Self-help Advice
Book Recommendations
The Girls Within: A True Story of Triumph Over Trauma & Abuse, Gill Frost
Gill Frost’s engaging and unparalleled account of treating her Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) client using energy psychotherapy. Suitable for any and all clients to read and very reader friendly. It’s a long case study broken up into chapters, not an academic textbook. If you yourself have a complicated trauma history you may find you need to dip in slowly and skip pages or chapters which are too traumatic. Nevertheless, I highly recommend this book to give you a sense of how energy psychotherapy – not talking therapy alone - can offer hope and healing.
EMDR and the Energy Therapies: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Phil Mollon
A comprehensive explanation of using energy in therapy written by the “father of energy psychotherapy in the UK”. This will give you a sense of how my colleagues and I practise energy psychotherapy including the theoretical underpinning behind our work. Be warned, however, it’s an academic textbook and may be a bit dense for a lay person. Start with The Girls Within and, if you’re still keen, go on to this!
From Amazon: “Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), along with methods from the new field of energy psychology, such as the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), enable the rapid processing and release of traumatic memories and painful emotion. In this innovative work, Phil Mollon demonstrates how the perspectives of EMDR, energy psychology, and psychoanalysis can inform and enrich each other. By summarising relevant research and providing many clinical examples, Mollon has produced a challenging and invigorating scrutiny of psychoanalysis and an expanded vision of the potential for psychosomatic healing”: .
The Little Book of Energy Medicine: The Secrets of Enhancing Your Health and Energy, Donna Eden
A lay person’s guide to doing energy medicine techniques on yourself in your own time.
From Amazon: “Donna Eden is a pioneer in the field of energy medicine. In this important book she shows you how to work with you body's energy to create physical, psychological and spiritual health and wellbeing. Discover how to:
Bring more energy and vitality into your everyday life
Use simple techniques to overcome tiredness and lethargy
Cure common complaints and prevent disease
Work with the eight major energy systems of the body for health and healing
Heal your mind, body and soul
Energy medicine is a beautifully written, step-by-step approach for everyone who wants to achieve a healthier body, a sharper mind and a more joyful spirit”.
Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis, Sally Weintrobe
A book about the greatest political, social and moral issue of our time: the climate emergency. An essential existential exploration.
From Amazon: “Psychological Roots of the Climate Crisis tells the story of a fundamental fight between a caring and an uncaring imagination. It helps us to recognise the uncaring imagination in politics, in culture - for example in the writings of Ayn Rand - and also in ourselves.
Sally Weintrobe argues that achieving the shift to greater care requires us to stop colluding with Exceptionalism, the rigid psychological mindset largely responsible for the climate crisis. People in this mindset believe that they are entitled to have the lion’s share and that they can ‘rearrange’ reality with magical omnipotent thinking whenever reality limits these felt entitlements”.
Couch Fiction: A Graphic Tale of Psychotherapy, Philippa Perry
Bestselling author Philippa Perry (The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read) turns her keen insights to the power of therapy. This compelling study of psychotherapy in the form of a graphic novel vividly explores a year's therapy sessions as a search for understanding and truth. Beautifully illustrated by Flo Perry, author of How to Have Feminist Sex, and accompanied by succinct and illuminating footnotes, this book offers a witty and thought-provoking exploration of the therapeutic journey. Philippa Perry is another brilliant British therapist. You think this is fiction...
The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, Stephen Grosz
A British psychoanalyst’s account of his work - each chapter has a focus on a different client. Grosz is a highly experienced clinician with an exquisitely beautiful and compelling writing style. Whilst his overly neat and tidy chapter endings grate a little with me, I am wild with envy at this brilliant book published towards the end of a brilliant career. (Could someone please get me a gig with his publisher?!) I have anecdotal evidence -from UK colleagues- that soon after it was published (2014) it became the most talked about book during therapy sessions. It may even have become a literary catalyst for people reaching out for the help they need.
To Call Myself Beloved, Eina McHugh
A stunningly beautiful memoir about therapy. An intimate and delicate book which discloses the private feelings evoked in, what can be, a very intense relationship. The book demonstrates the heightened vulnerability we can all feel as clients, and the importance of finding the right therapist who will be safe enough and containing enough to journey with us. Whilst the way I do therapy is different from the therapist in this book, I affirm the importance of the relationship between the therapist and client as a crucial component of the healing and transformation. Thank you Eina for putting your beautiful book out there in the world! A joy and consolation.
The Other Side of You, Salley Vickers
Fascinating because this work of fiction is borne out of the author’s career as a therapist (psychoanalyst) as well as a professor of literature. A novel by a former therapist about a former therapist. A highly polished work of art. Tender. Evocative. Moving. Haunting. Life-affirming. One of my fav books of all time.
Intersectionality and Relational Psychoanalysis: New Perspectives on Race, Gender and Sexuality, Max Belkin & Cleonie White
An important contribution to our perspectives on race, gender, and sexuality, and how they overlap.
Issues in Therapy with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Clients, Charles Neal & Dominic Davies
This is the latest book (2000) by Dominic Davies, who previously wrote the seminal book: “Pink Therapy” in 1996. Excellent.
Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving, Pete Walker
Includes an excellent list of how to manage flashbacks.
In Therapy: How Conversations with Therapists Really Work, Susie Orbach
One of Orbach’s many excellent books. Susie Orbach is arguably the most high profile psychotherapist in the UK. These fictionalised but life-like therapy sessions were a radio series before being compiled into a book. This is your opportunity to – legitimately - eavesdrop on some therapy sessions.
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