In 2024, I challenged myself to read one book a month. This proved to be my most successful New Year’s resolution ever, resulting in reading over two books a month. Since beginning graduate school (many moons ago), I have almost exclusively focused on reading psychology books. While that trend continued this year, I read a little fiction as well! I want to highlight some of the psychology and self-help books I found most helpful.
The Gap and the Gain by Dan Sullivan
I would highly recommend this as a book to help create New Year’s resolutions. For my perfectionists out there, it teaches how “gap” thinking leads to misery and how to look at the “gain” to overcome unhelpful perfectionism.
The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman
Yes, we’ve all heard of the love languages, but I’m not sure we’re accurate in our assessments of ourselves. This book has a lot more detail than we know in popular culture and helps to put the understanding of your and others’ love languages into action.
When Your Teen Has an Eating Disorder by Lauren Mulheim
This book outlines for parents how to engage in Family Based Treatment (FBT; or the Maudsley approach), the most highly recommended treatment for teens with eating disorders. More on this below.
That’s Disgusting by Rachel Herz
Okay, this one might bore you if you’re not a psychologist. But I’m very interested in how disgust is implicated in the OCD-spectrum disorders (contamination obsessions, ARFID, body dysmorphia, etc.). A better understanding disgust is informing my work with patients.
Rattled by Nicole Pensak
This is a great book for preparing for and better understanding treatment of potential postpartum mental health conditions. I would recommend it to anyone preparing for motherhood.
Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn
The founder of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) explains mindfulness. This is likely for more intermediate-level learning about mindfulness and meditation strategies.
Bad Therapy by Abigail Shrier
This book is so counter to therapy culture. It challenged me and I don’t agree with every word in it. I would recommend it to any parent as a counterbalance to the overload of social media parenting advice. Some people might be turned off by the author’s seemingly conservative political views, but I think it’s important to take in a different perspective.
Scarcity Brain by Michael Easter
Our little monkey brains are used to scarcity and don’t know how to handle this current world of abundance. This book explains dopamine better than any academic paper I’ve read and it helps to teach how to use the scarcity mindset to our advantage.
Little Treatments, Big Effects by Jessica Schleider
Single Sessions Interventions (SSIs) are here to stay! This book explains the power of little “aha” moments in the mental health journey and the usefulness of single time points in therapy. I’ll have a follow-up blog post on this one...
The Marshmallow Test by Walter Mischel
You’ve probably heard of the marshmallow test: it shows how long children are able to delay gratification. This book explains much more in-depth the importance of self-control and how to use principles from this test to improve your life.
Bonus: Continuing Education
In addition to reading, as a psychologist, I focused on getting more training in some specific areas this year. I want to share a few areas of learning...
Eating Disorders
I learned much more about “atypical anorexia,” which is when someone meets all of the criteria for anorexia except being underweight (meaning that they are either an average weight or overweight). Unfortunately, atypical anorexia can be just as deadly and detrimental to health, but it is less likely to be recognized because its sufferers are not as easily identified by sight. I am very concerned that many patients within the OCD community have atypical anorexia and are not being identified for treatment beyond ERP (which would be the top two evidence-based treatments for eating disorders, FBT and CBT-Enhanced).
OCPD
I learned a new intervention called STAIR that is used to manage the interpersonal and emotion regulation difficulties within OCPD. I look forward to continuing to work with people with OCPD, because very few people actually specialize in treating this disorder.
PCIT
I was able to attend the PCIT Convention in Knoxville, TN this year! The research confirms that virtual PCIT might actually have better outcomes than in-office PCIT. It was so nice to be with a community that understands this work. As many of my families could tell you, PCIT seems to strange until it starts working really well.
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