10 Self-Help Books Recommended by A Therapist
As someone who loves reading them, I do think most self-help books are extremely overrated. Many of them over promise and are badly researched. A lot make overarching assumptions and give catchy but oversimplified solutions. It’s easy to understand why; we’re much more likely to pick up the book that promises to change our life within 30 days, 10 simple steps, or, my favourite, a singular phrase (Mel Robbins, I’m looking at you). And sure, some of these might offer something helpful, but I think the best ones do something different.
As a therapist, I often recommend books to my clients that help reveal patterns about their lives or an understanding of something internal or external they might have otherwise missed. A good book might not be able to altogether replace experiential learnings, but sometimes they can help provide language for things you couldn’t name before.
In this article, I share 10 books I recommend for exactly that reason.
1. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents by Lindsay Gibson
Because of the clients I tend to work with, this has become one of my most recommended books. If you’ve ever found yourself stuck in a guilt to resentment loop with one or both of your parents, both needing their love and approval deeply, but simultaneously feeling angry at them for not seeing you and meeting your needs, this might be the book for you.
In Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, psychologist Lindsay Gibson explores what happens when parents are unable to provide the emotional attunement, empathy, and responsiveness that children need. She very accurately breaks down how children can become overly self-reliant, emotionally lonely, or preoccupied with managing their parents’ reactions.
One of the reasons I recommend this book so often is that it gives people an explanation for something that is often very confusing. You might have had a parent who loves you and who took care of your physical needs, but who could not meet your emotional needs. They might have changed the topic when you talked about something upsetting, told you you’re too sensitive, or made the issue about themselves. It might have gotten to the point where you knew if you talked to them about an issue you were having, you’d have to take care of your parent’s feelings before you were allowed to have your own.
When children grow up in these environments, they learn to adapt. They become the easy, responsible child, who doesn’t need much, and is in charge of a lot. These adaptations follow us into adulthood where these same children become chronic people-pleasers, struggle to figure out their own needs, and feel deeply guilty when someone is disappointed in them.
Gibson’s book can help you understand that these patterns didn’t come out of nowhere. If you’d like to learn more, read How to Heal from Emotionally Immature Parenting.
2. Fawning by Ingrid Clayton
Most of us know about fight and flight, some of us know about freeze, but very few of us know about fawning; the fourth trauma response.
Clayton’s Fawning breaks down what happens when keeping other people happy becomes a way of staying safe. Many of my clients find themselves in situations where they completely abandon themselves in order to please someone else. For example, someone might say something unprompted and offensive to you, and your first instinct is to ease the tension rather than address the comment.
If your instinct when someone is upset is to immediately apologize, fix the situation, make yourself smaller, or figure out what the other person needs before considering what you need, this book may help you identify why, and what to do. You may have spent years being praised for being thoughtful, easygoing, understanding, or selfless growing up without realizing that some of these behaviours are connected to a fear of conflict, rejection, or abandonment.
Fawning isn’t a personality trait, but a development that occurred during a time when being attuned to other people’s moods was important. If you grew up in an unpredictable environment, you may have learned to scan the room before acting on any associated feeling. You learned when someone was angry, when to apologize, when to stay quiet, and what you could do to make things feel okay again. The tricky thing about fawning is that it can be a useful strategy, and Clayton honours that while also recognizing that it’s absolutely exhausting. Fawning can be helpful for anyone who has spent years feeling that they could either choose to be authentic or stay connected with others, but could never have both.
3. What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo
What My Bones Know is an incredible memoir that can help you understand trauma not only as something that happened, but that continues to influence how you experience yourself and the world around you. Foo explores her experience with C-PTSD and the impact of childhood abuse, neglect, intergenerational trauma, and abandonment, while also exploring the different approaches she encountered in her own healing. What makes the book particularly compelling is that Foo doesn’t suggest that recovery is a simple or linear process; she shows what it can actually look like to try to understand yourself after years of experiences that shaped your nervous system, relationships, and sense of self.
This is a tough book to read; Foo even includes a preamble where she tells the readers to skip several chapters if they experience strong triggers. I don’t recommend it to everyone, but I often recommend it to people who feel frustrated because they already understand where their patterns come from but still can’t seem to change them. Knowing intellectually that your childhood affected you doesn’t necessarily mean your body will stop reacting as though you’re still living in that environment. One of the valuable things about Foo’s story is that it makes room for this complexity. Living with issues like the ones she experiences isn’t necessarily about reaching a point where you are never triggered again, but about developing a different relationship with those triggers and learning that you have more choices in the present than you did in the past.
4. It’s Okay That You’re Not Okay by Megan Devine
We are so, so, so uncomfortable with grief. When someone is grieving, our usual knee-jerk reaction is to make it better, say the right thing, reassure the person that things will eventually be okay. It makes sense; we have an instinct to fix things, but if you’re the person grieving you know that this instinct sucks. If you’re the person supporting, you might not know what else to do. Devine’s It’s OK That You’re Not OK offers a different way of understanding and reacting to grief and loss. Rather than treating painful emotions as problems that need to be solved, Devine explores what it means to make space for grief and recognize that some experiences simply hurt because they matter to us.
Devine does a good job at helping people grieving deal with the immediate and longer term after math. She also helps the usually well-meaning but misguided supporters figure out what we can do to actually help the person grieving. So, whether you’ve lost someone, or someone you care about has lost someone, Devine offers a way forward to make it just a little bit more survivable.
5. Fight Right by John and Julie Gottman
Every single couple experiences conflict. The question isn’t whether you and your partner will disagree, but how you handle your disagreements. Fight Right is probably my most recommended couples book because it’s so science-backed and so incredibly pragmatic. In it, relationship researchers John and Julie Gottman explore how couples can approach conflict without turning every disagreement into World War III.
The Gottmans offer a different way of looking at conflict, one that involves understanding the deeper emotional needs underneath the argument. A disagreement about dishes may actually be about feeling unsupported, for example. This doesn’t mean that every disagreement has some hidden psychological explanation, but it can be helpful to remember that couples are often arguing about much more than the thing that initially started the conversation. It’s even more helpful to understand what we can do about it; Fight Right is, in many ways, a really useful and practical handbook for how to better deal with relationship conflict.
6. Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski
Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are is a book I recommend to anyone who has questions about sexuality, desire, or the feeling that something about their sexual experience isn’t “normal.” Nagoski draws on research to explore the many factors that influence sexuality, including stress, body image, relationships, expectations, and our sense of safety. One of the most helpful messages in the book is that there isn’t one universal formula for desire, even though many of us grow up believing that there is supposed to be one.
This can be particularly important for people who assume that something is wrong with them because their desire doesn’t look the way they think it should. Stress may make it difficult to feel sexual, you may not experience “spontaneous desire” very often, you may have become disconnected from your body, or may struggle to stay present during sex.
Instead of approaching these experiences from a place of shame, Nagoski encourages readers to become curious about the conditions that make desire and pleasure possible for them. She gives useful insights about how we can feel safe, connected, and relaxed enough to experience pleasure.
7. No Bad Parts by Richard C. Schwartz
This is essential reading for any Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapist, but the language and tools are applicable for absolutely anyone who has ever felt like different parts of them want different things. Whether part of you wants to leave a relationship while another is scared of being alone, one wants to set a boundary while the other feels guilty, or one wants to rest while another tells you that you’re being lazy, this book is a goldmine of internal understanding. Schwartz’s No Bad Parts introduces readers to the IFS model, which understands these conflicting internal experiences as different “parts” of ourselves rather than evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with us.
Rather than asking yourself why you’re so anxious, avoidant, controlling, or self-critical, you can begin asking what that part of you is trying to accomplish. Your inner critic may be incredibly harsh, but perhaps it learned that perfection was the safest way to avoid criticism or rejection. The part of you that wants to withdraw whenever someone gets too close may not actually be trying to sabotage your relationships; it may be trying to protect you from getting hurt. You don’t have to agree with every part of yourself or let every impulse dictate your behaviour, but learning to listen to yourself without immediately going to war with yourself can change the way you relate to your own emotions.
8. Mating in Captivity by Esther Perel
This book speaks to one of the most tense truths of any relationship; the things that create emotional intimacy aren’t always the same things that create erotic desire. We want familiarity, security, and emotional closeness with our partners, but desire may need novelty, independence, mystery, and the sense that the other person is separate from us. Perel explores this tension in Mating in Captivity, looking at what happens to erotic desire within long-term relationships and why love and sexual desire don’t always operate according to the same rules.
This can be an important book for couples who assume that a change in sexual desire automatically means something is wrong with their relationship. We can become partners, parents, roommates, caregivers, and best friends, and sometimes the intimate part of the relationship gets lost somewhere along the way. Changes in desire can be a normal part of long-term relationships, and there are things we can do to address that. Perel encourages readers to think more deeply about the relationship between intimacy and desire rather than assuming that one naturally guarantees the other. You can deeply love someone and still experience changes in attraction. Understanding that complexity can make it much easier to have an honest conversation about what is happening.
9. Eight Dates by Doug Abrams, John M. Gottman, Julie Gottman, and Rachel Carlton Abrams
The Gottmans seem to have captured my heart and mind; they’re the only ones who get two books recommended on this list!
Eight Dates is a book, but also, kind of a program, made to help couples more openly communicate with one another about some of the topics that matter the most. Like the title suggests, the authors split the book up into eight dates which give readers the opportunity to have eight different conversations.
I like this book because it turns the vague advice to “communicate better” into something concrete. Telling a couple to communicate more doesn’t necessarily tell them what to talk about, how to bring up difficult subjects, or what to do when they discover that they have very different expectations.
The book can also be useful for couples who aren’t currently experiencing major problems. We tend to think about relationship work as something we need to do when things are going badly, but relationships benefit from intentional attention even when there isn’t a crisis. Having conversations about your expectations, values, dreams, and fears before they become sources of conflict can help couples understand each other on a deeper level. You don’t have to wait until your relationship is struggling to start asking each other meaningful questions.
10. What Happened to You by Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey
At the core of this book is the belief that we should be shifting questions around trauma-related behaviour away from, “What’s wrong with you?” and towards “What happened to you?” In What Happened to You?, psychiatrist and trauma expert Dr. Bruce Perry and Oprah Winfrey explore the relationship between trauma, adversity, brain development, and behaviour. Through personal stories and clinical perspectives, the book encourages readers to consider how our experiences can shape the ways we respond to the world around us.
This doesn’t mean that everything we do can be explained by trauma, that we’re helpless to what happened, or that our past determines our future. Rather, the question creates an opportunity for curiosity.
- Why does this particular situation feel so threatening to me?
- Why do I shut down when someone raises their voice?
- Why do I need so much reassurance?
- Why do I become controlling when I feel uncertain?
Sometimes the answers become clearer when we look at what we’ve experienced in the past. A behaviour that seems irrational in the present may have once been a very reasonable adaptation to the environment we grew up in, and this book does a great job in helping us understand that.
Looking for Therapy in Toronto?
I hope you’ve found something in this list that’s of use to you. If you’re looking for more support than self-help books can offer, don’t hesitate to reach out. At Melano Therapy, I offer guided, informed support for a variety of concerns including childhood trauma, couples issues, emotional regulation, and more. If you’re interested, you can contact me via email or book a free consultation call and we can discuss whether we’d be a good fit.
Want to learn more? Check out these articles:
5 Science-Backed Tips That Can Strengthen Your Relationship
The “Good Child” Syndrome: Making Sense of Perfectionism and Guilt
“We’ve Become Roommates”: How to Rebuild Intimacy in a Long-Term Relationship
What is Parentification? Signs, Important Impacts, and Healing
