Recommended Books and Music

Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel by Changing the Way You Think

This book is extremely helpful for those who are overwhelmed by depression or negative thinking. It de scribes how to change destructive thoughts and emotions and how to solve problems interfering with your relationships. Whether you choose to read special sections, complete the troubleshooting guides, or read the hint boxes, you will be pleased by the results. Psychotherapists will also find this helpful.

The Depression Workbook: Guide for Living with Depression and Manic Depression

The author is a manic depressive who developed a systematic approach to help herself cope with her illness. She clearly describes a step by step self help prescription for empowering oneself toward healing the emotional pain. If you take the time to complete the charts, you will find yourself liberated from debilitating moods; soon your self awareness and attitude toward life and self will be enhanced. Professionals will enjoy using this workbook as an adjunct to helping clients in the psychotherapy session.

Reinventing Your Life : How to Break Free from Negative Life Patterns and Feel Good Again

This is an easy self-help manual for discarding unproductive behaviors. It facilitates your understanding and awareness of the development of "lifetraps," and more important, how to break self defeating habits. Clients have reported how helpful this book has been in improving their behavior and attitude toward life.

Infidelity: A Survival Guide

Whether or not a troubled couple chooses to stay together, Lusterman says the best outcome is when both partners experience changes and new insights into their lives. He provides several case studies in which couples began to regain their trust through new communication, and instructs on the kind of feelings-expressing language that can help.

When Your Lover Is a Liar: Healing the Wounds of Deception and Betrayal

"Betrayal goes way beyond sexual affairs to include a host of lies and secrets. When Your Lover Is a Liar is an outstanding guide for helping women reduce the trauma of such interpersonal violations, choose a direction, and rebuild their sense of self."

After the Affair : Healing the Pain and Rebuilding Trust When a Partner Has Been Unfaithful

A leading therapist and expert on infidelity offers emotional support and proven strategies to help couples overcome one of the most devastating events in any committed relationship. After the Affair is the first book to help readers survive this crisis, and guides both the hurt and unfaithful partners through the stages of grief.

Women Who Stay With Men Who Stray: What Every Women Needs to Know about Men and Infidelity

A top psychologist and veteran journalist explains why men cheat, how this behavior affects marriage, and what a woman can do to survive this humiliating situation.

Secret Lovers: Affairs Happen...How to Cope

This intriguing book takes a new look at what really happens in affairs--how they begin, the stages they go through, and why they break up. This is a fascinating and rare glimpse at this secret side of life. Chapters such as "Healing" disclose essential guidance for coping with the sophisticated and secret complexities of extramarital affairs

Thoughts and Feelings: Taking Control of Your Moods and Your Life: A Workbook of Cognitive Behavioral Techniques

This is a workbook that describes simple stress reduction techniques. Psychotherapists, doctors, teachers, nurses will be pleased how easy these techniques are to facilitate rapid reduction of cognitive stress. Systematic Desensitization, stress inoculation, visualization, combating distorted thinking are only a few of the many helpful techniques that are described in this workbook. My patients have quickly incorporated the visualization exercises to thwart panic attacks and reinforce relaxation.

The Relaxation & Stress Reduction Workbook by Martha Davis, Matthew McKay, and Elizabeth Robbins Eshelman
Visit Amazon for a discounted price on this book.

The well-organized chapters on breathing, relaxation, meditation, thought stopping, and body awareness guide the reader through copious self-help techniques to try and, eventually, master. Other chapters, including job stress management, goal setting and time management, and assertiveness training, focus on daily scenarios people often find distressing.

The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook

This book excels not only in explaining the cause and nature of anxiety disorders and phobias but also in describing treatments. This is truly a "workbook," with exercises designed to facilitate recovery, either through private use or in conjunction with professional therapy.

Beyond Anxiety and Phobia: A Step-by-Step Guide to Lifetime Recovery

Beyond Anxiety and Phobia provides an array of alternative strategies for entering this long-term healing mode; describes alternative therapies such as herbs, yoga, massage, acupuncture, and homeopathy; and addresses the impact of perfectionism and other personality issues.

Anxiety, Phobias, & Panic : A Step-by-Step Program for Regaining Control of Your Life

The book teaches numerous exceptionally effective techniques for regaining a sense of control and self-efficacy. These include establishing a daily routine of decompressing, cognitive monitoring, desensitization, visualization, tips on overcoming perfectionism and the excessive need for approval and control.

Panic Attacks Workbook: A Guided Program for Beating the Panic Trick

Dr. Carbonell offers a complete self-help recovery program that includes the use of panic diaries, desensitization, and cognitive therapy. He makes clear how panic attacks work and what to do if you have one, provides specific self-tests and exercises that will help you begin to heal yourself right away

Dying of Embarrassment: Help for Social Anxiety & Phobia

This book is amazing. It truly holds the key to unlocking the door that social phobia bars shut. It works as a workbook, allowing you to write in your own stress management and anxiety charts, fears, goals, and a step by step guide on how to face those fears, overcome them, and literally better your life. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has even the slightest phobia's about meeting new people, or even self doubt, low confidence, or even to improve your social skills for everyday life.

The Shyness & Social Anxiety Workbook: Proven Techniques for Overcoming Your Fears

A truly excellent resource! This book is full of valuable exercises for challenging the irrational thoughts and avoidance behaviors that fuel social anxiety. I particularly appreciated the creative examples of how one can confront and overcome social and performance fears in a gradual and manageable fashion.

Why Marriages Succeed or Fail and How You Can Make Yours Last

Gottman describes his studies as being akin to a CAT scan of a living relationship and asserts that he's been able to predict the future of marriages with an accuracy rate of over 90 percent. In 1983 and 1986, his research team monitored more than a hundred married couples in Indiana and Illinois with electrodes, video cameras, and microphones as they attempted to work out real conflicts. Using the information derived from these sessions, Gottman concludes that a lasting relationship results from a couple's ability to resolve conflicts through any of the three styles of problem-solving that are found in healthy marriages- -validating, conflict-avoiding, and volatile.

A Couple's Guide to Communication

This book's suggestions are backed by years of clinical research on how thousands of couples communicate and presents the strategies that worked best for them, where Gray's are more based on observations. This book gives practical step by step knowledge of how to communicate with your partner and the little snags that you run into day by day without even knowing it.

The Relationship Cure: A 5 Step Guide to Strengthening Your Marriage, Family, and Friendships

"John Gottman is our leading explorer of the inner world of relationships. In The Relationship Cure, he has found gold once again. This book shows how the simplest, nearly invisible gestures of care and attention hold the key to successful relationships with those we love and work with." William J. Doherty, Ph.D.

The Power of Two

I recommend this workbook to therapists and couples who are working on improving relationships. Whether you are learning as a couple or are in therapy, you will be delighted with the clear curriculum for improving communication, listening, decision making, conflict resolution, and enhancing intimacy, respect, and growth as a vibrant couple. My colleagues have reported speedy results with their clients. How refreshing to develop an approach that reaffirms a balanced partnership where each identity thrives instead of becoming submerged!

The Seven Princples for Making Marriage Work

According to most relationship books, the key to a solid marriage is communication, communication, communication. Phooey, says John Gottman, Ph.D., author of the much-lauded Why Marriages Succeed or Fail. There's much more to a solid, "emotionally intelligent" marriage than sharing every feeling and thought, he points out--though most couples therapists ineffectively (and expensively) harp on these concepts.

Love Is Never Enough: How Couples Can Overcome Misunderstandings, Resolve Conflicts, and Solve Relationship Problems through Cognitive Therapy

With eloquence and accessibility, Dr. Aaron T. Beck analyzes the actual dialogue of troubled couples to illuminate the most common problems in marriage--the power of negative thinking, disillusionment, rigid rules and expectations, and miscommunication.

Music Themes of Love, Friendship, Dreams, and Goals

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I'm Grieving As Fast As I Can : How Young Widows and Widowers Can Cope and Heal

An excellent book about the grieving process.

How to Go on Living When Someone You Love Dies

A compassionate and practical guide to surviving the loss of a loved one.

Healing After the Suicide of a Loved One

The authors address the special needs and emotions of the survivors--those affected by the suicide of a loved one--explore the natural grief, and the added guilt, rage, and shame that dealing with a suicide often engenders. Includes a directory of worldwide support groups.

Kettlebells for Women: Workouts for Your Strong, Sculpted and Sexy Body

The ultimate high-intensity workout. Easy for beginners to follow but has plenty for the serious body builder.