Dr. Buckley's Self-Help Book Blog

Welcome

Here, I share my impressions of self-help books that I consider to be of the highest quality, as a psychologist in private practice.  They have all in some way been very helpful to me and my clients, as well as to friends and family.  

It's 2020, and this blog is archival while I work on other writing projects.  The books here are mostly 'classics' in self-help at this point.  Most people check the subject index for books on topics that interest them.

As you peruse this blog, please understand that self-help books are only as useful as they are relevant to your problem or goal.  So, if you need general help understanding what's wrong in your life situation or deciding what it is you really want to accomplish, talking to a licensed mental health professional recommended to you by someone you respect is usually the best place to start.

Whether you are a therapist or layperson, I've provided links to find these books.  Just click on the book titles that are in green typeface.

For new (2020) recommended articles and news about self-help and psychology, you can also follow me on Twitter @DrEJBuckley 

Thanks, and enjoy!

How to Evaluate Self-Help in 2013

For a time, it seemed there were no more experts in self-help.

What's that, you say?  What about all the authors mentioned on this blog?  What about Dr. Phil?

But perhaps you have noticed our global publishing tendencies have buried the good stuff in heaps of undistinguishable e-books, blog posts, and even large publisher books that are not well-edited (or sometimes not even read through by the publisher--yikes!)  If your temperament puts you on the attention-deficit spectrum, you can waste a lot of time reading advice that is repetitive, derivative, or hypocritical.  Conversely, you can skip some things that might be truly worthwhile.

For example, how do you choose what to read, or how to look at it, when you pick up a magazine that purports to curate the best self-help from experts?  

It doesn't take long to notice that Oprah magazine's 'experts' are sometimes thoughtful or reassuring, and other times odd and unrealistic, with their ideas.  If you are under 50, you can file these away as being entertainment as often as helpful advice.  If you are old enough to appreciate Dear Abby, clip and save, or send, the relevant columns you find in self-help.  But don't take them too seriously.

At the other end of the popular self-improvement magazine spectrum is the more scientifically-oriented Psychology Today, which elucidates some fascinating everyday phenomena such as sociopathic behavior, without being too dry or wordy.  But not everything in PT is research-based.  Some of it is impressionistic and abbreviated, if thought-provoking. You can read it to 'keep up' with psychology, but do think for yourself.

Oddly, I came across a memorable article on how to get over a disturbing event in Refinery 29, an online magazine I usually experience as a source of interesting hair advice(!)  It featured an interview with a psychologist and a life coach.  The wisdom presented by the former was right on, and was given more space than the usual short quote.  The behavioral suggestions by the latter seemed like they would need the addition of some training in self-hypnosis to work.  All in all, though, a nice surprise.  

Likewise, I recently gave a second look to a book for women on dating... by a young male entrepreneur.  When sharing my positive impression of the book--which is basically a Dale Carnegie approach to how to have a better love life--I raised the hackles of a more politically-correct colleague.  "If men behaved better, women wouldn't have any dating problems... " or words to that effect.  A fascinating subject for debate.

One of the benefits of having access to practically anything on the internet--and having things constantly pitched to you there--is that you get to be surprised by the sources you have to consider.  The temptation--or need--to give attention to all kinds of sources these days reminds me of Jerry Springer's (prior to scripted reality television) candid defense of the presentation of people fighting on his show:  "These people are actually just being really honest." 

So perhaps the challenge in looking for self-help these days is in doing our own assessment of the honesty of what falls across the computer screen, the doctor's office coffee table, or the real or virtual self-help bookshelves.  

Be discerning, but not a snob.

Meet the Sex, Love, and Romance Addictions

Most therapists I know seem to now have at least a cursory understanding of these addictions, or are rushing to get some training in the subject, because of the scandals that have been in the news the last two years. They are getting to know, in more depth, the inherent addictive qualities--as well as their compulsive manifestations--of sex, love, and romance. Rob Weiss, MSW, a leading trainer in the field, recently tweeted how impressed he was with the expected turnout (in the hundreds) for his recent presentation in Orlando. (I have to believe that, although these addictions are often interrelated with the substance addictions, sex addiction is still a bit more titillating, and therefore more attractive, to a broad range of professionals. Other addictions never attracted so much treatment attention so fast!)  

According to Patrick Carnes, the pioneering theorist of process addictions, these phenomena had been overlooked by most of us until the Clinton White House years. I went to hear him speak in London recently, and he was passionate about how--with our culture now steeped in easy sexuality, fast access to romance via the internet, and unhealthy, dependent love as common as your nearest relative--it behooves us all, as caring professionals and inward-looking laypeople, to be educated and alert to these forces working against our well-being in all spheres of life.

So, where to start in orienting professionals and those seeking help, when it comes to accessible books? A good book elucidating all three of these process addictions is Brenda Schaeffer's Is It Love or Is It Addiction? (2009, Hazelden.) Schaeffer explains how love addiction is about getting power over a love object, romance addiction is about attachment to the emotional rush of being in love, and sex addiction is about the compulsive use of sexuality as a drug, with negative consequences. All three reflect misguided attempts to heal old wounds resulting from childhood neglect and/or abuse.

Schaeffer's book, in my opinion, has a uniquely engaging self-test portion. As in most self-help books, there is a final chapter that is comprised of self-assessments and exercises. The assessments are not all-or-nothing: your current or past relationship may rate 'addictive' or problematic, but likely not problem-free. Thus, you can make subtle distinctions in your ways of functioning with different people in your life that reflect their complexity and relative 'healthiness'. Another strength to Schaeffer's exercises is that they are truly experiential. More than sentence completion, she uses imagery and visualization that call on non-verbal memories to spur creative processing.

So, whether professional or layperson, if you have been tempted to dismiss sex addiction as--as comedian Bill Maher recently put it--"something Dr. Drew made up to explain Andy Dick," perhaps you should take the time to acquaint yourself with what is damaging not just celebrities', but perhaps your own brother's, relationships. If you've always wondered how nice people can slide into stalking, read about love addiction. And if your wife is addicted to romance novels, perhaps you should try to understand the 'high' she is going after, and what it means in the context of your relationship.  These compelling phenomena, like the smartphone, are not going away anytime soon.

This post was  originally published in 2011.

Encountering Sociopathy in Everyday Life

Looking back on my years of practice, it's hard to remember a trauma-resolution case where the impact of an antisocial character in the environment was not an issue somewhere in the client's emotional makeup. Martha Stout's 2005 book The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us (Broadway Books) explores the astonishing variety of ways sociopathy expresses itself in our personal narratives. We take for granted the existence of a bad seed neighbor, the creepy boss, the parasitic ex-spouse. Yet, if we look at the source of our most persistent emotional disturbances, the things we find it hardest to 'get over', it's sometimes the overwhelming experience of the actions of such a person that we observe there. So much evil from one person. Is it possible?

It is.

Much of my reason for using the EMDR approach in my practice is to help people eliminate overpowering, anxiety-provoking, stuck, negative emotion that is the result of having been abused or exploited by someone who does not have a conscience.

In eludicidating the sociopathic character, Stout compares it to a neighbor cat who intimidates even her big Bengal feline. I, too, had a neighbor cat like that once. "Libby" stalked the close perimeter of our house at any hour looking to make eye contact with our unsuspecting indoor cats, Hitchcock-style, through the screen and the glass of any of our windows and doors.   As soon as she had it, she'd jump and splay her body, claws first, into the screen, prompting feline screams of terror. Our cats weren't angry, they were frightened. They were rendered uttterly insecure, in their own locked home.

It's fear that you have to listen to in your own human existence. Your instincts are trying to tell you something. People often repeat disturbing relationships through the lifespan because they have learned to override their instincts about another person. Generally, this is learned early in a traumatic parent-child relationship. The presence of an intimidating and remorseless parent discourages the development of many healthy defenses.

If your find yourself mixed up with the wrong sort of person, remember first that it is hardly likely that you are the first to have experienced them this way. Then, Stout argues, get out. Totally out. Sociopaths don't have to be murderers to do a lot of damage.

Fortunately our cats were relieved of their tormentor after some months. One afternoon, I found myself out on the curb, chatting with our neighbor cat's owner. He offered that he was moving back to his home country in the Middle East, having finished his doctorate here. Libby would be quarantined for some time once she arrived back in her homeland. At first I thought this prison term was justice for our cats. Then I thought of the emotional well-being of her future inmates. It concerned me a little. I blurted out, "Libby's really mean!" I figured even if this offended my neighbor, he was moving soon anyway. The consequences to me would be minimal. He only smiled half-heartedly and scraped the tip of his shoe on the ground thoughtfully. "I know," he said, "she's mean to us, too."

I recommend The Sociopath Next Door to anyone trying to understand what's going on in a persistently negative relationship that causes them fear. Therapists can find it helpful for clients who need to break through naivete about another person in order to make significant life changes.

The Sociopath Next Door is available at Amazon, on Kindle and on iBooks for iPad.

How to Write a Great Self-Help Book: Tip #3

Take the time to edit with all five senses.

Sight:

You want to write a beautiful book. Anything less just is not fair to any trees that might die for your printed work.

When print books were all you could get (many moons ago,) a writer fortunate enough to get published by a book company of any significance would have their work packaged by professional editors and designers. The result was a clean text proofread to the letter, intelligently selected fonts, and an artistic jacket that made buyers want to display the book like a status symbol.

Now, sales to younger buyers are via e-book, and you can thank the anonymity of the e-reader gateway for not personally associating you with the boring or silly padded covers that are sold for the devices. I am pleased to have an iPad (it saves certain natural resources), but I have yet to find a cover that is worthy of it.

For first time print book self-publishers (at whom I am aiming these three posts), the first order of business is making sure you have no obvious typos. Nothing takes away the smooth experience of drinking in a book as do careless visual errors left in. And unlike in a blog, you cannot go back and fix the mistake after it is published. Have at least one patient and careful reader friend scan your book or preliminary copy (galley) after you have spell-checked it electronically.

Assuming that you have any choice at all in what the cover and typesetting will look like, ask a genuinely talented artistic friend to give you some input, and see if you agree with their assessment. A high quality self-help book deserves to be eye-catching, and a well-chosen cover may earn it a place on the office bookshelf of some influential book collector. Self-published books often have a bland cover that reminds me of the little booklets at the supermarket check-out. They have a did-it-myself look that signals an unworthy read, whether that's really the case or not.

Next up: How does your book sound?

How to Become More Effective

I'm about to talk to you about another oldie-but-goodie, business and leadership consultant Steven Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change (2004, Simon and Schuster, Inc.)  Originally published in 1989, this book popularized some really annoying--yet somehow irreplaceable?-- buzzwords such as 'proactive', 'synergy', and 'win/win'.  Unlike psychology research, however, (most of which ages out at about 10 years), a really good self-help book written during the Me Decade is like an old Rolling Stones song.  Each time you re-experience it, it makes you want to stand up, shake the dust off your booty and move. 

That's how I felt about reading the Seven Habits recently, having for some reason only enjoyed it in the form of a page-a-day calendar previously.  Clearly this has been a highly influential book, promoting notions of work-life balance, the importance of good (empathic) listening skills, the idea that 'everyone is a leader', having a personal vision regardless of who you work for, walking your spiritual talk at work as well as everywhere else in your life, and organizing your activities according to a coherent set of principle-based priorities that you set on a daily basis.  The field of executive coaching owes a lot to Covey, whose powerful system has been restated a thousand times, but never outsold.

For me, as a psychologist, one of the most resonant ideas in the book is the notion of personal development from dependency, through independence, to interdependence.  You can't properly work as an equal beside others in the world until you accept responsibility for what happens to you.  And once you become independent, you have to begin to see yourself as part of a network of beings that rely on each other for service, and serve each other.  You can't fully succeed unless others succeed, and vice versa.  This is the course of a good relationship of equals, no matter the context: business, marriage, religious communities or the interface of the corporate and natural environments. Win/win... or no deal!  

'Proactive', of course, is business-speak for taking the initiative.  I noticed Covey reverts to the softer term 'initiative' in his forward to the 2004 edition of his book.  Since the forward addresses the increase in anxiety everywhere since the original publication of the book, this seems somehow reassuring.

'Synergy' refers to the blossoming of creative potential that happens when people function together from a place of awareness of their interdependent relationships with each other, intentionality, and good self-care.  It isn't Covey's fault if the term was bandied about in advertising for companies that weren't very good at communicating their true mission to the rest of us.

Like most self-help books, this one contains exercises to work through.  These are robust in their simplicity and take-to-work applicability.  I have been using his principle- and priority-based scheduling to rebalance my own time and energy.  I don't get everything that's on the list done every week, but as it is organized by the various 'roles' that I play throughout my life, I get something notable done for each role each week.  Covey admits it is hard work to follow his own program to the letter, and that he himself is very much a work-in-progress.  Perfectionism is not the object here, however: purposefully balancing where you put your energy is. 

Rick Blum's Gift to Therapists

The Tao of Your Psychotherapy Practice: How to Best Serve Your Clients While Maximizing Your Professional Freedom (2011, The Paradoxical Press) is psychologist Rick Blum's testimonial on building and maintaining a successful cash practice during the managed-care era.  While this book is aimed at all licensed mental health professionals, it comes at a moment when many private-practice psychologists are in an existential crisis. Do we succumb to what seems like a gradual de-professionalization through drastically lowered insurance reimbursement rates? Should we fight/negotiate for more? Will we have to perhaps go to work in settings we are not as well suited to, to make ends meet?  Blum does not attack this environmental pressure directly.  He uses the force of its momentum to make a point about private practice psychotherapy: ultimately, you are in charge of how you practice.

This is really a book about working in our field with integrity and thriving because of it.  To do that, these days, you need to understand the true value of what you do by being in touch with your philosophical/spiritual essence.  Then, you have to act in all of your roles according to these real values, be it with clients, case managers, paperwork or fee setting.  He uses his own practice/metaphor of Aikido to illustrate this.  It is really a rare window into a practice that rests on deep caring, genuine knowledge, and coherent method.       

The book has another aspect to it that should appeal to graduate students and trainees not yet licensed, who may be considering a private practice career.  He goes into great detail about the quality of his interactions with clients, sharing more than many of one's clinical supervisors ever will.  Indeed, Blum has taught and supervised in a humanist vein for some time.  His approach is nonetheless more integrative than psychotherapy research is generally comfortable with.  But it is far more like what most clinicians actually do, and find works, in the real world. 

If you are just looking for some quick tips on how to shift to a cash practice--and you work in a region that is not too competitive--you can certainly skip to the last part of the book and try out some of his ideas. But deciding you are worth such a shift in your relationship to the psychotherapy market, and then behaving as though you are, involves an organic process that might be helped by examining Blum's successful example in its entirety.  

The Tao of Your Psychotherapy Practice is available in paperback at Amazon.com.

 

How to Write a Great Self-Help Book: Tip #2

Make sure your book is really about something.

Books--like blogs--can be boring, unoriginal, lack a theme or direction, and sometimes they are not even about a problem.  Don't be that writer.

Pick a topic based on something you really have a passion for.  People want to travel excitedly with you.  Otherwise, the laundry awaits.  You don't even have to have a thousand things to say about it, if your idea is really clear and compelling.  

Take, for example, John Gray.  I've read two of his books, and they are so plainspoken and internally repetitive that I was able to read them in twenty-four hours each.  He took a great idea that meant something to him, previously written about in a scholarly style by Deborah Tannen, and made it accessible to the rest of the human race.  Now, thanks to him (whether they like it or not), most of the world is familiar with the idea that men and women have some fundamentally different relationship needs that they communicate differently about, too.  

Which leads me to the second aspect of topic choice: being original.  Seriously, Pema Chodron did not steal your idea.  Be familiar with the rest of what's been said on your topic of interest.  No excuses.  It's easy to research it using the internet.  Then ask yourself how your idea is different, or whether you can present an existing one in a way that makes it more accessible, or--if you're ambitious enough to enter the world of smartphone apps--more fun! 

Now, what is your theme and where do you want to go with it?  You have a collection of wise writings (yours, of course) that are unrelated.  Stop.  What is the thematic thread that runs through these pearls, that you really care about?  Make a collection around this theme, and take longer to write more related entries, if necessary.  Then give the book some organizing principle that will make it easy to navigate, such as the daily calendar, or a specific title to each entry that you can list in the table of contents.  If all you have is a collection of somewhat random inspirational writings, with no way to find a particular one, then that and a beautiful cover will make a nice coffee table book for a few bed-and-breakfasts.  But it is not a cohesive self-help book.

Lastly, a compelling self-help book tries to solve a problem.  In fact, more and more, the public and its concerns are driving topics experts write on.  Psychotherapist Mira Kirshenbaum (in my opinion, the best published self-help writer out there) crowd-sourced her latest--upcoming--book's topic through her website.  Shoot, it may not be too late to give her your opinion on her cover design, if you go over there right now!  (I'm not kidding.)  

At the very least, ask your friends what they'd like you to write on.  

They'll be eager to see it.

How to Write a Great Self-Help Book: Tip #1

I've been away from my blog for a little while. I'm taking a creative writing class at a local college, and seeing what else I can write these days that's not 'technical writing'. It has me thinking about what separates the great self-help books from the nice effort, but... ones.

These days, anyone can publish an e-book or self-publish, and it seems like everyone is trying it. I'd like to find some really wonderful new self-help books to talk about on my blog that are not by established, big-name authors. I've been sent a number of self-published, or (very) small publisher ones, and I've noticed some charming bits and some unappealing trends. So I thought I would put together a list of tips to help people decide how--or whether--to try to write a self-help book that people might really want to read.

Tip #1: Be an expert in your field, or consult one (or more)

By expert, I mean credentialled, practiced, experienced and generally credible. In other words, it's not just you that thinks you have something to say on the subject.  Most other people would think so, too.

Testimonial books by non-experts (e.g., the story of your successful divorce) can be really inspiring, but if you are going to give advice at all in the context of the book, get one or more professionals involved to make sure this is truly wise advice that will not hurt anyone, and could really help. Better yet, just stick to your narrative and make it genuine and personal (Eat Pray Love is one successful example of this approach.)  Journalist Abigail Trafford, author of Crazy Time--the classic what-divorce-feels-like-and-what-to-expect-book-- did both, by gathering in a number of expert advisors and telling her own story within an educative context.  You only need one honest collaborator to make your book more 'expert', though.

More tips in my next post...

 

Dating from the Heart

Charlotte Kasl's If the Buddha Dated:A Handbook for Finding Love on a Spiritual Path (2002, Penguin Group) reverently articulates the 'meaningful relationship' in the way only a spiritually enlightened psychologist can. Kasl encourages the interior search of the gentle reader with great sensitivity, acknowledging that finally entering the dating world with clear intention is stepping into "the sacred fire." I was delighted to see her illustrate the evolution of the personal ad from superficial to spiritual, finally capturing the essence of what you are/want, with many examples. But it's hard to flip through this book and just find that chapter. You have to work through it as a process, much as you do with Mira Kirschenbaum's books on evaluating partner relationships.

Kasl's approach is so delicate and thorough that you feel as though you are participating in a transformative workshop on the first reading. I wanted to take in the book slowly, line-by-line, just as I did when reading Freud as an undergraduate, or the Bible as a child. (Oh, well, there's always a second and third time through.) One message that particularly stands out is her frank admonition to "resolve unfinished business with family, friends, past lovers or spouses." Yes, she tells you exactly how to do that, in detail. While the content that follows is clearly twelve-step inspired, I can't help thinking that only a fellow EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) therapist would suggest you could resolve things--if only internally--within the time it takes to work through a good self-help book!

As a psychologist, I would recommend this book to single clients of any age who seem ready for a serious relationship at some level. This book was recommended to me not long ago by sex-addictions expert Rob Weiss, who suggested it as a how-to-date book. He notes that many courtship skills--both introspective and interpersonal--are never learned by those with childhood neglect and abuse histories.

There are those in my field who believe that men in their twenties today are generally not ready for deeply committed relationships, let alone marriage. The young men I meet in my practice, however, are bringing the social intelligence and inquisitiveness encouraged from early on by their boomer parents and/or teachers. They--as much as young women--want to know what's in store for them in the dating world, or what they might strive for.

These days, it seems, we all just want to make well-informed promises that we can keep.

If the Buddha Dated is available at Amazon.com in paperback and Kindle edition, and on iBooks for iPad.

 

The Hunter: ADHD and in Business

Once upon a time, ADHD was adaptive.

The author of ADHD Secrets of Success: Coaching Yourself to Fulfillment in the Business World (2002, SelectBooks, Inc.) is the first major proponent of the theory that people with the traits associated with ADHD were well adapted to prehistoric hunter/gatherer groups. In this book, Thom Hartmann discusses why farmers (the patient, detail-oriented folk who make up the rest of the population) have the advantage in middle management and other organizing roles, while hunters are natural at entrepreneurship and sales. The two do best in the modern world when partnered up for business, just as human beings first discovered in the few thousand years B.C. Today's average person is a genetic mix of the two types.

The hunter travelled across miles of tundra and woods in a day, taking all his wits and energy could catch and gather. Today, the hunter is lucky he's not completely extinct, since the early migrating farmers he eventually came in contact with lived in communities characterized by disease incubation, larger fighting armies and stable tool-developing societies.

Having recently revisited the hilly and river-fed Stonehenge area myself, however, it is easy to see how hunter/gatherers might be useful to the comfortable, less visionary farmers. The distractible, visually-oriented and impulsive individual can spot dangers and opportunities, change course quickly, and tolerate--and even enjoy--risk-taking. The hunter-gatherer trades his furs, medicinal woodland herbs and fruits, and traditional wisdom for the superior and always available nutritional products of the farmers. The hunter becomes the riverside night watchman and runner, and the farmer becomes his army.

It is a commonly heard maxim in the years since this book came out that you must partner up with those whose abilities are complementary to succeed. This is not to say that a legal partnership is in order (the author has some pointed warnings about these), but do divide the responsibilities of your workforce according to relative strengths, and do not allow yourself to be "promoted' into a management position that does not suit you.

This book is short, with short sentences. It is geared toward the ADHD reader, in other words. In addition to gathering a lot of quick tips, you may find you wish some of the ideas were 'unpacked' more. Nonetheless, it is a quick primer from a successful entrepreneur and ADHD facility director with much relevant experience and examples that he shares candidly.

I recommend this book to anyone with ADHD who wants to earn a better living by making their style work for them.