Resources

Books on Depression, Anxiety, and Stress

Mindfulness for Chocolate Lovers is a easy to read introduction to mindfulness and positive psychology, offering a refreshingly down-to-earth approach to addressing both daily life challenges as well as profound life struggles. 

Authentic Happiness is a great introduction to the science of happiness, positive psychology. Strangely, what most of us think will make us happy in the long-term, only provides a short-term boost of happiness. And things we don’t think contribute that much to happiness, really are the key to long-term happiness. A great option if you feel like you have much of what should make you happy, yet it still seems elusive.

Written by UCLA interpersonal neurobiology pioneer Dan Siegel, Mindsight is a straightforward approach to reducing stress, anxiety, and depression by learning to observe the mind in action. Mindsight offers readers a visual and systematic approach to managing difficult emotions in a more effective way without denying or drowning in them. This is a great option for visual learners and those who want a practical approach to managing their emotions.

Written by Oprah’s life coach, Finding Your Own North Star is a fun, down-to-earth read on identifying what really makes you happy. Peppered with pointed humor, this book takes you on a step-by-step process of how to get your own version of happy, including how to deal with beliefs, emotions, and relationships that hold you back. A book for action-oriented folks, each chapter has worksheets to help you figure out the right steps for you. If you can’t stand the typical self-help book, this is a good option for you.

Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life uses a workbook format to help address unhelpful thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors that result in feeling stressed, depressed, or anxious. Based on a leading evidence-based therapy approach, acceptance and commitment therapy, it integrates contemporary cognitive-behavioral therapy with some mindfulness-based concepts. A great text if you're solution-oriented and get a sense of enjoyment from taking practical steps to address concerns in your life.

Books on Trauma and PTSD

The Body Keeps Score offers a clear overview of modern trauma treatment, explaining the neurobiology behind symptoms like flashbacks and nightmares, the impact of untreated trauma on child development, and a range of evidence-based approaches allowing survivors to choose what best fits their needs.

The Dialectic Behavioral Therapy Workbook  teaches essential life skills—distress tolerance, emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, and mindfulness. Grounded in evidence-based DBT, it helps people cope with overwhelming emotions and supports trauma recovery, particularly for those with childhood abuse histories.

Healing from Trauma provides a thorough orientation to the physiological and psychological dynamics of the trauma experience as well as a practical guide for healing. It's a great place to start.

The PTSD Workbook provides trauma survivors with a practical guidebook for working through difficult symptoms - flashbacks, nightmares, hypervigilance, and dissociation. When combined with psychotherapy and memory  reprocessing, these techniques can help you learn to manage difficult situations and return to a more normal life.

Books on Divorce, Recovery, and Remarriage

Rebuilding is a comprehensive guidebook from the initial shock of divorce to creating a new, vibrant future. The authors provide guidance in coping with the many difficult emotions often related to divorce, such as grief, guilt, rejection, loneliness, and trust.

Getting Past Your Break Up. A no non-nonsense guide for recovering from a breakup by helping you set clear boundaries that allow you to focus on healing. The book also addresses how to make life easier for children and strategies for moving on.

The Co-Parenting Handbook guides parents through the separation and divorce process with a focus on minimizing negative effects on the children. This book covers common areas of conflict, such as holidays, new partners, public spaces, and finances.

Saving Your Second Marriage Before It Starts guides you through a series of nine questions to reflect on whether you are ready to start again. It educates on essential relationship skills correlated with happy marriages.

The Divorce Workbook for Children has 40 activities to help children discuss their feelings and cope with divorce. It can also be used as a reference for discussing divorce with your children.

Written for younger children, Two Homes is a storybook that helps children adjust to common changes that are part of divorce.

Books on Abusive Relationships

Why Does He Do That? examines the psychology of men who are verbally abusive. Bancroft argues the underlying belief leading to such abuse is male privilege. The author also identifies several different types of male abusers. This book can be helpful for those trying to make sense of a psychologically abusive relationship.

A Harvard psychologist radically proposes that most sociopaths are charming yet manipulative people that lack empathy and a conscience. The author estimates 1 in 25 Americans fits this profile, manipulating for financial gain and a personal sense of power and fulfillment. The Sociopath Next Door can be helpful in understanding some of your most challenging relationships.

Books for Couples

Written by the developer of one of the only two evidence-based treatments for distressed couples, Hold Me Tight provides an outstanding roadmap for maintaining a health relationship. Dr. Johnson outlines the underlying emotional and survival role intimate relationships play in our lives and uses this explain why we can behave so badly once committed. This book is essential for anyone wanting a stable, long-term relationship.

Written by the developer of one of the only two evidence-based treatments for distressed couples, Reconcilable Differences is the leading cognitive-behavioral approach helping couples build long-term, satisfying relationships. The book helps partners examine their differences and find new ways to understand each other, communicate better, and solve problems effectively. This is an essential read for anyone wanting to improve the quality of their current or future relationships.

Books for Adolescents and Their Parents

For parents of teens and soon-to-be-teens, Brainstorm provides a brain-based understanding of these often challenging and painful years. Dr. Dan Siegel provides a new way to think of the teen's changing brain and how it relates to risk-assessment, motivation, and identity development. Useful suggestions for how to deal with this frequently turbulent time are offered.

Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child provides parents with a developmental understanding of emotional intelligence and provides guidance on how to promote it a various stages of a child’s development. As most parents quickly discover, compassion, empathy, kindness, friendship, manners, and civility are not inborn—but taught. And today’s society creates many challenges for parents to do this successfully.

Girls and Sex is a must-read for parents and teens alike. Peggy Ornstein shares what she learned after interviewing 40 high school girls and 40 college girls about their sexual experiences. This book provides parents with essential information for helping their children through sexual development, and provides girls with a better road map for navigating a complex and often painful journey.

Boys are failing to launch and thrive at alarming rates. In Saving Our Sons, parents learn how to help their boys thrive during a time where they are more and more likely to under-perform in school, lack emotional maturity, and struggle with forming healthy relationships.

Books for Parenting

1-2-3 Magic is an essential guide for any parent struggling with children’s behavior issues  in children aged 3-12. If you happened to not start off particularly good at setting limits, this is your essential guide to getting children to listen without drama. It is a gentle approach to regaining control. If your child has impulse control issues, including ADHD, this book is a must.

Based on positive psychology research, Raising Happiness teaches parents how to raise their children in a way that promotes a lifetime of happiness. Much of the advice is not intuitive and may not be shared your neighbors down the street. In a nation where anxiety and depression are epidemic in children and adults, it's well worth some time to consider these evidence-informed guidelines for raising children who know how to maintain their own happiness, even when life does not go their way.