Books - Narratives Therapy

Books

“We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our pasts and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes us one less of oneself. But it’s just the opposite, more is more is more– more bleeding, more giving. These things, details, stories, whatever are like the skin shed by snakes, who leave theirs for anyone to see. What does he care where it is, who sees it, this snake, and his skin? He leaves it where it molts. Hours, days or months later, we come across a snake’s long-shed skin and we know something of the snake, we know that it’s of this approximate girth and that approximate length, but we know very little else. Do we know where the snake is now? What the snake is thinking now? No. By now the snake could be wearing fur; the snake could be selling pencils in Hanoi. The skinks no longer his, he wore it because it grew from him, but then it dried and slipped off and he and everyone could look at it.”
Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Trauma

“How can I bear it; buried here,
While overhead the sky grows clear”
Edna St. Vincent Millay

(Nonfiction)

The Body Keeps the Score
by Bessel Van Der Kolk

Lucky
by
Alice Sebolt

The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion

Understanding the Borderline Mother
by Christine Ann Lawson

Anxiety

(Nonfiction)

First, We Make the Beast Beautiful
by Sarah Wilson

(Fiction)

First, We Make the Beast Beautiful
by Sarah Wilson

“Holly: You know those days when you get the mean reds?

Paul: The “mean reds?” You mean, like the blues?

Holly: No. The blues are because you’re getting fat or it’s been raining too long. You’re just sad, that’s all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid, and you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Don’t you ever get that feeling?”

Truman Capote, excerpt from Breakfast at Tiffany’s