Books

Nadine Burke Harris - 'The Deepest Well - Healing the Long-term Effects of Childhood Adversity' (2018)

A pioneering physician reveals how childhood stress leads to lifelong health problems, and what we can do to break the cycle.

Dr. Nadine Burke Harris was already known as a crusading physician delivering targeted care to vulnerable children. But it was Diego — a boy who had stopped growing after a sexual assault — who galvanized her journey to uncover the connections between toxic stress and lifelong illnesses.

The stunning news of Burke Harris’s research is just how deeply our bodies can be imprinted by ACEs—adverse childhood experiences like abuse, neglect, parental addiction, mental illness, and divorce. Childhood adversity changes our biological systems, and lasts a lifetime.  For anyone who has faced a difficult childhood, or who cares about the millions of children who do, the fascinating scientific insight and innovative, acclaimed health interventions in The Deepest Well represent vitally important hope for preventing lifelong illness for those we love and for generations to come​.

 

Sue Gerhartd - 'Why Love Matters - How affection shapes a baby's brain' (2014)

Why Love Matters explains why love is essential to brain development in the early years of life, particularly to the development of our social and emotional brain systems, and presents the startling discoveries that provide the answers to how our emotional lives work. Sue Gerhardt considers how the earliest relationship shapes the baby's nervous system, with lasting consequences, and how our adult life is influenced by infancy despite our inability to remember babyhood. She shows how the development of the brain can affect future emotional well being, and goes on to look at specific early 'pathways' that can affect the way we respond to stress and lead to conditions such as anorexia, addiction, and anti-social behaviour. Why Love Matters is a lively and very accessible interpretation of the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology, psychoanalysis and biochemistry. It will be invaluable to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, mental health professionals, parents and all those concerned with the central importance of brain development in relation to many later adult difficulties.

 

Robin Grille - 'Inner Child Journeys - How our children grow us up' (2020)

Deep inside us all there is a source of answers to our most troubling parenting issues. Inner Child Journeys is a user-friendly handbook to help you locate this inner wellspring of natural wisdom.
Inner Child Journeys offers a whole new twist to parenting—as a path of personal growth, grounded in solid neuroscientific principles.
Here’s what parenting manuals don’t tell us: if we don’t understand our own childhoods, we cannot understand our children. This ground-breaking book shows how to unlock your natural intuition by tapping your embodied memories. But it is also much more: a guide for transforming your greatest challenges as a parent or teacher into fruitful opportunities for personal healing and growth.
Chock-a-block full of real-life examples, this book puts practical, powerful psychological principles in user-friendly terms – it is easy and fun to read.

 

 

Robin Grille - 'Parenting for a Peaceful World' (2013)

magine a world where war, tyranny, human rights abuses and ecological destruction are relics of the past. What if the means to create such a reality were in the hands of mothers and fathers, and all those involved in the care and education of children? Parenting for a Peaceful World is a fascinating look at how parenting customs have shaped societies and major world events. It reveals how children adapt to different parenting styles and how these early experiences underpin the adults they become. In this expansive book, Robin Grille draws on revolutionary new research to argue that the safeguarding of children's emotional development is the key to creating a more peaceful and harmonious world. Parenting for a Peaceful World is a book for parents, child health professionals, and adults learning to be whole again. It is a manifesto for policy-makers and a resource for teachers. If the findings outlined in these pages are put into practice, the result may be a revolution of peace, humanity, and a world beyond our imagining.

 

Bessel van der Kolk - 'The Body Keeps the Score - Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma' (2015)

An expert on traumatic stress outlines an approach to healing, explaining how traumatic stress affects brain processes and how to use innovative treatments to reactivate the mind's abilities to trust, engage others, and experience pleasure.

 

 

 

 

Gabor Maté - 'When the Body Says NO - Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection' (2013)

Can a person literally die of loneliness? Is there such a thing as a "cancer personality"? Drawing on scientific research and the author's decades of experience as a practicing physician, 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.

• Explores the role of the mind-body link in conditions and diseases such as arthritis, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, IBS, and multiple sclerosis
• Draws on medical research and the author's clinical experience as a family physician
• Includes The Seven A's of Healing-principles of healing and the prevention of illness from hidden stress

Shares dozens of enlightening case studies and stories, including those of people such as Lou Gehrig (ALS), Betty Ford (breast cancer), Ronald Reagan (Alzheimer's), Gilda Radner (ovarian cancer), and Lance Armstrong (testicular cancer). An international bestseller translated into fifteen languages, When the Body Says No promotes learning and healing, providing transformative insights into how disease can be the body's way of saying no to what the mind cannot or will not acknowledge.

 

 

Gabor Maté - 'In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts - Close Encounters With Addiction' (2010)

 

Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz - 'The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog - and other stories from a child psychiatrist's notebook / What traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing (2017)

What happens when a young child is traumatized? How does terror affect a child's mind-and how can that mind recover? Child psychiatrist Bruce Perry has treated children faced with unimaginable horror: homicide survivors, witnesses to their own parents' murders, children raised in closets and cages, the Branch Davidian children, and victims of extreme neglect and family violence. In The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, Dr. Perry tells their stories of trauma and transformation. He explains what happens to the brain when children are exposed to extreme stress and trauma and reveals his innovative (non-medicinal) methods for helping to ease their pain and allowing them to become healthy adults. In this deeply informed and moving book, Perry shares with the reader the lessons of courage, humanity and hope he learned from these scarred children. He dramatically demonstrates that only when we understand the science of the mind and the power of love and nurturing, can we hope to heal the spirit of even the most wounded child.

 

 

Bruce Perry and Maia Szalavitz - 'Born For Love - Why empathy is essential - and endangered (2011)

This book explains how empathy develops, why it is essential for our development into healthy adults, and how it is threatened in the modern world. This title shows that compassion underlies the qualities that make society work - trust, altruism, collaboration, love, charity-and how difficulties related to empathy are key factors in social problems.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kerstin Uvnäs Moberg - The Hormone of Closeness (2013)

The Hormone of Closeness offers an exciting physiological perspective on intimacy and relationships. The closeness hormone, oxytocin, give us comfort and peace, but it also creates and reinforces relationships throughout life. Based on current research, Kerstin Uvnäs Moberg, the author of the ground-breaking The Oxytocin Factor, describes the importance of oxytocin in the connection between parents and children, in love and companionship and in increasing trust in our society.

The author argues that oxytocin plays a crucial part in our ability to socialise, feel secure and calm, work well and be healthy. She investigates the effects of oxytocin in pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding, and looks at the role of oxytocin in the mother-child relationship and its long-term benefits.

Oxytocin also has an important role to play in adult relationships. It creates a bond between lovers and stimulates social interaction allowing us to form friendships and work in groups. The sense of trust triggered by oxytocin enables us to trust in strangers and accounts for the Doula phenomenon. The relationship between food and closeness is explored, and we learn how the hormone of closeness can offer the key to good health and a longer life.

 

Elizabeth Young-Bruehl - 'Childism - Confronting Prejudice Against Children' (2013)

In this groundbreaking volume on the human rights of children, acclaimed analyst, political theorist, and biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl argues that prejudice exists against children as a group and that it is comparable to racism, sexism, and homophobia. This prejudice- childism -legitimates and rationalizes a broad continuum of acts that are not in the best interests of children, including the often violent extreme of child abuse and neglect. According to Young-Bruehl, reform is possible only if we acknowledge this prejudice in its basic forms and address the motives and cultural forces that drive it, rather than dwell on the various categories of abuse and punishment. There will always be individuals and societies that turn on their children, writes Young-Bruehl, breaking the natural order Aristotle described two and a half millennia ago in his Nichomachean Ethics. In Childism, Young-Bruehl focuses especially on the ways in which Americans have departed from the child-supportive trends of the Great Society and of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Many years in the making, Childism draws upon a wide range of sources, from the literary and philosophical to the legal and psychoanalytic. Woven into this extraordinary volume are case studies that illuminate the profound importance of listening to the victims who have so much to tell us about the visible and invisible ways in which childism is expressed.

 

Suzanne Zeedyk - 'Sabre Tooth Tigers & Teddy Bears: The connected baby guide to attachment'

A quote from the first page: 'Every time you start your day, you draw on the emotional attachment processes your brain built as a baby. (...) It is astounding to realise how mcuh of our adult lives are influenced by experiences we had before we could walk, talk or consciously remember.
This shows the breadth of attachment processes. This is why so many people, from parents to childcare staff to police to economists, are interested in this science. We are facing up to the fact that emotions have a greater influence on our behaviour, thoughts and health than our society has realised. We are better placed to address societal problems, such as prison rates, outcomes for children in care, stress-related illnesses and even poverty, by paying closer attention to our children's emotional needs.'

A quote from the front cover inside:
'The public often finds information about attachment both compelling and sovering. It gives them unexpected glimpses into their own lives, and its relevance for policies becomes glaringly obvious. They reruently ask, "How come no one tells us this stuff?" This guide is an attemt to tell more people about this stuff.'