These are books you may find useful, whether or not you’re in therapy. Most are practical, and several are workbooks, which work best when you actually do the exercises and don’t just read about them, a distinction most of us learn the hard way. The last two are about meaning and about therapy itself.
Anxiety
The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook, Edmund Bourne. The standard anxiety workbook for decades, covering panic, phobias, worry, and the physical side of anxiety. It’s long, and you’re not meant to read it cover to cover. Get the most recent edition; the book has been substantially updated over the years.
The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety, John Forsyth and Georg Eifert. An anxiety workbook built on acceptance and commitment therapy. Where Bourne is mostly about bringing anxiety down, this one is about making room for it while you get on with what matters to you, and the two sit well side by side. Get the second edition.
Depression and mood
Feeling Good, David Burns. The 1980 book that brought cognitive therapy to a general audience, and it’s still in print. Some readers find his tone cheerful to a fault.
Mind Over Mood, Dennis Greenberger and Christine Padesky. A worksheet-based CBT workbook covering depression, anxiety, anger, guilt, and shame. It’s less a book you read than one you work through with a pencil. Get the second edition.
The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression, Kirk Strosahl and Patricia Robinson. An acceptance-based approach to depression, cowritten by one of ACT’s cofounders. It treats depression as something you get caught up doing more than something you have, which some weeks will feel like a relief and other weeks like an imposition.
Acceptance-based approaches
Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life, Steven Hayes. A general-purpose ACT workbook by another of its founders. A few of the exercises are strange on purpose, which is part of how they work.
The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook, Matthew McKay, Jeffrey Wood, and Jeffrey Brantley. The DBT skills (distress tolerance, mindfulness, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness) laid out so you can practice them on your own.
Couples
Getting the Love You Want, Harville Hendrix. The founding text of Imago therapy, first published in 1988 and updated in later editions with Helen LaKelly Hunt. Its central idea is that we tend to choose partners who echo unfinished business from childhood. Whether or not you buy all of it, the chapters on how couples settle into a power struggle are hard to unsee.
Hold Me Tight, Sue Johnson. An attachment-based way of understanding the fights couples keep having, built around seven conversations, from the developer of emotionally focused couples therapy. It helps if both partners read it, though one is enough to start.
On meaning, and on therapy itself
Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl. Frankl’s account of surviving the Nazi camps, followed by a shorter section on logotherapy, the approach to meaning he built from that experience. It’s brief, and the first half is the reason it has lasted since 1946.
The Gift of Therapy, Irvin Yalom. Written as advice to younger therapists, in eighty-five short chapters. That makes it an unusually candid look at what goes on from the other chair, and it’s worth reading if you’re in therapy and curious, or still deciding whether to start.
If any of these raises something you’d like to talk through, you can reach me at will@willbaum.com or (323) 610-0112.