Book Reviews

Four Ways to Click: Rewire Your Brain for Stronger, More Rewarding Relationships is a self-help book designed to illustrate, via a strongly neuroscience-based framework, the nature of reader’s personal relationships. The goal of the book is, ostensibly, to identify the reader’s strong and weak relationships through included evaluations and map out actions that can improve them. The explicit goal is to change the way readers’ brains are wired through interventions that target four specific brain regions as outlined in the book’s “C.A.R.E. Plan.”

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.

Sue Gerhardt’s book aims to reconcile the growing disparity between public and professional knowledge of the new developments in cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, as well as social developmental, and personality psychology that pertain to early infant development and beyond.

Resolving Yesterday: First Aid for Stress and Trauma with TTT is designed to teach the Trauma Tapping Technique (TTT), a stress management and coping tool that can be performed on the self and others. It is written to be as accessible as possible so that the technique can reach people of disparate levels of education, experience, and language.

I sat down to read Contemplative Psychotherapy Essentials with an agenda in mind. I felt rushed to get through the chapter yet found myself slowing, breathing. I settled into the chair. The have-to-do’s vanished. I was simply and completely present with the text. Wegela offers quotes from other Buddhist teachers, case examples from clients and students. Terms are defined and demonstrated. The material is accessible, user-friendly. A true invitation to not only read about but to also personally experience it, try it out, let it flow within and through.

Twenty-four years have passed since my first shamanic journey. When I received Carl Greer’s book, Change Your Story, Change Your Life: Using Shamanic and Jungian Tools to Achieve Personal Transformation, I thought I knew what I’d find in the pages of his text. I was not prepared for the depth of detail—both written by Carl and expected from me, the reader, embarking on a journey of self-transformation.

We have all experienced stress; in some form it is a survival tool that gives us energy and fuel to handle a pressing situation. Sometimes a stressful situation is so overwhelming that we will do anything to avoid that situation for the rest of our life. In these cases, our security system will code everything in that situation into a script that will trigger a stress response as soon as anything reminds us of it. That stress response will grow stronger as our system generalizes it, to the point where we can generate a full life-or-death panic response by simply thinking about it. It is then called post-traumatic stress.

Our Spring issue is pleased to have a personal and powerful article from Katja Rusanen, author, spiritual life coach, and inspirational speaker. She shares her early experience with a lover's suicide and its impact on her life, then ties her personal journey into her professional approach to health and healing.

In 2006, Louis Cozolino, a therapist and professor of psychology at the Pepperdine University, published the first edition of his book, The Neuroscience of Human Relationships. Since then, the field of neuroscience has expanded immensely. As a result, Cozolino has published a second edition, which contains much of the same content and more. It follows the same format as the first edition while integrating contemporary research with existing knowledge of the social brain.

Becoming Us is written in a first-person familiar voice— it reads as if you are sitting with Elly, sharing stories over a cup of tea. It is an easy-to-access resource for therapists and laypersons alike. Drawing from current research and psychotherapeutic theories, Taylor writes with a simplicity that gets to the heart of ordinary experience.