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    • Dana Harron, PsyD (She/Her)
    • Chris Sherman (She/They) MA, E-RYT 200, CPT, LGPC
    • Carissa Hannum, LPC (She/Her)
    • Mary Blair Holden LGPC (She/Her)
    • Yvette Mitchell, LCSW (She/Her)
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    • Katie Zweig MA (She/Her)
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  • Blog
  • Books We Love

"Loving ourselves through the process of owning our story is the bravest thing we'll ever do"

- Brene Brown

Disclaimer: The links below are affiliate links, which we may receive a small commission for at no cost to you if you purchase one of them with our link. Please know that we have not let this influence us. We are have experience with all of the books below and really only recommend books that we have found to be helpful for ourselves or our clients.

Eating Disorders

The Body is Not an Apology

The Body Is Not an Apology (2018) teaches you how to overcome the harmful relationships many of us have with our bodies through radical self-love. It unravels the mental processes that encourage us to hate our bodies so that we can learn to love them instead.

Buy Book

Perfectly Imperfect

Amy Harman is a wonderful body image and eating disorder clinician right here in the DC area! I’ve been able to attend one of Amy’s body image training sessions for clinicians. She is passionate about helping her clients as well as all others that have access to her Instagram community heal and accept their bodies. Amy’s book helps the reader understand that their body image extends to more than just their body.

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The F*ck it Diet

From comedian and ex-diet junkie Caroline Dooner, The F*ck It Diet is an inspirational guide that will help you stop dieting, reboot your relationship with food, and regain your personal power. A must-read for any chronic dieter who is fed up and just ready to f*ck the whole endeavor.

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Body Positive Power

Body Positive Power: Because Life Is Already Happening and You Don’t Need Flat Abs to Live It. Megan is teaching her readers more about body neutrality. Megan guides readers through a part memoir, part personal essay, part educational, and part skills-based book. She teaches others about her own journey with an eating disorder to self-acceptance.

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The Beauty Myth

The Beauty Myth: How Images of Female Beauty are Used Against Women. Originally published in 1991, Wolf explores the cultural implications of beauty and how the female identity remains restricted and controlled within society. Although women continue to have more leadership and power roles in society, cultural standards of beauty, body ideals, and diet culture continue to police a woman’s body today.

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Health At Every Size

Health At Every Size: The Surprising Truth About Your Weight. Although Dr.  Lindo Bacon has written several books guiding the reader about body image, body acceptance, and body respect, Health at Every Size is a groundbreaking book that considers the need to disentangle the idea that certain body sizes are equated with health within society. A Health at Every Size approach can be influential for the reader to learn more about intuitive eating, joyful movement, as well as a more researched and defined exploration of health.

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Your Dieting Daughter

Your Dieting Daughter guides parents in the Do’s and Don’ts that will help a daughter to accept, respect, and care for her body by setting a good example and the critical need to take the focus from numbers and measurements - such as scale weight, clothing size, miles run, or sit-ups accomplished - to important goals like health, body acceptance and finding physical activity to enjoy.

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Befriending Your Body

Befriending Your Body: A Self-Compassionate Approach to Freeing Yourself from Disordered Eating. This book is specifically for my clients that struggle with eating disorder behaviors or trauma that impact body image. Eating disorders and trauma can specifically make a person feel as though their body is the enemy. They may begin to disconnect themselves from their body and their body’s needs as a way of coping with painful emotions and memories.

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Life Without ED

"The truth is we all talk to ourselves. We just need to get better at it." Jenni Schaefer provides hope to the millions of people plagued by eating disorders in this supportive, lifesaving book that combines a patient’s insights and experiences with a therapist’s prescriptions for success to help you live a healthier, happier life without Ed.

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Starting Monday

Starting Monday is based on the simple premise that when our behaviors don’t align with our expressed intentions, we’ve got a conflict going on, often outside of our awareness. It helps identify and resolve these seven key areas: 1) create lasting change, 2) making conscious choices, 3) feel deserving, 4) how to comfort themselves, 5) know what's enough, 6) manage intimacy, and 7) developing a healthy identity.

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Words to Eat By

Do you know how to distinguish your trash thoughts from your treasure thoughts? national expert, award-winning, international author, Karen R. Koenig explains how self-talk ties thought to action or inaction and how what we say to ourselves is shaped―for better or worse―by our families, culture, and personal history.

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Outsmarting Overeating

Why do you turn to food when you’re stressed or distressed? According to Karen R. Koenig, an expert on the psychology of eating, you can transform your eating habits — and your life — by developing effective life skills by establishing and maintaining functional relationships, taking care of yourself physically and emotionally, thinking rationally, and creating a passionate, joyful, and meaningful life.

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Goodbye ED, Hello Me

Jenni Schaefer and eating disorders are no longer on speaking terms, not even in her most difficult moments. In Goodbye Ed, Hello Me Jenni shows you that being fully recovered is not just about breaking free from destructive behaviors with food and having a healthy relationship with your body; it also means finding joy and peace in your life.

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Treating Eating and Weight Issues

Packed with insights and practical tips, this unique book teaches clinicians how to help clients make peace with food and the scale and balance nutrition and exercise in a healthy lifestyle. It includes descriptions of how food and weight problems surface in conjunction with psychological and medical conditions, as well as how they create difficulties in various life stages and situations.

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The Food Feelings Workbook

This unique workbook takes on the seven emotions that plague problem eaters — guilt, shame, helplessness, anxiety, disappointment, confusion, and loneliness — and shows readers how to embrace and learn from their feelings. Written with honesty and humor, the book explains how to identify and label a specific emotion, the function of that emotion, and why the emotion drives food and eating problems.

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Helping Patients Outsmart Overeating

Helping Patients Outsmart Overeating offers a new paradigm for doctors and health care providers who treat patients with eating and weight concerns explaining how helping patients strengthen skills related to self-awareness, emotional management, stress reduction, appetite attunement, perseverance, and effective self-care can improve self-efficacy and support sustained motivation in improving health and wellness-promoting behaviors.

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Loving Someone with an Eating Disorder

This compassionate guide offers couples discover ways to communicate with empathy and understanding, strategies for dealing with mealtime challenges, and tips to help you both find your way back to trust, love, and intimacy. This book provides help by addressing your uniquely complex and difficult situations of parenting, sex, and intimacy, and running a household along with much-needed support for growth and healing.

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8 Keys To Recovery From an Eating Disorder

This is no ordinary book on how to overcome an eating disorder. The authors bravely share their unique stories of suffering from and eventually overcoming their own severe eating disorders. Interweaving personal narrative with the perspective of their own therapist-client relationship, their insights bring an unparalleled depth of awareness into just what it takes to successfully beat this challenging and seemingly intractable clinical issue.

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Eating in the Light of the Moon

Eating in the Light of the Moon: How Women Can Transform Their Relationship with Food Through Myths, Metaphors, and Storytelling. By weaving practical insights and exercises through a rich tapestry of multicultural myths, ancient legends, and folktales, Anita Johnston helps the millions of women preoccupied with their weight discover and address the issues behind their negative attitudes toward food.

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The Rules of "Normal" Eating

The Rules of "Normal" Eating lays out the four basic rules that "normal" eaters follow instinctively — eating when they're hungry, choosing foods that satisfy them, eating with awareness and enjoyment, and stopping when they're full or satisfied. Filled with humorous insights, compassion, and practical wisdom, the book outlines balanced attitudes and patterns that benefit all types of eaters.

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Living with Your Body and Other Things you Hate

Let’s be honest: most people are unhappy with at least some aspect of their physical appearance. Just think of all the money we spend each year trying to improve our looks! But if worrying about your appearance is getting in the way of living, maybe it’s time to start thinking about body image in a completely new way. Living with Your Body and Other Things You Hate offers a unique approach to addressing your struggle with body image.

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  • "When writing the story of your life, Don't let anyone else hold the pen."

Trauma

Waking the Tiger

Why are animals in the wild, though threatened routinely, rarely traumatized? Waking the Tiger offers a new and hopeful vision of trauma. The reader is taken on a guided tour of the subtle, yet powerful impulses that govern our responses to overwhelming life events. To do this, it employs a series of exercises that help us focus on bodily sensations. Through heightened awareness of these sensations, trauma can be healed.

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Necessary Losses

From grief and mourning to aging and relationships, poet and Redbook contributor Judith Viorst presents a thoughtful and researched study in this examination of love, loss, and letting go. Judith Viorst turns her considerable talents to a serious and far-reaching subject: how we grow and change through the losses that are a certain and necessary part of life.

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Trauma and Recovery

Trauma and Recovery is revered as the seminal text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a broader political frame, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context.

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The Body Keeps the Score

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 uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.

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Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

Lindsay Gibson exposes the destructive nature of parents who are emotionally immature or unavailable. 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.

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Recovering from Emotionally Immature Parents

Growing up with emotionally immature (EI) parents can leave you feeling lonely and neglected. Lindsay Gibson offers powerful tools to help you step back and protect yourself at the first sign of an emotional takeover, make sure your emotions and needs are respected, and break free from the coercive control of emotionally immature parents.

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Self-Care for Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

If you grew up with an emotionally immature, unavailable, or selfish parent, you probably still struggle with anger, sadness, resentment, or shame. As a child, your emotional needs were not met, your feelings were dismissed, and you likely took on adult levels of responsibility in an effort to compensate for your parent's behavior. Somewhere along the way, you lost your sense of self. And without this strong sense of self, you may feel like your own well-being isn't valuable.

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Miscellaneous

When the Body Says No

Can a person literally die of loneliness? Is there such a thing as a "cancer personality"? This book provides answers to these and other important questions about the effect of the mind-body link on illness and health and the role that stress and one's individual emotional makeup play in an array of common diseases.

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Scattered Minds

Scattered Minds explodes the myth of attention deficit disorder as genetically based – and offers real hope and advice for children and adults who live with the condition. Allowing parents to understand what makes their ADD children tick, and adults with ADD to gain insights into their emotions and behaviours. Gabor Maté also demonstrates how ADD is not an inherited illness, but a reversible impairment and developmental delay.

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How We Heal and Grow

Why is it so hard to change? The good news is that facing just those feelings is the path to freedom, and it is not as hard as it seems. Dr. Smith shows how to get to know your feelings, understand why and how they have been hidden from you and how to face them so that you, too, can heal and grow into the person you want to be.

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The Dance of Anger

A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships.

Anger is something we feel. It exists for a reason and always deserves our respect and attention. We all have a right to everything we feel—and certainly our anger is no exception.

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Escape from Freedom

If a man cannot stand freedom, he will probably turn fascist. This, in the fewest possible words, is the essential argument in this modem classic, Escape from Freedom. The author, Erich Fromm, is a distinguished psychologist, late of Berlin and Heidelberg, now of New York City.

He applies the psychoanalytical method to the illness of our civilization which expresses itself in an abject submission to dictatorship.

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The Art of Loving

In this astonishingly frank and candid book, he explores the ways in which this extraordinary emotion can alter the whole course of your life.

Most of us are unable to develop our capacities for love on the only level that really counts — a love that is compounded of maturity, self-knowledge, and courage.

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A General Theory of Love

From earliest childhood, our brains actually link with those of the people close to us, in a silent rhythm that alters the very structure of our brains, establishes life-long emotional patterns, and makes us, in large part, who we are. Three eminent psychiatrists tackle the difficult task of reconciling what artists and thinkers have known for thousands of years about the human heart with what has only recently been learned about the primitive functions of the human brain.

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In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts

Dr. Maté  argues persuasively against contemporary health, social, and criminal justice policies toward addiction and those impacted by it.  He presents addiction, not as a discrete phenomenon confined to an unfortunate or weak-willed few, but as a continuum that runs throughout our society; not a medical "condition" distinct from the lives it affects, rather the result of a complex interplay among personal history, emotional, and neurological development, brain chemistry, and the drugs (and behaviors) of addiction.

Buy Book

Contact Us: 2 Locations!

2 Wisconsin Ave, Suite 710

Chevy Chase MD 20815

10195 Main Street, Suite O

Fairfax, VA, 22031

(202) 656-3681

reachout@monarchwellness.com

 

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  • Home
  • About Us
    ▼
    • Join Our Team!
    • Dana Harron, PsyD (She/Her)
    • Chris Sherman (She/They) MA, E-RYT 200, CPT, LGPC
    • Carissa Hannum, LPC (She/Her)
    • Mary Blair Holden LGPC (She/Her)
    • Yvette Mitchell, LCSW (She/Her)
    • Meg Seymour PhD (She/Her)
    • Katie Zweig MA (She/Her)
  • Services
    ▼
    • Individual Psychotherapy
    • Couples Counseling
    • Group Therapy
  • Specialties
    ▼
    • Eating Disorder Treatment
      ▼
      • Binge Eating Disorder & Compulsive Overeating
      • Bulimia Nervosa
      • Anorexia Nervosa
    • Anxiety Treatment
    • Trauma Treatment
      ▼
      • PTSD
      • C-PTSD
      • Trauma Education
    • Grief & Loss
  • Online Therapy
    ▼
    • COVID Support Groups
    • Trauma Education
  • Getting Started
    ▼
    • Appointment Request
    • FAQs
    • Rates and Insurance
  • Events
  • Resources
    ▼
    • Books We Love
    • Helpful Links
      ▼
      • More Helpful Links
  • Blog