Reading Recommendations
Relationships
*Note that these books are heteronormative in their language and research; though concepts are applicable to all relationships
Hold Me Tight by Sue Johnson
“This book offers a revolutionary new way to see and shape love relationships. The stories, new ideas and exercises offered in Hold Me Tight are based on the new science of love and the wisdom of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFT), an effective new model developed by Dr. Johnson.
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by John M. Gottman
“The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work has revolutionized the way we understand, repair, and strengthen marriages. John Gottman’s unprecedented study of couples over a period of years has allowed him to observe the habits that can make—and break—a marriage.
Here is the culmination of that work: the seven principles that guide couples on a path toward a harmonious and long-lasting relationship. Straightforward yet profound, these principles teach partners new approaches for resolving conflicts, creating new common ground, and achieving greater levels of intimacy. Gottman offers strategies and resources to help couples collaborate more effectively to resolve any problem, whether dealing with issues related to sex, money, religion, work, family, or anything else”
Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment by Amir Levine and Rachel Heller
In Attached, Levine and Heller reveal how an understanding of adult attachment-the most advanced relationship science in existence today-can help us find and sustain love.
Pioneered by psychologist John Bowlby in the 1950s, the field of attachment posits that each of us behaves in relationships in one of three distinct ways:
Anxious people are often preoccupied with their relationships and tend to worry about their partner’s ability to love them back
Avoidant people equate intimacy with a loss of independence and constantly try to minimize closeness.
Secure people feel comfortable with intimacy and are usually warm and loving.In this book Levine and Heller guide readers in determining what attachment style they and their mate (or potential mate) follow, offering a road map for building stronger, more fulfilling connections with the people they love.”
The Relationship Cure: A 5 Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family, and Relationships by John M. Gottman and Joan DeClaire
Dr. John M. Gottman comes a powerful, simple five-step program, based on twenty years of innovative research, for greatly improving all of the relationships in your life—with spouses and lovers, children, siblings, and even your colleagues at work.
In The Relationship Cure, Dr. Gottman:
* Reveals the key elements of healthy relationships, emphasizing the importance of what he calls “emotional connection”
* Introduces the powerful new concept of the emotional “bid,” the fundamental unit of emotional connection
* Provides remarkably empowering tools for improving the way you bid for emotional connection and how you respond to others’ bids”.
Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships by Dr. Sue Johnson
“Every day, we hear of relationships failing and questions of whether humans are meant to be monogamous. LOVE SENSE presents new scientific evidence that tells us that humans are meant to mate for life.
Dr. Johnson explains that romantic love is an attachment bond, just like that between mother and child, and shows us how to develop our “love sense”–our ability to develop long-lasting relationships. Love is not the least bit illogical or random, but actually an ordered and wise recipe for survival. LOVE SENSE covers the three stages of a relationship and how to best weather them; the intelligence of emotions and the logic of love; the physical and psychological benefits of secure love; and much more. Based on groundbreaking research, LOVE SENSE will change the way we think about love”.
TRAUMA HEaling
Trauma and Recovery brings a new level of understanding to a set of problems usually considered individually. Herman draws on her own cutting-edge research in domestic violence as well as on the vast literature of combat veterans and victims of political terror, to show the parallels between private terrors such as rape and public traumas such as terrorism. The book puts individual experience in a broader political frame, arguing that psychological trauma can be understood only in a social context. Meticulously documented and frequently using the victims’ own words as well as those from classic literary works and prison diaries, Trauma and Recovery is a powerful work that will continue to profoundly impact our thinking.”
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
“In The Body Keeps the Score, 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.
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.”
Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma by Peter Levine
“Waking the Tiger offers a new and hopeful vision of trauma. It views the human animal as a unique being, endowed with an instinctual capacity. It asks and answers an intriguing question: why are animals in the wild, though threatened routinely, rarely traumatized? By understanding the dynamics that make wild animals virtually immune to traumatic symptoms, the mystery of human trauma is revealed. Waking the Tiger normalizes the symptoms of trauma and the steps needed to heal them. People are often traumatized by seemingly ordinary experiences. 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.”
Healing Collective Trauma by Thomas Hübl
A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding and Healing Shared Trauma
What can you do when you carry scars not on your body, but within your soul? And what happens when those spiritual wounds exist not just in you, but in everyone in your family, community, and even beyond?
Spiritual teacher Thomas Hübl has spent years investigating why it is that old and seemingly disconnected traumas can seed their way through communities and across generations. His work culminates in Healing Collective Trauma, a new perspective on trauma that addresses both its visible effects and its most hidden roots.
Thomas details the Collective Trauma Integration Process, a group-based modality for evoking and eventually dissolving stuck traumatic energies. Providing structured practices for both students and group facilitators, Healing Collective Trauma is intended to build a practical tool kit for integration.
Here, you will learn:
- The innumerable ways trauma shapes our world-from identity and health to economy, geopolitics, and the state of the environment
- The concept of "trauma loyalty"-unconscious group bonds based in a pain narrative
- How the climate crisis is both a manifestation of humanity''s collective trauma and an opportunity to heal
- "Retrocausality"-how the power of presence can reshape the past and make new futures possible
Including essays contributed by experts such as Dr. Gabor Maté, Dr. Otto Scharmer, Dr. Christina Bethell, and Ken Wilber, Healing Collective Trauma offers not just an advanced look at community trauma but also a hopeful glimpse of the future.
Healing Developmental Trauma: How Early Trauma Affects Self-Regulation, Self-Image, and the Capacity for Relationship by Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre
“Written for those working to heal developmental trauma and seeking new tools for self-awareness and growth, this book focuses on conflicts surrounding the capacity for connection.
Explaining that an impaired capacity for connection to self and to others and the ensuing diminished aliveness are the hidden dimensions that underlie most psychological and many physiological problems, clinicians Laurence Heller and Aline LaPierre introduce the NeuroAffective Relational Model® (NARM), a unified approach to developmental, attachment, and shock trauma that, while not ignoring a person’s past, emphasizes working in the present moment. NARM is a somatically based psychotherapy that helps bring into awareness the parts of self that are disorganized and dysfunctional without making the regressed, dysfunctional elements the primary theme of the therapy. It emphasizes a person’s strengths, capacities, resources, and resiliency and is a powerful tool for working with both nervous system regulation and distortions of identity such as low self-esteem, shame, and chronic self-judgment”.
In this groundbreaking book, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology.
The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. Menakem argues this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in all our bodies. Our collective agony doesn't just affect African Americans. White Americans suffer their own secondary trauma as well. So do blue Americans—our police.
My Grandmother's Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not only about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide.
This book paves the way for a new, body-centered understanding of white supremacy—how it is literally in our blood and our nervous system, and offers a step-by-step healing process based on the latest neuroscience and somatic healing methods, in addition to incisive social commentary.
The Emotionally Absent Mother by Jasmin Lee Cori
The groundbreaking guide to self-healing and getting the love you missed.
Often, the grown children of emotionally absent mothers can''t quite put a finger on what''s missing from their lives. The children of abusive mothers, by contrast, may recognize the abuse--but overlook its lasting, harmful effects.
Psychotherapist Jasmin Lee Cori has helped thousands of men and women heal the hidden wounds left by every kind of undermothering. In this second edition of her pioneering book, with compassion for mother and child alike, she explains:
Possible reasons your mother was distracted or hurtful--and what she was unable to give
The lasting impact of childhood emotional neglect and abuse
How to find the child inside you and fill the "mother gap" through reflections and exercises
How to secure a happier future for yourself (and perhaps for your children)
In EASTERN BODY, WESTERN MIND, chakra authority Anodea Judith brought a fresh approach to the yoga-based Eastern chakra system, adapting it to the Western framework of Jungian psychology, somatic therapy, childhood developmental theory, and metaphysics.
This groundbreaking work in transpersonal psychology has been revised and redesigned for a more accessible presentation. Arranged schematically, the book uses the inherent structure of the chakra system as a map upon which to chart our Western understanding of individual development. Each chapter focuses on a single chakra, starting with a description of its characteristics, then exploring its particular childhood developmental patterns, traumas and abuses, and how to heal and maintain balance. Illuminated with personal anecdotes and case studies, EASTERN BODY, WESTERN MIND seamlessly merges the East and West, science and philosophy, and psychology and spirituality into a compelling interpretation of the chakra system and its relevance for Westerners today.
Sexuality & Sexual Healing
The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse by Ellen Bass & Laura Davis
Come to terms with your past while moving powerfully into the future
The Courage to Heal is an inspiring, comprehensive guide that offers hope and a map of the healing journey to every woman who was sexually abused as a child—and to those who care about her. Although the effects of child sexual abuse are long-term and severe, healing is possible.
Weaving together personal experience with professional knowledge, the authors provide clear explanations, practical suggestions, and support throughout the healing process. Readers will feel recognized and encouraged by hundreds of moving first-person stories drawn from interviews and the authors'' extensive work with survivors, both nationally and internationally.
This completely revised and updated 20th anniversary edition continues to provide the compassionate wisdom the book has been famous for, as well as many new features:
Contemporary research on trauma and the brain
An overview of powerful new healing tools such as imagery, meditation, and body-centered practices
Additional stories that reflect an even greater diversity of survivor experiences
The reassuring accounts of survivors who have been healing for more than twenty years
The most comprehensive, up-to-date resource guide in the field
Insights from the authors'' decades of experience
Cherished by survivors, and recommended by therapists and institutions everywhere, The Courage to Heal has often been called the bible of healing from child sexual abuse. This new edition will continue to serve as the healing beacon it has always been.
Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life by Emily Nagoski, Ph.D
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.
This widely esteemed, highly respected resource helps survivors of sexual abuse heal from the past, improve relationships, and discover the joys of sexual intimacy.
Compassionate and enduring, renowned author, psychotherapist, and certified sex therapist Wendy Maltz presents a comprehensive program for healing that sensitively takes readers step-by-step through the recovery process, integrating expert advice with groundbreaking exercises, proven techniques, and first-person accounts of women and men at every stage of sexual healing.
This compassionate resource can help you to:
Identify the sexual effects of sexual abuse
Eliminate negative sexual behavior and resolve specific problems
Gain control over upsetting automatic reactions to touch and sex
Develop a healthy sexual self-concept
Healing Sex: A Mind-Body Approach to Healing Sexual Trauma by Staci Haines
The first encouraging, sex-positive guide for all women survivors of sexual assault -- heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian, coupled, and single -- who want to reclaim their sex lives. While most books on the topic broach sexuality only to reassure women that it is all right to say "no" to unwanted sex, Healing Sex encourages women to learn how to say "yes" -- to their own desires and on their own terms.
This mind-body approach to healing from sexual trauma was created by Staci Haines, who has been educating in the area of sexual abuse, sex education, and somatic healing for over 15 years. Her techniques are ideal for anyone looking for a new way to heal from trauma, beyond traditional talk therapy.
Sex Up Your Life: The Mind Blowing Path to True Intimacy, Healing, and Hope by Julie Archambault
A Deep-Dive into the Unconscious and Mostly Unspoken Realms of Sex
Sex Up Your Life goes beyond simply giving advice on how to have a better sex Life. It’s a deep dive into the unconscious and mostly unspoken realms about the meaning of sexuality within our lives.
sexual exploitation, and into realms of play, the heart, and our spirit. At each point along this continuum, the reader is asked to explore within their experiences and beliefs around the topic, and readers are provided with questions to explore undoing harmful, unconscious, and limiting patterns.
The book is Sex-worker friendly, kink-aware, trauma-informed, and contains some important information about decolonizing and reclaiming sexuality. Ultimately, this book helps to evolve our heart consciousness and move into becoming our full authentic selves, spiritually, emotionally, physically, and sexually.
In this collection of real-life stories and interviews--from Indie Music Producers, International Sex Educators, Creatives, Models, Corporate Jet-Setters, Sex Workers, Bisexual Muslims, Transgender Folk undergoing gender reassignment, Men, Women, Mothers, Fathers, and many more—holistic educator Julie Archambault has crafted a fascinating and revealing portrait of sex.
Everyone is dealing with something—and that something has a lot to teach you about yourself. Sex Up Your Life offers a unique "Continuum of Connection for Sex"--brought to life by collected stories of struggle and triumph—to guide you from destructive disconnect to blissful sexual for sex in your life.
The founder of Co-creative Sex, Julie forges a new paradigm where sex, relationships, and personal growth go hand in hand, and will help you “Up” your experience of sex in your life.
The Body is Not An Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor
“Humans are a varied and divergent bunch with all manner of beliefs, morals, and bodies. Systems of oppression thrive off our inability to make peace with difference and injure the relationship we have with our own bodies.
The Body Is Not an Apology offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by these violent systems. World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength. As we awaken to our own indoctrinated body shame, we feel inspired to awaken others and to interrupt the systems that perpetuate body shame and oppression against all bodies. When we act from this truth on a global scale, we usher in the transformative opportunity of radical self-love, which is the opportunity for a more just, equitable, and compassionate world–for us all”.
SEXUALITY & SEXUAL HEALTH
WEB Resources
Webinar:
Attachment, Trauma and Sexuality—Coming Home to the True Self with Ariel Giarretto
This is 2-part webinar series.
Description: For countless generations, beliefs about sex and the body have been exceedingly pejorative and condemning. Although most religions develop these mores as a necessary means of keeping social order, such ideologies have a devastating effect on our psyches, emotions and relationships with others. Abiding by these creeds necessitates a thorough disconnection from our essential nature.
Calling on my decades of experience as a trauma therapist and trainer of Somatic Experiencing, combined with extensive training in somatic sexuality, this series will address what it takes to heal our sexuality and our relationship to our gender, and to our bodies.
Through the science and heart of attachment and trauma, we’ll examine how we are physiologically designed for connection, closeness and pleasure—which is as deeply “wired” as our response to threat—as well as what happens when this nature is denied.
Through a mix of educational material, experiential exercises, reflections and homework this series will provide numerous ways of coming home to the body, finding advanced levels of pleasure and helping to identify and overcome all that gets in the way.
We will cover:
The science and psychobiology of attachment needs
The physiology of trauma, and how disconnection from the body prevents the resolution of past trauma
Exercises that support fuller embodied pleasure and self-acceptance
Ways of recovering from sexuality trauma and sexual abuse, and how to do this at a respectful pace that prevents re-traumatization
Sex Stores (Toronto)
Come As You Are - Founded as a worker-owned co-operative in 1997, we have a fundamentally anti-capitalist and feminist approach to sexual pleasure, health, and education. We don't profit from your pleasure and we only stock products that we truly love and believe in.
Good for Her - Good For Her is Toronto’s cozy, comfortable place where people of all genders, sexes, orientations and desires can find a variety of high quality sex toys, books, DVDs, workshops, great advice and much more. Offers women & trans people only hours. Good For Her also offers workshops, and sexuality coaching.
WEBSITES
SCARLETEEN: SEX ED FOR THE REAL WORLD
This incredible resource has THOUSANDS of pages of information related to sex, sexuality, reproductive justice, gender, and relationships. It is the best place on the internet for sexual health information.
Scarleteen provides “content and interaction that seeks to provide developmentally and culturally-sensitive sexuality education and information that reflects the diversity of people and sexuality; that aims to serve all sexes, genders, economic and social classes, sexual orientations and relationship models, types of embodiment and more, including information on contraception, safer sex and sexual health, reproductive choice, masturbation, anatomy, sexual orientation and other aspects of sexual identity, gender identity and equity, pleasure and human sexual response, body image, sexual and romantic relationship formation, communication and negotiation, sexual and other interpersonal abuse, self-esteem and care and compassion in sexual enactment that is not intentionally exclusive to any one group, save privileging those in their teens and twenties”.
OH JOY SEX TOY
Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan’s widely acclaimed Oh Joy Sex Toy (OJST) is a free weekly sex education webcomic that debuted April 2013 and updates every Tuesday.
It covers everything sex related from, sexuality and the sex industry, to toys, workshops, birth control and much more. With the aid of guest contributors giving us us many perspectives as possible, we strive to be relevant to a wide variety of genders, body types, and sexualities.
KINKLY
Kinkly was founded by two Canadian women who had plenty of sex-related questions – but found the online space short on answers, especially when it came to things like kink, sex toys, and content that explored sex and sexuality from all angles. So, they built that resource by creating the largest dictionary of sex terms on the web, along with an archive of content on all aspects of sexuality presented from a pleasure-based perspective.
Kinkly’s content is written by sex educators, coaches, therapists and writers with a background in sexual health – as well as people like you. We aim to provide a mix of information that is based on facts or, when appropriate, personal experience and insight. We understand that when it comes to sex, everyone’s tastes differ; our aim is to provide the full palate of flavours in a way that is respectful, insightful and fun.
THE BODY IS NOT AN APOLOGY
The Body Is Not An Apology is an international movement committed to cultivating global Radical Self Love and Body Empowerment. We believe that discrimination, social inequality, and injustice are manifestations of our inability to make peace with the body, our own and others. Through information dissemination, personal and social transformation projects and community building, The Body is Not An Apology fosters global, radical, unapologetic self love which translates to radical human love and action in service toward a more just, equitable and compassionate world.