Self-Development Audiobooks

Erotic Love and Marriage is written for couples who are searching to establish or restore a fulfilling sexual relationship and a meaningful and gratifying connection. Using history, everyday life situations, and careful analysis, Frederick Mondin makes the case for liberation from the fear, guilt, and shame that mark so much of human sexuality. He offers insight on sexual issues almost everyone struggles with in their relationships and promotes a healthier approach that highlights connection, communication, and exploration. Including an exploration of the role of religion and culture in shaping sexual attitudes and behaviors, he offers guidelines for establishing a healthier outlook on and understanding of sexual choices and desires. Intended to help the many couples struggling to break free of negative scripts, inhibition, fear, guilt, and shame surrounding intimacy and sexual connection, he offers real life examples and solutions that will help readers enjoy a closer more meaningful sexual and emotional relationship with their partners. Couples will learn how to improve their sexual experience by understanding male sexual functioning and female orgasm. Erotic Love and Marriage also explores what role pornography, infidelity, masturbation, sexual addiction, erotica, romance, and emotional connections play in a couple’s affairs. Mondin’s insights provide a positive and nurturing perspective that inspires and instructs in a way that leaves couples feeling more secure, grounded, and connected.

You Can Get Through This. Your doctor told you it was breast cancer. So now what?! You'll need plenty of essential advice—the kind that only comes from someone who's been there. In Just Get Me Through This! Deborah A. Cohen and Robert M. Gelfand, M.D. help you deal with all the ups and downs of the breast cancer experience. From the shock of diagnosis to getting through treatment to getting on with your life, they pack it with plenty of straight talk and practical tips. This newly updated edition also includes advice from two prominent breast cancer surgeons. Each step of the way, this wise and witty companion will be there with unfailing inspiration and heart-to-heart support. It's also simple to use, with an accessible format—to make even the toughest days a whole lot easier.

In a fusion of fact and fiction, nineteenth-century women institutionalized as hysterics reveal what history ignored “ City of Incurable Women is a brilliant exploration of the type of female bodily and psychic pain once commonly diagnosed as hysteria—and the curiously hysterical response to it commonly exhibited by medical men. It is a novel of powerful originality, riveting historical interest, and haunting lyrical beauty.” — Sigrid Nunez , author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through “Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?” wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history’s ghosts, marginalized and dispossessed due to their gender and class, they are reimagined by Maud Casey as complex, flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell. These linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical documents both authentic and invented, poignantly restore the humanity to the nineteenth-century female psychiatric patients confined in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital and reduced to specimens for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues. Maud Casey is the author of five books of fiction, including The Man Who Walked Away , and a work of nonfiction, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions . A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the St. Francis College Literary Prize, she teaches at the University of Maryland.

A clinical psychologist specializing in behavioral medicine presents a dozen practical approaches to transforming loss, pain, and suffering into positive growth and hope. Just as some flowers only bloom in the dark, so too, some people only grow by experiencing tough times. Each chapter explains an empirically based principle for handling adversity, followed by writing prompts designed to help readers experience the axiom personally. Tools such as self-reflection, meaning-making, narrative creation, benefit-finding, and inspired value-based action help readers move through their trauma toward a new exuberance for life.

Raising Your Kids to Succeed: What Every Parent Should Know describes what parents can do to be effective and help their children succeed, both in school and in life. Part I opens with some big, foundational questions, including the need for parents to realize their own importance. It goes on to discuss how to create a family mission statement, the importance of creating family traditions and rituals, and the pivotal need to model good behavior. Part II starts by exploring ways to let your kids know the importance you attach to education. It stresses the importance of really listening to your kids, reading to them, getting outside with them to enjoy nature, and teaching them life skills. Part III explores ways for you to be present at your child’s school and to be an advocate for your child. It also focuses on the issue of bullying and how to counter a toxic, sexualized and violent culture. Raise Your Kids to Succeed will help your children succeed and reach all of the dreams that you have for them—and, more important, the ones they have for themselves.

Have you ever spent 10 minutes looking for your reading glasses, and they were on the top of your head? Or, have you walked into a room and forgotten why you went there? Where are your car keys? What’s normal aging? When should you be concerned? Is there anything you can do to maintain your brain health as you age? This book provides useful, achievable actions you can take, accurate information about identifying problems, and real solutions. Our team offers anecdotes and scientifically validated information -- important tools in separating myth from reality. Our book is different from others on the market because our information and recommendations are based on scientifically validated, peer-reviewed studies published in reputable journals by world-renowned researchers in the neuroscience field, including our authors. We separate fact from fiction to ensure that our recommendations are practical, useful, achievable, and measurable. Our authors are recognized experts in the field of aging, cognition, and brain health. Most of the competition is not. Written by a world-renowned cognitive specialist, an extraordinary housecall physician, and an award-winning author on eldercare issues – all of whom specialize in caring for those with cognitive impairment -- this book is based on our expertise, practical experience, and peer-reviewed research. In addition to providing scientifically validated information and practical advice, our book separates myth from reality. Brain health, cognitive impairment, and mood disorders are serious issues. With the Baby Boomer market growing older and growing concerned about their and their parents’ brain health, the marketplace has attracted frauds, charlatans, and some well-meaning but poorly informed people who offer unproven and often dangerous products. Our authors are recognized experts, our practical experience is solid, and our science is peer-reviewed and validated.

Few of us know how to navigate the territory of traumatic loss successfully. Sweet Sorrow shows how we can respond and grow stronger from loss and suffering. Written by a psychologist and certified bereavement trauma specialist in the decade following the loss of her husband, father, mother, and only sibling, this carefully considered work provides perspective on grief and healing over time. This longer-term approach allows readers to have a more complete and accurate picture of the oscillations of grief over time. The book describes not only the immediate agony of the author’s losses, but also the process of starting over and making a successful new life as a single person full of hope and joy. Sweet Sorrow combines the author’s psychological expertise and clinical experience with the compelling art of memoir to illuminate the surprising ways in which loss survivors can grow and even thrive to achieve wholeness after heartbreaking, traumatic losses. Using findings from post-traumatic growth, as well as evidence-based psychological approaches, Sweet Sorrow illustrates through story and example, ways for grief survivors to start over, to manage chaos and stress, to let go, and to heal with new strategies and re-storying. Sweet Sorrow also provides resources and recommendations for self-care, as well as tips and suggestions for all of us trying to respond creatively and helpfully to those around us suffering loss. Ultimately, Sweet Sorrow is a book of inspiration intended to companion readers through the processes of loss and grief much like a helpful Sherpa might guide a lost traveler.

“It’s like the meanest, wildest monkey running around my head, constantly looking for ways to bite me.” That was how Kirsten Pagacz described her OCD to her therapist on their first session when she was well into her 30s she’d been following orders from this mean taskmaster for 20 years, without understanding why. Initially the tapping and counting and cleaning and ordering brought her comfort and structure, two things lacking in her family life. But it never lasted; the loathsome self-talk only intensified, and the rituals she had to perform got more bizarre. By high school she was anorexic and a substance abuser, common "shadow syndromes" of OCD. By adulthood, she could barely hide her problems and held on to jobs and friends through sheer grit. Help finally came in the form of a miraculously well-timed public service announcement on NPR about OCD -- at last her illness had an identity. Leaving the OCD Circus reveals the story of Pagacz’s traumatic childhood and the escalation of her disorder demonstrating how OCD works to misshape a life from a very young age and explains the various tools she used for healing including meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy, yoga, exposure therapy, and medication.

Neuroscientists estimate that over 90 percent of our operating systems—beliefs, behaviors, patterns—are unconscious. Since the surface story determines less than 10 percent of our decisions, how can we illuminate the shadow story responsible for over 90 percent of what we do each day? Once we systematically understand our relationship with money, can we overcome the mind and brain’s resistance to change? Especially when so many of the current popular strategies for change are contrary to the way the mind and brain work? Each money story line contains unspoken assumptions, emotional agendas, and unconscious meanings. Money becomes a portal to the immaterial and the intangible, a Rorschach onto which we project our needs and hopes. Your New Money Story: The Beliefs, Behaviors, and Brain Science to Rewire for Wealth combines twenty-five years of psychiatric and psychoanalytic practice and over a dozen years of professional and executive mentor coaching with groundbreaking research in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics to show readers how to recognize money behaviors ghostwritten by hidden assumptions, overcome the brain’s patterned responses that lead to bad decisions, harness the power of regulating states of mind, develop the art and neuroscience of money strategies, and identify and remedy emotionally based money mistakes and financial fallacies. The ROADMAP System deconstructs the process of understanding a money story to systematically construct a new one to write new mind software and rewire the brain for wealth. YOUR NEW MONEY STORY The Beliefs, Behaviors, and Brain Science to Rewire for Wealth David Krueger, Read by Edward Bauer • Unabridged • AUGUST 2019 Vibrance Press • Digital Download Narrator Edward Bauer sounds like a friendly college instructor who wants to spare you the anguish you've had trying to get your financial life in order. He has a wonderful phrasing palette, smooth and natural sounding, and what stands out is how he finesses the author's desire to help: He's assertive enough with the direct advice and many lists offered by the psychiatrist/business-coach, but he keeps enough distance from his listeners to convey respect for their autonomy. They can take this advice or leave it. This vocal attitude is important with a lesson like this, which is psychologically invasive with its pointed assumption that all financial mismanagement begins with limiting psychological beliefs. This is effective audio advice on how to overcome those beliefs with brighter expectations, concrete strategies, and discipline. T.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Longtime manuscript editor and Chicago Manual of Style guru Carol Fisher Saller has negotiated many a standoff between a writer and editor refusing to compromise on the “rights” and “wrongs” of prose styling. Saller realized that when these sides squared off, it was often the reader who lost. In her search for practical strategies for keeping the peace, The Subversive Copy Editor was born. Saller’s ideas struck a chord, and the little book with big advice quickly became a must-have reference for copy editors everywhere. In this second edition, Saller adds new chapters, on the dangers of allegiance to outdated grammar and style rules and on ways to stay current in language and technology. She expands her advice for writers on formatting manuscripts for publication, on self-editing, and on how not to be “difficult.” Saller’s own gaffes provide firsthand (and sometimes humorous) examples of exactly what not to do. The revised content reflects today’s publishing practices while retaining the self-deprecating tone and sharp humor that helped make the first edition so popular. Saller maintains that through carefulness, transparency, and flexibility, editors can build trust and cooperation with writers. The Subversive Copy Editor brings a refreshingly levelheaded approach to the classic battle between writers and editors. This sage advice will prove useful and entertaining to anyone charged with the sometimes perilous task of improving the writing of others.