Take Control of OCD

Take Control of OCD: The Ultimate Guide for Kids With OCD is a unique guide just for kids ages 10–16 with obsessive compulsive disorder to help them take control of their disorder and find success in school and in life. Using a cognitive-behavioral therapy method to challenge obsessive thinking patterns and promote gradual exposure, the book takes kids step-by-step through a ladder-based process to conquer their fears and demolish their worries.

Focusing on helping kids change their obsessive thoughts, tolerate uncertainty, develop positive self-talk and stress management, advocate for their needs in school, find successful relaxation procedures, and face their fears, the book includes workbook-style pages for kids to complete. Along with sharing the thoughts and worries of real-life kids with OCD, the author also provides tons of advice, information, and ideas perfect for kids and teens wanting to overcome OCD. This handy guidebook is sure to help children with OCD change their behaviors and conquer their worries, discovering a sense of accomplishment and achievement.

Monkey Mind

Daniel Smith’s Monkey Mind is the stunning articulation of what it is like to live with anxiety. As he travels through anxiety’s demonic layers, Smith defangs the disorder with great humor and evocatively expresses its self-destructive absurdities and painful internal coherence. Aaron Beck, the most influential doctor in modern psychotherapy, says that “Monkey Mind does for anxiety what William Styron’s Darkness Visible did for depression.” Neurologist and bestselling writer Oliver Sacks says, “I read Monkey Mind with admiration for its bravery and clarity… I broke out into explosive laughter again and again.” Here, finally, comes relief and recognition to all those who want someone to put what they feel, or what their loved ones feel, into words.

Healing Walks for Hard Times

Sometimes life’s hurdles literally stop us in our tracks, sapping vitality and preventing us from participating fully in our own lives and the lives of those we love. Carolyn Scott Kortge recognizes that a key to joyous re-engagement with the world can be—just as literally—to get moving again. With a focus on walking for wellness, Kortge outlines a compassionate, practical program for navigating your way through life’s physical, emotional, and spiritual hard times.

Within the supportive framework of this eight-week walking program you set your own pace, taking steps that restore a sense of balance and order, even if you’re weighed down by the lethargy and loss of control that often accompany illness, depression, or trauma. Discover how to link mental focus with physical movement to create healing periods of stress release. Learn to match your steps with meditation in a way that clears a path through confusion. Move forward, literally, both in good times and in tough ones, with mental and physical steps that lead you away from fear or stress and guide you toward wellness and peace. Engage in a path to recovery that attends to not just the physical, but also acknowledges healing as an emotional, spiritual, and mental journey—a journey of survivorship.

Exercise for Mood and Anxiety

Exercise has long been touted anecdotally as an effective tool for mood improvement, but only recently has rigorous science caught up with these claims. There is now overwhelming evidence that regular exercise can help relieve low mood-from feelings of stress and anxiety to full depressive episodes.

With Exercise for Mood and Anxiety, Michael Otto and Jasper Smits, well-known authorities on cognitive behavioral therapy, take their empirically-based mood regulation strategy from the clinic to the general public. Written for those with diagnosed mood disorders as well as those who simply need a new strategy for managing the low mood and stress that is an everyday part of life, this book provides readers with step-by-step guidance on how to start and maintain an exercise program geared towards improving mood, with a particular emphasis on understanding the relationship between mood and motivation. Readers learn to attend carefully to mood states prior to and following physical activity in order to leverage the full benefits of exercise, and that the trick to maintaining an exercise program is not in applying more effort, but in arranging one’s environment so that less effort is needed. As a result readers not only acquire effective strategies for adopting a successful program, but are introduced to a broader philosophy for enhancing overall well-being. Providing patient vignettes, rich examples, and extensive step-by-step guidance on overcoming the obstacles that prevent adoption of regular exercise for mood, Exercise for Mood and Anxiety is a unique translation of scientific principles of clinical and social psychology into an action-based strategy for mood change.

Girl, Wash Your Face

Do you ever suspect that everyone else has life figured out and you don’t have a clue? If so, Rachel Hollis has something to tell you: that’s a lie.

As the founder of the lifestyle website TheChicSite.com and CEO of her own media company, Rachel Hollis developed an immense online community by sharing tips for better living while fearlessly revealing the messiness of her own life. Now, in this challenging and inspiring new book, Rachel exposes the twenty lies and misconceptions that too often hold us back from living joyfully and productively, lies we’ve told ourselves so often we don’t even hear them anymore.

With painful honesty and fearless humor, Rachel unpacks and examines the falsehoods that once left her feeling overwhelmed and unworthy, and reveals the specific practical strategies that helped her move past them. In the process, she encourages, entertains, and even kicks a little butt, all to convince you to do whatever it takes to get real and become the joyous, confident woman you were meant to be.

With unflinching faith and rock-hard tenacity, Girl, Wash Your Face shows you how to live with passion and hustle–and how to give yourself grace without giving up.

5 Survivors

Each year millions of people are afflicted by Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Most struggle to simply make it through the day as sights, sounds, and smells bring their life’s most harrowing experience front and center, to be relived again and again. And many are unaware of the root problem of these symptoms or are unwilling to admit one exists.

Through moving firsthand accounts, 5 Survivors sheds an intimate light on the impact of PTSD on three veterans of war, a survivor of Hurricane Katrina, and a victim of childhood sexual abuse. With courage and honesty, they tell their stories of trauma, revealing the struggles they faced later in life, and how they eventually worked toward positive change and healing.

With the guidance of PTSD expert and researcher Tracy Stecker, Ph.D., who outlines the symptoms and progress of each survivor, those living untreated with PTSD may see themselves in these stories, realize they are not alone, and take action to get help. Friends and family of those who have been greatly impacted by trauma will gain a more intimate understanding of a loved one’s struggle and pain.

My Age of Anxiety

As recently as thirty-five years ago, anxiety did not exist as a diagnostic category. Today, it is the most common form of officially classified mental illness. Scott Stossel gracefully guides us across the terrain of an affliction that is pervasive yet too often misunderstood.

Drawing on his own long-standing battle with anxiety, Stossel presents an astonishing history, at once intimate and authoritative, of the efforts to understand the condition from medical, cultural, philosophical, and experiential perspectives. He ranges from the earliest medical reports of Galen and Hippocrates, through later observations by Robert Burton and Søren Kierkegaard, to the investigations by great nineteenth-century scientists, such as Charles Darwin, William James, and Sigmund Freud, as they began to explore its sources and causes, to the latest research by neuroscientists and geneticists. Stossel reports on famous individuals who struggled with anxiety, as well as on the afflicted generations of his own family. His portrait of anxiety reveals not only the emotion’s myriad manifestations and the anguish anxiety produces but also the countless psychotherapies, medications, and other (often outlandish) treatments that have been developed to counteract it. Stossel vividly depicts anxiety’s human toll—its crippling impact, its devastating power to paralyze—while at the same time exploring how those who suffer from it find ways to manage and control it.

My Age of Anxiety is learned and empathetic, humorous and inspirational, offering the reader great insight into the biological, cultural, and environmental factors that contribute to the affliction.

Urges

Trichotillomania has been part of the life of Gary Hennerberg since the age of six. His personal story takes you deeply into his thoughts as he searches for ways to cope with the baffling urge to pull his hair. In this book, Gary reveals three ways he has learned to co-exist with trichotillomania: his faith, self-acceptance, and discovering his gifts and talents. This is a book of hope, inspiration and encouragement for people who feel isolated and powerless over trichotillomania and other mysterious compulsive disorders. As a child, Gary believed he was the only person in the world who pulled his hair and he kept his hair pulling urge a secret. Today we know trichotillomania (also called trich or TTM) is silently suffered by as many as 10 million people. Compulsive hair pulling creates deep shame and loss of self-esteem. While his prayers to stop the urge to pull his hair were never seemingly heard or answered, Gary later recognizes that his prayers were answered in unexpected ways.