Between sessions
Resources
Therapy is one hour. The week is the other hundred and sixty-seven. What follows is what I hand people most often when they ask what to read, listen to, or try on their own.
Immediate help
If you need support right now
Practice
Self-compassion practices
Kristin Neff offers free recorded self-compassion meditations on her site. Some are long enough to sit down with. Others are micro practices you can fold into a walk, a commute, or the ten minutes before a hard conversation. If you are not sure where to start, begin with the Self-Compassion Break.
self-compassion.orgThe model
The Comprehensive Resource Model
Many people arrive here having already done years of good work. They understand their patterns. They can name what happened. And the body still responds as though it were happening now.
The Comprehensive Resource Model, or CRM, was developed for that gap. It is a body-based approach to complex trauma that builds internal resources first: breath, connection to the body, a felt sense of safety. Only once that scaffolding is in place does the harder material get approached. The work is done with you fully present and grounded rather than flooded or checked out.
I use CRM with clients who want to go deeper than insight. You can learn more about the model and its developer, Lisa Schwarz, M.Ed., here.
comprehensiveresourcemodel.comReading
Books
No Bad Parts
The premise is that there are no bad parts of you, only parts carrying a job they once took on to protect you. Helpful if you have ever felt at war with yourself, or noticed that the part that wants change and the part that resists it are both, somehow, you.
Radical Acceptance
For the person who has done years of insight work and still meets themselves with a low hum of criticism. Brach’s central move is meeting what is actually here rather than the version of yourself you were supposed to become by now.
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents
For anyone who cannot point to a single event but grew up doing the emotional work of the household. It gives language to a childhood that looked fine from the outside.
Healing Trauma
Short, practice-forward, with guided exercises and audio. Levine’s premise is that trauma lives in the body’s incomplete responses, not only in memory. Good if you would rather do something than read about it.
Reading
For couples
Hold Me Tight
The foundational book on Emotionally Focused Therapy. It reframes recurring fights as attachment protests rather than communication failures. If you and your partner keep having the same argument in different outfits, start here.
Come Together
On sexual connection in long-term relationships, grounded in research rather than technique lists. Nagoski’s argument is that desire is contextual, not a fixed trait you either have or lost.
Take something with you
Free practice worksheets
A few short practices you can work through on your own between sessions.
These resources are offered as general education. They are not therapy and not a substitute for care. If you are in crisis, please use the numbers above.