Book Reviews

Your Life After Trauma: Powerful Practices to Reclaim Your Identity is designed to help in “post-trauma identity development.” Eclectic in its methods, it uses motivational interviewing and incorporates cognitive behavioral, existential, gestalt, narrative, psychodynamic, psycho-educational, transpersonal, and neuropsychological frameworks into its exercises, questions, and passages.

Tea with Winnicott does seem like a real conversation with the acclaimed psychoanalyst, and allows the reader to develop a personal understanding of Winnicott as not just a figure of modern psychoanalysis, but as a regular person. Often funny and charming, Winnicott ends up capturing your attention and perhaps even your heart, creating a valuable place on the shelf to reflect on the importance and value of Winnicott.

If we put blinders on, if we ignore the entirety of a person’s experience, including the impact of our own background, our own sense of have and have not, we are setting up yet another dysfunctional experience.

Meeting the Needs of Parents Pregnant and Parenting After Perinatal Loss offers a supportive framework that integrates continuing bonds and attachment theories to support prenatal parenting at each stage of pregnancy. Giving insight into how a parent’s world view of a pregnancy may have changed following a loss, readers are provided with tools to assist parents as they explore pregnancy (conception, gestation, labor and birth) once again.

Written by Judith Blackstone, PhD Reviewed by Nancy Eichhorn, PhD “Wholeness is not a vague ideal, but a lived experience. It is a potential, inherent in...

Perhaps it’s because the contributors and editors are all Hakomi specialists, perhaps it’s because they are not just practitioners of this methodology but have sincerely immersed themselves in Hakomi’s foundational precepts personally and professionally: mindfulness, presence, loving kindness, and nonviolence. I felt as if the material was written according to the core essence of Hakomi— “assisted self-study done in a state of mindfulness”.

The Science of Addiction provides up-to-date research to explain causes of and treatment options for addiction. In so doing, author Carlton Erickson informs readers of the many facets of addiction, i.e., neurobiology, genetics, brain disease, and offers a detailed look at its manifestations. Thirteen distinct chapters help readers understand addiction. Chapters 1-3 focus on the terminology of addiction and why it confuses both professionals and the general public. A detailed look at what addiction is and what it is not is rooted in words. The author suggests that words like ‘addiction’ and ‘alcoholism’, as used in every day conversations, are “colloquial, unscientific, stigmatizing, and just plain wrong” (pg. 3). “Words matter!” he writes. “Precise language reduces misunderstanding, stigma and false impressions” (pg. 4).

Ardea writes with bodily expression, with movement in color, in text, in breath: “My pelvis feels inflamed, wobbly, twisted. It’s heavy like an overloaded water balloon. When I breathe and pay attention to my pelvis, I feel sadness well up, as though there’s an artesian well bursting up from my lower abdomen to fill my heart with sad, sad, waters. My hands feel prickly as all these waters overflow from my heart. They gust out in shaky waves down my arms and hands”.

In a society that praises and encourages extroverted behavior, Susan Cain’s book Quiet Power: The Secret Strength of Introverts is a lifeline for youth and adolescents who struggle to accept and find the value in their introverted tendencies. Building on previous research on introversion, Cain’s book serves as both a self-help guide for introverts and a learning tool for clinicians seeking to understand introverts and adjust their practice accordingly.

Gill Westland’s 2015 release entitled, Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication in Psychotherapy, merits mention. Her voice felt personable, reachable, while professional, informative. There’s something for anyone involved in mental health care as Gill draws on current findings from: infant development studies; neuroscience; various schools and approaches; and mindfulness/Buddhist practices.