Resources

By the acclaimed author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a bracing critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing.

In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. So what is really “normal” when it comes to health?

Over four decades of clinical experience, Maté has come to recognize the prevailing understanding of “normal” as false, neglecting the roles that trauma and stress, and the pressures of modern-day living, exert on our bodies and our minds at the expense of good health. For all our expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how today’s culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance. Now Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick, connects the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society—and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing. Co-written with his son Daniel, The Myth of Normal is Maté’s most ambitious and urgent book yet.

“Why don’t you come sit on my lap, so you don’t have to crank your neck?”

I didn’t have bruises.
She never left him.
He didn’t actually rape me.
Maybe I wasn’t worth believing.
Maybe it wasn’t that bad.

What if emotional abuse is so hidden, its effects remain unchallenged for decades, masquerading as personal failings?

Believing Meis an emotionally gripping memoir that gives language to the hidden and ineffable nature of childhood trauma and how it can imprint on a person, resulting in fractured self-esteem, addictions, perfectionism and a string of abusive relationships.

Ingrid Clayton had been in the pursuit of healing for a lifetime, including becoming a clinical psychologist and trauma therapist, but she never fully understood what she was healingfrom. Growing up in a fog of gaslighting made her question her reality. It wasn’t until she sat next to Dr. Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score) as he shared a case study so similar to her life, that a seed was planted: “Trauma” might be a word that was personal to her.

When her stepfather died, Ingrid felt a calling to write her story and these were the truths reflected on the page. By recounting vivid childhood memories, she wrote her way through patterns of lies and denial that had infected her entire family. She came to face the feelings she had minimized for so long.

By reclaiming her story, Ingrid transcended the role of healer into someone becoming healed, showing us what real healing looks like in the process.

People with Borderline or Narcissistic Personality Disorders are master manipulators; Caretakers fall for them every time. This book helps Caretakers break the cycle and puts them on a new path of personal freedom, discovery, and self-awareness, through the use of real stories and practical suggestions from a seasoned therapist.

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

In 2001, Kathy Baldock, a straight conservative evangelical Christian, met Netto Montoya, a lesbian Native American, on the local hiking trails near her home in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Their friendship challenged Baldock's cultural and religious beliefs about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.

In Walking the Bridgeless Canyon: Repairing the Breach between the Church and the LGBTQ Community, Baldock uncovers the historical, cultural, medical, and political filters of discrimination through which the LGBTQ community is seen. With a foundational context firmly established, she examines the most controversial filter of all: what the Bible says about same-sex behavior.

Ten years of research, as well as relationships with thousands of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, led to answering important questions: How did history, culture, science, and politics intertwine to create social discrimination against the gay and transgender communities? When and why did the conservative Christian community turn their focus on the gay and transgender communities? Should Christian fellowship be extended to gay and transgender people? Should Christian marriages, be granted to same-sex couples? What is happening within the LGBTQ Christian movement today?

Baldock carefully constructs a historical timeline narrative as she untangles the details of various influences and influencers. Along the way, she shares fascinating stories and testimonies enriching the journey. Finally, for those who are wondering how they might enter into productive and respectful conversations about the intersection of faith and sexual orientation or gender identity, this book offers the resources and tools needed to make informed, wise, and Christ-centered choices. This book has a companion Discussion Guide intended for personal, group, or Bible study use.

“As a biblical scholar and a gay man, I sometimes have people ask me for reading suggestions on LGBTQ issues and Christianity. I can usually recommend a book on some aspect of the topic, and another on another aspect. But Kathy Baldock’s book is the best I know right now for covering many of the relevant topics: history, science, scripture, politics, and even self-help suggestions at the end. I’ll be recommending this book as the number one place to start for many people in the future.”

Dale B. Martin, Woolsey Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Yale University

“Kathy Baldock is one of the most tireless, dedicated, and influential advocates for LGBT Christians in the evangelical church. Her work has helped to transform the lives of thousands of people, and her ministry is a model of the kind of effective, conciliatory bridge-building work the church desperately needs. In Walking the Bridgeless Canyon, Baldock guides the reader on a fascinating journey of how the church has responded to the LGBT community--and how we all can and should do better. Brilliantly researched, accessibly written, and lovingly expressed, this book is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the intersection between the conservative church and the LGBT community. I highly recommend it--and its remarkable author.”

Matthew Vines, president of The Reformation Project, author of the book God and the Gay Christian, Random House

“If you read only one book on the history of LGBTQ rights, the culture, psychotherapy, religious reactions, and what the Bible really says about being gay Walking the Bridgeless Canyon should be it. It is well researched, compelling, and eye-opening. This book is destined to be the go-to resource for everyone interested in the truth about LGBTQ people, our rights, and the rights of all people”

Yvette Cantu Schneider, former policy analyst Family Research Council, former director of women's ministry at Exodus International, and author of the book, Never Not Broken

Strengthen and deepen your relationships with revelatory practical exercises, seven profound conversations, and sage advice from “the best couple’s therapist in the world” (John Gottman, PhD, bestselling author)
 
Are you looking to enrich a healthy relationship, revitalize a tired one, or rescue one gone awry? We all want a lifetime of love, support, and companionship. But sometimes we need a little help.
 
Enter Dr. Sue Johnson, developer of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy and “the most original contributor to couple’s therapy to come along in the last thirty years,” according to Dr. William J. Doherty, PhD. In Hold Me Tight, Dr. Johnson shares her groundbreaking and remarkably successful program for creating stronger, more secure relationships.
 
The message of Hold Me Tight is simple: Forget about learning how to argue better, analyzing your early childhood, making grand romantic gestures, or experimenting with new sexual positions. Instead, get to the emotional underpinnings of your relationship by recognizing that you are emotionally attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent for nurturing, soothing, and protection. Dr. Johnson teaches that the way to enhance or save a relationship is to be open, attuned, and responsive to each other and to reestablish emotional connection. With this in mind, she focuses on key moments in a relationship and uses them as touch points for seven healing conversations, including:  

Recognizing the Demon Dialogues

Finding the Raw Spots

Revisiting a Rocky Moment

Forgiving Injuries

Keeping Your Love Alive

 These conversations give you insight into the defining moments in your relationship and guide you in reshaping these moments to create a secure and lasting bond.
 
Through stories from Dr. Johnson’s practice, illuminating advice, and practical exercises, you will learn how to nurture, protect, and grow your relationship, ensuring a lifetime of love.
 

In this pioneering, practical book, Daniel J. Siegel, neuropsychiatrist and author of the bestselling Mindsight, and parenting expert Tina Payne Bryson offer a revolutionary approach to child rearing with twelve key strategies that foster healthy brain development, leading to calmer, happier children. The authors explain—and make accessible—the new science of how a child’s brain is wired and how it matures. The “upstairs brain,” which makes decisions and balances emotions, is under construction until the mid-twenties. And especially in young children, the right brain and its emotions tend to rule over the logic of the left brain. No wonder kids throw tantrums, fight, or sulk in silence. By applying these discoveries to everyday parenting, you can turn any outburst, argument, or fear into a chance to integrate your child’s brain and foster vital growth.

Complete with age-appropriate strategies for dealing with day-to-day struggles and illustrations that will help you explain these concepts to your child, The Whole-Brain Child shows you how to cultivate healthy emotional and intellectual development so that your children can lead balanced, meaningful, and connected lives.

“[A] useful child-rearing resource for the entire family . . . The authors include a fair amount of brain science, but they present it for both adult and child audiences.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Strategies for getting a youngster to chill out [with] compassion.”—The Washington Post

“This erudite, tender, and funny book is filled with fresh ideas based on the latest neuroscience research. I urge all parents who want kind, happy, and emotionally healthy kids to read The Whole-Brain Child. This is my new baby gift.”—Mary Pipher, Ph.D., author of Reviving Ophelia and The Shelter of Each Other

“Gives parents and teachers ideas to get all parts of a healthy child’s brain working together.”—Parent to Parent

An insatiable need for sex and love. Periods of overeating or starving. A pattern of unstable and painful relationships.

Does this sound painfully familiar?

Trauma counselor Kelly McDaniel has seen these traits over and over in clients who feel trapped in cycles of harmful behaviors-and are unable to stop.

Many of us find ourselves stuck in unhealthy habits simply because we don't see a better way. With Mother Hunger, McDaniel helps women break the cycle of destructive behavior by taking a fresh look at childhood trauma and its lasting impact. In doing so, she destigmatizes the shame that comes with being under-mothered and misdiagnosed. McDaniel offers a healing path with powerful tools that include therapeutic interventions and lifestyle changes in service to healthy relationships.

The constant search for mother love can be a lifelong emotional burden, but healing begins with knowing and naming what we are missing. McDaniel is the first clinician to identify Mother Hunger, which demystifies the search for love and provides the compass that each woman needs to end the struggle with achy, lonely emptiness, and come home to herself.

An essential exploration of why and how women’s sexuality works—based on groundbreaking research and brain science—that will radically transform your sex life into one filled with confidence and joy.

Researchers have spent the last decade trying to develop a “pink pill” for women to function like Viagra does for men. So where is it? Well, for reasons this book makes crystal clear, that pill will never be the answer—but as a result of the research that’s gone into it, scientists in the last few years have learned more about how women’s sexuality works than we ever thought possible, and Come as You Are explains it all.

The first lesson in this essential, transformative book by Dr. Emily Nagoski is that every woman has her own unique sexuality, like a fingerprint, and that women vary more than men in our anatomy, our sexual response mechanisms, and the way our bodies respond to the sexual world. So we never need to judge ourselves based on others’ experiences. Because women vary, and that’s normal.

Second lesson: sex happens in a context. And all the complications of everyday life influence the context surrounding a woman’s arousal, desire, and orgasm.

Cutting-edge research across multiple disciplines tells us that the most important factor for women in creating and sustaining a fulfilling sex life, is not what you do in bed or how you do it, but how you feel about it. Which means that stress, mood, trust, and body image are not peripheral factors in a woman’s sexual wellbeing; they are central to it. Once you understand these factors, and how to influence them, you can create for yourself better sex and more profound pleasure than you ever thought possible.

And Emily Nagoski can prove it.

Within every community, toxic people can be found hiding in families, couples, companies, and places of worship. The cryptic nature of psychological abuse involves repetitious mind games played by one individual or a group of people. Psychological abuse leaves no bruises. There are no broken bones. There are no holes in the walls. The bruises, brokenness, and holes are held tightly within the target of the abuse.

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, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr. van der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal—and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.