Body Disorders

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Tally lives in a world where your 16th birthday brings aesthetic perfection: an operation that erases all your flaws, transforming you from an "Ugly" into a "Pretty". She is on the eve of this important event and cannot wait for her life to change. As well as guaranteeing supermodel looks, life as a Pretty seems to revolve around having a good time. But then she meets Shay, who is also 15 - but with a very different outlook on life.

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.

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?

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.

"Special Circumstances": The words have sent chills down Tally's spine since her days as a repellent, rebellious ugly. Back then Specials were a sinister rumor - frighteningly beautiful, dangerously strong, breathtakingly fast. Ordinary pretties might live their whole lives without meeting a Special. But Tally's never been ordinary. And now, in the third book in the series, Tally's been turned into a Special: a superamped fighting machine engineered to keep the uglies down and the pretties stupid.

After years of trying different therapies for his debilitating anxiety without success, Dr. Russell Kennedy had an epiphany: anxiety does not start in the brain. Anxiety starts in the body, where trauma is stored and physical and emotional perception begin. Alarm bells originating in the body are what trigger those anxious thoughts that we call anxiety, and Russ realized that true healing starts only when we learn not to conflate the two.

Extras, the final book in the Uglies series, is set a couple of years after the "mind-rain", a few earth-shattering months in which the whole world woke up. The cure has spread from city to city, and the pretty regime that kept humanity in a state of bubbleheadedness has ended. Boundless human creativity, new technologies, and old dangers have been unleashed upon the world.

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.

Have you ever thought that if only you could change something about the way you looked, your life would be better? But the truth is that even if you were to magically attain the “perfect” body right now, your problems wouldn’t be solved. Because body image issues are never just about the body. Body image issues are always about something deeper, and they always serve some kind of purpose.

Mainstream health science has let you down. Weight loss is not the key to health, diet and exercise are not effective weight-loss strategies, and fatness is not a death sentence. Body Respect debunks common myths about weight, including the misconceptions that BMI can accurately measure health, that fatness necessarily leads to disease, and that dieting will improve health. The authors also help make sense of how poverty and oppression - such as racism, homophobia, and classism - affect life opportunity, self-worth, and even influence metabolism.

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.

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.