Review: The Myth of Normal (DNF)

Title: The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Author: Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté

Genre: Psychology/Health

Trigger Warnings: Chronic illness, terminal illness, pedophilia/childhood sexual abuse, rape, incest, domestic partner abuse, abandonment, war (mentions), cancer

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 25%

Back Cover:

In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. So what is really “normal” when it comes to health?

Over four decades of clinical experience, Maté has come to recognize the prevailing understanding of “normal” as false, neglecting the roles that trauma and stress, and the pressures of modern-day living, exert on our bodies and our minds at the expense of good health. For all our expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how today’s culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance. Now Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick, connects the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society—and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing. Cowritten with his son Daniel, The Myth Of Normal is Maté’s most ambitious and urgent book yet.

Review:

I have read a LOT about trauma and its effects over the past few years (e.g. here, here, here, and here). This is a topic of personal interest for me, as well as one where, at this point, I feel fairly well-versed. From the emphasis on the back cover, I thought this was going to be about the many small and not-so-small traumas we face every day because of how society is set up (the “toxic society” promised in the subtitle) and how those affect our health. I expected something more along the lines of Sedated than anything.

I’m going to refer to author in the singular here because even though the book tries to emphasize that Daniel also had a large hand in the writing of the book, the concepts and ideas are obviously all Gabor’s.

The main premise of The Myth of Normal is that modern medicine’s fundamental assumptions about human health are wrong – that the mind and body are not and can never be truly separated, and that trying to treat illness as separate from the person’s life circumstances is short-sighted and misses essential underlying factors that affect a disease’s onset, progression, and treatment. All of which I do agree with. However, for all its emphasis on challenging fundamental assumptions, the book itself refuses to challenge or even acknowledge the fundamental assumptions that drive it:

1. There exists a state of perfect health which is possible for humans to achieve;
2. Achieving this state is both possible and essential for every human being;
3. Therefore, the ultimate goal (or one of the ultimate goals) of every human being should be to work to achieve this state.

To be fair, Gabor is a doctor and he likely doesn’t realize he is making those three assumptions in this book. These are underlying assumptions of our society as well – just look at any health, diet, or weight loss claim. Once you know to look for them, you’ll see these assumptions everywhere. So I don’t really blame Gabor for writing from that perspective. It’s great that he’s on board with the growing body of evidence about trauma’s effects on physical health. I think he just didn’t go far enough in the “challenging society’s assumptions about health” aspect.

There is a lot of research presented here, so I do give him credit for that. It’s not really anything I didn’t get from The Body Keeps the Score (Gabor even quotes Bessel van der Kolk several times), but if you’re not familiar with the concepts and the research, I think it would be a good introduction. Where I had issues was all the parts that weren’t research. The anecdotes and stories were incredibly sensationalized. It was always someone with a horrible and fatal disease going from being bed-bound to living a pretty much normal life due to healing from horrific childhood sexual abuse. Nobody was healing from schoolyard bullying or their parents’ divorce and as a result seeing improvement in their back pain or having fewer headaches. It was always people with something dramatic and incurable who healed their trauma and therefore fixed their disease.

As someone who is disabled/chronically ill, I’ve heard all of the “one weird trick to heal your incurable disease! Doctors are amazed!” stuff. And if you strip away the scientific trappings, what Gabor is presenting sounds exactly like the “natural cure without drugs!” bullshit you find in weird alternative health circles. Take out the fact that Gabor is a doctor and cut the parts where he cites research and you could replace “trauma healing” with “kale,” “yoga,” “unpronounceable exotic herb,” or whatever else in every single anecdote and it would sound exactly as outlandish. Gabor is pretty much promising that healing your trauma will fix anything and everything wrong with you, up to and including incurable and fatal conditions.

I don’t want to deny the fact that there is research. Unlike most “cures” in this non-medical modes of healing space, the trauma-health connection actually has a lot of promising research around it. Which I think is why I take such issue with the way it’s presented here. Could healing your trauma help your physical health? Absolutely, and there’s research to back that up. Will healing your trauma cure your cancer? I can’t bring myself to believe that, no matter how fancy the credentials of the doctor telling me the story.

This book may have fallen prey to the whims of marketing, ignoring scientific nuance in favor of something that will sell – and sensationalism sells. Or maybe Gabor completely believes in trauma healing as a miracle cure. I don’t know. But regardless, I don’t recommend this one. The concepts and research are good, but you can get the same information in other books (I recommend The Body Keeps the Score and It Didn’t Start With You) with many fewer issues. The effects of trauma on physical health are worth learning about. But not from this book.

Review: Running on Empty

Title: Running On Empty: Overcoming Your Childhood Emotional Neglect

Author: Dr. Jonice Webb

Genre: Self-Help/Psychology

Trigger Warnings: Child abuse, child neglect, mental illness, suicide, suicidal ideation, self-harm (mentions), moralizing about food, diet talk, emotional abuse (mentions)

Back Cover:

Do you sometimes feel as if you’re just going through the motions in life? Are you good at looking and acting as if you’re fine, but secretly feel lonely and disconnected? If so, you are not alone. The world is full of people who have an innate sense that something is wrong with them. Who feel they live on the outside looking in, but have no explanation for their feeling and no way to put it into words. If you are one of these people, you may fear that you are not connected enough to your spouse, or that you don’t feel pleasure or love as profoundly as others do. You may drink too much, or eat too much, or risk too much, in an attempt to feel something good. Running on Empty will give you clear strategies for how to heal, and offers a special chapter for mental health professionals. In the world of human suffering, this book is an Emotional Smart Bomb meant to eradicate the effects of an invisible enemy.

Review:

Before we get into the actual review, I have to add some context. This review is probably going to come off significantly more scathing than I intend, and I’m hoping by providing some context to my comments and the book itself, you’ll have a better idea of where I’m coming from.

First, I’ve been working on the whole “dealing with childhood trauma” thing for eight years, which includes reading a ton of internet articles and many books on related topics. So I’m already incredibly familiar with not just the basics of mental health, childhood trauma, PTSD, and trauma treatment and recovery concepts, but also things like generational trauma, the physical effects of emotional trauma, and interpersonal and capitalistic factors affecting mental health. I would even go as far as to say that there are very few layperson-accessible concepts around mental health and trauma that I haven’t read at least a little about (although if you want to introduce me to something new I’d love to hear about it). So I’m already going into this with a strong foundation.

Second, this book was published in 2012. I didn’t start my journey to work on my childhood trauma and mental health until 2014-2015, so I’m not very familiar with what was going on in that space before then. For all I know, this book was groundbreaking and revolutionary at time of publication. However, I’m reading it a full decade after it was published with eight years of mental health and trauma reading behind me. All of which strongly affected my opinions.

Now let’s do a review.

The whole idea of the first part of this book seems to be built on convincing readers that emotional neglect is an actual thing. It has a “quiz” asking if you’ve experienced any of these symptoms that are common with emotional neglect – although I noticed that many of the questions were phrased so broadly that almost anyone could legitimately say yes. Then there were examples. So, so many examples. Part one discussed the different types of emotionally neglectful parents, and each type was illustrated with examples, often multiple examples.

The book states at the beginning that it’s written for both patients and clinicians. (It clearly also has a third audience of parents who don’t want to emotionally neglect their children, who get a whole chapter in part three but don’t get mentioned as an explicit audience for the book.) I have to assume that clinicians are familiar with many of the concepts involved, and I imagine that patients who seek this book out have some level of awareness about the problems going on. The excessive examples got annoying fast.

This book also implicitly contradicts itself almost constantly. It’s a “do as I say, not as I do” situation – the stated opinions are completely opposite to the tone and attitude of the writing. Part one states to not blame your parents, but then spends the rest of the section teaching you what specifically to blame your parents for. It kept claiming that you don’t have to be perfect to be a good parent, but everything else about the book seemed to say that if you aren’t a perfect parent your child is doomed to loneliness and suicidal ideation.

It keeps telling you that just because you were emotionally neglected in childhood doesn’t mean you’re irreparably broken, but it spends so much time talking about all the different ways emotional neglect damages you that it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that you are irrevocably doomed. It may claim you can heal the damage, but the ratio of “discussion of the damage” to “here’s how to heal yourself” is significantly skewed towards descriptions of the mental anguish and shattered relationships that result from emotional neglect. It spends so much time describing the problem that the solutions feel inadequate, like offering a band-aid for a bullet wound.

The few solutions provided seem better described as “paltry advice” – inspiring but vague, more concepts than action plan, and incredibly meager compared to the sheer volume of pain the book describes. Most of the ideas are things I recognize from the concept of re-parenting yourself. And all of the practical advice is worksheets. Literally all of it. Jonice has some worksheets available on her website and that’s the one tool you get to help overcome a childhood of emotional neglect. I actually was curious about the enjoyment worksheet and went and looked it up, and it turns out they’re not even worksheets. They’re tracking forms. The enjoyment one has boxes for every day of the year and asks you to count how many times you prioritized enjoyment each day. That’s it.

This book really feels like it was trying to introduce a brand new concept into the public consciousness. And perhaps in 2012, it was. But I was aware of the concept of emotional neglect long before I heard of this book (so I guess if that was the goal, it did its job) and found this book-length definition depressing and unhelpful. Emotional neglect is a great concept for both personal and clinical work to identify and describe a particular type of childhood trauma. But while the idea is good and useful, the book itself is not.

Review: The Art of Gathering

Title: The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

Author: Priya Parker

Genre: Psychology/Relationships

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), sexism (mentions), colonization (mentions)

Back Cover:

From the host of the New York Times podcast Together Apart, an exciting new approach to how we gather that will transform the ways we spend our time together–at home, at work, in our communities, and beyond.

In The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker argues that the gatherings in our lives are lackluster and unproductive–which they don’t have to be. We rely too much on routine and the conventions of gatherings when we should focus on distinctiveness and the people involved. At a time when coming together is more important than ever, Parker sets forth a human-centered approach to gathering that will help everyone create meaningful, memorable experiences, large and small, for work and for play.

Drawing on her expertise as a facilitator of high-powered gatherings around the world, Parker takes us inside events of all kinds to show what works, what doesn’t, and why. She investigates a wide array of gatherings–conferences, meetings, a courtroom, a flash-mob party, an Arab-Israeli summer camp–and explains how simple, specific changes can invigorate any group experience.

The result is a book that’s both journey and guide, full of exciting ideas with real-world applications. The Art of Gathering will forever alter the way you look at your next meeting, industry conference, dinner party, and backyard barbecue–and how you host and attend them.

Review:

If you’ve ever read any of my nonfiction reviews, you know that I am all about my nonfiction having practical action steps. I’ve been known to stop reading books that might have been perfectly interesting but weren’t giving me practical knowledge. So you will be pleased to know that this book is relentlessly practical.

I put this on hold at the library, and when it finally got around to me about two months after placing the hold, I was skeptical. “Alright, past me,” I was thinking. “This looks like it might be about business meetings and will go into the ‘I only pick up business books on accident’ category, but I’ll give it a shot.”

And then I gave it a shot. And I am so very glad I did, because I am very very bad at people and this book is step-by-step how to have a gathering of people that goes well.

It does discuss business meetings, but it also discusses social gatherings and provides principles that can apply to anything from a conference to having friends over for dinner. Have you considered the power dynamics between guests and host? I didn’t even consider that there was such a thing, but Priya explains (with examples) that there is such a thing, it’s an integral part of the social gathering, there isn’t a way to get rid of it without making your gathering worse, and here’s how to take charge of it to make it a good experience for everyone. Does your gathering have a purpose? No, “hanging out with friends” is not a purpose, but Priya will help you find a good purpose to guide every other decision that goes into planning the meeting. Did you realize that the event starts the moment guests become aware of the gathering and the host having a “pregame” strategy will make the actual event run smoother? Don’t worry, Priya has you covered on that front, too.

Whether you’re hosting a game night with old friends, a dinner party to introduce new friends to a group, a work meeting to discuss departmental conflicts, or a sit-down with Mom and Dad to discuss their end-of-life plans, this book will explain what to consider, provide steps for making it as successful as possible, illustrate with examples from Priya’s work as a professional gathering facilitator, and set you up for a great interpersonal experience.

I cannot express how helpful this knowledge is to me. I am very, very horrible at people (I blame the autism, but limited social interaction as a child didn’t help either), and this book basically said to me, “It’s okay, honey, here’s how people gather, what they expect when they get together, and how use this knowledge to plan a good gathering yourself.” As someone who both does not understand people at all and who married a Dungeon Master and so ends up regularly hosting game nights, I wish I’d found this book years ago.

If you are a human being who spends time with other human beings, this book is guaranteed to be helpful. (Unless you are that magical human being who knows everything in this book instinctively, in which case, I would like to purchase said instincts.) This book is definitely going on the Required Reading page, and I unreservedly recommend it to everyone.

Review: Numb

Title: Numb: How the Information Age Dulls Our Senses and How We Can Get Them Back

Author: Charles R. Chaffin

Genre: Pop Psychology

Trigger Warnings: Moralizing about food, diet culture

Back Cover:

In Numb, distinguished author Dr. Charles R. Chaffin delivers a fun and evidence-based exploration of how you can devote more attention on what you believe is important while ignoring the distractions that increasingly permeate your life. Using research from cognitive, education, positive, and clinical psychology, the book identifies the sources of noise and distraction in this information age and how we can manage it in all aspects of our lives.

You’ll learn about:

• How experiences in technology, from social media to selfies to porn, impact our ability to engage and connect with others
• The news we consume and the impact of confirmation bias, filter bubbles, and tribalism
• How FOMO and choice overload impact our decision-making
• The power of our attention in all aspects of our daily lives

Perfect for anyone interested in the expanding impact of the information age on our collective psyche, Numb helps empower you to use technology and information not as a destination, but as a tool towards authenticity and empowerment.

Review:

This is not technically a book that promised practical actions and then didn’t tell me what to actually do. But the usefulness of the “practical actions” here is limited, and I think this does count as a book whose title lied to me, even if it didn’t technically lie about proposing a solution.

The subtitle of this book is “How the Information Age Dulls our Senses and How We Can Get Them Back.” That subtitle is the main reason I picked up this book. I didn’t feel like my senses were getting dull, but I wanted to read about how they were and how I could fix it. That is not what I actually got in this book.

Charles does not look that old in his author photo (and this book came out six months ago so I assume his picture is fairly up-to-date), but this whole book makes me think of an old man complaining, “You kids and your mobile telephones! Get off your Tweeter apps and talk to your friends face to face, why dontcha!” Now, this is not entirely fair, since I can tell Charles either uses the technologies he complains about or at least knows enough about them to discuss them competently. However, this book feels like a collection of all the “smartphones/social media/the internet are bad” studies and arguments and rationales.

An incomplete list of things that this book complains about:

• Smartphones bad, too distracting
• Push notifications bad, too distracting
• Multitasking bad, you can’t focus
• Social media bad, it makes you feel bad about your life
• Social media bad, it creates echo chambers
• Texting bad, talk to your friends in person
• News bad, it just makes you mad
• Political stuff on the internet bad, let’s just all be friends
• Cameras bad, you focus more on photographing the experience than living the experience
• Porn sites bad, videos don’t make you use your imagination (which is an anti-porn hot take that I have not heard before)

The book never actually gets around to talking about how all of this stuff dulls your senses. It focuses more on attention. It started off really strong, in fact, discussing the attention economy and how so many websites are designed to grab your attention because that’s where they make money and how attention is a zero-sum game and not an infinite resource. Maybe the “senses” that are getting dulled are your ability to focus and pay attention? Regardless, it made some really good points before it buckled down to the complaining.

Now, I don’t entirely disagree with the complaints. I’m not denying that the studies Charles cites happened and got results. And I have noticed personally that consuming a lot of negative news does affect my mood and view of the world and following influencers posting perfect-looking lives on Instagram did make me feel less satisfied with my own life. What I take issue with is the “how to get your senses back” part of the book, where the one and only advice was to get off your phone.

That is the extent of the practical advice here. News makes you angry, stop reading the news. Social media gives you FOMO, get off social media. Phone keeps you distracted, put your phone in another room. The information age is dulling your senses so just opt out of the information age.

I think this book would have felt less like complaining if there was more advice than “get off your phone.” With that being the only advice, it felt like this was the book form of all the rants I’ve seen about “social media is destroying the youth,” “dang kids need to get off their phones and do stuff in the real world,” etc. I think there was promise to the idea, but its complete failure to live up to the “how to get your senses back” part of the subtitle made it feel complaining and largely pointless.

Review: It Didn’t Start With You

Title: It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle

Author: Mark Wolynn

Genre: Health/Psychology

Trigger Warnings: Genocide, child abuse (mentions), addiction, chronic illness, death, death of children, death of parent, suicidal thoughts

Back Cover:

Depression. Anxiety. Chronic Pain. Phobias. Obsessive thoughts. The evidence is compelling: the roots of these difficulties may not reside in our immediate life experience or in chemical imbalances in our brains–but in the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. The latest scientific research, now making headlines, supports what many have long intuited–that traumatic experience can be passed down through generations. It Didn’t Start with You builds on the work of leading experts in post-traumatic stress, including Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score. Even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died, or the story has been forgotten or silenced, memory and feelings can live on. These emotional legacies are often hidden, encoded in everything from gene expression to everyday language, and they play a far greater role in our emotional and physical health than has ever before been understood.

As a pioneer in the field of inherited family trauma, Mark Wolynn has worked with individuals and groups on a therapeutic level for over twenty years. It Didn’t Start with You offers a pragmatic and prescriptive guide to his method, the Core Language Approach. Diagnostic self-inventories provide a way to uncover the fears and anxieties conveyed through everyday words, behaviors, and physical symptoms. Techniques for developing a genogram or extended family tree create a map of experiences going back through the generations. And visualization, active imagination, and direct dialogue create pathways to reconnection, integration, and reclaiming life and health. It Didn’t Start With You is a transformative approach to resolving longstanding difficulties that in many cases, traditional therapy, drugs, or other interventions have not had the capacity to touch.

Review:

In my online research about trauma, I came across the idea of intergenerational trauma – that you can inherit the trauma of your ancestors. However, the sites that talked about healing your intergenerational trauma also tended to be the type that advised rose quartz would heal your mother wound and other such less-than-scientific “treatments.” So I was excited for this book, hoping to get a more trustworthy look at intergenerational trauma and see if the idea has any scientific merit.

I was surprised to find that it actually does. The book starts with a solid scientific foundation, discussing the basics of epigenetics and how trauma not only changes our own genes, but the genes that go into our egg and sperm cells that later become our children. It traces why trauma can be shared back three generations but often isn’t passed down longer than that, and it discusses how outside of genetics, family dynamics can encourage people to take on traumas from relatives they’re not directly descended from (e.g. aunts and uncles). I was fascinated to find such a strong scientific basis for inheriting trauma.

The bulk of this book, though, is a healing program to help the reader identify the trauma, figure out who in their family system it actually belongs to, and “give it back” so they don’t have to deal with a trauma that isn’t even theirs. There’s an assortment of writing and reflection exercises, interspersed with nearly-miraculous stories of healing from people Mark has taken through these steps. You’re supposed to do each of the exercises as you read, but I was listening to this at work and couldn’t really stop doing my job and pull out a notebook. I did do one of the exercises (number 12, I think) on a break, and it was intense and enlightening. This is one of those books that I want to read again in a different format so I can follow along better and actually do the exercises.

Though I think this book can and will be very helpful, I don’t think it’s perfect. The stories of recovery Mark shares seem almost impossible in their rapidity and completeness, which makes me skeptical, but I’m going to reserve judgement on that until I actually try all the steps. What bothered me the most was towards the end, the book harped really hard on forgiving your parents, reconciling with them, and putting effort into having a relationship with them. Putting aside the fact that I’m definitely not ready to forgive my mother, I kept thinking, What if your parents aren’t safe? I don’t think my parents would be physically violent or attempt to ruin my life or anything like that when I come out to them, but I highly doubt they’ll be willing to use my real name and pronouns. Should I just live with their clear and obvious disregard for who I am just to have a relationship with my parents? And what about queer people who are in legitimate physical danger of injury or even death from parents who won’t accept them? Should they put themselves in danger to attempt a relationship with parents who would rather have a dead child than a gay or trans one? It’s all well and good when your parents still love you and the only thing between you and them is trauma, separation, and/or differences in how you give and receive love, but I have to imagine there are ways to heal that don’t involve exposing yourself to people who are dangerous to you.

That said, I still consider this a valuable book. It has a solid basis in science, and it’s full of practical steps with plenty of examples to follow. As I mentioned, this is one I want to get in physical or ebook form to actually follow along with the steps. (The audiobook is supposed to have a PDF with the exercises and diagrams, but my library apparently doesn’t include accompanying PDFs with audiobooks.) Though I’m skeptical about advising “you need a relationship with your parents” to everyone, overall I think this is a very important book.

Review: The Body Keeps the Score

Title: The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Author: Bessel van der Kolk

Genre: Health/Psychology

Trigger Warnings: Pretty much every event or circumstance that can cause trauma responses is mentioned, including graphic descriptions of self-harm, suicide, suicide attempts, sexual assault, sexual violence, rape, child abuse, child death, child sexual abuse/molestation/pedophilia, incest, domestic abuse, 9/11, car crashes, and war atrocities

Back Cover:

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Such experiences inevitably leave traces on minds, emotions, and even on biology. Sadly, trauma sufferers frequently pass on their stress to their partners and children.

Renowned trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he transforms our understanding of traumatic stress, revealing how it literally rearranges the brain’s wiring–specifically areas dedicated to pleasure, engagement, control, and trust. He shows how these areas can be reactivated through innovative treatments including neurofeedback, mindfulness techniques, play, yoga, and other therapies. Based on Dr. van der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score offers proven alternatives to drugs and talk therapy–and a way to reclaim lives.

Review:

I think this book is supposed to just be a review of Dr. van der Kolk’s research on trauma, with an overview of the physiological effects of trauma and discussions of the various therapies he’s tried with traumatized patients and the biology and neuroscience of how they helped or didn’t. However, all of these points are made with stories of Bessel and his patients, and I found it to be a combination of the science of trauma, insights about my own trauma, and hope that there are effective therapies out there that might help me.

Like all good books that make me recontextualize my past, I could only read this book in small doses. But that may not be a bad way to read this book – it is absolutely packed with information and you’ll need time to absorb it. From the history of trauma being recognized as an actual problem to the biological and neurological underpinnings of the symptoms of being traumatized to the different therapies he has found to be effective and the neuroscience and psychology of why they work, it’s thirty years of trauma research condensed to less than 500 pages. One read doesn’t feel like it’s enough to grasp all the information and possibilities here.

To my non-medical-trained ears, some of the problems caused by trauma and some of the miraculous healing from trauma described in this book seemed nothing short of outlandish. However, Bessel van der Kolk is one of the world’s top researchers in trauma studies and is partially responsible for the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (a Congressionally mandated initiative for helping traumatized children) and for PTSD being considered an actual diagnosis in the first place. So he probably knows what he’s talking about.

The main drawback to this book is that the people who most need to read it – i.e. people who are dealing with the long-lasting effects of trauma – are the ones most likely to be triggered by the graphic descriptions of abuse and neglect. It does make for much less boring reading than facts and statistics and I recognize that knowing about the specific traumas is integral to most stories of how the patients recovered, but I found myself wondering if the graphic details couldn’t have been toned down just a bit for the sake of traumatized non-doctors reading about this research on their own behalf. Bessel does mention in one anecdote that an instructor in one of the therapies he was learning criticized him for “voyeuristic tendencies” and wanting to know everything about his patients’ traumas, and I wonder if the graphic descriptions in these anecdotes were an unintentional expression of his own interest in other people’s traumas.

This book is very thorough and very intense. If you’re in the medical field, it’s absolutely worth reading. If you’re traumatized yourself, it’s also worth reading, but take it slow and be aware that it’s full of descriptions of abuse that might be triggering. But it’s also full of hope that we don’t have to be defined by our trauma forever.

Review: Drunk Tank Pink

Title: Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces that Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave

Author: Adam Alter

Genre: Pop Psychology

Trigger Warnings: Institutional racism (mention), sexism (mention)

Back Cover:

Most of us go through life believing that we are in control of the choices we make, that we think and behave almost independently from the world around us, but as Drunk Tank Pink illustrates, the truth is our environment shapes our thoughts and actions in myriad ways without our permission or even our knowledge. Armed with surprising data and endlessly fascinating examples, Adam Alter addresses the subtle but substantial ways in which outside forces influence us–such as color’s influence on mood, our bias in favor of names with which we identify, and how sunny days can induce optimism as well as aggression. Drunk Tank Pink proves that the truth behind our feelings and actions goes much deeper than the choices we take for granted every day.

Review:

I really shouldn’t have read this directly after reading The Extended Mind, because they’re so similar in both tone and content that I’m having a hard time sorting out what information was from each book. The Extended Mind is about using things outside your brain to help you think better, while Drunk Tank Pink is about the way things outside your brain affect your thinking. Different sides of the same coin, basically.

It wasn’t bad information, and in many cases was very interesting. The main ideas covered were nominative determinism, or that your name shapes your destiny, the weather’s profound influence on mood, and how color psychology is influencing you more than you think. According to the book, I’m less likely to be given opportunities because both my first and last name are hard to pronounce and spell, and I likely have such a strong interest in Arabic language and culture because my birth name came from an Arabic root.

That’s one of my big problems with the book – it made these effects out to be absolutely MASSIVE. The bulk of this book is an overview of a bunch of studies on a particular topic (loosely held together with some interpretation and spectacularly bad transitions), and the impression that you get is that if you have a difficult-to-spell name you’ll never succeed, if it’s hot out you’re going to be violent, and if you’re in a pink room you lose all ability to function. I don’t know if the intent was to exaggerate for sensationalism and sales or if that was an unintended effect of less-than-stellar writing, but it seemed like the book was trying to convince me that my environment was really in control and I had no influence on my life.

Drunk Tank Pink was slightly more engaging than The Extended Mind, probably because it spun the studies it discussed into stories instead of just presenting them as studies, but they both cover very similar ideas and both read like an academic literature review rewritten to sell as pop psychology. This book seemed like it was sensationalizing its ideas, though, and I was overall unimpressed.

Review: The Extended Mind

Title: The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain

Author: Annie Murphy Paul

Genre: Pop Psychology

Trigger Warnings: Ableism (mentions), racism/racial discrimination (mentions)

Back Cover:

For centuries, we’ve believed that our thoughts happen entirely inside our brains. But in the last decade, new research has revealed that our bodies, our gestures, and our surroundings dramatically impact our intelligence and mental health. For example, did you know that closing your eyes makes you smarter, that half an hour among trees is as effective as a dose of Ritalin at controlling ADHD, that certain hand gestures aid memory, and that negotiators win an average of 80 percent more value when on their own turf? Indeed, as Annie Murphy Paul shows, we are constantly thinking outside our brains.

Like Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences or Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, The Extended Mind offers a dramatic new view of how our minds work, full of practical advice on how to think–and feel–better.

Review:

Don’t read this book like I did. This is not a book that should be started 40 hours into a 60-hour workweek on six hours of sleep and while barely functional and not completely awake. (It has been a rough week at work, can you tell?) This is not a book that you can use to engage your brain and wake you up. You have to be already fully awake and ready to think to grasp this one.

The idea behind this book is that thinking doesn’t all happen in your brain, it also happens in your environment, your body, and between people. I absolutely agree that your body, environment, and interactions affect your thinking. In my writing, I find some of my best ideas while walking and when talking things through with my husband. But I’m not sure that “thinking outside your brain” is the best way to phrase it – it seems more like “using things outside your brain to support your thinking process.” Your body may know things your mind doesn’t, but it still has to end up in your brain for you to be able to use it.

This is not an incredibly practical book. It does offer some recommendations and it is extremely easy to draw out principles from the research, but the main purpose of this book seems to be presenting all the research already done on this topic of “thinking outside the brain.” Since it was published only three months ago (June 2021), it includes all the most recent research. There is a lot of it, and it’s presented well and in a logical order. But it’s difficult to comprehend if you’re half asleep.

To me, this book read like an academic meta-analysis rephrased as pop psychology because pop psychology sells and academic papers don’t. If you’ve ever read an academic literature review, reading this book feels like reading one of those but with fewer long words. It wasn’t horribly boring (although it did drag at times) and once I was fully awake I found the information presented fascinating, ringing true to my own experiences, and likely interesting to apply. However, it wasn’t nearly as engaging as I’d hoped, and if you do choose to read it be prepared to read a LOT of citations.