Healing and Personal Growth Resources

Lately I have been in a fairly intensive phase of my healing and personal growth journey (also known as Life). I'd like to share a list of books and other resources that have been especially helpful to me (some recently, some many years back, and some that I first found a long time ago and have recently revisited). They are arranged roughly chronologically in the order that I first encountered them (as best I can remember). At the bottom of the page, I've also included a section called Putting it All Together, with some reflections.

Resources

Book: Making a Living While Making a Difference: A Guide to Creating Careers with a Conscience, by Melissa Everett

This book contains a bunch of exercises to help you figure out what your values are, whether they are aligned well with your work, and how to make that alignment better. The edition I read was published in 1995; there’s a newer edition now. There are many other books that can help you figure out what your values are and how to bring your life into alignment with them; my friend Melissa highly recommended one called A Couple's Guide to Happy Retirement and Aging: 15 Keys to Long-Lasting Vitality and Connection, by Sara Yogev (I haven't read it, but it might be more appropriate to your stage of life than this one, which I read when I was 29).

Book: Ethics for the New Millennium, by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

The central thesis of this book is the Buddhist idea that everyone seeks (and has the right to seek) to be happy and avoid suffering. The path to true happiness and fulfillment is thus to help others achieve happiness and avoid suffering.

Book: Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, by Marshall B. Rosenberg

This book is for learning emotional intelligence and compassionate communication methods, specifically nonviolent communication (NVC), which has two components. The first is about getting in touch with your own emotions and the universal human needs that underlie them, and learning to communicate your emotions and needs clearly and compassionately, along with making reasonable requests (not demands) of others to help meet your needs. The second is compassionate listening, which is about hearing the same things from someone else and maybe helping them to communicate it to you. The central thesis underlying this process is that emotions are expressions of met or unmet needs, and actions are strategies people use to try to meet their needs.

Other NVC resources:

Web site/videos: TaiFlow, with Leia Cohen

Tai Chi videos, good for body awareness, life balance, and gentle movement. She has some free videos on YouTube (you can find the link on her site), and you can also subscribe to her site to use her extensive library of additional videos.

Professional help: CBT, EMDR, and Pelvic PT

Sometimes, what you need to move forward is help from a professional. I have benefited greatly working with a mental health therapist who practices CBT (cognitive-behavioral therapy), which is about changing the way you think and behave to replace dead-end, depressive patterns. I also worked with the same therapist using EMDR (eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing), which seems like a magical new-age woo-woo procedure that shouldn't work, but is actually a scientifically-tested, effective treatment for PTSD and other trauma. EMDR helps your brain reprocess traumatic memories into narrative memories, which is the key to being able to deal with a traumatic past and get beyond its lingering effects on your mind and body. EMDR can also be used as an aid to processing of other difficulties that don't quite rise to the level of trauma, much faster than ordinary talk therapy.

I've also benefited from physical therapy (PT) for dealing with musculoskeletal issues many times in the past, including seeing a specialist in pelvic PT for issues around urination and defecation (both things that I think we don't talk about enough, because they seem private or gross).

If after the first meeting with either a mental health or pelvic therapist, you don't feel comfortable, then go back to search mode (as hard as that might be!) and find someone else -- you're unlikely to make progress by sticking with a therapist of either type that you're not comfortable with. A good place to look for a mental health therapist is Psychology Today's therapist finder -- there you can search by specialty, age group, and geographical area, and read the bio of prospective therapists. 

Book: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel van der Kolk

This book is about how traumatic events can affect your later life, and how to heal from this. The author believes that childhood trauma should be a primary psychological diagnosis, much like how PTSD is, rather than diagnosing people with things that are basically the effects of that trauma (depression, disassociation, inability to form relationships, etc.). Traumatic memories are not stored in the brain the same way as normal (narrative) memories, and they return as vivid flashbacks rather than stories. Techniques such as EMDR can help to integrate the traumatic memories into narratives, and other techniques (relaxation, mindfulness, safe relationships, etc.) can help you befriend your emotional brain so that you can ease into having healthy responses to stress instead of fight/flight/freeze. I will note that the first half of this book is very difficult to read, as it is a compendium of some very traumatic events from people’s lives, but you can skip to the second half to get some hope.

Book: What Happened To You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing, by Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey

This book is also about childhood trauma, but it is not as difficult to read as The Body Keeps the Score. A friend of mine highly recommended listening to the audio book rather than reading it – it’s a conversation between the two co-authors.

Book: When The Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, by Gabor Maté

This book is about how stress leads to physical illness, and how for so many people, our childhood is a source of stress. The author believes that looking at people’s personality and emotional intelligence can be a good predictor of whether they will develop two classes of diseases that are related to the immune system: auto-immune diseases (too much immune system) and cancer (too little immune system); also of how well people will respond to treatment for either. The central idea is that people who lack emotional competence (ability to feel and express emotions effectively, and understand the past residues and genuine needs that drive emotions) are more likely to have these immune system issues. He sets out the “7 A’s of Healing” as a way to move towards health -- I found it very helpful to organize my strategies for healing around these categories:

  1. Acceptance of the state of the present; treating ourselves with compassionate curiosity
  2. Awareness of our emotional reality and stress
  3. Anger, expressed in a constructive, regulated way and recognized as a source of information about losses and threats
  4. Autonomy: clear boundaries and independence
  5. Attachment: connection and community, sharing, giving and receiving support
  6. Assertion: declaring to the world that we are who we are, and we are of value
  7. Affirmation: creativity and spirituality as statements of values

App: How We Feel

This free app (Android/iPhone) is very useful for identifying and tracking emotions, and it also contains some very good videos about emotional intelligence and learning to accept your current emotional state.

Book: The Way Out: A Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven Approach to Healing Chronic Pain, by Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv

This book is about neuroplastic pain, which is pain that does not originate from a physical illness or injury, but instead originates from patterns of brain activity. The authors believe that most chronic pain is neuroplastic, and the book sets out several ways to understand whether your pain is neuroplastic, including that it moves around or is otherwise inconsistent, that it lasts long after the original injury or illness, that it started without a definite injury or illness, that it is widespread or bilateral, that mental stress and anxiety make it worse, and that medical tests have failed to uncover a cause. The book also describes a process called Somatic Tracking, which involves focusing on the pain with playful curiosity while telling yourself that there is nothing physically wrong. I made a YouTube playlist of Somatic Tracking videos, since I found that trying to do Somatic Tracking on my own was not working well for me; these guided videos worked well (there are plenty of others on YouTube if these don't speak to you).

Web site/course: Palouse Mindfulness course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction

This free, self-paced, online 8-module course in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teaches you to be more in touch with the present moment, and also how to deal compassionately and constructively with unpleasant emotions, physical sensations, and other people through the practice of mindfulness. Once you start the course (and/or after you finish it), you can also sign up for their newsletter, attend one of many weekly Zoom meditations led by trained facilitators, and occasionally attend a larger Zoom meeting to meet other students and alumni. The web site also has a set of "graduate modules" for deeper exploration; I plan to delve into some of those in the future, and am also going back and reading some books that were suggested during the course as "optional" reading materials for further study of the topics the course introduced.

If a self-paced course is not for you, there are several organizations that offer more structured MBSR courses online. I've attended an in-person meditation retreat from Mindfulness Northwest, and they are one organization that offers online MBSR courses -- I'd expect them to be good, since the retreat leader was excellent. Palouse Mindfulness also has a list of other live MBSR courses on their site.

Putting it All Together

I don't think that one book, web site, organization, or person can tell you how to live your life in a way that will make you truly happy and fulfilled, or how to be physically and mentally healthy. Instead, I think we all need to figure out for ourselves what makes us happy and healthy, and how to structure our lives so that we are doing more of those things -- I don't think it is the same for everyone, but there is some commonality. For instance, we all know about the importance of diet and exercise for health; what constitutes a healthy diet and what form of exercise is best, however, are not the same for everyone. Also, living life according to our values is a core component of being happy for everyone, I believe, but the specifics of what those values are differ from person to person. Finally, we all suffer if our basic needs are not fulfilled; I believe that those needs are pretty much universal, but the strategies that will work best for each of us to fulfill our needs could be different, and could evolve over time.

For my part, I have had intensive several-year periods of personal growth (meaning learning major things about how I could be happy and healthy, and making changes to put what I learned into practice) starting at around the ages of 18, 29, and 56; the resources I listed above were helpful for the "figuring it out" part during the latter two periods, and maybe some of them will also help you. I'll also just mention that during this latest period, one realization I had at some point was that it was time to move from a phase of healing (intensive learning and making changes) into a phase of self-care (living according to what I had learned, and maintaining my health and happiness). And I've found it very helpful to make sure my self-care includes doing things that bring me joy and speak to my spirit, such as singing, volunteer work, creativity, connecting with people, and being out in nature.

I wish you success in your own journey: may you be happy and healthy, and live a life free from suffering.