Therapy and the idea of delving into yourself and how you operate can be daunting. While books are not a substitute for therapy, they are an incredible supplement, and one that I recommend to my clients in many of our sessions together. Reading outside of sessions allows you to make connections you may not have in a guided session, and not only that, but picking up a book while not directly in session allows you to want to get to know more about yourself and what you are talking about in session. It allows you to draw meaningful connections between yourself and the work that you are doing, and it lets you look at and explore what you are curious about (whether that is ADHD, trauma, breaking cyclical thought patterns, etc) from a whole new perspective. It can be tricky and overwhelming to know where to begin, so to get started here are some of my favorites, with a quick summary of each so you know what you’re diving into!
The Body Keeps The Score, by Bessel van der Kolk
Focus: Trauma & Healing
Trauma lives in the body. But, how? Are there different types of trauma? How do they show up somatically after the fact? Throughout this book, Bessel answers these questions and expands upon how PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) lives in the body after one has experienced various traumas. It’s an academic study that turns into an interesting self-reflection depending on what you draw from this book, and I’ve noticed that many clients pick out different areas of the book that speak to them and their respective traumas. As a DBT focused therapist, this book stands out to me not only by validating and affirming peoples’ traumas, but it also gives readers nervous system regulation techniques as well as exercises that can fit into your day to day life that allow you to reaffirm and regulate not only yourself, but those around you.
Good Morning Monster, by Catherine Gildener
Focus: Countertransference & the Therapeutic Relationship
Therapists are people! People who ultimately, make mistakes and have flawed thoughts and opinions more often than their clients would like to recognize sometimes. I really enjoyed this book for a few reasons- not only does it deep dive into a therapist’s perspective on her clients and look back on how she may have been biased in treating them throughout their time together, it also allows clients reading this book to realize that their therapists are people too. This book goes through a few clients who stood out to Dr. Gildener throughout her time as a clinician, and those who helped her shape her experience. These experiences, though, are also ways to critique the therapist themself, and I do think that this book could have been a bit more acknowledging of intersectionality and lived experiences, and how uncomfortability can result from that as a factor. It does beautifully offer a way forward in the end, and this book was a great look into therapy from the perspective of a therapist, and is very much a must-read for clinicians starting out.
The Deepest Well, by Nadine Burke-Harris
Focus: Childhood Trauma
Childhood trauma, more often than not, does tend to come up in therapy sessions. This book is a great companion to The Body Keeps The Score, as it talks about ACES and how they show up somatically for you as you grow up and move through your lived experience. As a brief overview, ACES stands for adverse childhood experiences, and they are traumatic events that occur in childhood that you carry with you, physically and/or mentally, into adulthood. Much like Good Morning Monster, The Deepest Well dives into individual client experiences, allowing readers to pull their own experiences from others, and creating a feeling of validation and affirming care that may feel similar to the sessions clients are partaking in. This book allows people to understand ACES and how it may affect them throughout their life, but it feels very accessible and tackles the proverbial “elephant in the room” within most therapy spaces.
Maybe You Should Talk To Someone, by Lori Gottlieb
Focus: Countertransference & the Therapeutic Relationship
Similarly to Good Morning Monster, Maybe You Should Talk To Someone explores therapy not only from the perspective of the therapist, but it goes a level deeper to explore her therapy as well. This book is a beautiful introspection of what it’s like to be a therapist while receiving therapy, and how doing both at the same time tends to bleed into one another. While Maybe You Should Talk To Someone also details clients' experiences from the therapist’s perspective, it does a wholly empathetic job of figuring out how these clients fit into the therapist’s own life, and how her own lived experiences make her differently empathetic to each of their predicaments. Again, while this book does a fantastic job showing clients the “other side” of therapy, I do always want to issue a warning to the reader that therapists are not perfect- and this book exemplifies the uncomfortable boundary setting that can come with a therapeutic relationship.
The Anxious Generation, by Jonathan Haidt
Focus: Adolescent Mental Health
While this book is largely statistically focused, it lays out an incredibly compelling argument for how adolescent mental health is deteriorating. Jonathan Haidt details some of the reasons that this could be happening- smartphones, social media, and the increasing social pressure due to the former two leading to decreasing mental health. For example, Haidt talks about how social media has led to less need for outside play and stimulation as children are developing, and how this leads to a reliance on social media as an attachment tool as they get older. While this seems bleak, Haidt then details how we can take collective action towards solutions for improving adolescent mental health on federal, state, and local levels, emphasizing community action over all. Parents can delete social media apps from kids’ phones, yes, but redirection and independence are two of the most productive tools in allowing kids to feel less anxious and more stimulated as we move through increasing levels of technology permeating our lives.
I want to emphasize that while this is not an exhaustive list, it’s one that can get a curious reader started if they are looking into resources outside of therapy sessions! Curiosity is important now more than ever, and these books allow you, as a reader, to explore more both about yourself and about your therapist. It allows you to see therapy and your sessions from other perspectives, emphasizing community action and validation above all else as ways to strengthen your support system and subsequent mental health in uncertain times. As always, please read these books through your own lens while being open to others’ perspectives, and keeping yourself open to new experiences allows you to broaden your worldview. Like I mentioned in a couple of my summaries, being able to read these books both empathetically and critically is a skill you can always build upon through reading more, and staying curious about yourself and the world is a way to community build- maybe even through starting a book club!
References:
Burke Harris, N. (2021). The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Trauma and Adversity. Second Mariner Books paperback edition. Boston, Mariner Books.
Gildiner, C. (2020). Good Morning, Monster: A Therapist Shares Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery. St. Martin's Publishing Group.
Gottlieb, L. (2019). Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Penguin Publishing Group.
Van der Kolk, B. A. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body In The Healing of Trauma. Viking.
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