Building mental wellness on a foundation of strength
Don't Believe Everything You Feel by Robert L. Leahy uses an emotional schema approach to help you manage anxiety and depression. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) tools are ussd as part of this approach. It's set up as a workbook, with a substantial amount of text interspersed with worksheets. Some of the worksheets are fairly structured,… Continue reading Book Review: Don’t Believe Everything You Feel
The Gratitude Project, edited by Jeremy Adam Smith et al., is a project of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley in California. It includes chapters by a number of different authors on various aspects of gratitude. I liked that the book took a realistic approach to what gratitude can and can not do.… Continue reading Book Review: The Gratitude Project
Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself is written by Kristin Neff, a prominent researcher in the area of self-compassion. It includes research findings, a variety of exercises with room to complete them in the book, and stories from the author's personal experience. The author draws on Buddhist teachings, and she writes that:… Continue reading Book Review: Self-Compassion
The Silent Scream: An Anthology of Despair, Struggle, and Hope is put together by Maria Alfieri. There are 10 other contributors to the book using their full names, including myself, and other writing anonymously. In the introduction, Maria writes: "It is through our vulnerability that our liberation from our inauthenticity starts. Through honest conversation we… Continue reading Book Review: The Silent Scream
My Heart's Song: Emotional Musings 3 is a book of poetry by Maria Pratico, who you may know from her blog Emotional Musings. She explains in the introduction that after a messy divorce, she realized that her purpose was to use her own experiences to help others heal. She describes the poems in the book… Continue reading Book Review: My Heart’s Song
Can't Keep Me Down is the latest book from Maranda Russell, who you may know from her blog or the multiple other books she's written. This is a poetry and short prose chapbook, which isn't a term I'd ever heard before. So, off to Wikipedia, which says that it's a form of short book with… Continue reading Book Review: Can’t Keep Me Down
The ACT Workbook for Depression & Shame is written by psychologists Matthew W. McKay, Michael Jason Greenberg, and Patrick J. Fanning. It's based on acceptance and commitment therapy and focused on addressing the defectiveness schema in depression. The book begins and ends with a series of several self-assessment questionnaires to let you see how much… Continue reading Book Review: The ACT Workbook for Depression & Shame
If you know Ashley from her blog MentalHealth@Home, you’ll be already familiar with her no-nonsense and straight to the point writing style. Her latest book, ‘Managing the Depression Puzzle’ is a short one, 124 pages, but is packed full of information about, you guessed it, depression. The book is written in short chapters which makes […]Book… Continue reading Book Review – Managing The Depression Puzzle — Food.for.Thoughts
I Lost My Little Apricot by Melody Finch, the lovely Caramel (Learner at Love), shares the heart-wrenching experience of miscarrying. The foreword includes the figure that one in four pregnancies will end in miscarriage, and points out that it's a subject that doesn't get talked about enough. Parts of the book were written before and… Continue reading Book Review: I Lost My Little Apricot
The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk is perhaps one of the best-known books about trauma, and in particular early life trauma. It's been on my to-be-read list for quite a while, and I've finally managed to get around to it. This is a hefty book. The epub version that I was… Continue reading Book Review: The Body Keeps the Score