5 Therapy-ish Book Recommendations for 2024
For those of us who feel overwhelmed by the amount of self-help and therapy-related books available, Bristlecone Therapy would like to offer a few therapeutic classics to check out (or re-check out) in the new year.
> The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk
The Body Keeps the Score is a broad-sweeping neuroscientific overview of how our bodies hold pain and what we can do to find release from our pain. While admittedly it can be a bit much to wade through at times, we highly recommend the audiobook version which is read by a narrator that brings Bessel's work to life.
> The Dance of Anger by Harriet Lerner
Harriet Lerner is a master of disentanglement from codependent relationships. While the subtitle of this book is "A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationship", we have found this book to be very much of use to men as well as women. Lerner's examples of how to speak only for oneself and not get caught up in telling others what they should be thinking/feeling/doing or in twisting ourselves into pretzels to please others are pure gold.
> Mindsight by Dan Siegel
From the father of interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB), Mindsight unpacks all the ways in which we become ourselves in the context of our most important relationships and through the attachment patterns we experience in childhood. Seigel does well to make sense of how our relationships shape our neural circuitry as well as how we can "reshape" our brains through good therapy and healthy adult relationships.
> My Grandmothers Hands by Resmaa Menakem
Oh boy is this a powerful work on racialized trauma! In it Menakem shows how a trauma which begins in an individual body can over time become embedded in a culture. He goes on to note how once trauma is embedded in culture, the culture's response to the trauma can become normalized and the traumatic retention in the bodies of people in that culture can go unnoticed. And then multiply this process by a zillion when different groups of people come into conflict!
We'd also like to mention one newer book worth reading. While this one isn't quite old enough yet to be a classic, it is well on its way!
> The Myth of Normal by Gabor Maté
In The Myth of Normal Maté brings together themes he has explored in his previous books: bodily illness, mental health, attachment bonds, and addiction. Written with his son, this is a work about healing--body, mind, and soul. (We'd like to give a special shout out to the section of the book on the power of psychadelics to recover from trauma.) This text is very much Maté's magnum opus.