. When sleep is interrupted, the brain is not able to properly integrate traumatic experiences, a process that is already biologically complex under the best of circumstances. Prolonged sleep disturbance/inadequate sleep can compound traumatic responses. On the flip side, proper sleep can substantially accelerate the healing and integration process. As a therapist, I am familiar with the wide range of therapeutic approaches for treating trauma, but without a strong foundation of sleep, any technique will be deeply limited.

One of the most surprising and controversial chapters in the book is about the dangers of sleep medications and their surprisingly low effectiveness rates (equivalent to that of placebo pills). Walker builds up to this point after many chapters explaining the different phases of sleep and each of their unique contributions, not all of which are present with sleep induced by medications. In fact, he notes that some sleeping medications even work counterproductively to these stages of sleep, outright suppressing them. In our generally overworked and overtaxed culture, the allure of sleeping pills is profound and this might be deeply disappointing news for some. However, it’s not hopeless, if you are suffering with sleep issues, CBT-I (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia) has been proven extremely effective.

One more finding of the book that I found to be of interest was his exploration around the proliferation of ADHD diagnoses and the sleep issues faced by kids and teens these days. The symptoms for sleep deprivation look eerily similar to those of ADHD criteria. Unfortunately, the medications for ADHD are stimulants and amphetamines, the very last things to take with underlying sleep issues. If you are a parent with a child who you believe may meet criteria for ADHD, Walker encourages a thorough sleep assessment prior to any medication intervention.

Walker is somewhat of a sleep evangelist and there are a multitude of issues he believes will largely be dramatically improved with proper sleep. While some of his claims may seem extreme, I admit I am somewhat of a convert.

Read: Maybe You Should Talk To Someone

March can be a dreary month for many, not quite springtime, with winter dragging its heels on its way out the door. If you are finding this month to be a challenging one and maybe you have been considering therapy but just aren’t sure what it’s all about, this is a lovely read.

Unlike most of my other suggestions which are more educational, Lori Gottlieb’s book is an exploration in the deeper more emotional and connection driven aspects of what therapy is all about. She writes from a unique lens as both a therapist reflecting on the impactful work she has done with her clients and as a client herself reflecting on her own therapeutic work. I have so many dog-eared pages scattered throughout this book because of her beautiful use of language to capture such deep, messy and complex themes so eloquently.

One overarching theme is the importance of human connection and her observations on how uncomfortable we have become in our culture with moments of being alone. I have heard multiple adolescent clients in my practice express anxiety over having to walk from one class to another or out to their car on their own and the fear of how this will be perceived by others. “I will look lonely or like I have no friends,” and despite the fact that neither are true, the fear of this external perception is massive. Not to mention the inability to tolerate small moments of aloneness without reaching for our various devices to connect- though only indirectly.

She touches on another common and controversial theme, self-sabotage, “If I screw up my life, I can engineer my own death rather than have it happen to me. If I hide in fear instead of facing what’s wrong with my body, I can create a living death- but one where I call the shots.” This is something that comes up a lot in my work with clients with eating disorders but it can show up in a range of ways. To see these outwardly frustrating patterns of behavior as an attempt at mastery over death offers us a chance at compassion and exploration of the fear that drives us into these dark spaces of avoidance, often at great cost. She notes that the main themes of therapy can all fall under four categories, “death, isolation, freedom and meaninglessness.” This is the foundation for Existential Psychotherapy, something I enjoy engaging in with clients very much.

Lori’s book explores each of these themes through her clients as well as in her own work in a way that is deeply relatable and illuminates the connectedness beneath the seeming separation of our individual issues. Sometimes her characters seem very unlikable until these deeper truths come to light and their underlying humanity floods the reader with compassion not only for them, but for the parts of ourselves that we see reflected in them.

Read: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

Not your average Valentine’s Day bouquet of standard roses, this book offers a more creative delight to the senses. While the title may sound like another in the sea of mindfulness instruction manuals, it is something else entirely. Jenny Odell manages to invert how we experience our consciousness on quite a broader level. She pulls equally and effortlessly from ancient philosophy and modern art, to track the multitude of ways humans have been challenging the perimeters of perception for centuries. Certainly not your typical pop psych book, Odell is more historian and philosopher.

I find this book challenging to summarize as it is truly expansive and multifaceted. However, here are some of my favorite passages that highlight how “monoculture,” has corrupted and limited our individual imaginations.

“Just as practices of logging and large-scale farming decimate the land, an overemphasis on performance turns what was once a dense and thriving landscape of individual and communal thought into a Monsanto farm whose ‘production’ slowly destroys the soil until nothing more can grow. It extinguishes one species of thought after another, it hastens the erosion of attention.”

Odell asks very simply over and over, “productivity that produces what? Successful in what way, and for whom?” These are the questions she echoes throughout the book and ones I think we need to be asking ourselves far more often. I find that the most well-adjusted young adults I work with, were once teenagers and children who were given the freedom to explore these questions or to witness their parents doing so. But in a culture that pushes over-scheduling and a blind march towards the uniformity of college, these individuals are becoming more and more rare.

Without adults willing to ask these questions, the next generation is growing up blind to the influences that will narrow the development of their very identities. “When the language of advertising and personal branding enjoins you to ‘be yourself,’ what it really means is ‘be more yourself,’ where ‘yourself’ is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital.”

But Odell offers us hope, a way out beyond, “loudly quitting Facebook and then tweeting about it.” She suggests, “a real withdrawal of attention happens first and foremost in the mind…what is needed is not to just withdraw attention, but to invest it somewhere else, to enlarge and proliferate it, to improve its acuity.” She explores how resisting the attention economy means so much more than our individual battles with these forces, it ultimately will require social change and activism on a large scale. But for now, this book is a good place to begin.

Read: Burnout, The Secret To Unlocking The Stress Cycle

I can think of no better suggestion to kick off the New Year and new decade than this book! I know I am making two Emily Nagoski suggestions back to back but consider me an official fangirl!

This time of year we will all be bombarded by messages telling us to reinvent the wheel of our lives in a multitude of ways. For many of us, this is the last message we need. So instead, let me offer you some wisdom from this book and suggest instead, that the wheel does not need reinventing, it needs a break! Emily co-authored this book with her sister and the two of them explore the various components of burnout which they define as a combination of emotional exhaustion, depletion of empathy and feelings of futility.

They discuss the various social constructs that have lead to what they coined, “Human Giver Syndrome,” something that predominantly impacts women in our culture but certainly not exclusively, “At the heart of Human Giver Syndrome lies the deeply buried, unspoken assumption that women should give everything, every moment of their lives, every drop of energy, to the care of others.” She explains how this imbedded cultural assumption leads to perpetual feelings of guilt around self-care. This is something I see in the women I work with in my practice all the time. It’s not exclusive to adult women, I see it in teenagers who have incredible difficulty saying no to plans or commitments despite massive amounts of overwhelm or who have intense guilt going to sleep before exams when they feel every moment should be spent on “productive” studying late into the night. This book tackles the general concept of how we define productivity in our culture, something I have long taken issue with in my own clinical work.

The heart of the book is the explanation of the importance of completing the stress-response cycle and the many dangers of failing to do so, emotionally and physiologically. While they lay the science out clearly and inarguably, they also nod to the ways our culture has made completion of this cycle challenging when emotional expression of hardship has been largely considered taboo and a sign of weakness. However, they offer a range of ways to address this through emotional and physical outlets both independent and social. Couple all of this with the social pressures around body image which they endearingly coin, “The Bikini Industrial Complex.” While the address the ways in which this particular complex leads to disordered eating, they also explore the more general psychological toll that captures a wider pool of victims.

Overall, the book reads like a deeply validating friend, pointing to all the ways our society sets women up for burnout from all angles. But we are not doomed! For each component of burnout there are numerous ways to combat that harmful influence and complete the stress-response cycle to prevent things piling up and leading to burnout. So this January, I highly suggest getting a copy of this book, questioning your definition of productivity for a little while and curling up for a beneficial and delightful read.

Read: Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski, Ph.D.

Even when clients are coming into therapy for a multitude of other reasons, sex is one theme that tends to inevitably arise. Sex shows up with my clients who are recovering from their eating disorders and rediscovering their bodies in new ways. Sex comes up with clients who have lived through rape and sexual assault and are working to untangle pleasure from trauma. Sex arises up in couples sessions and individual sessions and across ages. Because it is such a centrally human theme, I am always on the lookout for good resources to share with my clients and Emily Nagoski’s book is currently the top of my list.

She uses research as her primary method of exploration and yet captures these dense findings in beautifully approachable metaphors. She touches on attachment theory, advanced biology, social constructs, feminist theory, Health At Every Size and cutting edge trauma research to name just a few of her lenses. Emily weaves in workbook-like activities to guide the reader through the content as it applies to oneself.

Throughout her book, the thesis remains front and center, “you are normal.” The fear that there is something irreparably wrong or damaged when it comes to sexual response and arousal is one that I hear women echo frequently. There are many reasons behind this pervasive and nagging fear, not the least of which is the vast difference between how things are portrayed in the media and what is real and true for most women. Among many other common concerns, she addresses the concepts of nonconcordance, arousal vs desire, spontaneous vs responsive desire and scientifically sound strategies for arriving at orgasm.

All of these themes I hear in my practice are usually blanketed under a deep layer of shame. While this book tackles sexual experience from a mainly biological perspective, her psychological theory and explanation is invaluable and truly shame busting. One of my favorite examples of this is where she makes it a point to explain how meta-emotions impact sexual experience. While she goes into depths explaining the science behind this concept, this quote sums it up beautifully,

“feeling okay about how you feel-even when it’s not what you expected- is the key to extraordinary sex.”

I’ll end with one of my other favorite quotes, both biologically accurate and psychologically freeing,

“sex is not a drive, like hunger. It’s an incentive motivation system, like curiosity…so stay curious.”

Read: Motherhood In The Age of Fear by Kim Brooks

Summer break is upon us! All of my teenage clients are officially in countdown mode, some desperately white-knuckling to keep their focus in school and others who have already succumbed to the end of the year summer trance. While this is a time of much anticipated relief and excitement for kids and teens, it is one that is often mixed for parents. There is excitement for more time spent together as a family, the possibility of travel to new places and/or the comforting repetition of summer traditions spent outdoors in the backyard. However, there is also an increase in parental anxiety with summer being a time that begs for freedom, to stay out late with no school-day curfew in sight and to go on spontaneous adventures with friends, the final locations of which couldn’t be named in advance when asking for parental permission. Parents navigate the desire to give their kids independence and freedom while holding back their own fear when they do or their guilt when they don’t. While this article focusses on the mother’s perspective, parental fear and guilt is certainly not gender specific. In my practice I work with kids ages 13 and up, but these articles touch on the importance of freedom and independence beginning in earlier childhood as well.

This article by Kim Brooks, “Motherhood in the Age of Fear,” does a wonderful job illustrating the pain and power of going against the motherhood grain in today’s culture. The article examines the unique cultural context of raising kids today in the United States, and the mass amounts of fear that parents face daily. The article examines the history of how parents became so fearful, how childhood became so sanitized and the costs of the smooth-edged playgrounds of today’s youth on overall development. The author also illuminates the challenges of raising kids in a culture where parents often feel under surveillance by other parents, or even by the law, to parent according to the same fear-based rules and structures. It also beautifully touches on where the rigidly hands-on approaches rooted in hypervigilance can foster legal injustices and fear within lower socio-economic circles, where parental responsibilities may not allow for this mandated ever-watchful eye.

Ultimately, it begs the question, who benefits from this fear-driven approach? It certainly isn’t parents, and if you’re looking for more exploration on the impact on children, I highly suggest the book, “How To Raise An Adult,” which I reviewed in the previous post. Spoiler alert- kids don’t benefit either.

Another New York Times, article that pairs nicely on this theme is, “From Tokyo to Paris, Parents Tell Americans to Chill,” by Lela Moore. It compiles a range of different parenting comments from all over the world that help to illustrate just how culturally unique the fearful American parenting approach truly is and how we may benefit from getting out of our myopic cultural bubble when it comes to the theme of freedom in childhood.

“What really struck me was when I started to notice groups of mothers having coffees together: The Anglophone mothers sat next to each other facing outward, watching their children the whole time. The Swiss mothers sat facing each other around a table having a nice chat, with their backs to the children playing around them.” - Wrike, Switzerland

I can bet that the mothers who were able to turn towards their friends and give full attention to their adult relationships in those few hours then returned to their children substantially more emotionally fueled. Yet, for so many American parents, guilt would prohibit even this slight shift. As a culture, we let the guilt of turning away for a brief moment inhibit the enormous value of what is brought when we then turn back towards our children with a more filled self.

I hope parents read these articles, take a deep breath, and send their kids outside this summer on their own to have a grand adventure, even if it’s just down the block. I hope that when we see parents at the playground reading their books rather than supervising their children’s play, we give them a gentle nod of solidarity and encouragement. I hope parents can begin to challenge their moment to moment guilt for the bigger long-term gains for both their own senses of self and the independence and self-efficacy of their children.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/27/opinion/sunday/motherhood-in-the-age-of-fear.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/reader-center/free-range-parenting-outside-united-states.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article