A Road Paved With Books
When I started down this road of working with people, I figured what I learned in school would carry me along. Now I know you must keep up on the advancements in our understanding of people, their problems, and how to help. Keeping up takes books, lots of them.
Three Books and One Chapter
Some of these books impact your mind and heart more than others. A few become the architects and narrators of what guides you in your work with people. Here are three, plus one chapter, that hold that special place for me.
The Casework Relationship, by Felix Biestek, SJ (1957). This little book became a staple in social work around the world for generations. Biestek taught me that the relationship with our clients is the fundamental means used in helping people grow and change. Second, Biestek explained the importance of experiencing the client’s emotions and responding well to those emotions. He encouraged awareness of our own emotions interacting with the client’s and showed the importance of self-discipline in the use of those emotions. They should be used, not set aside as if they are harmful to the relationship with the client. Biestek illuminatied the emotional intelligence needed to do our work effectively, and he did so forty years before anyone knew there was such a thing as EQ.
“Attachment and Intersubjectivity,” chapter 1 of Attachment-Focused Family Therapy, by Daniel A. Hughes (2007). Hughes’s great contribution to our field is his clear explanation that intersubjectivity in relationships is the mechanism for the development of human persons. That reciprocal and reciprocating connection of two persons enables coregulation of affect and the cocreation of meaning that are the basic building blocks to a coherent sense of self.
The Heart of Trauma: Healing the Embodied Brain in the Context of Relationships, by Bonnie Badenoch (2017). This may be the most important book I have read in the last 30 years. Badenoch brings a relational perspective, and a wholistic one, to neurobiology and therapy. Part one of this book maps the neurological system from skin, muscles, eyes, ears, belly brain, heart brain, and parts of the brain itself. Part two paints a clear picture of how a person works with another person through person-to-person focus, contact, experience, and love. Badenoch knows that healing work is a process, one in which the therapist leads, follows, and responds (chap. 18). This process of “nourishing accompaniment” depends on co-attaching, which is the foundation of relational healing (chap. 19). The final chapter, “A Sacred Space Opens,” portrays the power and effectiveness of therapy done in and through an honest, active, and sensitive relationship.
Understanding and Treating Chronic Shame: Healing Right Brain Relational Trauma, 2nd ed., by Patricia DeYoung (2022). Patricia DeYoung is a relational psychotherapist. DeYoung carefully distinguishes chronic shame from unspecified shame. And she explains the origins of chronic shame are relational trauma, not trauma in general. DeYoung’s thought and work runs in the same stream as Biestek, Hughes, and Badenoch. Like Badenoch and Hughes, DeYoung understands that old wounds are treated in the current moment in the therapy room. This is done through close attention to the relationship of client and therapist as it unfolds moment to moment. It requires honest discussion by both people of what is felt and thought in the process of the work. This interaction is the work.
I hope the road you are on in your work is paved with books. And I pray that a few rise to the top to be those special guides that God wants to give to us all.
