Resource List

What I'm currently...

Watching: Masters of the Air on AppleTV

Reading: The Fox Wife by Yangsze Choo

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Resource List, topics listed A-Z:

Addiction

• Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke, nonfiction. Themes: understanding and leveraging brain chemistry to deal with addictive behaviors, the "pain-pleasure" principle.

• Heart of Addiction by Mark Shaw, nonfiction. Themes: understanding the emotional drivers underlying addictive behavior.

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ADHD

• Driven to Distraction and ADHD 2.0 by Hallowell & Ratey, nonfiction. Themes: the neuroscience of and evidence-based treatments for ADHD.

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Asian American Mental Health

• Permission to Come Home by Jenny Wang, PhD, nonfiction. An approachable book with Dr. Wang's personal reflections from life and practice, reviewing the themes relevant to Asian Americans in therapy. Has some helpful reflective exercises.

• Racial Dissociation, Racial Melancholia by Han & Eng, academic text. It's heady and dense, especially if you do not have background in psychoanalytic theory. But if you don't mind that, I've found it a helpful resource to understand how the psychological experiences of being Asian in America contributes to mental health struggles. Also separates the experiences of Gen X Asian Americans, who grew up under a more "colorblind" culture and millenials, which I found useful. 

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Complex & Intergenerational Trauma

• What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo, memoir, themes: personal experience with surviving childhood abuse in an Asian immigrant family, seeking treatment for C-PTSD. I'm really grateful this book exists because it's not an academic text on trauma. It's someone's real-life experience that people can connect to. 

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Grief, Loss, Death & Bereavement

• Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, memoir. Themes: loss of spouse,  language to express grief. 

• Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li, fiction (though I imagine heavily based on her own experience). Themes: suicide loss, continuing bonds with lost loved one, the semantics of death and grief. 

• A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis, memoir. Themes: loss of spouse to cancer, challenges to faith/spirituality, language to express grief.

• Rachel Getting Married, movie, starring Anne Hathaway. Themes: how each family member can experience the same death differently.

• Wandavision, television, starring Elizabeth Olsen. Themes: prolonged grief, the process of resolving grief

• The Invisible String and The Invisible Leash by Patrice Karsh, children's book. Themes: continuing bonds with loved ones (and pets) who have passed. (note: though a children's book I found it to be helpful for my own grief process and once read it aloud to an adult client)

• All There Is with Anderson Cooper, podcast. By their own description: "Do we ever move on from grief, or do we just learn to live with it? In Season 2 of All There Is, Anderson Cooper continues his deeply personal journey to understand his own feelings of grief in all its complexities, and in moving and honest discussions, learn from others who’ve experienced life-altering losses. All There Is with Anderson Cooper is about the people we lose, the people left behind, and how we can live on – with loss and with love." I found this really moving and comforting because I'm hearing other, real people, share vulnerably about their losses. 

• "Healing 2.0: Life After Loss" episode on Hidden Brain with Shankar Vedantnam, podcast. Shankar interviews Lucy Hone, a researcher and survivor of loss herself on how to live on after grief and how the "5 stages" aren't all that helpful (I happen to agree). 

• Ted Lasso, "No Weddings and a Funeral," S2E10. Themes: how different family members can grieve differently, the complicated nature of losing someone who also hurt you, how exposure to death makes us feel funny, how we can hold each other in grief... honestly there's so much in this episode.

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How We Think & Feel

• The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul and related Ezra Klein podcast. Themes: shifts our concept of the brain as a "computer," a cognition machine impervious to its environment, rather our brain is more sensitive to our environment than we realize. If you're stuck on a project, go outside and take a walk. See what happens. 

• Hidden Brain podcast, podcast, hosted by Shankar Vedantam. Themes: "science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships."

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Trauma

• Primers: Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman, Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. Where most classes and people start with when it comes to trauma because these were the books that shifted public understanding of what trauma is and how it works. 

• The Heart of Trauma by Bonnie Badenoch. I'm still working through it, but I appreciate how the book, though drawing on neuroscientific research, invites us to move out of our head and into our bodies. It provides a more hopeful roadmap toward healing and restoration. 

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