Level Up Your Love Life This Valentine’s Day
Get ready to celebrate Valentine’s Day in the best way possible…adding new books to your TBR! Check out our list of recommendations for all your love life’s needs.
Sex in midlife can be a bumpy road, especially for women. Our bodies change with age, and those changes can lead to shame, confusion, and the loss of intimacy. The Bedroom Gap shows us how society developed destined-to-fail gender roles and expectations in the bedroom and makes clear how we can level the playing field between midlife men and women.
This groundbreaking yet easily accessible guide not only clarifies the physical changes of menopause and how they affect sex in midlife, it also details how we can treat those changes, reframe our views on pleasure and desire, narrow the discrepancy in sexual functioning between middle age men and women, and optimize sexual pleasure after 40.
Now in paperback, renowned sex therapist Ian Kerner shares the unique and indispensable methodology he uses to help thousands of couples get unstuck and into sexual sync.
Dr. Ian Kerner is a Sherlock Holmes of the bedroom—a sexual detective helping individuals and couples solve the mystery of their sexual distress. His secret weapon? Anaylzing your “sex script.”
Kerner takes a magnifying glass to a recent sexual event, examining the entire sequence of interactions—beginning, middle, and end—from multiple angles. In those details—the what, where, when, and why of the last time you had sex—all the clues of what went wrong are revealed and the mystery of how to create mutual pleasure can be solved. When our sex scripts work, we lose ourselves in mutual pleasure; but when they fail, it’s all we can do not to ruminate over the details. What can be learned by looking at your sex life in action?
With wit and warmth, the nationally recognized sex therapist and author of the smash hit She Comes First shows readers how to tap into their erotic personalities and realize their sexual potential. Dr. Kerner provides the tools and techniques you need to assess, fix, and expand your sex scripts, as well as discuss many common sexual problems that get in the way of happy endings. With the help of decades of clinical insight, the latest sexual science and research, valuable homework assignments, case studies, and more, this insightful and original book strips away discomfort and offers couples not just the ability to talk about sex, but the ability to actually do something about it.
Dr. Ian Kerner is a Sherlock Holmes of the bedroom—a sexual detective helping individuals and couples solve the mystery of their sexual distress. His secret weapon? Anaylzing your “sex script.”
Kerner takes a magnifying glass to a recent sexual event, examining the entire sequence of interactions—beginning, middle, and end—from multiple angles. In those details—the what, where, when, and why of the last time you had sex—all the clues of what went wrong are revealed and the mystery of how to create mutual pleasure can be solved. When our sex scripts work, we lose ourselves in mutual pleasure; but when they fail, it’s all we can do not to ruminate over the details. What can be learned by looking at your sex life in action?
With wit and warmth, the nationally recognized sex therapist and author of the smash hit She Comes First shows readers how to tap into their erotic personalities and realize their sexual potential. Dr. Kerner provides the tools and techniques you need to assess, fix, and expand your sex scripts, as well as discuss many common sexual problems that get in the way of happy endings. With the help of decades of clinical insight, the latest sexual science and research, valuable homework assignments, case studies, and more, this insightful and original book strips away discomfort and offers couples not just the ability to talk about sex, but the ability to actually do something about it.
More people than ever are receptive to the pleasures of anal, but compassionate, medically comprehensive information can be challenging to come by. No more!
Whether you’re a top or a bottom, gay or straight, experienced or just getting ready to stretch your, um, imagination—Butt Seriously gives you the medically accurate, scientifically-backed information you need to keep your peach ready to take you to the height of sexual bliss.
This first-of-a-kind guide will teach you how to keep your anus healthy, maximize your pleasure, and bust the myths holding us back around anal sex. Among other takeaways, Butt Seriously will:
- Offer comprehensive, medically-accurate sex-ed for anyone who engages, regardless of gender and sexual identity
- Reveal why a prostate orgasm is the best orgasm
- Show women how butt play allows access to their other erogenous spot (the A-zone)
- Recommend the best techniques, toys, lubes, and other products
- Teach readers how to poop, sit, eat, exercise to support their pelvic floor and heal common challenges such as hemorrhoids and fissures.
Grounded in the science of attachment, triple board-certified clinical and forensic neuropsychologist Dr. Judy’s Ho’s game-changing approach shows that our attachment style impacts every aspect of our lives: romantic relationships, friendships, career, goal setting, and our sense of self. Moreover, we can all learn to become securely attached—no matter what attachment style we developed in childhood.
Through Dr. Judy’s innovative program, readers will learn to recognize their core needs and wounds, and implement evidence-based practical tools to heal their inner child. Readers will also benefit from:
·A new quiz to identify your attachment style in all areas of life.
·A personalized approach that allows you to start making positive change today.
·More than two dozen transformative exercises to support your journey to healing.
With warmth, and a bias to action, The New Rules of Attachment is a call to achieving unconditional self-love and a meaningful, joyful life.
Grounded in two decades of original research and work with couples from around the world, Love by Design introduces a groundbreaking new foundation for love: The Emergent Love Model. As Dr. Sara Nasserzadeh knows, successful partnerships do not thrive on love, at least as we know it. Instead of chasing our butterflies, we need to cultivate six core relational ingredients that make it possible for love to emerge:
·Attraction: What do you like and value about each other?
·Respect: How do you keep each other’s needs and priorities in mind?
·Trust: Do you know that you will show up for each other consistently?
·Compassion: Can you honor the other’s emotional experience without making it about you?
·Shared vision: Where are you committed to going together?
·Loving behaviors: How do you show your partner they’re special to you?
Offering dozens of exercises and reflection prompts, this groundbreaking book gives readers a new foundation for a thriving, lasting coupledom.
We all know dating sucks. It hasn’t gotten any easier since it was invented—in fact, some might say the advent of online dating, apps like Tinder and Hinge, and now AI has made it nearly impossible to find love even thought we’re more connected than ever. And yet, as challenging as it is to meet someone, we’re all still desirous of love, because we’re humans, and we’re facing a loneliness epidemic. With How to Find True Love, Francesca Hogi provides a better plan for finding true love. Hogi seeks to bring purpose to modern dating and optimism to the hearts of cynical daters everywhere. With her advice, exhausted romantics will find comfort in releasing the impossible ideal of one perfect person being their “one true love,” and instead understand that true love is first and foremost an inside job. Co-creating a true love relationship with another is a choice, and it’s available to everyone who wants healthy love. To do this, readers will work on improving their:
·Mindset: empowering readers to expand how they think of love
·Heartset: energizing the reader’s feelings by leaning into self-love
·Skillset: equipping readers with the skills necessary to navigate modern dating
·Soulset: helping readers embody the energy of love
Modern dating is broken. How to Find True Love is the fix—it’s time for a true love revolution.
Not only is deep, meaningful connection with others something we yearn for, research shows that connection has profound effects on our overall health. Yet so many of us have feelings of loneliness and dissatisfaction with our personal relationships, feeling misattuned, misunderstood, or emotionally distant–and confused about why that may be. In Attuned and Attached licensed professional counselor Yolanda Renteria shares practical strategies to help us take a deeper look at our current relationships and identify our emotional disconnections, which tend to present as:
- Hyper-independence, never asking for help
- Highly functional, high achieving, perfectionistic
- Expressions of love by doing a lot for others or gift giving
- Difficulty listening during conflict, difficulty apologizing
- Deep desire for connection mixed with strong instinct to self-protect
Once we know our patterns, we can then:
- Identify safe people and healthy relationships
- Feel safer in current relationships
- Set realistic and healthy relationship expectations
- Enhance emotional connections
- Repair relationships after a rupture or misattunement
- Develop resources to feel connected more often
By blending clinical research with her own experience of emotional disconnection, Yolanda invites the reader on a healing journey through understanding and validation. Emotional disconnection isn’t wrong; it’s caused by myriad factors throughout one’s life. But there is a way forward. Yolanda’s work especially speaks to those who feel that they had a fine or “good enough” childhood, but still feel emotionally disconnected, lost, and unfilled in their relationships. Whether you identify disconnection in yourself or in someone close to you, you will learn how to bring more safety and vulnerability into your relationships for nourishing, peaceful, and fulfilling connections.
Many of us were told to stuff our feelings down when we were younger. We were taught that that our emotional reactions and responses should be controlled so we didn’t embarrass or upset our parents and those around us. However, if that control oozes over into our relationships it’s considered a bad thing. Controlling our friends or romantic partners is seen as toxic. Control is a precarious thing. Some sides of control are meant to keep us safe, while others harm connections. So, what are we supposed to do?
In Why Do I Keep Doing This? licensed family and marriage therapist , Kati Morton, explores this common struggle and contradiction with control. Kati shows how our upbringing and anxiety are often connected to our struggle to take up space. We can feel like we are too much by just existing in the same place as someone else, or that we are less deserving of their time and care. This struggle with asserting ourselves, or taking what we require can harm our development. We sometimes think the only way to feel okay and get what we need is to please everyone else first. Why Do I Keep Doing This? is a vital tool in helping us understand why control can be so attractive, but if left unmonitored can become detrimental to our lives. We all go through tough times and face uncertain futures, and we do what we can to cope, but as we get older and in an attempt to get wiser, we have to notice what behaviors are holding us back and change them.
Why Do I Keep Doing This? will shed light on shared struggles as readers follow Kati through some key points of growth in her own life while incorporating what she has learned as a therapist and content creator who knows how to create lasting healthy change. This book gives readers the ability to not only ask themselves why do I keep doing this? but also have the insight to find a real answer.
Do you say “yes” when you mean “no”? Do you end up in lopsided relationships, feeling resentful but not sure how to speak up? Do you feel anxious, struggle with perfectionism and imposter syndrome, or feel like you’ve lost touch with your true self? You’re not alone: Thousands of people, especially those of us socialized as women, struggle with Emotional Outsourcing—a term nurse practitioner and life coach Beatriz Victoria Albina coined to describe the codependent habits that keep us stuck.
In End Emotional Outsourcing, Albina explores the origins—both personal and systemic—of these tendencies, and coaches readers through a science-backed program of thought work and somatic practices. Readers will learn to:
·Regulate their nervous systems
·Reframe their habitual thoughts and actions
·Take back their time and energy
·Improve relationships with parents, friends, and partners
·Discover their inherent self-worth and lovability
Groundbreaking, healing, and urgent, End Emotional Outsourcing is poised to change the conversation about codependency, and help an entire generation of women step into their power.
Gaslighting. Love bombing. Hoovering. Triangulating. These are all insidious weapons in the narcissist’s toolkit. Narcissism can be hard to diagnose, but it is one of the hallmarks of abusive relationships. As a therapist specializing in narcissism and domestic abuse, Vanessa M. Reiser has strategies to help victims to identify, understand, and heal from abusive relationships. With a blend of information, education, and stories, Reiser defines what narcissistic abuse is, breaks down how it’s a form of domestic violence and how narcissists think and operate, uncovering their mindset and motivations, so readers can spot a narcissist more accurately, avoid toxic relationships, escape dangerous situations, and heal from mental, emotional and/or physical trauma. Readers will learn how to:
- Identify dangerous behaviors and warning signs of narcissistic abuse
- Create an exit strategy to safely escape from an abuser
- Heal from the psychological damage and trauma.
Explaining narcissistic personality disorder, clarifying common misconceptions about narcissism, and detailing how narcissism works on a spectrum of benign to malignant, Narcissistic Abuse gives readers a clear picture of what narcissistic abuse entails, using specific situations and examples to show how narcissistic traits translate into real-life behaviors. Reiser describes the five stages of narcissistic abuse (luring, love bombing, mask slipping, discarding, and the smear campaign) and lists common stages and emotions that come after the relationship with a narcissist has been severed (including devastation, confusion, sadness, anger, understanding, and healing). With practical tools and a warm, empathetic tone, Narcissistic Abuse provides a clear path for readers to break the cycle and find a path back to themselves.
As our world clashes and collapses around us, it’s no surprise that one in two of us will be diagnosed with a mental health condition by the age of 40, with one in five people affected each year. It’s hard to view all our mental health symptoms as disordered if so many of us are experiencing them. Perhaps it’s not that something’s gone wrong in our bodies and minds, but that something’s gone right: These symptoms are brilliant alarms and adaptions to survive a disordered world. Having sensitive protective functions that sound alarms or short-circuit when we’re threatened isn’t a design flaw. It’s a design success.
As a psychiatrist, professor, and mental health speaker, Joanna Cheek argues that we’re not broken or doing it wrong when we’re stressed or struggling. As our systems are pushed to the brink of collapse, self-improvement alone neglects the source of our suffering. Instead, to care for ourselves, we must heal the imbalances in our wider systems that keep making us all sick. In It’s Not You. It’s the World, Dr. Cheek offers a survival guide of mental health tools to care for both ourselves and our collectives, helping us understand and befriend our alarms so we can come together to solve the shared problems they’re signaling.
With a foreword by Gabor Maté, chapter-by-chapter guidance, and practical action to empower, connect, and instill hope in the reader, It’s Not You. It’s The World is the go‑to guide for anyone feeling depressed, anxious, enraged, despairing, numb, or sick from adapting to a world on fire.
—Richard Schwartz, PhD, creator of Internal Family Systems and author of No Bad Parts
In a first-of-its-kind practical guide rooted in the groundbreaking IFS therapeutic model, two maternal mental health experts help moms untangle complicated feelings like anger, guilt, shame, and failure, offering empathy and support.
Moms have it hard; whether due to ingrained beliefs, the pressures of everything from social expectations to social media, or our own childhood wounds, even the best moms can feel like they are failing. With empathy, compassion, and deep wisdom, maternal health experts Jessica Tomich Sorci and Rebecca Geshuri address difficult and often suppressed feelings such as anxiety, anger, shame and guilt, as well as disappointment, ambivalence about being a mom, and yearning for your “old” life.
Tomich Sorci and Geshuri help any mom anywhere to identify these pain points, make sense of her distress, and begin to find relief. Their revelatory approach validates the unique suffering moms experience and offers reinterpretations that bring hope and empowerment. Filled with exercises, strategies, and step-by-step guidance, When Good Moms Feel Bad shows you empowering ways to access your abundant inner resources begin building self-trust. You’re already a good mom. Start discovering how your harshest internal voices are trying to help you—and befriend the parts of yourself that you’ve been fighting.
We live in a world where we’re told we need weekly therapy, a stack of expensive daily supplements, and a two-hour morning routine before we can expect to feel better about ourselves. Let alone handle the daily struggle of living in a modern world where everything seems to be falling apart. And while there are so many ways to “feel better” and “do more,” -our biggest issue today is that we have forgotten that we already have everything we need inside of us.
It’s All Within You shifts the focus from chasing external quick fixes to recognizing and trusting your innate wholeness. Global wellness expert, Millana Snow, reminds us of our inherent power to heal and transform ourselves by coming home to ourselves. Drawing on her thirty years of exploration in meditation, healing and spirituality, Millana shares the seven essential principles that serve as starting points to begin personal transformation from the inside out—awareness, presence, cultivation, integration, grieving, faith, and rest. Backed by real-life examples and practices that she’s taught to thousands of people, these principles will foster a deeper awareness of the effects of personal and collective trauma so you can tackle the stress and daily struggles of your life head on, rather than just managing the symptoms.
It’s All Within You is a manifesto that considers us all healers. When we recognize our power and choose to make healing a way of life, we shift from being passively formed by our circumstances to forming our life as we choose.