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

Read: How To Raise An Adult by Julie Lythcott-Haims

While the millenial generation is already at the tail end and moving quickly into adulthood, they have brought up a lot of parenting questions around what it means to be a teenager today. The current youth generation of millennials has gotten a real rotten reputation, millennials are often described as entitled, lazy, self-indulgent and vain. However, they also struggle with record high rates of anxiety, depression and suicide. How can it be that such a “cush,” generation is also in such dire mental health territory?

In her wonderfully well-rounded and insightful book, Julie Lythcott-Haims, walks the reader through the various societal influences that have lead to the development of the millennial generation. She touches on a range of subjects, including the prolific news coverage of child disappearances in the 80’s, the current perceived scarcity around higher education access, and most interestingly in my opinion, the unique parenting style seamlessly adopted by the baby boomer generation. In regards to that last element, she writes, “Maybe those champions of self-actualization, the Boomers, did so much for their kids that their kids have been robbed of a chance to develop the belief in their own selves.” What the book tackles at the core is why the newest generation, despite having substantially more privilege than the previous, struggles with some of the highest rates of depression and anxiety and lowest rates of self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a term coined by famous psychologist Albert Bandura and is defined in the book as, “the belief in one’s capacity to organize and execute the courses of action required to manage prospective situations.”

However, this book does not just dissect the etiology of this generation’s challenges and the parenting behind it, it serves as a guide towards shifting these dynamics that are arguably harmful, despite the very best of intentions.  The author refers to a conversation had with psychology professor Martin Seligman, “…it’s crucial that humans experience contingency which means, ‘learning that your actions matter, that they control outcomes that are important.’ Young children who experience noncontingency between actions and outcomes will experience ‘passivity, depression and poor physical health.’” This means not only learning that positive steps lead to positive outcomes, but perhaps even more critically, that negative steps lead to negative outcomes. It is the latter that parents often struggle with allowing space for, jumping in to finish homework assignments or call college admissions offices to prevent those deeply critical fumbles from being felt.

Another favorite simple change the book offered to parents is to shift from naming static attributes. The author notes that children who are praised for being smart, tend to choose less challenging opportunities in order to secure success and preserve that title. However, when children are praised for efforts, they become more daring and willing to push themselves and have higher resilience when the desired outcome may not have been reached. Praise in general is not the enemy, but the kind of praise makes a big difference.

As a therapist, I often work with my teenage clients around building resilience and self-efficacy to combat depression and anxiety. But ultimately, when I can get parents in the room and offer them these tools, the work is all the more impactful. I highly recommend this book to anyone in a parental role or anyone working with parents, kids or teenagers.

Read: Mating In Captivity by Esther Perel

Entering into Valentine’s Week, it seemed only appropriate to do a little dedication to a woman who I feel is a true therapeutic master in the world of sex and intimacy with couples therapy, Esther Perel. You have likely already heard of her one way or another, her TED Talks, podcasts and books have become widely known and desperately clung to in a world where sexual intimacy and satisfaction seems to be waning at a rapid pace. I enjoy her writing not only for the therapeutic skills and philosophical musings but for her way with language which tackles complex psychological themes with true poetic aplomb.

Her first book has a very simple thesis behind the declining rates of stated satisfaction in long-term partnerships, “…today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning and continuity.” This is perhaps the first flaw in our modern culture, the wide tangle of expectations heaped onto one single individual. The second fatal flaw occurs, “in the course of establishing security, many couples confuse love with merging.” Perel expounds on the value of separation (meaning lack of enmeshment more than literal space) between the individuals in a romantic partnership, the need for distance in order to maintain space for sexual and romantic drawing back to occur. If this sounds easier said than done, you’re not alone. The book examines real couples and their varying challenges navigating toward a more satisfying dynamic with Perel’s expert eye witness observations along the way. I think many readers will find themselves among peers in these pages and that alone can offer great relief.

In the multitude of writings on the subject, I find Perel’s words to be rare in their ability to normalize and carve out clear space for hope where other outlooks would likely begin encouraging couples towards surrender and separation. She calls out the flaw in these more common fatalistic perspectives on love, intimacy and partnership and locates their varying flawed roots. One of them being the glossy fairy tale belief in one singular perfect partner as a static entity. Perel alludes to this flawed but all too common belief structure in referencing psychologist Eric Fromm, saying, “we think it’s easy to love, but hard to find the right person. Once we’ve found “the one,” we will need no one else.” This more fluid look on love and intimacy as something effortfully co-created, fostered and resurrected, is one that brings relief to the majority of my couples therapy sessions where folks have come in sadly assuming the lack of pulse between them means things are too late.

Perel invites us to get more familiar with the constructs quietly informing our insurmountable romantic expectations and offers us beautifully illustrated logic to defend against them and their ensnaring limitations. If cramming this book in before Valentine’s Day seems lofty, I’d suggest starting with her TED Talk which is a wonderful sampling of these themes.

https://www.ted.com/talks/esther_perel_the_secret_to_desire_in_a_long_term_relationship?language=en

Read: Man's Search for Meaning by Dr. Viktor Frankl

The holiday season is about so many things for different individuals based on culture, beliefs, and family traditions. But regardless of these many variations it tends to be a season with deep roots in the act of meaning making. Of course there is the original meaning that was made behind the multitude of holiday celebrations relating to miraculous events that inspired meaning making to continue for generations. Today, we can find meaning making in thoughtful gift giving, in spiritual and religious ritual, in spending time with family and friends, in charitable donations of our time and/or money etc. That said, all of the meanings that infuse this season with such magic can also become easily lost this time of year.

Dr. Viktor Frankl, was a man who knew all about how to find meaning. He was a brilliant psychologist who survived the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. In his most famous book, he describes the different reactions he witnessed in his peers and in himself during this period and presents the origins for what he coined as, Logotherapy. Logotherapy essentially highlights the importance of each individual having a sense of meaning and purpose in life to withstand suffering and to maximize value. The core human needs for meaning and purpose that Frankl highlights in Logotherapy, have become foundational to so many different therapeutic approaches.

“Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how.” 

Frankl concluded that even in the midst of arguably some of the most atrocious human suffering in history, there was meaning to be found and even more shockingly, freedom. He highlights the value of freedom and the need to locate choice even in circumstances where it may seem to elude us. But it is not merely the having of freedom that he feels brings meaning, but the application of it.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” 

So this season, in the chaos and whirlwind of the demands on your time and finances, I urge you to consider, how might you reconnect to meaning as you move through this season? How might you find freedom in choice in what presents as obligation? How might the meaning you make this season impact you the rest of the year? Perhaps reading this book will help to spark some ideas...

Read: Cinderella Ate My Daughter by Peggy Orenstein

On the heels of Halloween, with the multitude of princess costumes that surely flooded the streets in all corners of this country, I can think of no better book to reference than this one.

Let me say first,  I loved this book and my copy is almost entirely underlined. To paint a brief picture, I’ll choose one of those powerful snippets, “even as new educational and professional opportunities unfurl before my daughter, and her peers, so does the path that encourages them to equate identity with image, self-expression with appearance, femininity with performance, pleasure with pleasing, and sexuality with sexualization.”

Orenstein examines a specific niche of the many challenges of raising a girl in the modern, capitalist driven American culture we live in today. She tracks developmental stages alongside of marketing campaigns targeted at them and their long-term outcomes on esteem and self-concept. She explains how the sexualization of toys and the culture directed at young girls, leads to a fixation on appearing somewhere on the desirable/approved–sexy spectrum, and simultaneously disconnects girls from their own emotional exploration around desire and self-satisfaction. In this way, the goal becomes external approval and external satisfaction. This is the beginning of a series of trap doors that follow young women throughout their development, often leading to high levels of anxiety, depression and certainly eating disorders to name a few.

 All of that and not to mention really murky territory when it comes to development of sexual empowerment later in life. Here is another choice snippet by Deborah Tolman to illustrate the risk, “they [teenage girls] respond to questions about how their bodies feel- questions about sexuality and arousal- by describing how they think they should look. I have to remind them that looking good is not a feeling.” That quote gives me chills. It is a frightening abdication from one’s sense of self to confuse internal feelings of one’s own experience with external assessments of how one appears to the outside lens (which we might add, is then ever changing).

Luckily, it’s not all gloom and doom. Along with bigger more radical steps, this book also illuminates many simple parenting approaches to help buffer these influences. One that may ring controversial, is that yes, it is okay to tell your daughter she is beautiful. The key is to tell her when she is crying, when she is sweaty after a soccer game, when she speaks up to a friend, when she has her first heartbreak. Orenstein says, “it is important to connect beauty and love…Everything about you is beautiful to me- you are beautiful to me. That way you are not just objectifying her body.”

Orenstein brings the reader along as she navigates her experience with her own daughter with humility and humor. This book is valuable to anyone helping to raise, influence, role model or connect with a young girl in today’s world.

*It should be noted that Orenstein writes in reference to the cisgender, straight, young female population.

Read: Sick Enough by Dr. Jennifer L. Gaudiani MD, CEDS, FAED

It is highly unlikely that you will find any other medical text recommended on this platform. That is not, as one might assume, due to the unique and niche role that this text fills for the field of eating disorder work, but rather, because the ease with which it can be understood sets it apart from the vast majority of other texts of this caliber.  

Sick Enough, is of critical value to any practicing medical professional. Regardless of specialty, at some point, there will be an interaction with a patient that either counters weight bias and the varying stigmas that minimize and/or perpetuate eating disorders, or there will be a missed opportunity that quietly lays root to harm. If those stakes feel high for medical practitioners, they should.

Luckily, in addition to various medical interventions, the book is capped with a number of actions that can be taken by providers and loved ones alike so as not to be paralyzed in the face of concern. This book will leave every reader armed with knowledge and grace to feel capable in the critical role of support.

Dr. Gaudiani is as adept at capturing and distilling medical nuances as she is with broadly addressing a multitude of social issues that not only impact this population, but the vast entirety of our diverse and complex culture. Sadly, I find it as rare in the medical community as I do refreshing, how Dr. Gaudiani languages issues pertaining to the social oppressions that so many patients face. Her unique approach  to zoom out far beyond the physical human body and into the social realms and constructs impacting each individual, truly exemplifies whole person care.

Anyone who is a provider, despite efforts to be as non-hierarchical as we can, is in a position of power. Dr. Gaudiani tackles this truth with deep humility and powerful dedication towards her role as a pioneer in the medical field for truly doing no harm on a much more influential level.

This book is as critical for the education of providers and supports as it is for the validation of those living with eating disorders.  

https://www.amazon.com/Sick-Enough-Medical-Complications-Disorders/dp/0815382456/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1539097995&sr=1-1&keywords=sick+enough