Welcome to Psych Central's review section. This is our primary repository for all of our book reviews on mental health, relationships, parenting, children, human behavior, and psychology.
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Book Review: Defining You
For people to reach their full potential, they need to first understand who they are. In Defining You, Fiona Murden offers her readers exercises that incorporate reflecting, collecting, and doing. Murden believes that when people spend time thinking about who they want to be... 
Book Review: Somebody Hold Me
Imagine sending an email to about a dozen friends proposing a four-hour get-together “to do a little experimentation around human touch.” You assure your friends that nothing sexual will be involved, clothes will stay on, and the gathering will not take place in a... 
Book Review: Transformation in Troubled Times
“The willingness to bear with our wounds opens our eyes and potentially our hearts to what is going on around us. A wounded planet is also potentially a healing planet,” write Chris Robertson and Sarah Van Gogh.
Their new book, Transformation in Troubled Times: Re-Vision’s...
Book Review: Feeling Better: Beat Depression & Improve Your Relationships
There are many ways we can try to feel better. We can try to improve the way we think. We can try to make more money. Have more stability. Get a better job.
But all of these things, say Cindy Goodman Stulberg and Richard Frey,...
Book Review: Borderline Bodies: Affect Regulation Theory for Personality Disorders
“The body,” says Clara Mucci, “is the essential go-between in the relationship between the self and other.”
In personality disorders, this relationship between the self and the other is especially troubled. However, this “other” can be the body itself.
Mucci describes psychosomatic disorders as an outcome...
Book Review: Bodyfulness: Somatic Practices for Presence
I didn’t know how very much I needed this book until I opened it -- one of the biggest gifts for a reader, and for a person who seeks understanding. That word bodyfulness is instantly recognizable as a side-stepping of mindfulness, but you’re wrong... 
Book Review: Say What You Mean
This brilliant book opens with a perfect analogy: “Communicating is a bit like learning an instrument. Playing scales is essential, but the aim is to make music.” I smiled and entered the book with an eagerness that’s often lacking when I read other books... 
Book Review: Finding Hope in a Crisis
"When clients come to therapy to 'free themselves so they can be themselves,' in a hermeneutic sense, they do change by becoming who they really are,” writes Maura A. Matarese.
In her new book, Finding Hope in a Crisis: A Therapist’s Perspective on Love, Loss,...
Book Review: The Unexpected Joy of Being Single
In The Unexpected Joy of Being Single, author Catherine Gray is single and happy at the end of her story. She even realizes that she would still be happy if she stayed single for the rest of her life. For someone with her inauspicious... 
Book Review: The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober
“The first time I got drunk, I’d felt like I finally unzipped my wrong skin and slipped into a slinky new one, “writes Catherine Gray.
In her new book, The Unexpected Joy Of Being Sober, Gray describes her journey from fake friends, hungover mornings, and...