Sadness Workshop


Book Description

Stevie Edwards' Sadness Workshop, a winner of the 2016 Button Poetry Prize, explores love, lust, womanhood, and vulnerability. Each poem is daring and honest, shattering cultural expectations and stereotypes. Edwards' refreshing and bold stance will appeal to readers everywhere.




Sadness Workshop


Book Description

Stevie Edwards' Sadness Workshop, a winner of the 2016 Button Poetry Prize, explores love, lust, womanhood, and vulnerability. Each poem is daring and honest, shattering cultural expectations and stereotypes. Edwards' refreshing and bold stance will appeal to readers everywhere.




It's Not Always Depression


Book Description

Fascinating patient stories and dynamic exercises help you connect to healing emotions, ease anxiety and depression, and discover your authentic self. Sara suffered a debilitating fear of asserting herself. Spencer experienced crippling social anxiety. Bonnie was shut down, disconnected from her feelings. These patients all came to psychotherapist Hilary Jacobs Hendel seeking treatment for depression, but in fact none of them were chemically depressed. Rather, Jacobs Hendel found that they’d all experienced traumas in their youth that caused them to put up emotional defenses that masqueraded as symptoms of depression. Jacobs Hendel led these patients and others toward lives newly capable of joy and fulfillment through an empathic and effective therapeutic approach that draws on the latest science about the healing power of our emotions. Whereas conventional therapy encourages patients to talk through past events that may trigger anxiety and depression, accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP), the method practiced by Jacobs Hendel and pioneered by Diana Fosha, PhD, teaches us to identify the defenses and inhibitory emotions (shame, guilt, and anxiety) that block core emotions (anger, sadness, fear, disgust, joy, excitement, and sexual excitement). Fully experiencing core emotions allows us to enter an openhearted state where we are calm, curious, connected, compassionate, confident, courageous, and clear. In It’s Not Always Depression, Jacobs Hendel shares a unique and pragmatic tool called the Change Triangle—a guide to carry you from a place of disconnection back to your true self. In these pages, she teaches lay readers and helping professionals alike • why all emotions—even the most painful—have value. • how to identify emotions and the defenses we put up against them. • how to get to the root of anxiety—the most common mental illness of our time. • how to have compassion for the child you were and the adult you are. Jacobs Hendel provides navigational tools, body and thought exercises, candid personal anecdotes, and profound insights gleaned from her patients’ remarkable breakthroughs. She shows us how to work the Change Triangle in our everyday lives and chart a deeply personal, powerful, and hopeful course to psychological well-being and emotional engagement.




A Shelter for Sadness


Book Description

This poignant and heartwarming story explores the many faces of sadness and addresses the importance of mental health in a child-friendly way. A small boy creates a shelter for his sadness so that he can visit it whenever he needs to, and the two of them can cry, talk, or just sit. The boy knows that one day his sadness may come out of the shelter, and together they will look out at the world and see how beautiful it is. In this timely consideration of emotional wellbeing, Anne Booth has created a beautiful depiction of allowing time and attention for difficult feelings. Stunningly atmospheric illustrations by David Litchfield personify sadness as a living being, allowing young readers to more easily connect with the story's themes of emotional literacy.




Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief


Book Description

With this groundbreaking book, discover the critical connections between anxiety and grief—and learn practical strategies for healing, based on the Kübler-Ross stages model. If you're suffering from anxiety but not sure why, or if you're struggling with loss and looking for solace, Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief offers help and answers. As grief expert Claire Bidwell Smith discovered in her own life—and in her practice with her therapy clients—significant loss and unresolved grief are primary underpinnings of anxiety. Using research and real life stories, Smith breaks down the physiology of anxiety, providing a concrete explanation that will help you heal. Starting with the basics questions—“What is anxiety?” and “What is grief?” and moving to concrete approaches such as making amends, taking charge, and retraining your brain, Anxiety takes a big step beyond Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's widely accepted five stages to unpack everything from our age-old fears about mortality to the bare vulnerability a loss can make us feel. With concrete tools and coping strategies for panic attacks, getting a handle on anxious thoughts, and more, Smith bridges these two emotions in a way that is deeply empathetic and profoundly practical.




Creating a Wholesome Human Being


Book Description

This is a true story about a girl who was born on Thanksgiving Day in 1936 to two French Canadian parents. Throughout her life, she experienced mental, emotional and physical distress caused by her father’s disease of alcoholism. Neither parent understood the dynamics of alcoholism and the consequences of an alcoholic’s behavior on the entire family. Revealing her ancestors’ genetic predisposition to alcoholism helps to understand how every generation can inherit the disease. Monique never felt that she belonged in her family, therefore she went on a lifelong journey to discover her true authentic self. She managed to connect to universal energy and allowed her spiritual masters to guide her life. She learned that evaluating lessons learned from negative events altered her emotional attachment to each event. She desperately wanted to heal herself and her family members, therefore she became a nurse to discover the different methods of healing. When the use of medical technology failed to heal her or her family, she became interested in alternative methods of healing. She joined the American Holistic Nurses Association and found that Reiki energy healing helped her heal her body, mind and spirit and transform her life. Throughout the course of her life, a Shaman showed up to introduce her to Shamanic healing technology. She eventually she became a Shamanic practitioner and currently uses Shamanic and Reiki energy to heal herself and others. Monique underwent twenty years of intensive therapy to grieve the suicide deaths of her father and two brothers as well as the death of her first child. Therapy also helped her get through her divorce. She learned how the words, messages and behaviors of parents, educators, social media and peers affected her emotions and behavior. Identifying the negative thoughts, irrational beliefs and suppressed emotions that impacted her life in a negative manner was the most difficult part of her recovery. Because she had developed strong survival skills to keep her safe from harm, she felt fearful when her therapist told her that she needed to let go of her mask of pretense. Becoming an Addiction Counselor helped Monique gain the knowledge she felt she needed to heal the alcoholics in her family. After years of enabling and rescuing her family members, she learned to allow them to be responsible for the consequences of their actions. She knew that she had finally become a wholesome human being once she identified the healthy changes in her body, mind and spirit.




Jenny Mei Is Sad


Book Description

"A picture book about sadness uniquely told from the friend's point of view as she does her best to comfort her friend Jenny Mei"--




The Wild Edge of Sorrow


Book Description

The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and be stretched large by them. As seen on All There Is with Anderson Cooper Noted psychotherapist Francis Weller provides an essential guide for navigating the deep waters of sorrow and loss in this lyrical yet practical handbook for mastering the art of grieving. Describing how Western patterns of amnesia and anesthesia affect our capacity to cope with personal and collective sorrows, Weller reveals the new vitality we may encounter when we welcome, rather than fear, the pain of loss. Through moving personal stories, poetry, and insightful reflections he leads us into the central energy of sorrow, and to the profound healing and heightened communion with each other and our planet that reside alongside it. The Wild Edge of Sorrow explains that grief has always been communal and illustrates how we need the healing touch of others, an atmosphere of compassion, and the comfort of ritual in order to fully metabolize our grief. Weller describes how we often hide our pain from the world, wrapping it in a secret mantle of shame. This causes sorrow to linger unexpressed in our bodies, weighing us down and pulling us into the territory of depression and death. We have come to fear grief and feel too alone to face an encounter with the powerful energies of sorrow. Those who work with people in grief, who have experienced the loss of a loved one, who mourn the ongoing destruction of our planet, or who suffer the accumulated traumas of a lifetime will appreciate the discussion of obstacles to successful grief work such as privatized pain, lack of communal rituals, a pervasive feeling of fear, and a culturally restrictive range of emotion. Weller highlights the intimate bond between grief and gratitude, sorrow and intimacy. In addition to showing us that the greatest gifts are often hidden in the things we avoid, he offers powerful tools and rituals and a list of resources to help us transform grief into a force that allows us to live and love more fully.




Group Action


Book Description

Martin Ringer, an internationally known consultant and writer on group psychology, here outlines techniques for understanding groups that will be relevant to those who lead teams in any setting. The result is an accessible guide both to leading a group, and to understanding the necessary dynamics that will result in the best team-work.




The Positive Power of Sadness


Book Description

Written by two clinical psychologists with nearly a century of combined experience, this book explains how people who suffer from depression, anxiety, or undue anger can overcome these difficulties by allowing the normal process of grieving to occur. Sadness is generally characterized as a negative emotion, yet experiencing sadness plays a positive and key role in achieving and maintaining mental health and in avoiding anxiety, depression, and anger. Indeed, sadness can be understood as a normal and necessary feeling that always occurs when one loses something that is loved. The Positive Power of Sadness examines the experience of sadness, taking into account the personal, relational, and neurological factors of sadness; explains the cultural reasons that many resist feeling sad and consequently displace sadness into secondary processes; and provides a practical and systematic way to overcome anger, anxiety, and depression by allowing the normal process of being sad to occur. This simple paradigm of love and loss causing joy and sorrow in tandem is founded on solid research, carefully considered theory, and extensive experience and will serve to stimulate further thought and writing. Professional therapists, psychologists, counselors, teachers, and clergy who work with people in various settings will find this enlightening reading, as will general readers seeking self-help or possessing an interest in psychological functioning or relational difficulties.