Emotional Regulation
Books
The Language of Emotions by Karla McLaren
A guide that treats every emotion — including the dark and difficult ones — as an intelligent messenger, offering practical tools for welcoming and working with feelings rather than suppressing or being overwhelmed by them.
Triggers: How We Can Stop Reacting and Start Healing by David Richo
Psychotherapist David Richo explores what lies beneath our most painful reactions and shows how, with patience and inner work, triggers can become doorways to healing rather than sources of siege.
Anxiety, Panic and Fear
Books
Hope and Help for Your Nerves by Claire Weekes
Written by a physician who experienced nervous illness herself, this book teaches that anxiety and panic are not dangerous or permanent — and that the path through them is not resistance or control, but acceptance, patience, and learning to float rather than fight.
Podcasts and Videos
Working with Anxiety, Anger and Rage with Dr. Laurence Heller and Brad Kammer – Transforming Trauma Podcast, Episode 046
An exploration of how unresolved anger and childhood protest transform into anxiety and panic — and how the NARM approach works with these primary emotions to support reconnection to the authentic self.
Rewiring Fear and Anxiety from the Inside Out with Thomas Hübl – Heart Mind Institute (Video)
A conversation on how fear and anxiety are not just personal — exploring how trauma lives in the nervous system as frozen energy, how inherited and cultural wounds shape our anxiety, and why genuine healing requires embodied awareness, co-regulation, and the holding power of shared presence.
Depression
Books
It’s Not Always Depression: A New Theory of Listening to Your Body, Discovering Core Emotions and Reconnecting with Your Authentic Self by Hilary Jacobs Hendel
Introduces the Change Triangle — a map of emotions, defenses, and sensations — showing how unprocessed emotions disguise themselves as depression, and how reconnecting with core feelings rather than avoiding them is the most direct path toward aliveness.
Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari
A journalist’s investigation into the real causes of depression — not brain chemistry, but disconnection from meaning, community, work, and the natural world — weaving together personal experience, science, and social research into an account of what it might actually take to heal.
I Don’t Want to Talk About It by Terrence Real (men-focused Book)
Explores the silent epidemic of male depression — how it hides behind anger, workaholism, and emotional withdrawal, and how its roots in childhood emotional neglect can be healed and its legacy broken.
Podcasts and Videos
Understanding and Conquering Depression – Huberman Lab Podcast, Essentials
A concise and accessible overview of the neuroscience of depression — covering neurotransmitters, hormones, inflammation, and treatment options from medication to lifestyle tools — for anyone who wants to understand what is happening in the body and brain.
This is the Root Of Your Depression and Anxiety with Dr. Gabor Mate – Your Inner Child Matters (Short Video)
A short exploration of what depression actually means — how pushing down emotions, particularly anger, begins in childhood when the environment cannot receive a child’s authentic feelings, and how this disconnection from the self becomes the root of both depression and anxiety.
How Suppression Can Lead to Depression – Talking Therapy with Alex Howard, Episode 12
An examination of how suppressed emotions can become the root of depression — why what we don’t feel we don’t heal, how numbing pain also numbs joy, and what it takes to begin metabolizing the feelings that have been pushed down and carried as a burden.
Anger
Books
Facing the Fire: Experiencing and Expressing Anger Appropriately by John H. Lee
Lee, having spent years helping others heal their relationship with anger, .invites readers to stop managing anger and start feeling it — safely, consciously, and fully — as a path toward genuine aliveness rather than ongoing suppression.
Podcasts and Videos
Understanding Healthy Aggression and How Unprocessed Anger Becomes Internalized with Sarah Baldwin — You Make Sense Podcast
An exploration of the difference between healthy aggression and destructive rage — and why so many of us learned to suppress this vital self-protective energy as a survival response, and how to reconnect with it through somatic awareness.
Healthy Anger, Healthy Body with Dr. Gabor Maté — Mindfulness Exercises Podcast
An exploration of the link between suppressed anger and physical illness — how chronic “niceness” rooted in childhood survival patterns can silently weaken the immune system, and what it means to relate to anger in a truly healthy way.
How to Process Your Anger and Rage with Dr. Gabor Maté, Video
Drawing on his own experience with rage, Maté explains the difference between healthy anger and suppressed rage that erupts from the past — and how working with the body’s experience of anger, rather than acting it out or suppressing it, is the path to genuine processing.
Shame and Guilt
Books
Healing the Shame That Binds You by John Bradshaw
Identifies toxic shame — the kind that becomes part of our identity rather than a passing feeling — as the root of addiction, codependency, and compulsive behavior, and draws on the author’s own recovery to offer a path from shame-based living toward genuine self-worth.
Shame and Guilt: Masters of Disguise by Jane Middleton-Moz
An exploration of how debilitating shame and guilt are created in childhood and how they manifest in adult life and relationships — using myths and fairytales to illuminate different shaming environments and help readers recognize the shamed child within.
Podcasts and Videos
We need to talk about Shame with Brené Brown, Video
A short, clarifying talk on the difference between shame and guilt, why shame thrives in secrecy and silence, and how empathy — not self-improvement — is the path through it.
Letting Go of Shame That Isn’t Yours with Dr. Laurence Heller – Transforming Trauma Podcast
An exploration of shame as an early coping mechanism that preserved attachment to caregivers — and how NARM approaches shame not as something we are, but as something we do, opening a path toward curiosity and healing rather than self-rejection.
Grief and Loss
Books
The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller
A guide to grief as sacred communal work rather than a private burden — tracing five gates of sorrow that range from personal loss to ancestral grief, and offering ritual, poetry, and reflection as ways to fully feel and release what we carry.
Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief by Joanne Cacciatore
A bereavement researcher and Zen priest, who has accompanied hundreds of families through traumatic loss and lost a child herself, offers a compassionate companion for grief that resists the cultural pressure to move on, and instead opens space to fully feel, integrate, and honor what has been lost.
Falling Out of Grace: Meditations on Loss, Healing and Wisdom by Sobonfu E. Somé (Free to read with an Open Library account)
Drawing on the spiritual traditions of her village in Burkina Faso, Somé reframes loss, failure, and grief as falls from grace that carry us toward deeper wisdom — contrasting the West’s individualistic relationship with suffering against indigenous practices of communal ritual, ceremony, and healing.
The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss by Mary-Frances O’Connor
A neuroscientist explains what happens in the brain during grief — how attachment creates neural maps that must be slowly rewritten after loss, why “grief brain” is real, and why healing means integration rather than getting over it.
Podcasts and Videos
Embracing the Wisdom of Grief with Francis Weller — Point of Relation Podcast, Episode 152
A conversation on grief as a threshold into the full range of what it means to be human — exploring how communal ritual creates the conditions for sorrow to be truly met, and why grief carried collectively touches much more than when we are left to carry our sorrow alone.
Grieving and Ritual with Sobonfu Somé — CIIS Public Programs Podcast
A talk by the late Burkina Faso-born author and activist exploring the role of communal grief rituals in West African tradition — and what these practices offer those of us living in cultures that have largely forgotten how to grieve together.
Grief Works Podcast hosted by Julia Samuel (Podcast)
A grief psychotherapist hosts candid conversations with people who have survived significant loss — exploring how grief is not something to get over, but something to be accommodated, as life slowly rebuilds itself around what has been lost.
Death and eternal with Four seasons in Finland — Eckhart Tolle, Video
A reading from Stillness Speaks over footage of Finnish forests — moving through impermanence, loss, and the nature of death as an opening rather than an ending. Includes a rare and quietly profound passage on how to be present with a dying person.