"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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Trauma
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.
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.
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.
Miscellaneous
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.
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.
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.