Books On Our Radar
In our therapy sessions, certain books frequently emerge as touchstones for discussion and reflection. While we don’t officially endorse these titles, they represent works that our clients often find meaningful or challenging during their therapeutic journey. Here, we share some of the books that regularly surface in our conversations, offering a window into the literature that shapes many of our therapeutic discussions.
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Mothers, Daughters, and Body Image: Learning to Love Ourselves as We Are
McBride’s first book asks a question most body image research skips: not what goes wrong, but how some women ended up at peace with their bodies anyway. The sample is narrow and the editing is rough. The ladder metaphor is worth the trouble.
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The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters
A facilitator’s book on hosting with purpose, read here for what it offers someone designing a hard family gathering, a chosen-family ritual, or a memorial with no inherited script.
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Tell Me What You Want: The Science of Sexual Desire and How It Can Help You Improve Your Sex Life
Justin Lehmiller surveyed 4,000+ people on sexual fantasy. The finding that matters in therapy isn’t what people want, it’s what happens once they say it out loud.
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How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community
Mia Birdsong argues that isolation isn’t just a personal problem. How We Show Up makes the case for chosen family, deeper friendships, and community as the antidote to the loneliness baked into American life.
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Unfuck Your Boundaries
Faith G. Harper breaks boundaries into seven concrete categories and gives you practical tools for consent and communication. A direct, no-nonsense read for people who understand boundaries in theory but keep failing at the execution.
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Arousal, Answered
When sex stops working the way it used to, Kayna Cassard’s Arousal, Answered gives you a framework to understand why—not just a checklist. Her Arousal Architecture® model maps the five systems behind desire, from nervous system regulation to shame to physical sensation.
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How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics
Michael Pollan reports on the clinical trials, the buried history, and the personal experience of psychedelics — and what all of it means for people stuck in treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, and addiction.
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ADHD and Sex: A Workbook for Exploring Sexuality and Increasing Intimacy
If you’re in the middle of sex and you suddenly notice the radiator clicking, or the way the sheet is touching your leg, or that you forgot to respond to a text from three hours ago. And the whole thing falls apart from there. You…
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Unfuck Your Brain: Using Science to Get Over Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Freak-Outs, and Triggers
Faith Harper explains what your brain is doing when anxiety, depression, and triggers take over, then gives you actual tools to deal with it. No clinical jargon, no hand-holding.
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Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
Jon Kabat-Zinn built the MBSR program for people whose stress, pain, and anxiety weren’t responding to conventional treatment. Full Catastrophe Living is the home version of that clinical program — 600 pages of learning to pay attention to what’s actually happening instead of fighting it.
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How to Keep House While Drowning
KC Davis, a therapist and ADHD-er who went viral on TikTok, wrote this 176-page guide after postpartum depression made basic tasks impossible. The core argument: your house exists to serve you, and the shame around mess is doing more damage than the mess itself.
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The Neurodiverse Couples Sex Therapy Workbook
Dr. Cheri Timko’s workbook fills a real gap for ADHD and autistic couples whose intimacy problems have been misread as motivation failures. An honest clinical reading guide covering what it does well, where it runs thin, and who should skip it.
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Feel It All: A Therapist’s Guide to Reimagining Your Relationship with Sex
A groundbreaking guide to sexuality that dispels the stale cultural attitudes about sex that leave too many feeling inadequate, and offers an expansive, attachment-based framework to free us and develop bolder, more satisfying relationships with our sexual selves. When it comes to sex, most people feel…
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The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love
Sonya Renee Taylor’s ‘radical self-love’ framework is sharper on body terrorism than on practice. A therapist’s honest take on who this book serves well, who it doesn’t, and what to pair it with.
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Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself
Nedra Glover Tawwab’s bestselling guide is for people who were rewarded for absorbing everyone else’s feelings. Plainspoken and worth reading — with a blind spot for queer and trans readers that most reviews don’t mention.
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Supporting Someone Polyamorous: FAQs About Non-Monogamy and Allyship for Family, Friends and Loved Ones
If someone in your life just came out as polyamorous and you have no idea what to do with that, Lola Phoenix wrote this book for you. An honest look at one of the few resources written for the people on the outside looking in.
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Stop Letting Everything Affect You: How to Break Free from Overthinking, Emotional Chaos, and Self-Sabotage
Daniel Chidiac’s short self-help read on emotional reactivity has real value in its guilt and boundary chapters, but its pause-and-choose framework assumes a nervous system that trauma-impacted readers may not have. An honest editorial take with a clinical reading guide.
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The Power of Attachment: How to Create Deep and Lasting Intimate Relationships
Most attachment books stop at naming your style. Diane Poole Heller’s approach goes further, using somatic techniques to actually shift the patterns — not just understand them. An honest review of where it delivers and where it’s best used alongside therapy.
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It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle
Mark Wolynn’s It Didn’t Start with You explores how trauma echoes across generations through epigenetics and family systems, with practical tools for identifying inherited patterns and a Core Language Approach for breaking the cycle.
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Don’t Be Nice, Be Real: Balancing Passion for Self with Compassion for Others
Kelly Bryson’s NVC-based guide to ditching people-pleasing and learning honest communication. Strong on practical tools, uneven in the second half, but the core message about being real over being nice holds up.
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Gender Identity, Sexuality and Autism
A collection of first-person narratives from autistic LGBTQIA+ people exploring the intersection of neurodivergence, gender identity, and sexuality, with clinical context and a practical diagnostic framework.
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Raising Them: Our Adventure in Gender Creative Parenting
Sociologist Kyl Myers documents raising her child Zoomer without a gender assignment — not as a thought experiment, but as a lived account of school forms, family dinners, and strangers who can’t let it go.
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A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy Who Joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She is Today
Kate Bornstein’s memoir covers twelve years in Scientology, gender transition, the BDSM community, and a letter to her estranged daughter. A brutally honest, often funny account of refusing to stay in any box the world tried to put her in.
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The Science of Kissing: What Our Lips Are Telling Us
Sheril Kirshenbaum digs into the neuroscience, chemistry, and evolutionary biology of kissing. A genuinely interesting premise with uneven execution — here’s what lands and what doesn’t.
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Secure Love: Create a Relationship That Lasts a Lifetime
Julie Menanno’s Secure Love applies Emotionally Focused Therapy to everyday couples conflict, with communication scripts and the EVICT framework for interrupting repeating patterns. Covers all four attachment styles, with particular focus on how styles collide in practice.
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Polyamorous Advice You Won’t Get from Your Monogamous Friends
Sam Cat writes about polyamory from inside the community, not above it. This peer guide covers opening up, jealousy, metamour relationships, and agreements — with the frankness you won’t get from your monogamous friends.
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Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love
The book that launched a thousand Instagram infographics about attachment styles. A useful starting point — just don’t use it to diagnose your partner at dinner.
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Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex
Science journalist Angela Chen discovered her own asexuality while reporting this book. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, Ace uses the ace spectrum as a lens to question what our culture assumes about desire and sex.
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In Each Other’s Care: A Guide to the Most Common Relationship Conflicts and How to Work Through Them
Stan Tatkin breaks down the fights couples have on repeat — money, sex, chores, all of it — and gives you actual tools to stop the cycle. Grounded in neuroscience, written like he’s talking to you.
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Polyamory For Dummies
If you’re poly-curious or newly polyamorous and drowning in questions, this research-backed Dummies guide covers the basics without condescension — jealousy, consent, coming out, and building relationships that actually work.
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The Mistress Manual: The Good Girl’s Guide to Female Dominance
A playful starter guide for women curious about dominance and power exchange in their relationships. Dated in spots but still full of creative ideas for anyone figuring out what control and surrender actually look like for them.
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The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure
What happens when feminists make porn? This essay collection from performers, directors, and scholars answers that question with more nuance and honesty than you’d expect. Academic in places, personal in others, provocative throughout.
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Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us
Kate Bornstein threw out the gender rulebook in 1994 and it still hasn’t been put back together. Part memoir, part manifesto, part performance art — this one changes how you think.
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Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict Into Connection
The Gottmans’ research says you can predict how a fight ends based on the first three minutes. Fight Right breaks down why, and what to do about it.
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The Consent Guidebook: A Practical Approach to Consensual, Respectful, and Enthusiastic Interactions
AASECT award-winning guide to practicing consent in every part of your life, not just sex. Practical, accessible, and written for people who already know consent matters but want better tools for the complicated moments.
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Wired for Love: How Understanding Your Partner’s Brain and Attachment Style Can Help You Defuse Conflict and Build a Secure Relationship
The couples book therapists hand to each other. Less about feelings, more about what’s happening in your nervous system when you and your partner can’t stop fighting about dishes.
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Unfuck Your Intimacy: Using Science for Better Relationships, Sex, and Dating
Dr. Faith Harper gets into the tangled mess of intimacy — shame, trauma, kink, consent, attachment — with the same no-nonsense science she brought to Unfuck Your Brain.
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The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
Gabor Maté’s argument is simple and uncomfortable: what we call “normal” is making us sick. If therapy has helped your mind but your body still keeps score, this book connects those dots.
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Different Loving: A Complete Exploration of the World of Sexual Dominance and Submission
One of the first books to let kink practitioners tell their own stories. The language is dated — it’s from 1993 — but the core insight holds: BDSM is a form of loving, not a diagnosis.
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Monogamy? In this Economy?: Finances, Childrearing, and Other Practical Concerns of Polyamory
Skip the jealousy talk — this one is about who pays the electric bill, whose name goes on the lease, and how to split groceries between four adults and two kids.
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Reclaiming Pleasure: A Sex Positive Guide for Moving Past Sexual Trauma and Living a Passionate Life
If you’ve survived sexual trauma but your desire still feels stuck, this book picks up where most recovery resources stop — the journey from “I’m okay” to actually wanting pleasure again.
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No Holes Barred: A Dual Manifesto of Sexual Exploration and Power
Born from the wildly popular podcast WHOREible Decisions, this NYT bestseller is raw, funny, and genuinely insightful about sex, desire, healing, and owning your pleasure without apology.
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The Jealousy Workbook: Exercises and Insights for Managing Open Relationships
A practical guide to understanding and managing jealousy in open relationships, with exercises developed over decades of polyamory counselling work.
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Whole-Body Sex: Somatic Sex Therapy and the Lost Language of the Erotic Body
For people who feel disconnected from their bodies during sex, Walker’s award-winning guide to somatic sex therapy works with breath, sensation, and movement—not just talk—to help readers tune back into pleasure.
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Sexual Intelligence: What We Really Want from Sex
Marty Klein’s “Sexual Intelligence” argues that the real problem with sexual dissatisfaction isn’t your body or desires, but the impossible cultural standards we’re taught to measure ourselves against that create anxiety and shame.
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Mind Over Mood: When Depression Makes Everything Feel Impossible
Mind Over Mood is a CBT workbook that teaches you to question automatic negative thoughts and track mood patterns using structured worksheets, rather than pushing generic “positive thinking.”
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Trans Sex: Nurturing Trans Erotic Embodiment and Gender-Pleasure in the Body
The book that redefines trans sexuality as pleasure and possibility, for providers and trans people to cultivate erotic embodiment that loves rather than just lives with trans bodies.
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Building Open Relationships: Your hands on guide to swinging, polyamory, and beyond!
Powell turns the complex landscape of ethical non-monogamy from theory into practice, and gives readers the emotional intelligence tools and practical frameworks to build real open relationships.
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Open Monogamy: A Guide to Co-Creating Your Ideal Relationship Agreement
Nelson’s book turns the messy landscape of consensual non-monogamy into a map for couples to create agreements that honour their true selves while keeping emotional safety and mutual respect.
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Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together
Love in a F*cked-Up World is a new take on relationship problems that many therapy clients will find relatable and useful. Not everyone will agree with all of Spade’s conclusions but the book’s emphasis on communication, emotional awareness and community building is useful for anyone…