Book Reviews

Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat, for Binge Eating: A Mindful Eating Program for Healing Your Relationship With Food and Your Body is designed to assist readers in altering their eating habits. As the title implies, the author incorporates mindfulness exercises for readers to practice at their own pace to increase their self-awareness of appetite and compulsive eating habits.

Alexandra Katehakis’ book dives into the foundations of sex addiction and the best possible treatment of it through a neurobiological lense. Informed by her own experiences and therapeutic journey as well as her work as a psychotherapist, Katehakis offers her own conception of an approach to treatment called Psychobiological Approach to Sex Addiction Treatment (PASAT). PASAT combines “cognitive-behavioral containment of addiction, transpersonal psychology expanding the self beyond the individual, and emotionally regulating, intuitive, and relation-based psychotherapy informed by affective neuroscience” (4). The target audience is mainly psychotherapists as the book hones in on PASAT and how to utilize it, but it can also be appreciated by those dealing with sex addiction, whether they’re in recovery or not. Through Katehakis’ detailed examination of sex addiction as a legitimate disorder and her resulting treatment plan, it is clear that she is deeply passionate and knowledgeable about the subject. The book opens with a foreword by Allan N. Schore followed by Katehakis’s introduction where she touches on her journey to becoming a psychotherapist and provides an overview of the book. She describes a deeply traumatic experience of her own that drew me in. My attention was captured by her explanation of her personal connection to psychotherapy; it humanizes her and serves as a way to broach the topic of psychotherapeutic treatment.

As a constituent of the American Psychological Association (APA) Theories of Psychotherapy Series, the second edition of Laura S. Brown’s Feminist Therapy highlights the contemporary model of feminist psychotherapy as well as its history and context. She additionally informs readers how feminist therapy is utilized in practice and evaluates its practicality.

Ever wonder why a fight with your significant other deteriorates into a middle school shouting match? Or why a contentious conversation with a parent throws you into a temper tantrum? Chances are you are experiencing reality in one of many different ego states.

Jaime Lowe’s memoir chronicles her struggles with bipolar disorder and explores lithium: the medication that saved her life but also caused her body irreparable harm. A story full of progress and setbacks, stability and mania, and hope and desolation, Lowe’s book is emotionally tumultuous. Written colloquially and free of highly scientific content, this book can cater to a wide audience. Though it is specifically useful and relevant for people who are bipolar and/or utilizing lithium medication, it’s also helpful for anyone who wants to understand these two things better. Lowe’s book offers both a raw and honest account of what it’s like to live with bipolar disorder and important information about lithium to provide a holistic understanding of her journey. 

“Writing has helped me heal. Writing has changed my life. Writing has saved my life.” These powerful first sentences of Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Stories Transforms Our Lives immediately conveys the author’s strong belief in the curative power of writing. She posits that writing helps people recover from “thorny experiences” and can help heal those suffering from a variety of situations, from dislocation and violence to rape and racism (4). DeSalvo is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Hunter College and is the author of over a half dozen books, so her advice is rooted in her own personal experience using writing as an instrument of healing.

Written by Kyle Davies Foreward by Gabor Mate Reviewed by Monica Spafford   In The Intelligent Body: Reversing Chronic Fatigue and Pain from the Inside Out, author Kyle...

Drs. Elizabeth Johnston and Leah Olson highlight the work of key researchers, describing their text as a “tasting menu that introduces the variety of delicacies available in the vibrant and growing field of emotion research” (xvi). Drawing from researchers dating back to Darwin, Johnston and Olson weave together a myriad of theories that seek to define emotion in various ways. The authors offer comprehensive coverage of what they view as the most profound contributions to affective neuroscience, hoping to engage their audience in a way that goes beyond a mere question-answer approach.

  By Nancy Eichhorn, Ph.D. My inner editor smiles (envision a Cheshire Cat grin) when reviewing a new book and its layout includes all the necessary...

I am a big fan of Rothschild. Her earlier book (2000) elevated awareness of the autonomic nervous system (ANS), the substrate of all health, in the psychotherapy world, and taught us to look for and precisely recognize ANS signals in order to appropriately support recovery from trauma. Her new book adds excellent additional detail, including a “six-categories-of-ANS” poster that can now be viewed on the wall of our classroom at CSES. The bulk of the book is about therapy insights, which I found to be excellent; my concerns were just in a few pages of her Chapter Two. The problem for me starts with Rothschild’s description of Polyvagal Theory (PVT), which occupies two pages in the chapter. She summarizes PVT as being the discovery of the “ventral vagus” function as distinct from the previously-known “dorsal vagus” function, which is the foundation of the parasympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. Both down-regulate the heart, but in different ways. She states that calm states arise from the ventral branch, and that collapse states arise from the dorsal branch. This is not all wrong, but for a person of Rothschild’s immense professional stature, I was really hoping for more.