Books can really supplement the therapy experience or give a new perspective! Here’s a list of books I personally recommend for various therapy concerns. Please note that readers may have different perspectives on these books or authors and those are valid. Your experience reading a book may differ from mine or another reader’s. Also please practice caution when reading trauma narratives, especially if you have your own trauma that you are working through.
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Healthy body image/eating (many geared towards female-identified readers)
- Body Positive Power – Megan Jayne Crabbe
- Body Respect – Linda Bacon
- Health at Every Size – Linda Bacon
- Come as You Are – Emily Nagoski
- The Body is Not an Apology – Sonya Renee Taylor
- The Anti-Diet – Christy Harrison
- Women Don’t Owe You Pretty – Florence Given
- The Beauty Myth – Naomi Wolf
- Fearing the Black Body: The racial origins of fatphobia – Sabrina Strings
Anxiety/Depression
- Self-compassion – Kristin Neff
- The Upward Spiral – David DeVries
- First We Make the Beast Beautiful – Sarah Wilson
- How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy – Jenny Odell
- DBT for anxiety – Jonathan Moran
- Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy – David D. Burns
Trauma/abuse
- Getting Past Your Past – Francine Shapiro
- The Body Keeps the Score – Bessel Van der Kolk
- The Courage to Heal (book and workbook) – Laura Davis
- Life After Trauma – Dena Rosenbloom & Mary Beth Willilams
- It Didn’t Start with You – Mark Wolynn
- Know My Name – Chanel Miller
- Self Therapy – Jay Earley
For therapists in training or those interested in therapy
- Love’s Executioner – Irvin Yalom
- Trauma Stewardship – Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky
- I Think You Should Talk to Someone – Lori Gottlieb
- A Life Worth Living – Marsha Linehan
- Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl
- The Silent Patient – Alex Michaelides
- The Sociopath Next Door – Martha Stout
- EMDR Made Simple – Jamie Marich
Parents/family members with mental illness
- Toxic Parents – Craig Buck & Susan Forward
- Surviving a Borderline Parent – Kimberlee Roth & Freda Friedman
- Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents – Lindsay Gibson
- Borderline Mother – David Lawson
- Stop Walking on Eggshells Workbook – Randi Kreger & James Paul Shirley
Discrimination, lived experiences of POC, & anti-racism
- The Color of Law – Richard Rothstein
- So You Want to Talk About Race – Ijeoma Oluo
- Women, Race, and Class – Angela Davis
- Queer InJustice – Ritchie, Mogul & Whitlock
- Automating Inequality – Virginia Eubanks
- Invisible Women – Caroline Criado Perez
- The Space Between Us – Reyna Grande
- The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down – Anne Fadiman
- Born a Crime – Trevor Noah
Men in therapy
- I Don’t Want to Talk About It – Terrance Real
- The Group – Rosenstein & Yopp
Relationships
- The Ethical Slut – Janet Hardy
- Daring Greatly – Brene Brown
- Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work – John Gottman
- Eight Dates – John Gottman & Nan Silver
- Secrets of a Passionate Marriage – David Schnarch
- Nonviolent Communication – Marshall Rosenberg
- Say What You Mean – Oren Jay Sofer, Joseph Goldstein
I sometimes also include book reviews on my Youtube Channel.