If You Read Any Books About Relationships and Self-Discovery This Year, Read These

These books changed what I knew about myself and relationships profoundly.

I used to be a voracious reader. I consumed books regularly, everything from high-fantasy to self-help to philosophy.

When I shifted focus to my career and committed relationships, many of my hobbies suffered, marathon reading sessions included.

As I became more self-aware and weathered two agonizing, consecutive break-ups, I knew I needed to make internal changes.

Research, it seemed, was the best way to get there.

I poured myself into reading and learning, and I kid you not — took notes on all of these books.

Every. Single. One.

Several of them were audiobooks that I then bought hard copies of because hearing them just wasn’t enough.

These books shifted my perspectives on how I viewed myself and what I knew about relationships profoundly and unforgettably. They helped me find the way back to myself when I felt lost and out of control.

It’s worth noting that any book, including those on self-improvement, can be taken with a grain of salt as no author or book is perfect.

The best way to leverage the books I read is to take what resonates for me and leave the rest.

Self-Discovery

How to Do The Work — Dr. Nicole LaPera

Not only did she author this book, but Nicole has a significant following on Instagram with a large community of self-healers, ordinary people sharing transformational stories of deep healing and growth.

Nicole explains how we can empower ourselves “to be our own best healers” through different psychological concepts and progressive approaches, mixing evidence-based research with mindfulness and alternative healing modalities.

She explains that the rigidity in the traditional psychology model felt restricting for her patients and didn’t address an individual as a whole person, body, mind, and soul (or spirit), so she began exploring new methodologies for herself and her clients.

She goes into a lot of depth, providing context about why we do what we do and how to be more aware of it. Her inclusion of examples from her own life and personal anecdotes make it more relatable.

Main Takeaways:

• I may not have been able to choose my family, childhood circumstances, or genetic coding. Still, I can take responsibility for becoming aware of my thinking patterns and making new choices that support my healing.
• Approaching healing through an integrative lens and focusing on whole personhood (body, mind, soul) can prove more effective for addressing trauma and working through negative thought and behavioral patterns.

Boundary Boss — Terri Cole

Terri Cole kicks a*s and takes names.

Licensed psychotherapist, author, and relationship and empowerment expert, Cole inspires people worldwide to get honest with themselves and create boundaries to support the life they want. She also hosts The Terri Cole Show, a podcast covering different topics in interpersonal relationships.

Reading about her journey as a high-functioning codependent made me feel understood for the very first time. It helped me realize there wasn’t anything wrong with me; I just hadn’t learned how to say no.

Terri provides practical steps and tools for defining, identifying, developing, and maintaining boundaries for deeper relationships and more balanced life.

After reading it, I realized I had a much more significant role in my own experiences and relationships. It helped me see how much I helped create and participated in unhealthy dynamics.

The general tone feels she catered primarily towards women or identifying women. Still, it can be helpful to anyone who is working on developing their power or feels trapped in an unhealthy relationship or work dynamic.

Main takeaways:

• My healing lies in the “asking or telling.” The power to shift the dynamics in my relationships relies on my ability to be vulnerable enough to communicate my needs and wants and detach from the opinions and judgments of others.
• Saying ‘no’ to certain things that drain me allows me to create space to say ‘yes’ to other more fulfilling things.
• Putting myself first is not selfish. It’s necessary to fill up my cup, so I show up as the best version of myself and give ungrudgingly to others.

Single On Purpose-John Kim

I listened to this gem after I was ghosted by a guy I should have never entertained in the first place.

It was the last go-around of my dysfunctional relational pattern, and I was ready to take the plunge into singledom seriously. I repeated the same torturous patterns with men and decided that building a fulfilling life alone would be the key to attracting what I wanted.

I listened to this book one weekend while I painted my bedroom, furious at myself for allowing another low-effort person in my life, and cried through most of it.

John Kim, a psychotherapist, author, and podcast host, shares his story with humor, humility, and vulnerability. Also known as The Angry Therapist, he talks about his experience of awakening after his divorce and the subsequent steps he took to discover himself and learn how to be alone. Through his mix of pragmatism, humor, and spirituality, he offers perspective and suggestions on the crux of being alone and how to do it.

His process was super accessible and relatable. It made me feel like he was in trenches with me, and if he could face his demons and get through them, so could I.

Main Takeaways:

• We are responsible for creating a life that meets our needs and sustains us. Relying on someone else to do this or meet all of our needs puts excessive pressure on the other person and results in unmet expectations, resentment, and loneliness.
• Until we can love ourselves from the inside, it’s nearly impossible to create a healthy, interdependent relationship with someone else. Loving ourselves can be challenging as f*ck, but learning to do so helps us identify what we deserve and respect ourselves and other people.
• No relationship will ever be easy. Period. We will bring and play out all of our old wounds, traumas, fears, and patterns with romantic partners. This means we are committing to the other person and agreeing to continually look at ourselves, own, and work on these areas to support the depth and evolution of the relationship.

The Gifts of Imperfection — Brene Brown

This book helped me when I was going through a period of hyper self-criticism and stuck in a cycle of endless judgment.

This book helped me get honest about my shame. It shed a lot of light on the difficulty of confronting ourselves and the love and forgiveness it takes to accept ourselves.

Main Takeaways:

• Courage is found in our ability to be authentic and vulnerably speak our truths and risk rejecting even when we know what we need to share may not be received well.
• Shame will prevent us from pursuing our most significant dreams because it keeps us small and hidden, believing we aren’t worthy of love and acceptance.
• Boundaries make us better at being compassionate and protecting ourselves and our energy reserves, which gives us more energy to give to others.
• We often judge other people for doing the things we are too afraid to try ourselves and project our self-rejection and disappointment onto them to make ourselves feel better.

Relationships

Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How it Can Help You Find-and Keep-Love -Amir Levine and Rachel S. F. Heller

I remember reading this book five years ago, and it’s more relevant for me today than it was then.

Information on attachment styles has exploded in the mainstream, and the more self-aware I become, the more influential the information in this book feels.

Levine and Heller expand on attachment theory, applying it to adult relationships. It was initially developed by psychologist Mary Ainsworth and expanded upon by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby.

They explore attachment theory and how it relates to romantic relationships, categorize and explain the different types, and use rubrics and self-evaluations to help the reader identify their attachment style and where they fall on the spectrum.

They then offer tools for working with the different styles to create healthier, more harmonious relationships.

Main Takeaways:

• None of us are immune to attachment styles. The more information we have about our particular type, the more awareness we can have when relating to our partner and communicating our needs for closeness or space.
• We are not destined to suffer the negative aspects of our attachment styles, trapped in their clutches forever. Attachment styles can be changed and healed over time to reach a more secure place.

Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence — Esther Perel

OH. MY. GOD. Mating in Captivity turned the way I thought about relationships on its head.

In her bestselling book, Esther Perel, psychotherapist and all-around queen, explores sustaining desire and what keeps the passion alive in long-term relationships.

I read this at a time when I was disillusioned in love and didn’t know if I even believed in the possibility of long-term commitments or the realism of monogamous relationships.

I grew up with divorced parents, so my faith in the likelihood of experiencing a successful marriage or long-term relationship was virtually nonexistent.

I was a cynic.

Main Takeaways:

• One of the critical ingredients to nurturing relationships is that both individuals promote themselves and follow their dreams and goals, inherently becoming more attractive.
• Pursuing shared experiences sways the brain to associate new, positive emotions with the person we’re with.
• Space and time away from one another is a must. It gives us time to enjoy activities that sustain us outside of the relationship and gives us time to miss and long for the other person, which drives desire and the craving for reconnection.

The New Codependency: Help and Guidance for Today’s Generation — Melody Beattie

I have struggled with codependence for most of my adult life. In my first abusive relationship, I was introduced to Melody Beattie by a therapist when I was 17.

In her first book, Codependent No More, Beattie introduced the world to the term ‘codependent’ in the ’80s, and ever since, it has continued to come up regularly in conversations surrounding relationship dynamics.

From much of her personal experience, Beattie details the definition of codependence, what drives it, and how to identify it. She puts words to the experience of overextending and rescuing and guides the reader on how to break free and heal from that cycle.

Main Takeaways:

• Dependent people are vulnerable to those with ill-intentions and struggle with self-trust. This often drives us to settle for anyone who comes along in a bid to get our needs met. Unfortunately, no one will ever be able to make up for the things we didn’t get that we wish we had, and it is our responsibility to reparent ourselves.
• Two of the most extensive experiences underlying codependence are fear and control. We are often afraid that something terrible will happen if we don’t have power, usually based on previous traumatic experiences. If we can learn to surrender control, we’re more like to move into accepting and out of concern for what someone else is doing.

“Caretaking is what we think we have to do to be a good person. It fills the emptiness inside and compensates for feeling like we don’t have a life. It allows us to hide low self-worth and attaches us to people. It makes people look like they’re dependent on us when we’re the ones who need them.”

Philosophy & Perspective

How to Do Nothing — Jenny Odell

I cannot rave enough about this book.

Jenny Odell makes a rock-solid case for a life without much technology, challenging the attention economy and making us rethink our relationship with it.

She highlights the imperative nature of sustained attention and how it’s required for so many, if not all, social movements, creative and artistic pursuits, deeper connections, and long-term, sustainable change.

I read this book when I was feeling lost and filled with existential dread about the current state of the world. I was glued to my phone, distracting myself from the fact that I wasn’t doing anything to contribute to positive change and relying on dopamine hits from likes.

Odell’s book made me reevaluate how I used my devices and where my present awareness wandered. I reflected on the connections she made between leisure and freedom, what it meant to philosophers throughout history, and what it means to me now.

I noticed where I sacrificed hobbies done for pleasure, rest, and silence in exchange for “connection.” The irony is that the more time and energy put into scrolling and numbing with apps, the less leftover for pursuits of genuine value.

Not to mention, as a writer — so much inspiration and magic come from time spent engaging with the world and experiencing new things.

This was one of those reads I’ve regularly thought about since reading it. It really just hit.

Main Takeaways:

• Our attention is exceptionally profitable and precious. It is consistently being vied for often to the detriment of our growth, happiness, and inner peace.
• Attention is essentially our last freedom, the final frontier of consumerism’s culture of commoditization, and there is a tremendous amount of power and resistance in reclaiming it.

Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World — Cal Newport

Cal Newport is a bestselling author and computer science professor at Georgetown.

He also has no social media.

I absolutely LOVED this book.

Drawing upon an experiment Newport conducted to identify what happens when people complete digital detoxes, he explains how technology is a tool and should be used intentionally. Otherwise, it may erode our spare time, ability to be alone with ourselves and leave us feeling more disconnected than ever.

Through philosophical reflection and psychology, he remarks on the impact technology has had on us as individuals and as a society at large, following it up with guidance on implementing our digital detoxes.

Partway through reading this book, I deleted all of my social media apps on my phone and got locked out of my Instagram account. I have not been able to access it since. It’s been over a month, and after the initial anxiety of, “what if someone tries to reach me?” or “how will people know I’m relevant,” I realized that Instagram had added nothing of value to my life.

If anything, it vastly minimized my screen time, and I’ve read more books, written more articles, and spent more time in quiet reflection.

Main Takeaways:

• We are inundated with information all the time. Honest reflection and appreciation often occur in the space between activities and interactions when we’re alone. Never taking the opportunity to disconnect prevent us from experiencing this time for introspection and intellectual review.
• Validation from social media and internet approval is not the same thing as real-life connections, intimacy, and interaction, and it’s damaging for us to confuse the two.
• Technology is a tool and should be used as such. If we cannot honestly say that it brings actual value to our lives, we’re better off without it.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck — Mark Manson

This book is pretty much a tried and true classic at this point. Mark Manson makes the compelling case for less being more regarding what should and should not qualify as deserving of our attention.

His thoughtful and often philosophical reflections’ crass tone and humorous delivery make his writing accessible, entertaining, and insightful.

Main Takeaways:

• If this is our only go-around, which I suppose it is, since I cannot remember anything before this lifetime, we should make it count as much as possible. This means letting go of the opinions of others and the things that won’t matter 5 minutes, days, months, or years from now. Fewer things matter in life than those that don’t.
• Choose a small number of things to devote energy and attention to (purpose, people, passions) and do your best at executing those things well.
• Acting like we don’t care is stupid. It’s not cool to act superior or “above it all.” It’s a cowardly attempt to conceal our fear of rejection and taking risks through aloofness, never investing in things we’d be scared to lose. It’s a way to avoid vulnerability by passing it off as cool, unique, or mysterious. When we do this, we block opportunities for real intimacy and growth.

The wonderful thing about books is that even if I lived 5 lifetimes, I could never read them all. 2021 was a huge year of self-discovery and I can only hope that 2022 is an even bigger one for all of you.

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