Body Disorders

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent more than three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust.

Sufferers with any type of body image or anxiety conditions will identify with Chloe’s suffering and the daily struggles she faces. Dr. Callaghan and Dr. O’Connor’s wisdom, expertise, and compassionate approach have enabled Chloe to move on significantly with her life. Their approach is captured perfectly as they provide valuable insight into why and how Chloe struggled with her condition and what needs to be done to ensure her path to recovery and beyond.

Catherine Cook-Cottone provides tools for clinicians working with clients to restore their healthy selves and use their bodies as a positive resource for healing and long-term health. The book goes beyond traditional treatments to talk about mindful self-care, mindful eating, yoga, and other practices designed to support self-regulation.

It is now thought that people who have been traumatized hold an implicit memory of traumatic events in their brains and bodies. That memory is often expressed in the symptomatology of post-traumatic stress disorder - nightmares, flashbacks, startle responses, and dissociative behaviors. In essence, the body of the traumatized individual refuses to be ignored. While reducing the chasm between scientific theory and clinical practice and bridging the gap between talk therapy and body therapy, Rothschild presents principles and non-touch techniques for giving the body its due.

There is an end to the anguish of emotional eating - and this book explains how to achieve it. Geneen Roth, whose Feeding the Hungry Heart and When Food Is Love have brought understanding and acceptance to tens of thousands of fans over the last two decades, here outlines her proven program for resolving the conflicts at the root of overeating.

If you regularly eat when you're not truly hungry, choose unhealthy comfort foods, or eat beyond fullness, something is out of balance. The good news is that the brain can be rewired for optimal emotional health. When Food Is Comfort presents a breakthrough mindfulness practice called inner nurturing, a comprehensive, step-by-step program developed by an author who was herself an emotional eater.

First-time novelist Natasha Friend is a writer with a talent for realistically expressing the fears and uncertainties of today’s adolescents in a good story. Perfect has received the Milkweed Prize for Children’s Literature and is a Book Sense "Winter Picks" selection. This is the moving story of a young girl who develops a dangerous eating disorder while dealing with intense grief.

The Wisdom of Your Body offers a compassionate, healthy, and holistic perspective on embodied living. Weaving together illuminating research, stories from her work as a therapist, and deeply personal narratives of healing from a life-threatening eating disorder, a near-fatal car accident, and chronic pain, McBride invites us to reclaim the wisdom of the body and to experience the wholeness that has been there all along.

Heal trauma. Reclaim your body. Live with wholeness. These are the gifts of utilizing the power of fundamental consciousness-a subtle field of awareness that lies within each of us. In Trauma and the Unbound Body, Dr. Judith Blackstone explores how we can resolve the mental, physical, and emotional struggles of trauma through the power of fundamental consciousness.

If you have body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRB) such as hair pulling or skin picking, you may feel embarrassed about seeking help. But there are proven-effective strategies you can use to overcome these behaviors and improve your overall quality of life—this book will show you how. In this evidence-based resource, three renowned experts and clinicians offer powerful CBT skills to help you move past BFRB. You'll learn why you engage in these behaviors, and how to identify your own sensory "triggers"—places, things, or experiences that cause your behavior to become worse.

This best-selling classic presents seminal theory and research on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Together, the leading editors and contributors comprehensively examine how trauma affects an individual's biology, conceptions of the world, and psychological functioning. Key topics include why certain people cope successfully with traumatic experiences while others do not, the neurobiological processes underlying PTSD symptomatology, and enduring questions surrounding traumatic memories and dissociation.

In Trauma and Memory, best-selling author Dr. Peter Levine (creator of the Somatic Experiencing approach) tackles one of the most difficult and controversial questions of PTSD/trauma therapy: Can we trust our memories? While some argue that traumatic memories are unreliable and not useful, others insist that we absolutely must rely on memory to make sense of past experience. Dr. Levine suggests that there are elements of truth in both camps.

Asserting that the body is the main site of oppression in Western society, the contributors to this pioneering volume explore the complex issue of embodiment and how it relates to social inclusion and marginalization. In a culture where bodies of people who are brown, black, female, transgender, disabled, fat, or queer are often shamed, sexualized, ignored, and oppressed, what does it mean to live in a marginalized body? This anthology explores how power, privilege, oppression, and attempted disembodiment play out on the bodies of disparaged individuals.

When it comes to health, there is one criminally overlooked element: sleep. Good sleep helps you shed fat for good, stave off disease, stay productive, and improve virtually every function of your mind and body. That's what Shawn Stevenson learned when a degenerative bone disease crushed his dream of becoming a professional athlete. Like many of us, he gave up on his health and his body...until he decided there must be a better way.

Healing Sex is the encouraging, sex-positive guide for all women survivors of sexual assault- heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian, coupled, and single - who want to delight in their own sexuality. While most books on the topic broach sexuality to reassure women that it's 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.

Anxiety affects more than forty million Americans—a number that continues to climb in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. While conventional medicine tends to view anxiety as a “neck-up” problem—that is, one of brain chemistry and psychology—the truth is that the origins of anxiety are rooted in the body. In The Anatomy of Anxiety, holistic psychiatrist Dr. Ellen Vora offers nothing less than a paradigm shift in our understanding of anxiety and mental health, suggesting that anxiety is not simply a brain disorder but a whole-body condition.

Stress is our internal response to an experience that our brain perceives as threatening or challenging. Trauma is our response to an experience in which we feel powerless or lacking agency. Until now, researchers have treated these conditions as different, but they actually lie along a continuum. Dr. Elizabeth Stanley explains the significance of this continuum, how it affects our resilience in the face of challenge, and why an event that's stressful for one person can be traumatizing for another.

Brittany Piper spent most of her life sitting across from conventional therapists recalling the painful stories of her trauma. But rehashing each harrowing event—being put into foster care as a baby, losing her brother in a car accident, enduring a brutal rape and a very public trial, and more—made her even more stuck. At a crossroads, she took her recovery into her own hands. On this journey, Brittany discovered emerging science that explains how and why trauma lives in our bodies, not in the story of what happened to us.

The first book offering support for parents and carers of children and young people with body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), this guidebook explains the condition as well as the impact that it may have in education settings, family life and socialisation. The guide begins by explaining how and why BDD emerges, before moving onto an exploration of how the mental health condition presents itself emotionally, psychologically, physically and behaviourally.

In the second book of the Uglies series, Tally's Pretty. And everything's changed. The new, Pretty Tally is totally happy right where she is. She doesn't think she needs any kind of cure at all. When someone from her Ugly life shows up with a message, Tally has a hard time listening. Did she really promise to give all this up? Is she bound by a promise she made when she was a different person?