100 Books Like Getting Our Bodies Back

This is the best book I’ve ever found for guiding clients with step-by-step instructions and practices for developing a somatic capacity for resilience in the face of stress. This is the book I would want to write if I were writing the perfect book to give to clients to support their healing. It’s like handing clients the keys to their own healing process. I love it so much I agreed to write the foreword!

And…it’s perfectly structured. I know that’s not the usual reason for loving a book, but as an educator I can say that the learning structure is so perfect that it makes the content accessible and understandable for clients who struggle with learning from written material. 

This is the most compassionate and humorous book about anxiety that I’ve ever read. Who would have thought that it could be this much fun to learn about anxiety? I mean, really, really learn about anxiety from someone who has felt its challenges and who has wrestled those challenges into an incredibly helpful and practical set of tools.  

I love recommending this book to clients because I know they will feel seen and understood when they read it. I also know they will come away with more compassion for themselves, less shame, and a more expanded context in which to understand their anxiety symptoms. Most vitally, they will have been encouraged to take ownership of their relationship to the anxiety they feel.

This is my go-to book now for clients who are looking for more trauma-informed and inclusive versions of Twelve Step programs. I have never read another book on the Twelve Steps that so thoroughly and gracefully weaves so many different knowledge areas and traditions together in such a seamless whole and that so thoroughly models inclusion and cross-cultural curiosity.  

And, oh my, the number of fabulous practices that are given as examples is like a treasure-trove of gems for both practitioners and clients alike. I love the kindness and generosity that is present in this book’s expansive invitation to embodied healing in the recovery journey. 

Again and again, I had the experience of clients seeking out meditation and mindfulness practices to relieve their trauma symptoms–only to see those clients come undone by the very thing they thought would help. I struggled to find resources that would help them understand how they could access those powerful tools of transformation without having their symptoms exacerbated.

This book completely eliminated that struggle for me. The relief I felt when I first read this book was profound: I had found the safety net for my clients I had been longing for. It has everything in it that I would want a client with a trauma history to know before including mindfulness practices in their healing journey, including putting those practices into cultural contexts that further enhance their safety.  

Lembke explains very well how the modern, technological environment we find ourselves in gives us too easy access to high-stimuli activities like gambling, social media, porn, and junk food.

With all the distractions and easy rewards we have around us, we need to be conscious in order to find balance and thrive. Otherwise, we will be very vulnerable to overconsumption, which has real consequences for our happiness and drive.

Even though this book covers other addictions as well, it is a great book to understand more about compulsive behavior and our dopamine system.

The book is surprising because it is written by a clinical psychologist who, based on his own studies and a wide review of the literature, shows that many aspects of the romantic love notion we construct in movies, songs, and society, in general, are actually biologically and psychologically pathological.

I think this is probably the only book written by a clinical psychologist that truly delivers a deep analysis of romantic love, including its history.  

Motivational Interviewing (MI) is not so much a therapeutic intervention as a technique, a way of talking to another person to help them move in a different direction. The fundamental idea, brilliant in its simplicity, is that people don’t change because you tell them to. They change because they tell themselves to. MI does precisely what Socrates did: question and draw people out, getting them to see the contradictions in their own thinking as a way of motivating them to change their beliefs (and ultimately their life). If Socrates were a therapist (and in a way he was), he’d be doing MI (and in a way, he did).

This book really appealed to me because it presented an easy way to understand why it is so hard to break bad habits and addictions. I like the author's friendly, often humorous, and conversational style of explaining some of the brain science behind difficult-to-shift bad habits.

I found his explanation helpful. Our craving mind works as a rewards-based system, whether our individual challenge is a compulsion to binge eat, smoke, take harmful drugs, or check our phones and social media constantly. His book taught me that once we understand the brain mechanism, we can use the practice of mindfulness to interrupt these bad habits. I particularly like the way he backs up these ideas with the neuroscientific research that supports this field. 

We’re straight in the story from page one, experiencing the intensity of the toxic relationship Louise has with her new best friend – a woman she’s only known ten days. Louise has a complex personality, her low self-esteem leading to constant self-assessment. But boy, how she changes! I liked the way the author breaks the fourth wall by directing comments to the reader, the foreshadowing allowing us to know what’s coming before the characters. Not my usual choice, as the novel is set in America with a cast under 30, but I enjoyed the build in tension as I waited for Louise to be caught out. 

This book may seem out of place in a list of psychologically-minded self-help recommendations. And it is long, and hard to read. Don’t even get me started on the use of end-notes in a work of fiction. But it is quite simply one of the best books written in the past 100 years and it is all about people who have gotten stuck, trapped by habit or circumstance, and are yearning for a way to find meaning in life.

To me, this book is a self help book because it is written so powerfully (in a not-so-distance fictional future) that as the characters are inevitably transformed and sometimes freed from their assumed destinies, Wallace somehow illustrates how we too can be transformed in our daily routines and interactions by finding moments of clarity and meaning right where we are, rather than being saved by some outside force that promises liberation… show more.