Books with category 🩹 Emotional Healing
Displaying 13 books

The Alternatives

2024

by Caoilinn Hughes

The Alternatives is a tale about sisterhood, a novel of ideas, and a chronicle of our collective follies. It unfolds in prose full of gorgeous surprises and glows with intelligence, compassion, and beauty.

The Flattery sisters were plunged prematurely into adulthood when their parents died in tragic circumstances. Now in their thirties—all single, all with PhDs—they are each attempting to do meaningful work in a rapidly foundering world. The four lead disparate, distanced lives, from classrooms in Connecticut to ritzy catering gigs in London’s Notting Hill.

One day, their oldest sister, a geologist haunted by a terrible awareness of the earth’s future, abruptly vanishes from her work and home. Together for the first time in years, the Flatterys descend on the Irish countryside in search of a sister who doesn’t want to be found. Sheltered in a derelict bungalow, they reach into their common past, confronting both old wounds and a desperately uncertain future.

Warm, fiercely witty, and unexpectedly hopeful, The Alternatives is an unforgettable portrait of a family perched on our collective precipice, told by one of Ireland’s most gifted storytellers.

I’m Glad My Mom Died

I’m Glad My Mom Died is a heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor—including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother—and how she retook control of her life.

In I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette recounts all this in unflinching detail—just as she chronicles what happens when the dream finally comes true. Cast in a new Nickelodeon series called iCarly, she is thrust into fame. Though Mom is ecstatic, emailing fan club moderators and getting on a first-name basis with the paparazzi (“Hi Gale!”), Jennette is riddled with anxiety, shame, and self-loathing, which manifest into eating disorders, addiction, and a series of unhealthy relationships. These issues only get worse when, soon after taking the lead in the iCarly spinoff Sam & Cat alongside Ariana Grande, her mother dies of cancer. Finally, after discovering therapy and quitting acting, Jennette embarks on recovery and decides for the first time in her life what she really wants.

Told with refreshing candor and dark humor, I’m Glad My Mom Died is an inspiring story of resilience, independence, and the joy of shampooing your own hair.

What Are You Going Through

2020

by Sigrid Nunez

A story about the meaning of life and death, and the value of companionship.

A woman describes a series of encounters she has with various people in the ordinary course of her life: an ex she runs into by chance at a public forum, an Airbnb owner unsure how to interact with her guests, a stranger who seeks help comforting his elderly mother, a friend of her youth now hospitalized with terminal cancer. In each of these people, the woman finds a common need: the urge to talk about themselves and to have an audience to their experiences.

The narrator orchestrates this chorus of voices for the most part as a passive listener, until one of them makes an extraordinary request, drawing her into an intense and transformative experience of her own.

In What Are You Going Through, Nunez brings wisdom, humor, and insight to a novel about human connection and the changing nature of relationships in our times. A surprising story about empathy and the unusual ways one person can help another through hardship, her book offers a moving and provocative portrait of the way we live now.

The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Healing the Social Brain

2017

by Louis Cozolino

An update to the classic text that links neuroscience and human behavior in the context of therapy. This groundbreaking book explores the recent revolution in psychotherapy that has brought an understanding of the social nature of people’s brains to a therapeutic context.

Louis Cozolino is a master at synthesizing neuroscientific information and demonstrating how it applies to psychotherapy practice. New material on altruism, executive function, trauma, and change round out this essential book.

Commonwealth

2016

by Ann Patchett

One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating's christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny's mother, Beverly—thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.

Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved. Spending summers together in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a lasting bond that is based on a shared disillusionment with their parents and the strange and genuine affection that grows up between them.

When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with the legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book, ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, their guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another.

Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories. It is a brilliant and tender tale of the far-reaching ties of love and responsibility that bind us together.

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

If you grew up with an emotionally immature, unavailable, or selfish parent, you may have lingering feelings of anger, loneliness, betrayal, or abandonment. You may recall your childhood as a time when your emotional needs were not met, when your feelings were dismissed, or when you took on adult levels of responsibility in an effort to compensate for your parent’s behavior. These wounds can be healed, and you can move forward in your life.

In this breakthrough book, clinical psychologist Lindsay Gibson exposes the destructive nature of parents who are emotionally immature or unavailable. You will see how these parents create a sense of neglect, and discover ways to heal from the pain and confusion caused by your childhood. By freeing yourself from your parents’ emotional immaturity, you can recover your true nature, control how you react to them, and avoid disappointment. Finally, you’ll learn how to create positive, new relationships so you can build a better life.

Discover the four types of difficult parents:

The emotional parent instills feelings of instability and anxiety
The driven parent stays busy trying to perfect everything and everyone
The passive parent avoids dealing with anything upsetting
The rejecting parent is withdrawn, dismissive, and derogatory

Stitches: A Handbook on Meaning, Hope, and Repair

2013

by Anne Lamott

What do we do when life lurches out of balance? How can we reconnect to one another and to what's sustaining, when evil and catastrophe seem inescapable?

These questions lie at the heart of Stitches, Anne Lamott's profound follow-up to her New York Times-bestselling work, Help, Thanks, Wow. In this book, she explores how we find meaning and peace in these loud and frantic times; where we start again after personal and public devastation; how we recapture wholeness after loss; and how we locate our true identities in this frazzled age.

We begin, Lamott says, by collecting the ripped sheets of our emotional and spiritual fabric and sewing them back together - one stitch at a time. It's in these stitches that the quilt of life begins, and embedded in them are strength, warmth, humour and humanity.

The Tennis Partner

An unforgettable, illuminating story of how men live and how they survive, from Abraham Verghese, the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Cutting for Stone.

When Abraham Verghese, a physician whose marriage is unraveling, relocates to El Paso, Texas, he hopes to make a fresh start as a staff member at the county hospital. There he meets David Smith, a medical student recovering from drug addiction, and the two men begin a tennis ritual that allows them to shed their inhibitions and find security in the sport they love and with each other.

This friendship between doctor and intern grows increasingly rich and complex, more intimate than two men usually allow. Just when it seems nothing can go wrong, the dark beast from David’s past emerges once again—and almost everything Verghese has come to trust and believe in is threatened as David spirals out of control.

Compassionate and moving, The Tennis Partner is an unforgettable, illuminating story of friendship and loss.

Will I Ever Be Good Enough?

2008

by Karyl McBride

From experienced family therapist Dr. Karyl McBride, Will I Ever Be Good Enough? is an essential guide to recovery for women with selfish, emotionally abusive, and toxic mothers—designed to help daughters reclaim their lives.

The first book for daughters who have suffered the abuse of narcissistic, self-involved mothers, Will I Ever Be Good Enough? provides the expert assistance you need in order to overcome this debilitating history and reclaim your life.

Drawing on more than two decades of experience as a therapist specializing in women’s health and hundreds of interviews with suffering daughters, Dr. Karyl McBride helps you recognize the widespread effects of this emotional abuse and create an individualized program for self-protection, resolution, and complete recovery.

Narcissistic mothers teach their daughters that love is not unconditional, that it is given only when they behave in accordance with maternal expectations and whims. As adults, these daughters have difficulty overcoming feelings of inadequacy, disappointment, emotional emptiness, and sadness. They may also have a fear of abandonment that leads them to form unhealthy romantic relationships, as well as a tendency to perfectionism and unrelenting self-criticism or to self-sabotage and frustration.

Dr. McBride’s step-by-step program will enable you to:

  1. Recognize your own experience with maternal narcissism and its effects on all aspects of your life.
  2. Discover how you have internalized verbal and nonverbal messages from your mother and how these have translated into overachievement or self-sabotage.
  3. Construct a personalized program to take control of your life and enhance your sense of self, establishing healthy boundaries with your mother and breaking the legacy of abuse.

Warm and sympathetic, Dr. McBride brings a profound level of authority to Will I Ever Be Good Enough? that encourages and inspires you as it aids your recovery.

Abide with Me

Abide with Me is a luminous and long-awaited novel by the bestselling author Elizabeth Strout. Returning readers to the archetypal, lovely landscape of northern New England, the story unfolds in the late 1950s in the small town of West Annett, Maine.

Here, Reverend Tyler Caskey struggles to regain his calling, his family, and his happiness in the wake of profound loss. The community he serves charismatically must come to terms with its own strengths and failings—faith and hypocrisy, loyalty and abandonment—when a dark secret is revealed.

Tyler has come to love West Annett, "just up the road" from where he was born. The short, brilliant summers and the sharp, piercing winters fill him with awe—as does his congregation, full of good people who seek his guidance and listen earnestly as he preaches. But after suffering a terrible loss, Tyler finds it hard to return to himself as he once was. He hasn't had The Feeling—that God is all around him, in the beauty of the world—for quite some time.

He struggles to find the right words in his sermons and in his conversations with those facing crises of their own, and to bring his five-year-old daughter, Katherine, out of the silence she has observed in the wake of the family's tragedy.

A congregation that had once been patient and kind during Tyler's grief now questions his leadership and propriety. In the kitchens, classrooms, offices, and stores of the village, anger and gossip have started to swirl. And in Tyler's darkest hour, a startling discovery will test his congregation's humanity—and his own will to endure the kinds of trials that sooner or later test us all.

In prose incandescent and artful, Elizabeth Strout draws readers into the details of ordinary life in a way that makes it extraordinary. All is considered—life, love, God, and community—within these pages, and all is made new by this writer's boundless compassion and graceful prose.

Close Range: Wyoming Stories

2000

by Annie Proulx

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes comes a celebrated short-story collection. Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in these tales of loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love. Each portrait in Close Range reveals characters fiercely wrought with precision and grace.

These are stories of desperation and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both stark and magnificent.
The stories include:

  • The half-skinned steer
  • The mud below
  • 55 miles to the gas pump
  • The bunchgrass edge of the world
  • A lonely coast
  • Job history
  • Pair a spurs
  • People in Hell just want a drink of water
  • The governors of Wyoming
  • The blood bay
  • Brokeback Mountain

This collection showcases an author writing at the peak of her craft.

The Hours.

The Hours is a daring and deeply affecting novel inspired by the life and work of Virginia Woolf. It presents a passionate, profound, and haunting story of love and inheritance, hope and despair.

Exiled in Richmond in the 1920s, taken from her beloved Bloomsbury and lovingly watched over by her husband Leonard, Virginia Woolf struggles to tame her rebellious mind and make a start on her new novel.

In the brooding heat of 1940s Los Angeles, a young wife and mother yearns to escape the claustrophobia of suburban domesticity and read her precious copy of Mrs Dalloway.

In New York in the 1990s, Clarissa Vaughan steps out of her smart Greenwich Village apartment and goes shopping for flowers for the party she is giving in honor of her lifelong friend Richard, an award-winning poet whose mind and body are being ravaged by AIDS.

These are the characters in Michael Cunningham's exquisite and deeply moving novel, which takes Woolf's life and work as inspiration for a meditation on artistic behavior, failure, love, and madness. Moving effortlessly across the decades and between England and America, Cunningham's elegant, haunting prose explores the pain and trauma of creativity and the immutable relationship between writer and reader.

The Riders

1996

by Tim Winton

Fred Scully is eagerly waiting at the airport to reunite with his wife and daughter after two years of traveling through Europe. He envisions a new life for them, filled with stability and hope, in a cottage that he has lovingly renovated in the Irish countryside.

However, as the flight lands and the airport doors hiss open, only his seven-year-old daughter, Billie, steps out. Scully's world shatters as he discovers his wife is missing, leaving behind no note or explanation. This unexpected turn of events thrusts him into a desperate search across Europe, trying to unravel the mystery of her disappearance.

The Riders is a haunting and beautifully written tale that delves into the complexities of love, marriage, and the bonds between a father and his daughter. It explores the deep-rooted fears and challenges in relationships, and the resilience needed to move forward despite life's uncertainties.

Join Scully on this gripping odyssey, as he navigates through emotional turmoil and the shadows of his past, in a poignant story that captures the essence of human resilience and the enduring power of family ties.

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