Facing Codependence
By Pia Mellody
Pia Mellody creates a framework for identifying codependent thinking, emotions and behaviour and provides an effective approach to recovery. Mellody sets forth five primary adult symptoms of this crippling condition, then traces their origin to emotional, spiritual, intellectual, physical and sexual abuses that occur in childhood. Central to Mellody's approach is the concept that the codependent adult's injured inner child needs healing. Recovery from codependence, therefore, involves clearing up the toxic emotions left over from these painful childhood experiences.
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts
By Gabor Maté
“In this brilliant and well-documented book, Gabor Maté locates the source of addictions in the trauma of an emotionally empty childhood, making it a relational rather than a medical problem. Such a radical thesis of cause leads to human connection rather than traditional treatment as the cure. This passionate and compassionate book, filled with scientific evidence and personal narratives, should be on the shelf of every person interested in the pervasive challenge of addiction.”—Harville Hendrix, PhD
The Four Agreements
By Miguel Ruiz
In The Four Agreements, bestselling author don Miguel Ruiz reveals the source of self-limiting beliefs that rob us of joy and create needless suffering. Based on ancient Toltec wisdom, The Four Agreements offer a powerful code of conduct that can rapidly transform our lives to a new experience of freedom, true happiness, and love.
Don't Expect Me To Cry
By Janet Bentley (Founder of Courageous Survivors)
Don’t Expect Me To Cry is a powerful story of the horrors she experienced at the hands of multiple abusers, including her father, and the courageous journey of healing that brought her to a life that is inspirational to other survivors.
Codependent No More
By Melody Beattie
With instructive life stories, personal reflections, exercises, and self-tests, Codependent No More is a simple, straightforward, readable map of the perplexing world of codependency--charting the path to freedom and a lifetime of healing, hope, and happiness.
Man's Search For Meaning
By Viktor Frankl
A book for finding purpose and strength in times of great despair, the international best-seller is still just as relevant today as when it was first published.
Broken to Beautifully Whole
By Cathy Studer
How can we recover after being hurt or suffering abuse? What choices can help us transition from feeling like a victim to reclaiming our purpose and empowering our potential?
Author and speaker Cathy Studer shares the steps she followed as she moved through her own pain of carrying shame, low self-worth, and humiliation after suffering six years of childhood sexual abuse. She models how it is possible to recover from intense hurt and abuse, and create a life filled with value, purpose, and joy.
The Body Keeps the Score
By Bessel van der Kolk M.D.
Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.
It Didn't Start With You
By Mark Wolynn
It Didn’t Start with You builds on the work of leading experts in post-traumatic stress, including Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score. Even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died, or the story has been forgotten or silenced, memory and feelings can live on. These emotional legacies are often hidden, encoded in everything from gene expression to everyday language, and they play a far greater role in our emotional and physical health than has ever before been understood.
War with Myself
By Shani-Lee Wallis
As a child, she lived a life of abuse and bullying. As an adult, she had to battle the most challenging opponent, herself. Fighting a life-threatening disorder, she had to find a way to survive. An inspiring memoir for anyone suffering with Bulimia or mental illness.
Codependent's Guide to the Twelve Steps
By Melody Beattie
Millions identified with Melody Beattie in Codependent No More and gained inspiration from her in Beyond Codependency. Now she’s back to help you discover how recovery programs work and to help you find the right one for you. Interpreting the famous Alcoholics Anonymous Twelve Steps specifically for codependent issues for the very first time, this groundbreaking book combines Melody’s expertise with the experience of other people to:
• Explain each step and how you can apply it to your particular issues.
• Offer specific exercises and activities to use both in group settings and on your own.
• Provide a directory of the wide range of Twelve Step programs—including Al-Anon, Codependents Anonymous, Codependents of Sex Addicts, Adult Children of Alcoholics, and more.
The New Codependency: Help and Guidance for Today's Generation
By Melody Beattie
In Codependent No More, Melody Beattie introduced the world to the term codependency. Now a modern classic, this book established Beattie as a pioneer in self-help literature and endeared her to millions of readers who longed for healthier relationships. Twenty-five years later concepts such as self-care and setting boundaries have become entrenched in mainstream culture. Now Beattie has written a follow-up volume, The New Codependency, which clears up misconceptions about codependency, identifies how codependent behavior has changed, and provides a new generation with a road map to wellness.
The 12 Steps to Self-Parenting for Adult Children
by Patricia O'Gorman and Philip Oliver-Diaz
If you are the child of an alcoholic or an adult who has experienced trauma in childhood, you can give yourself a second chance for intimacy, fulfillment and joy by self-parenting. 12 Steps to Self-Parenting, based on the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, will guide you to nurture your inner child so that it may grow into healthy self acceptance.
Allies in Healing: When the Person You Love Was Sexually Abused as a Child
by Laura Davis
Based on in-depth interviews and her workshops for partners across the country, Laura Davis offers practical advice and encouragement to all partners—girlfriends, boyfriends, spouses, and lovers—trying to support the survivors in their lives while tending to their own needs along the way. She shows couples how to deepen compassion, improve communication, and develop an understanding of healing as a shared activity. Addressing partners' most important questions.
The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse
by Laura Davis & Ellen Bass
Come to terms with your past while moving powerfully into the future.
The Courage to Heal is an inspiring, comprehensive guide that offers hope and a map of the healing journey to every woman who was sexually abused as a child—and to those who care about her. Although the effects of child sexual abuse are long-term and severe, healing is possible.
Weaving together personal experience with professional knowledge, the authors provide clear explanations, practical suggestions, and support throughout the healing process. Readers will feel recognized and encouraged by hundreds of moving first-person stories drawn from interviews and the authors' extensive work with survivors, both nationally and internationally.
The Courage to Heal Workbook: A Guide for Women and Men Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse
by Laura Davis
In this groundbreaking companion to The Courage to Heal, Laura Davis offers an inspiring, in-depth workbook that speaks to all women and men healing from the effects of child sexual abuse. The combination of checklists, writing and art Projects, open-ended questions and activities expertly guides the survivor through the healing process.
Survival Skills—Teaches survivors to create a safe, supportive environment, ask for help, deal with crisis periods, and choose therapy.
Aspects Of Healing—Focuses on the healing process: gaining a capacity for hope, breaking silence, letting go of shame, turning anger into action, planning a confrontation, preparing for family contact, and affirming personal progress.
Guidelines For Healing Sexually—Redefines the concept of "safe sex" and establishes healthy ground rules for sexual contact.
Bradshaw On: The Family: A New Way of Creating Solid Self-Esteem
by John Bradshaw
Based on the public television series of the same name, Bradshaw On: The Family is John Bradshaw's seminal work on the dynamics of families that has sold more than a million copies since its original publication in 1988. Within its pages, you will discover the cause of emotionally impaired families. You will learn how unhealthy rules of behavior are passed down from parents to children, and the destructive effect this process has on our society.
Using the latest family research and recovery material in this new edition, Bradshaw also explores the individual in both a family and societal setting. He shows you ways to escape the tyranny of family-reinforced behavior traps--from addiction and co-dependency to loss of will and denial--and demonstrates how to make conscious choices that will transform your life and the lives of your loved ones. He helps you heal yourself and then, using what you have learned helps you heal your family.
Finally, Bradshaw extends this idea to our society: by returning yourself and your family to emotional health, you can heal the world in which you live. He helps you re-envision societal conflicts from the perspective of a global family, and shares with you the power of deep democracy: how the choices you make every day can affect--and improve--your world.
Healing the Shame that Binds You
by John Bradshaw
Shame is the motivator behind our toxic behaviors: the compulsion, co-dependency, addiction and drive to super-achieve that breaks down the family and destroys personal lives. This book has helped millions identify their personal shame, understand the underlying reasons for it, address these root causes and release themselves from the shame that binds them to their past failures.
This is not just a recovery book. Among other things, it is a classic book on identifying and working through unresolved family issues. Includes affirmations, visualizations, inner voice and feeling exercises. Strong supporting studies make this a popular book with counselors and other professionals.
Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child
by John Bradshaw
In this powerful book, John Bradshaw shows how we can learn to nurture that inner child, in essence offering ourselves the good parenting we needed and longed for. Through a step-by-step process of exploring the unfinished business of each developmental stage, we can break away from destructive family rules and roles and free ourselves to live responsibly in the present. Then, says Bradshaw, the healed inner child becomes a source of vitality, enabling us to find new joy and energy in living.
Homecoming includes a wealth of unique case histories and interactive techniques, including questionnaires, letter-writing to the inner child, guided meditations, and affirmations. Pioneering when introduced, these classic therapies are now being validated by new discoveries in attachment research and neuroscience. No one has ever brought them to a popular audience more effectively and inspiringly than John Bradshaw.
The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
by Alice Miller
Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own feelings, needs, and memories skillfully in order to meet our parents' expectations and win their "love." Alice Miller writes, "When I used the word 'gifted' in the title, I had in mind neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. I simply meant all of us who have survived an abusive childhood thanks to an ability to adapt even to unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb.... Without this 'gift' offered us by nature, we would not have survived." But merely surviving is not enough. The Drama of the Gifted Child helps us to reclaim our life by discovering our own crucial needs and our own truth.
Who Else Can Love You
By Dwight E. Kobar
Read this book to your own inner child or to any child, or let children read to themselves. It will lift the spirits of both reader and audience, even if they're one and the same. Keep it handy and read it often as a reminder of just how delightfully precious you really are. I dare you not to smile before you reach the end each time.
Sexual Anorexia - Overcoming Sexual Self-Hatred
by Patrick Carnes, PhD
A first-time examination of sexual anorexia, an extreme fear of sexual intimacy and obsessive avoidance of sex, by the acknowledged leader in the treatment of compulsive sexual behavior and recovery.
Author Dr. Patrick Carnes begins by defining sexual anorexia and demonstrating how it and its parallel disorder, sexual addiction and compulsivity, often arise from a background of childhood sexual trauma, neglect, and other forms of abuse. Carnes explores the numerous dimensions of sexual health, examining key issues which must be addressed and resolved for recovery to proceed.
