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All Self-Help Coverage

NonfictionSelf-HelpBody, Mind & Spirit

4 modern takes on the eternal quest for self-improvement

Feature by Arlene McKanic

Tiny Pep Talks

Reading Paula Skaggs and Josh Linden’s humorous and often snarky Tiny Pep Talks: Bite-Size Encouragement for Life’s Annoying, Stressful, and Flat-Out Lousy Moments is much like an afternoon spent with your favorite vodka aunty who’s always had your best interest at heart. After a lighthearted introduction, their advice covers sticky situations that range from the utterly trivial to the somewhat deep. It starts out, for example, with “For When It’s Time to Get Off the Couch and Go to Bed.” Other offers of comfort include “For When Your Clothes Don’t Fit,” and, inevitably, “For When You Just Got Ghosted: A Spooky Tale.” There’s also advice for if you’ve been walking around with spinach between your teeth, when your battery’s down to 5% and when you can’t stand your friend’s significant other (Skaggs and Linden specify that this means a significant other who’s simply annoying, as opposed to one who’s abusive and dangerous. That’s for a “more serious book.”)

Even weighty  stuff like grief is handled with a touch of sass. Grief, they write, “is like a toddler. At any given moment, it might be messy, it might kick and punch you in the gut, and it might refuse to go to bed when all you want is to go to sleep.” But as Scarlett O’Hara said, tomorrow is another day. You’ll be okay.

Good People

Gabriel Reilich and Lucia Knell’s lovely, open-hearted Good People comforts through example. It tells the stories of all kinds of ordinary folk who’ve gone through stuff and come out the other side, sometimes battered, like the narrator of “Invictus,” but unbowed.

In the very first story, we follow Amy B. as she happily moves from Washington, D.C., to attend law school in New York City, only to be poleaxed by a family tragedy. New Yorkers are notorious for ignoring people who break down and cry on subways or airport terminals, but in Amy’s case, someone notices and helps her. She never learned his name and doesn’t even know if she’d recognize him if she saw him again, but his brief presence permanently changed her life for the better. Good People is full of stories where an “angel” shows up at a moment of crisis. Wherever you land in this book, you’ll be comforted by the fact that despite the insanity of the times we live in, most people are indeed, good.

Life Audit

Ximena Vengoechea’s Life Audit: A Step-by-Step Guide to Discovering Your Goals and Building the Life You Want is one inspirational book where you’ll need to do some work. As the title says, it asks you to do an audit of your life, but the process is led by pages of delightful bar graphs, mind maps, drawings and Venn diagrams in cool pastel colors. In other words, it’s much more fun than an IRS audit of your taxes.

Auditing your life is a worthwhile pursuit when you don’t quite know what you want to do, or if you’re in a rut. Vengoechea breaks down the process into small but revealing steps. At the beginning you’re encouraged to write down every single one of your wishes, no matter how trivial, on 100 sticky notes in the space of an hour. Though labor-intensive, this helps you prioritize your wishes, identify your core values, use your time wisely and pick the people (five of them, the author suggests) who are eager to offer you support. Vengoechea also shows you how to avoid folks who would drag you down and shares motivational tricks, such as getting an ice cream cone or putting on a party dress after you’ve turned in your manuscript. Life Audit is a lovely book to keep on your bedside table.

Not Sure Who Needs to Hear This, But . . .

Though this book is over 200 pages long, you can easily read Willie Greene’s Not Sure Who Needs to Hear This, But . . . in a few hours. Indeed, its layout allows you to just jump in anywhere, for every page holds something pithy. Greene, the founder of WE THE URBAN, which launched as a Tumblr account that dispenses similar advice, divides his book into six chapters: Peace; Love; Learning, Unlearning, Relearning; Creativity; Well-being and Affirmations. The first few pages of each chapter posit the virtue, followed by sections, none more than a couple of paragraphs long, that tell you how to achieve it. After that comes pithy adages, often framed by colorful boxes that recall sticky notes. Included are: “Forgive yourself every night before going to sleep”; “Act. Even if fear is present” and “Delete the Ex-files.” (This one, I believe, means to move right along after you’ve been dumped or subjected to that even worse 21st-century atrocity of “ghosting.”) There are dozens of these little pep pills for the soul. Who needs to hear them? We do!

 

 

Humans have been trying to improve themselves since they discovered they had selves that needed improving. As the search for spiritual, mental and physical health continues ever on, four new books are here to help.
NonfictionSelf-Help

How to Winter

Review by Anna Christensen

When the first white flurries twirl on the frosty air where I live, I am instantly transported back to my 7-year-old self, running off to find my snow boots and mittens. But for many others, winter’s inexorable return means a depressing lack of light, bone-cold mornings and messy roads. Kari Leibowitz’s How to Winter: Harness Your Mindset to Thrive on Cold, Dark, or Difficult Days offers a guide for discovering the magic of the season. 

Leibowitz once counted herself among those who dreaded the onslaught of frigid air, precipitation and fading light, admitting that “as a high school senior, I used to refuse to drive my little brother—a freshman—to class unless he preheated my car to a toasty warmth each morning.” Years later, as a psychologist, she was studying the common diagnosis of seasonal affective disorder. Perplexingly, when she researched northern communities, even ones near the Arctic Circle, her expected findings—a rise in the number of people with depression during the long, dark winters—didn’t pan out. Needing to see it for herself, Leibowitz went to Tromsø, Norway, where, for two months of the year, the sun doesn’t rise. Its inhabitants seemed utterly unfazed: “Once, in a blizzard, I saw a man out for a run in a pair of shorts,” she reports. 

Investigating customs from places as far-flung as Reykjavik, Iceland; the Outer Hebrides off the coast of Scotland; and Tokyo, Leibowitz records the ways people have learned to slow down with the season and embrace what it has to offer. Even the most winter-averse reader will be hard-pressed not to hitch their breath at Leibowitz’s description of sinking into a steaming Japanese bath as the snow begins to fall, or of gazing into a crackling fire as the wind howls outside a traditional thatched cottage in the hinterlands of Scotland. No passport is necessary, however: Peppered with activities and tips for incorporating similar comforting winter practices into your own life, How to Winter is a cozy field guide for not just surviving, but flourishing, in the long dark.

How to Winter is a cozy field guide that will show you how to survive and flourish when days shorten and temperatures drop.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Meditations for Mortals

Review by Amy Scribner

It’s time to let go of the idea that there is another checklist, another productivity hack, that will lead us to a nirvana where we can finally relax. If you feel like you need permission for this, British journalist and time management guru Oliver Burkeman outlines an exit from the hamster wheel in Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts. 

“We set out to make mincemeat of our inboxes,” he writes, “defeat our to-read piles, or impose order on our schedules; we try to optimize our levels of fitness or focus, and feel obliged to be always enhancing our parenting skills, competence in personal finance, or understanding of world events.” He flies in the face of generations of self-help books, arguing with kindness and empathy that there is no magic wand to complete every task and attain total control. In fact, we don’t need to “do it all” . . . at all.

For example, Burkeman embraces what he calls “scruffy hospitality”: There’s no need to wait until your house is sparkling clean and you have mastered a gourmet menu to invite people over. Just pick up the major piles of stuff, make spaghetti and feed your friends! In a chapter titled “Too Much Information,” Burkeman writes that we will never be able to consume all the books and all the magazines and all the podcasts, even at double speed. Instead, “treat your to-read pile like a river, not a bucket.” Choose a few books as they flow past you, and let the rest go with the current.

Meditations for Mortals is a generous book chock-full of hard-earned advice from someone who has felt the same pressures we all have, but has thought about it more deeply than most. Burkeman suggests that we treat his book’s chapters as daily meditations, reading one per day, and that is likely a satisfying course of action. But his compelling set of mini-lessons may have readers swiftly sprinting through. Burkeman will likely forgive us the imperfection.

Oliver Burkeman flies in the face of generations of self-help books, inviting readers to let go of their desire for control and get off the hamster wheel of endless to-do lists and TBR stacks.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Shame on You

Review by Anna Christensen

Shame, that deep burning sensation that seems to dig all the way down to the core of who we are, is a feeling that journalist Melissa Petro is well acquainted with. In 2012, when she was teaching at a New York City elementary school, she published an op-ed in which she disclosed that she was a former sex worker. Overnight, she became the unwilling cover girl of the New York Post; the tabloid’s cruel, mocking coverage continued until she resigned months later.

It would be fair to think that Petro is uniquely qualified to speak on the subject of shame. But in Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification, Petro insists that she is not unique. Shame is a weapon of control that has been deployed to great effect against women and femmes for centuries. Equal parts self-help, memoir and social investigation, Petro’s triumphant debut methodically presents how shame has pervaded almost every aspect of our lives, and offers up ways to free ourselves from it.

Differentiating shame from other emotions, like guilt and humiliation, Petro argues that shame causes us to believe there is something fundamentally flawed in how we are. She interviews a diverse group of women, including trans women and gender nonconforming nonbinary people, to capture a feeling both universal and deeply personal: Shy, a queer Black woman, describes how the early pressure she felt to be “a good, clean, god-​fearing, heterosexual Christian” drove her to be suicidal. Ariel, a disability activist who has a facial disfigurement, shares how being pointed at in public elicits a reaction that she later feels ashamed about. Brazen, a fat woman who has experienced a lifetime of body shaming, found empowerment through sex work and “being paid to have my body worshipped, adored, cared for.”

In Shame on You, Petro invites us to get “quiet and curious” in our efforts to flush shame into the light and challenge its control over our lives.

 

In Shame on You, Melissa Petro invites us to flush shame into the light and challenge its control over our lives.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Hope for Cynics

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Psychologist Jamil Zaki, who studies kindness and empathy as the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, begins his book with an unexpected confession: “In private, I’m a cynic, prone to seeing the worst in people.” The book is inspired by his colleague and friend Emile Bruneau, a psychologist who built a study of the “neuroscience of peace.” Bruneau believed that hope could change the world, and maintained that belief up until his death from terminal brain cancer in 2020, at age 47. Bruneau “diagnosed triggers that inspire hatred, and then designed psychological treatments to reduce conflict and build compassion.”

Bruneau died during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Zaki lost all hope. He realized, to his chagrin, that he had become cynical. Being a scientist, he began to take a hard look at this outlook. In Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness, Zaki shows how and why cynicism is a harmful social disease, and what we can do about it.

In the first illuminating section, “Unlearning Cynicism,” Zaki identifies key differences between a cynical mindset, which is invariably negative, and a skeptical mindset, which allows room for hope. This section also lays out the conditions for today’s high levels of cynicism, noting that corruption and inequality can leave people feeling helpless and like they are unable to make a difference. And it offers persuasive research on perception, noting how often we misperceive others’ motivations (for instance, research shows that most people like helping others, though most of us think otherwise) and shares historical episodes that illustrate how overly negative assumptions can lead to catastrophic decisions.

Later sections offer narratives of people whose hopeful mindsets have led them to change their communities for the better. Throughout, Zaki shares his own failures to stay hopeful, recounting his conversations with Bruneau and Bruneau’s widow, and he explores the factors that may have contributed to Bruneau’s optimistic outlook. Hope for Cynics is a timely guide, and Zaki’s tribute to his radically hopeful friend adds an endearing, personal layer to this book.

 

Psychologist Jamil Zaki’s illuminating Hope for Cynics shows how and why cynicism is a harmful social disease, and what we can do about it.
NonfictionSelf-HelpScience

Rewire

Review by Linda Castellitto

Each section of neuroscientist and corporate coach Nicole Vignola’s Rewire: Break the Cycle, Alter Your Thoughts and Create Lasting Change is titled with phrases that will sound familiar to readers bent on self-improvement: “Ditch the Negative,” “Shift Your Narrative,” “Boost the Positive.”

While those imperatives may not be new, the author’s explanations of how one might actually achieve those goals—via understanding and taking advantage of the brain’s neuroplasticity—feel remarkably fresh, thanks to her knowledgeable, approachable voice and gift for making the complex clear.

An edifying mix of scientific research, personal anecdotes and real-world examples of rewiring done right provide aha moments galore as Rewire leads readers on a path toward change. Herself a reformed “stressy messy,” Vignola explains that we ignore the fundamental interplay between physical and mental health at our peril (or at least frequent frustration): “The brain is your hardware, and the memories, thoughts, habits and behaviors within it are the software.” For example, someone who’s not eating properly or getting good sleep will run on “low-power mode,” making it especially difficult to overcome negative self-talk, a tendency toward rumination and other long-held habits.

Similarly, while social media is vital to Vignola’s coaching practice and educational endeavors, it’s become a serious energy drain for so many—and a brain without ample rest or space to daydream isn’t receptive to rewiring. “Imagine you were on a treadmill for eight hours a day . . . and then in your lunch break you move on to the stationary bike . . . you’re not actually taking a break,” which stymies “brain energy renewal.” However, planned “strategic breaks” shore up the overworked brain; exercise releases myokines, which “aid in alleviating depressive symptoms, improving anxiety,” and more; and visualization techniques boost adaptability, as exemplified by Olympian Michael Phelps.

Vignola firmly believes that once armed with a deeper understanding of how the brain works, even non-Olympians are capable of effecting positive and lasting change. In Rewire she provides a “neuroscientific toolkit” rife with practical strategies and tips, data and experience to back them up, and an unwaveringly supportive refrain: “You can, if you so wish, create yourself. Whoever you want to be.”

In Rewire, neuroscientist Nicole Vignola provides a remarkable toolkit rife with practical strategies and tips for self-improvement.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Take Back Your Brain

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Before creating her popular podcast Unf*ck Your Brain, Kara Loewentheil was already ambitious and accomplished: Her accolades include a degree from Harvard Law School, a clerkship for a federal judge and a job as a litigator for the Center for Reproductive Rights. “I had it all,” she writes, but “the problem was that my brain did not seem to share this understanding. . . . I felt like I was being held hostage by a voice that was a cross between a middle school bully and a disapproving English governess.”

Through working with a life coach, Loewentheil learned cognitive behavioral techniques to challenge her unproductive thoughts and emotions, but even after getting certified as a life coach herself and coaching other women for years, something was still missing. “What we needed to really change our lives—and therefore change the world—was feminist coaching.” Loewentheil’s literary debut, Take Back Your Brain: How a Sexist Society Gets in Your Head—and How to Get It Out, examines how sexist and patriarchal messages impact women’s thoughts and emotions and undermine our self-esteem and self-confidence. What’s more, she offers practical advice for living well despite those long-standing messages.

The book’s first section, “Reclaim Your Brain,” walks readers through the ways pervasive, sexist beliefs play into unconscious emotional and mental cycles. Loewentheil offers a written exercise called the “thought ladder” to help readers move from a negative or debilitating thought to a neutral or even positive thought. The book’s second section, “Reclaim Your Life,” covers body image, self-esteem, romantic relationships, money mindset and time. Each chapter is grounded in cultural and social history or reportage—for instance,the beauty and wellness industries—and offers practical exercises and prompts. Throughout, Loewentheil shares anecdotes and quotes from clients, as well the missteps and successes that make up her own story.

While some of the book’s cognitive-behavioral techniques may be familiar to readers who’ve seen therapists, the feminist framework is a welcome approach for our still-evolving 21st-century society. And Loewentheil is an engaging, straightforward guide.

 

Kara Loewentheil offers a feminist take on self-help in the engaging, straightforward Take Back Your Brain.
NonfictionSelf-HelpFamily & Relationships

Always a Sibling

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

Growing up together means our siblings understand “not just who you are but why you are,” as author Annie Sklaver Orenstein writes. Sometimes the “why” is even a direct response to the siblings themselves; we may follow in an older sibling’s footsteps or rebel against expectations set by their example.

We expect siblings to not only grow up with us but also grow old alongside us; even when relationships are strained or barely existent, siblings share history, and their family experience may most closely mirror one another’s. When a sibling dies early, it can be a devastating, isolating loss. But there aren’t a lot of resources for sibling-specific grief. Orenstein has learned this firsthand in the 13-plus years since her oldest brother’s death in Afghanistan when she was 25.

In Always a Sibling: The Forgotten Mourner’s Guide to Grief, Orenstein addresses this gap in resources by providing tips, related reading and exercises to help readers face their grief after a sibling’s death. A researcher and oral historian, Orenstein puts her skills to use by collecting stories of sibling loss, braiding anecdotes and data with her own experience with grief.

Her plain-spoken, direct style ensures that the research she shares remains relatable. Sometimes she names too many interview subjects and their siblings, leaving the stories at risk of running together. But at their best, the stories help readers feel seen. For example, Orenstein recounts a woman at a party who opens up after hearing that the author is working on this book. The woman quickly warms to the subject and asks, is her experience normal? Or are the feelings she’s faced since her sibling’s death just her own? 

And that’s Always a Sibling’s greatest triumph. There are grief support groups and resources for parents, spouses and kids whose parents have died. But it isn’t often that young (or youngish) adults encounter others who share sibling loss. Orenstein shows her readers that they aren’t alone. Their feelings and reactions aren’t unusual. And their grief matters, too.

Always a Sibling braids stories, data and the author’s own experience with loss to provide a rare guide to mourning a sibling’s death.
NonfictionSelf-HelpEnvironment

Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth

Review by Linda M. Castellitto

Like so many of us, poet and Brown University professor Kate Schapira is deeply worried about the future of our planet. Rather than fret alone, in 2014 she set up her Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth (inspired by “Peanuts” character Lucy van Pelt) in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, as a means of communication and commiseration.

Now, she’s distilled what she heard, discussed, felt and learned into her debut book, Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth: How to Live With Care and Purpose in an Endangered World. Schapira, who writes in a voice resonant with empathy, encouragement and fierce determination, recommends the book be read “in order and together” because “the progression of stories, questions, and practices is designed to unwind tightly tangled grief, frustration, exhaustion, and inertia . . . into a followable path of courage, capability, and strength.”

Such a path was far from clear when her booth debuted in 2014: “No one I knew seemed to want to discuss it at all,” she writes, “and that made me feel frantic and alone.” But as her network of climate-conscious compatriots grew, Schapira developed a process to help readers “transform what [they] feel, with others, into connection and action,” which this book details across eight chapters rife with information and analysis.

Schapira also takes on capitalism and white supremacy, which she believes create and perpetuate climate change. For example, she describes so-called sacrifice zones, “places where ecology, including human well-being, is sacrificed for power and profit,” noting residents “are usually people culturally devalued by their city or nation.” And she cites the work of activists she encountered, like Mark, who walked a cross-continent barefoot pilgrimage to Brooklyn-based BK ROT, a compost-hauling service whose hiring practices ensure “some of the people hit hardest by capitalism and white supremacy feed themselves, their families, and the soil.”

Ultimately, Schapira writes, her book is “not the last word on anything—or the first word either,” but it’s certainly a valuable reading experience for those seeking shared solace as well as motivation for positive, productive communal action. An extensive contributors and resources section, as well as a glossary, nicely bolster Schapira’s smart, heartfelt and inspirational efforts.

Kate Schapira offers a guide to transforming climate angst into collective action in her inspiring Lessons From the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth.
NonfictionSelf-Help

The Ritual Effect

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

Behavioral scientist Michael Norton may be a business professor at Harvard, but he’s probably best known for his TEDx Talk, “How to Buy Happiness.” Norton’s lively new book, The Ritual Effect: From Habit to Ritual, Harness the Surprising Power of Everyday Actions, may be just what the doctor ordered.

Many of us grow up associating rituals with traditional religions. Yet, Norton tells us, other kinds of rituals have an important place in our everyday lives. Personal, “secular rituals” can encompass everything from a child’s bedtime routine to activities more eccentric, like how Agatha Christie always ate an apple during her evening bath. Norton explains that rituals are different from mere habits; they strike our emotions more deeply and provide meaning to our lives.

While Norton does define what makes a ritual, his main focus is exploring the “ritual effect”: ways in which rituals can help us realize our human potential and face challenges, whether it’s public speaking, practicing self-control or being a more aware and responsive parent or partner. For example, in a section on relationship rituals, Norton discusses rituals that wake up our experience of commitment. These might be recognizing the special nature of annual celebrations, or even ordering the same takeout meal one night a week. Norton reminds us that “it matters much less what you do and much more that both of you do it regularly together.”

The Ritual Effect covers a wide range of rituals, including those associated with life-changing events like grief and loss. Norton’s examples draw from experts and a wide range of cultures and traditions. He closes his fascinating book with an invitation, or perhaps a challenge: to experiment with, explore and discover rituals to help you transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Michael Norton’s fascinating The Ritual Effect encourages us to experiment with, explore and discover rituals to help transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Ring in 2024 with 6 transformative self-help books

List by the editors of BookPage
STARRED REVIEW
January 23, 2024

Ring in 2024 with 6 transformative self-help books

Tips for healing, motivation and balance abound to help you keep those resolutions this year.
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Tips for healing, motivation and balance abound to help you keep those resolutions this year.
NonfictionSelf-HelpFamily & RelationshipsBusiness & Finance

Money and Love

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Throughout our lives, we encounter fraught decisions around love and money: whether to take a better job across the country when our partner wants to stay put; when and whether to marry, buy a house, have a child; if we should work full time with children in the picture. Money and love “are profoundly intertwined, and both are fundamental to living a life of purpose and meaning, health, and well-being,” write Myra Strober and Abby Davisson, co-authors of Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life’s Biggest Decisions.

Strober, who was the first female faculty member at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, created a groundbreaking class on work and family and has led thousands of students through it over the years. As a business school student, Davisson took Strober’s class with her then-boyfriend, and for their final paper, the couple chose the topic of living together before marriage. (Now married, the two have returned to the class as guest speakers for a decade.) Money and Love is informed by this popular class.

Organized around issues such as dating, marriage, deciding where to live and dividing household chores, the book’s chapters offer anecdotes, background research and thoughtful commentary, as well as questions and exercises. The authors call their decision-making framework the 5Cs: clarify (define your deep-down preferences), communicate, choices (generate a broad range of choices), check in (consult with friends, family, research) and consequences (categorize possible outcomes over time). This framework may sound simplistic, but the authors emphasize the complexity of each step toward making life decisions. Good communication, for instance, “isn’t always polite and calm. Sometimes it’s incredibly awkward and uncomfortable. Sometimes it involves raised voices and, later, apologies for what was said in the heat of the moment.”

Money and Love offers a readable approach with nuggets of wisdom throughout. “Remember that each new agreement is essentially temporary, changing as different parts of life ebb and flow,” Strober and Davisson note in the chapter on sorting out housework and caregiving. The authors supplement anecdotes from former students and colleagues with their own, and Strober’s stories about the end of her first marriage and her second husband’s Parkinson’s disease, and Davisson’s story of her mother’s devastating brain injury at 68, add depth to the book. Money and Love is a useful guide, particularly for young couples on the verge of big decisions.

Organized around issues such as dating, marriage and deciding where to live, Money and Love is a useful, logical guide for couples on the verge of big life decisions.
NonfictionSelf-HelpFamily & Relationships

Drama Free

Review by Sarah Carter

Licensed therapist and author Nedra Glover Tawwab offers readers practical guidance on breaking the cycle of family dysfunction in Drama Free: A Guide to Managing Unhealthy Family Relationships. In the introduction, Tawwab writes, “How people engage in the family is usually how they engage in the world.” This might be a relief for the lucky few who grew up in perfect families, but for most of us, unlearning the cycle of family dysfunction takes hard work and a little help. 

Drama Free offers just that: clear, easy-to-understand direction for identifying and breaking dysfunctional family patterns. The book is divided into three sections titled “Unlearning Dysfunction,” “Healing” and “Growing”—three important milestones on the road from chaotic family relationships to healthy ones. Each chapter begins with a quote or a real-life example from Tawwab’s therapy practice. Then it moves on to a brief analysis of the dynamics at play in the opening story and ends with a series of self-reflective questions. Chapters cover a wide range of topics including codependency, enmeshment, thriving versus surviving, managing relationships with people who won’t change and troubleshooting relationships with parents.

Tawwab’s longtime career as a therapist, her thriving Instagram community (@nedratawwab) and her New York Times bestselling debut, Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself, have made her a leading voice on relationships and boundaries. Drama Free builds on this work by concentrating specifically on family relationships, supporting readers as they take responsibility for their own actions and move toward greater authenticity. 

Whether you’re struggling to process trauma, addiction or neglect in your childhood or just looking for increased transparency in your family relationships, Drama Free offers clinical insight in the warm, accessible tone for which Tawwab is known.

Nedra Glover Tawwab builds on her work in Set Boundaries, Find Peace by concentrating on family relationships in Drama Free, helping readers unlearn the cycle of family dysfunction.

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